The Slow-Moving Rift in Evangelical Higher Education

Quietly over the past few years, conservative Christian colleges have reemerged as a fault line in evangelicalism's ongoing process of defining itself against the broader culture and policing its own boundaries. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, which legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states, seemed to muffle what had been a flashpoint among evangelicals, who returned to defeating abortion and championing religious liberty at the ballot box and in their advocacy. Candidates who ran in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries seemed to find no upside to running against Obergefell.