Above: Christopher Hanson on SPU's campus in May. 

Christopher Hanson arrived at the International Symposium on the Philosophy of Music Education in June 2019 on a high note. The public school teacher from Texas had just accepted an offer to become the director of music education and orchestral activities at Seattle Pacific University, a small private Christian institution in a city he’d only recently visited for the first time. But before moving to Seattle with his partner for good, he’d decided to attend “the nerdiest thing,” this four-day gathering of music education scholars at Western University in London, Ontario.

He could join the group of largely faculty members now as a legitimate peer, as a professor. He even ordered an SPU T-shirt to wear around.

At the conference, Hanson, a violinist with the “gift of gab,” made fast friends with a fellow PhD. They both played strings, had similar research interests, and applied for some of the same faculty jobs. They were hitting it off—until Hanson told him about the gig he’d actually landed. “Oh.”

His new friend had interviewed for the position at SPU, too. Then he removed his application.

“What do you mean, remove your application?” Hanson asked.

“Well,” the friend replied, “I’m gay.”

Hanson’s heart sank. He’d only discovered the SPU job through a Google alert earlier that spring—late in the application game. But as someone who identifies as queer and grew up in a Baptist family, he’d worried about the evangelical school’s stance on LGBTQ+ issues and allyship.

Before his interview, Hanson had done some digging. Many clicks later, he unearthed a troubling lifestyle expectation in the school’s employee handbook. It was grounded in an even more troubling institutional statement:

“We believe it is in the context of the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman that the full expression of sexuality is to be experienced and celebrated and that such a commitment is part of God’s plan for human flourishing. Within the teaching of our religious tradition, we affirm that sexual experience is intended between a man and a woman.”

SPU’s stance was old-fashioned, Hanson thought, not only because of its implicit opposition to same-sex relationships but also for its retrograde take on premarital sex and cohabitation. And, sure enough, Hanson’s interviewers assured him the policy was a relic. Many faculty members didn’t even know about it. This was Seattle, after all, where, proportionally, the third-largest LGBTQ+ community in the country resides. This couldn’t be real—right?

But sometimes the terms and conditions really do apply. All those words hidden behind clicks and dusty bindings can tether someone, or an entire institution, to the past. Before his conversation at that conference, Hanson thought SPU had progressed far enough beyond the statements to render them moot. Instead, his new friend’s comments turned out to be more like foreshadowing.

Over the next four years, the fight over SPU’s anti-LGBTQ+ policy would come to define a small school long on the periphery of Seattle’s academic and cultural identities. It would be the subject of lawsuits and protests, national media coverage and viral TikTok videos. It would lead to the resignations of dissenting board members, faculty, and staff. It would coincide with enrollment drops and job cuts. It would animate an ongoing conversation about how Christian schools should reckon with growing support for LGBTQ+ causes within their halls. Ultimately, it would threaten faculty, staff, and students’ faith in the school’s future, and their own.

A schism laid the foundation for what’s known today as Seattle Pacific University. In 1860, a pastor from New York state helped organize the Free Methodist Church of North America after his expulsion from the Methodist Episcopal Church. Benjamin Titus Roberts had condemned, among other things, the traditional institution’s support for slaveholding and renting pews. His “free” church wouldn’t sell seats or otherwise exclude devotees. Three decades later, a member of the church gifted it five acres on the northern slope of Queen Anne Hill.

Seattle Seminary opened in 1893 with 34 students training to become missionaries in a brick building. By 1913, college-level courses merited the addition of “and College” to its moniker; two years after that, administrators coined it Seattle Pacific College. It wasn’t until 1977 that the college became Seattle Pacific University, which now claims 43 verdant city acres and more than 3,000 students.

The endurance of an evangelical school in progressive Seattle, dubbed one of the country’s “atheist capitals” not long ago, might seem improbable. But like other small universities in the area, SPU has long operated quietly in the shadows of the University of Washington. And at least superficially, the school’s diversity aims align with the values of a big liberal city. Last fall, 54 percent of undergraduates hailed from historically underrepresented backgrounds, and about 96 percent received some form of financial aid.

The school’s religious composition is more varied than one might expect from a denominational affiliate of the Free Methodist Church, too. Students don’t need to be Christian to attend. And SPU’s Statement of Faith, which faculty and staff must affirm, declares its approach “genuinely ecumenical,” open to employees from any Christian tradition.

But the Statement of Faith isn’t the only guiding document at SPU. In the early 1990s, an explicit course on human sexuality spawned concerns that led to the university’s first iteration of an obscure Statement on Human Sexuality—the one that said sex should be “between a man and a woman.” According to faculty researchers, that statement lived for years only as a hard copy in the Office of Human Resources; the employee handbook’s “Employee Lifestyle Expectations” merely alluded to this separate document’s existence.

For more than a decade, the statement was something of a specter. In a 2001 memo, the dean of student life referred to SPU’s stance on LGBTQ+ students and employees as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

In 2007, before a group of predominantly gay Christian advocates visited campus on a bus tour called the Equality Ride, the school distributed guidelines that included a link to its anti-LGBTQ+ statement online. SPU didn’t block the Equality Ride from happening, but the visit cracked open a long-suppressed discussion about LGBTQ+ members of campus. “It kind of erupted,” says Kevin Neuhouser, a sociology professor who joined SPU in 1996.

Afterward, SPU students organized the school’s first gay-straight alliance, Haven. Neuhouser signed on as faculty advisor, but the school didn’t officially recognize the club until 2013, one year after Washington legalized same-sex marriage. And it wasn’t until 2018 that the school removed language prohibiting “homosexual” activity from its student conduct guide. Still, periodic outcries didn’t alter the school’s covert but very real expectation that employees would refrain from same-sex relationships.

Then, in 2021, an adjunct professor in the nursing school named Jéaux Rinedahl filed a lawsuit against the university. The complaint and ensuing outrage would finally force the school to own its position on LGBTQ+ employees.

Rinedahl alleged that a higher-up said he’d been denied consideration for a full-time faculty position “because he was not heterosexual.” Rinedahl, who’d married his husband before joining the school, was suing for illegal discrimination.

In court filings, the university would admit that Rinedahl was disqualified for employment “on the basis of the University’s religious beliefs.” Like other religious educational institutions, SPU reserves the right to prefer candidates and employees based on their faith and related conduct. But it also refuted the dean’s reported claim that Rinedahl had been rejected due to his sexual orientation.

Eight days after the news of Rinedahl’s suit first made headlines, faculty and staff began to weigh in via survey. Strong majorities opposed treating same-sex marriage as banned employee conduct. In February, the Board of Trustees, the school’s governing body, received the survey results and a “Letter of Lament” signed by over 1,200 people, more than half of whom were SPU alumni.

“We thought the Board of Trustees would hear and understand the pain and harm that had been caused through this policy,” says Jill Heiney-Smith, a director of graduate teacher education at SPU who holds two degrees from the school.

But a confidential meeting of the trustees that March ended in a vote to maintain the policy. Shortly thereafter, university president Dan Martin resigned, and 72 percent of surveyed faculty issued a statement of “no confidence” in the board.

For the first time, but not the last, trust at the university had been broken.

“My name is Christopher Hanson, and I am bisexual.”

Thousands of emailed missives have lit up SPU’s Faculty/Staff Forum listserv since the Rinedahl case surfaced during pandemic-mandated virtual classes. But a bolded, straightforward line in the middle of one titled, “Who I am. Who God made me to be,” jumped off screens on June 6, 2021.

Christopher Hanson had agonized over whether to become the school’s first publicly queer faculty member. Even as he typed draft after draft of his coming out letter, he worried he could lose his job just after uprooting his family to Seattle. But as the “complicated” Rinedahl suit played out, misinterpretations of the school’s employment policy exhausted his patience. There were queer people working at SPU—to him, the school’s position was discriminatory in part “because they will hire queer people that pass this litmus test that they’ve created.”

Hanson had to take the test himself, he realized. During his interviews back in 2019, someone asked him to spell the name of his wife, Erin. “In the moment, I’m like, that’s a weird question.” Only later did it become clear why they were relieved when he uttered the letters. “Oh, well, that’s a feminine spelling.”

Erin, a mezzosoprano who regularly performs with her husband, helped Hanson hone his email. A mentor did, too. But it was Erin’s blessing that emboldened him to press send.

The junior faculty member received almost universal support in the aftermath. Almost. Over time, Hanson noticed a handful of colleagues distance themselves from him, which he’d anticipated. “This is incredibly difficult to type,” he continued in the email, “as sadly, I believe it may negatively impact my relationship with some of you.”

By then Hanson knew SPU wasn’t quite as progressive as he’d been led to believe. Right after the symposium in Canada in 2019, before he, Erin, and their two kids had even unpacked boxes in a Greenwood triplex, he met with a higher-up in the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion office. Hanson framed the conversation as an opportunity to learn about the school’s efforts to be inclusive and accessible. It wasn’t a tough sell; his own research focused on the topic. But after his friend’s alarming comment about SPU at the conference, he also wanted some clarity on the school’s employment policy and its attitude toward LGBTQ+ advocacy.

“When I put my ally flag on my door, what happens?” he asked her. She sighed. There was a new guard and an old guard. Change could be contentious.

Hanson thought he could deal. His office in the Crawford Music Building at SPU is basically a study in balancing new and old schools of thought. A book on Mahler sits below a window with a Pride flag hanging from it. On the opposite side of the room, flanked by violins and a piano, yearbook photos of him and Melissa Jefferson, aka Lizzo, adorn a black poster. He attended Alief Elsik High School in Houston with the pop star. (Lizzo autographed the poster after she performed at Climate Pledge Arena last year.) But this duality is perhaps most apparent by his desk, where a plant pot reads, “Let Me Be Perfectly Queer,” and a maroon Bible with yellowed pages rests on a stand nearby.

Hanson grew up juggling his faith and identity. Raised by a single mother in a one-bedroom townhome in southwest Houston, he went to church every Sunday with his grandfather, a former Baptist minister. But a different kind of revelation arrived when he was nine years old. I’m attracted to boys and girls.

In Texas, being queer and Christian could be difficult. Even today, only some of his family members know he’s bisexual. But in Seattle, he quickly found he could be “authentic to who I am.” He could walk around the city in skirts and wear gauges in his ears without receiving second glances. “I’m just like everybody else. It’s not odd.”

In this climate, and after the board’s jarring first vote to maintain the anti-LGBTQ+ lifestyle expectation, he thought coming out would inspire other employees to do the same. Kristi Holt, an adjunct in the chemistry department, sent a similar note to the listserv shortly after Hanson’s, announcing she was lesbian. But airing their identities didn’t spark a movement; only one other person has come out. “It was the two of us, and in many ways, it still is the two of us,” Holt said in April.

At least among those who’ve stuck around. Some others would come out, Holt says, but only as they exited the university. A survey showed nearly half of employees had never heard of the lifestyle expectation regarding sexuality before they were hired. On average, faculty members wouldn’t learn of it until 4.3 years into their tenure, around the time when they might start serving on interview committees.

Lynette Bikos, the school’s chair of clinical psychology, didn’t know about the policy when she joined SPU in 2005; the Equality Ride in 2007 called her attention to it. Later, when she became interim department chair, she remembers inquiring about how to handle the application of an LGBTQ+ candidate. According to Bikos, she was told not to bring media or legal attention to the employment policy. At that time, the employee handbook was only accessible with an SPU login. “How would any applicant know that these were restrictions?” she wondered then.

Bikos let it go, afraid of risking her chance at tenure. Even when students asked if they could collaborate with her department on a survey of the school’s attitudes toward LGBTQ+ policies and issues, Bikos had to be convinced to answer their calls for help. Their persistence was typical of “the most phenomenal undergraduate student leaders I have ever seen.”

Chloe Guillot wanted to get out of Kansas. In fall of 2017, the co-editor of Salina Central High’s student newspaper published an article about the evolution of racism in America that caused an uproar in a largely conservative city. Guillot, who is biracial, wrote about concepts like implicit bias and white privilege and how they manifested at her school. A student quoted in the story said, “Racism is not a big deal in America.” The school district would apologize for the story’s controversial subject matter.

Guillot had just wanted to raise an issue of immediate relevance in the aftermath of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Now she felt “blackballed.”

By then she’d already fallen out of favor with her conservative friends. The child of deeply religious parents had long been a “church rat,” spending nearly as much time there as at home, but her politics had shifted left.

When it came time to look at colleges, a small school in Seattle appealed to both her politics and faith. On her first visit to Seattle Pacific University in January 2018, an admissions leader talked about mission trips as a form of colonization. This place is different, she thought. “I can really feel the genuine heart of the people here.” The school also offered her one of its distinguished scholar awards—a full ride.

Guillot decided to double-major in Theology and Social Justice, a new academic focus at the school. She’d start contributing to SPU’s history of student LGBTQ+ activism herself after first learning about the Rinedahl lawsuit in The Falcon, SPU’s student newspaper, which doggedly reported on the school’s reckoning with its employment lifestyle expectation.

With almost all classes still remote, students held a few protests in 2021. But they remained optimistic that the board would see the new visions of Christianity spreading on campuses today. In one survey, nearly a quarter of school members identified as LGBTQ+. “If we can just help them understand, then they’re going to come around,” Guillot says of student activists’ mindset then.

Like many universities, the responsibility for SPU’s governance and control rests exclusively with a Board of Trustees, in this case 12 to 18 people. At least one-third of these members must belong to the Free Methodist Church, including the school’s president. One of the FMC’s three bishops, Matt Whitehead, has been on SPU’s board for the past 28 years.

In a declaration to the court during the Rinedahl case, Whitehead wrote, “Free Methodists believe homosexual intimacy is not in keeping with God’s best intention for the human family because it distorts God’s created order (Romans 14:12).” Yet he also acknowledged that other churches’ views were shifting on the matter, including one with historical ties to the FMC. The United Methodist Church, he wrote, was expected to splinter over, in part, some congregations’ support for same-sex marriage (which would later happen).

There was some irony in this development. The FMC was born from a progressive split with a UMC predecessor; now it was conservatively sticking to the “majority views in Christendom.” And Whitehead, an SPU alum, was drawing a hard line on this position. “If the University changed its employment policies to permit employment of Christians in same-sex marriages, the Free Methodist Church would be compelled to disassociate itself from the University.”

Not everyone on the board shared his view. A group was interested in changing the school’s employee lifestyle expectation. And so were student leaders. Guillot and other officers in the Associated Students of Seattle Pacific decided their focus in 2021–2022, Guillot’s senior year, would be on advocating for LGBTQ+ students and staff, including a change to the employment policy.

As students woke up on September 13, 2021, for the first schoolwide day of in-person classes since 2020, rainbow flags lined sloping walkways around campus. Statements like “SPU Is Gay” and “God Is Trans” were inscribed in chalk on the concrete. Some students were apathetic to the cause, but others were galvanized. About 86 percent of students who responded to a survey opposed the employment policy. They wanted affirmation. That’s why I’m here, thought Rae Perez, then a sophomore who’d spent their first year at SPU taking remote classes in their native California.

The messages wouldn’t last long. By the next day, the school had cleared campus of the visual demonstration it hadn’t pre-approved, one of many hasty flag roundups to come over the next two years. At various points during that time, unaware visitors might leave campus thinking SPU was at the forefront of LGBTQ+ affirmation in higher ed. Rainbow flags popped up everywhere from flower beds to faculty windows. Even the school’s arching gateway to Tiffany Loop, a quad with some of Seattle’s oldest trees, got repurposed with a multi-color treatment. But a message on signs and shirts captured a prevailing frustration: “SPU Is Not the Board.”

As students like Guillot made public shows of their outrage in fall of 2021, faculty members quietly resumed talks with trustees, in part brokered through a crisis management consulting firm hired by the board. In November, the board apologized for its poor communication the previous spring. And shortly thereafter, interim president Pete Menjares announced the formation of an LGBTQ+ work group to present options for handling the school’s sexual conduct beliefs and employment policy.

Spring of 2022 brought genuine hope for change. The Rinedahl suit settled out of court after more than a year of litigation. And after months of meetings, the work group finished its 58-page written report offering different paths forward. The first approach was to do nothing. Another was the opposite: “affirming,” or revising the school’s statements so that those in same-sex marriages were both eligible for employment and “blessed by God.” Instead, the majority of the group preferred a middle ground, or “Third Way.” The school could keep, revise, or eliminate its Statement on Human Sexuality, but it would have to change its employment policy to be inclusive of workers in same-sex marriages.

Hanson, who wasn’t part of the discussions, was confident the rest of the board would go for this compromise. “Third Way” proponents didn’t want to disassociate from the Free Methodist Church; they just wanted to acknowledge that, to fully explore the intersection of faith and human sexuality, Christians of all identities needed access to the conversation.

Something had to change, anyway. Enrollment was plummeting despite a 25 percent cut in the cost of tuition. Faculty and staff were resigning. Relationships with local organizations were in peril. (The Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra, for instance, won’t rent space from the school until SPU changes its “discriminatory hiring policies.”) A school built into the hills of a progressive city was now stuck on a conservative island.

But later that month, the board delivered a bombshell: It had reaffirmed the employment policy, citing a desire to “remain in communion with its founding denomination.”

Faculty, staff, and students felt betrayed. Board chair Cedric Davis and a handful of other dissenting board members resigned or declined to renew their terms because of the vote. “I couldn’t stand by the policy,” Davis told The Seattle Times in the aftermath.

When she got the news, Guillot texted her friends to see how they should respond. They orchestrated a walkout during classes the next day. Someone held a cardboard “Jesus Is Ashamed!” sign. Then they did something more radical.

Bodies sprawled across the second floor of Demaray Hall with laptops and blankets during the late spring of 2022. After the walkout on May 24, ASSP president Laur Lugos called for a sit-in outside interim president Pete Menjares’s office. Guillot thought Lugos meant for a couple of hours. But once they were inside, Lugos said they’d be there as long as it took to change the school’s policy. For the next 39 days, dozens of students made the hallway, as some would quip, SPU’s first gender-neutral dorm.

The impromptu sleepover “was not a well-thought-out plan,” Guillot says. But as the demonstration made the rounds online, it earned the support of SPU staff, alumni, and the broader Seattle community. Faculty and other school employees passed out pizza the first night. Campus ministries staff made a Costco run. Local allies donated sleeping mats and vegan doughnuts and coffee. Even if SPU was on an island, many of its neighbors hadn’t forgotten whom its board had stranded there.

The scene on the second floor of Demaray had the ergonomics and aesthetic of a concert ticket stakeout. Some nabbed inflatable mattresses and spots close to fans. Others sat with their backs against the wall, hiking their knees to support their screens. More than a few posted signs on the glass doors to Menjares’s office. (One, a cartoon Jesus saying, “I didn’t say that,” was later made into a shirt.) Those who stayed overnight often wore masks to limit the spread of Covid. “The sit-in was the SPU that I knew,” says Lugos, a music composition and social justice double-major from the Bay Area.

Administrators had to step past students to get to their workplace every day. While Menjares came out and spoke to the group, he didn’t promise any changes.

Before graduation in June, Guillot, Lugos, and others brainstormed ways to needle the interim president. They’d seen a funny TikTok of students handing a president erasers as they received diplomas. Maybe they could do the same, with a twist.

An order of rainbow erasers didn’t make it in time for the big day. But when Guillot arrived at the Tacoma Dome for commencement, someone handed her a bunch of rainbow flags. The community had come through again.

There weren’t enough flags for all who wanted one. Lugos had to hand Menjares a note. (“Resign,” it said in closing.) But dozens of students, Guillot included, received big cheers as they carried out their silent protest.

Afterward, Guillot was exhausted. While everyone partied that night, she retreated to her Fremont apartment and decided to edit a TikTok for @engaygetheculture, a play on the school’s credo, “Engaging the Culture, Changing the World.” Set to some glib flutes, the clips showed student after student exchanging their flags for maroon diploma holders from a not-so-amused Menjares. (“It was a wonderful day to celebrate with our graduates,” Menjares wrote in a statement afterward. “Those who took the time to give me a flag showed me how they felt and I respect their view.”)

Soon after she posted the video, Guillot’s phone started blowing up. By the next morning, media outlets from around the world were emailing her. Within two days, her post had been viewed more than three million times.

The TikTok was perhaps the most widely seen student protest of a Christian school’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies, a growing canon of outrage. At Whitworth University in Spokane, the Presbyterian school’s culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell” has come under fire after a professor came out last year. And at Azusa Pacific University, a Free Methodist institution, an outcry led the school to lift a ban on same-sex student relationships for good in 2019. Other schools have embraced changes to their employee conduct policies. In 2015, two Mennonite schools left the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which includes SPU, after allowing faculty in same-sex marriages to be hired.

SPU stuck to the religious freedom argument it had made in the Rinedahl case. Four days before graduation that June, state attorney general Bob Ferguson opened a civil rights investigation into whether SPU was violating Washington’s workplace discrimination law. The next month, the school sued Ferguson for not recognizing its First Amendment right “to decide matters of faith and doctrine, to hire employees who share its religious beliefs, and to select and retain ministers free from government interference.” A judge dismissed SPU’s suit last October, allowing the AG’s investigation to proceed. SPU swiftly appealed the decision.

After graduation, the sit-in continued for a few weeks. But the school didn’t institute any changes by the students’ July 1 deadline. “We recognize our response does not provide the answers you were seeking,” wrote Dean Kato, the new board chair, in a letter to students.

Guillot was disappointed but undaunted. She’d already decided to stick around at SPU. She’d start a Master of Divinity program at the school the next fall to further her progressive vision of faith. But not before joining a new form of resistance.

On the first day of the 2022–23 school year, students once again gathered to protest in Martin Square near the school library. But this time, the demonstration had a celebratory air. They’d finally gone all in. That morning, a lawsuit filed by some of them in King County Superior Court argued that their school was “imploding.”

The complaint brought by Guillot and 15 other faculty, staff, and student plaintiffs alleged that some SPU board members had put their personal religious convictions above protecting the school’s future. According to the plaintiffs, the actions of this “rogue” faction of the board had led to an exodus of employees as the school tried to weather a $10 million budget deficit. Enrollment that fall had dropped to 3,114, down from 3,443 a year prior and 4,175 in 2015. (SPU pointed to enrollment declines at private schools countrywide over the last few years as a factor.)

In its arguments, the suit addressed a question that lingered after so many board members resigned following the school doubling down on its anti-LGBTQ+ policy: Why, if so many trustees opposed the lifestyle expectation, had the board ignored the LGBTQ+ workgroup’s advice to change it? The short answer, the lawsuit claimed, was that a pair of trustees who also served on the Free Methodist Church’s board had changed the number of votes needed to make a change.

After the work group first shared options to update the school’s stance on human sexuality and employment in late April, Mark Mason and Matt Whitehead allegedly presented a resolution to the board of the Free Methodist Church. It stated that any FMC university hiring same-sex couples would be automatically disaffiliated from the church. The resolution passed. (The Free Methodist Church declined to comment on this change and declined a request for an interview with Whitehead.)

Before this move, a simple majority of trustee votes could have changed the policy at SPU. But now that the human sexuality and employment policy was tethered to FMC disaffiliation, it would seemingly require three-quarters of trustees to approve, per SPU’s Articles of Incorporation. Whitehead and Mason recused themselves from the SPU vote, but the lawsuit argued that by that point they’d already made it nearly impossible for the policy to change.

And it was about to get even uglier. A filing from the board members’ defense team said the suit was “rife with false accusations, exaggeration, and hyperbole.” The board’s defense attorneys quickly moved to dismiss the suit charges via the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, a law often used to defend journalists when their First Amendment rights come under threat. If the suit were dismissed, the plaintiffs would now become liable for the defense’s attorney fees.

The board members were now, in essence, countersuing their school’s own students and faculty.

Multiple plaintiffs dropped off the suit because of the motion, afraid about what defense costs the board might incur. Others who left were among the contingent of tenured faculty accepting buyouts from the school as part of its effort to slash budgets. Menjares recently recommended reducing the school’s faculty by 40 percent.

Christopher Hanson’s music education program was one of the casualties of those budget cuts. While he’ll continue to teach other courses, Hanson said his program couldn’t overcome low enrollment and schools boycotting placements and internships due to the controversy. The animus also cut through the heart of curricula across campus. “How are we supposed to teach classes that are talking about the civil rights movement and talking about oppression…and it’s happening in our institution?”

Undergraduates have felt career and reputational hits, too. The school says it will help students who need to transition majors as courses disappear. But employers are inquiring about the school’s LGBTQ+ stance. And in social settings, Laur Lugos, the former ASSP president, sometimes tells people she went to Seattle University just to avoid having to talk about her real alma mater.

Lugos stayed on the Guillot et al v. Whitehead et al lawsuit. So did, among others, Rae Perez, Lynette Bikos, Jill Heiney-Smith, Kristi Holt, and Guillot. “At this point, I have nothing to lose,” Guillot said in March.

By then she’d opted not to continue in the SPU’s Master of Divinity program. Returning to campus after the board’s decisions was more difficult than she’d anticipated, as was being defined there solely by her advocacy. “It’s hard to walk across campus and know that people see you for one thing that you did.”

She hopes people recognize that their activism comes from a Christian place. She cites one of her favorite Bible stories. A man named Zelophehad has no sons, so his five daughters appeal to Moses to inherit their father’s land, as only men could at that time. Moses brings it up with God, who agrees to change the inheritance rule to include women. “You have these stories in the Bible itself, of moments where there’s an injustice that the law wasn’t prepared to address,” says Guillot, “and God agrees: Yeah, that law should be changed.”

White and maroon balloons made for an unlikely backdrop at a National Day of Silence gathering outside Demaray Hall on a cloudless Friday afternoon in mid-April. A preview for admitted SPU students was just wrapping up as current students and faculty arched around a stairwell to recognize harms done to those in the LGBTQ+ community. Prospective undergrads glanced down from above as speakers addressed a small sea of allies wearing rainbow beanies and scarves.

Christopher Hanson stressed that queerness and Christianity weren’t in conflict. Rae Perez, who’s gender nonconforming, added that ideology couldn’t drive out their community. “Queer presence at this institution is the future, if this institution has a future, because we’ve always been here.”

Perez and others worry that the school will turn into a smaller, more conservative bubble than it already is. After the Rinedahl suit, SPU made its Employee Lifestyle Expectations public and, even more recently, more straightforwardly anti-LGBTQ+, ditching any allusion to the Statement on Human Sexuality. Faculty and staff are expected to refrain from “sexual behavior that is inconsistent with the University’s understanding of Biblical standards, including cohabitation, extramarital sexual activity, and same-sex sexual activity.”

In July, Roberts Wesleyan University president Deana Porterfield will take over for interim president Pete Menjares at SPU. Porterfield stood by an ethos statement at the Free Methodist school in New York with nearly identical language to SPU’s. (SPU declined interview requests for Menjares, Porterfield, and multiple board members.)

Just before the Day of Silence, a King County judge dismissed all but a fraud charge on procedural grounds from the Guillot et al v. Whitehead et al suit. A trial could start as early as September to adjudicate whether Menjares and Whitehead made false statements about their views on diversity, shared governance, centering student concerns, and operating in the best interest of the school, but no one’s banking on it. All counts covered by the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act were dismissed, meaning the remaining plaintiffs may still have to pay the school board’s attorney fees.

Those closest to Hanson advised him not to join the suit. It would do too much damage to a junior faculty member’s career, they said. He had a mortgage and kids to support. He struggled to accept this but eventually realized that litigation wasn’t the only way to fight. “My existence here is a form of protest,” he says.

Unlike at the outset of the pandemic, Hanson now has a full life beyond the SPU bubble, too. He directs the Rainbow City Orchestra, a local performing arts ensemble that promotes LGBTQ+ causes. He posts popular TikTok videos of outfits that challenge gender norms. He regularly attends a church downtown. He’ll be fine. He doesn’t need to change.

“Don’t pray for me,” he says. “Pray for this institution.”