Baylor University rejected a $643,401 grant to study “the disenfranchisement and exclusion of LGBTQIA+ individuals and women” in the church. Baylor President Linda Livingstone announced the decision this afternoon, reaffirming that the viewpoints promoted by the research conflicted with traditional Baptist teaching on sexuality.
“As we reviewed the details and process surrounding this grant, our concerns did not center on the research itself, but rather on the activities that followed as part of the grant. Specifically, the work extended into advocacy for perspectives on human sexuality that are inconsistent with Baylor’s institutional policies, including our Statement on Human Sexuality,” Livingstone wrote.
The grant to Baylor’s Center for Church and Community Impact (C3I) originally aimed to develop training resources for churches and take “concrete steps toward genuine inclusion” of LGBTQ+ people.
Garland School of Social Work dean Jon Singletary and C3I director Gaynor Yancey have agreed to rescind their acceptance of the grant. The grant funds will be returned to the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation, a nonprofit that supports progressive causes and has previously donated to Baylor’s C3I.
Livingstone informed the Baylor community that the university remains committed to being “a loving and caring community for all—including our LGBTQIA+ students.” Livingstone also emphasized that the university continues to value academic freedom.
The announcement acknowledged the confusion and pushback surrounding Baylor’s acceptance of the grant.
“Please be assured that Baylor’s institutional beliefs and policies remain unchanged. … We affirm the biblical understanding of human sexuality as a gift from God, expressed through purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman,” the Baylor president wrote.
More from IRD:
Baylor University Receives Grant to Study LGBTQ+ Inclusion in the Church
Comment by Jiggs Cartwright on July 9, 2025 at 5:35 pm
So was John Baugh , Sysco kingpin, a big supporter of the gay lifestyle ? Or is it someone else using that Sysco fortune in his name to promote it?
Comment by Wilson R. on July 9, 2025 at 6:07 pm
John Baugh was never a champion of LGBTQ causes, so far as I know. He was mostly known as a moderate in Baptist circles. The cause he was publicly associated with was an effort to prevent a fundamentalist takeover of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (the entity that Baylor is affiliated with rather than the SBC) and of Baylor itself. I lived through the fundamentalist purges, and they were very nasty. I admired Baugh for fighting them.
He died in 2007. His wife died not long after, and his daughter is dead, too. So the closest family connection to this foundation are two granddaughters. All of them are/were Baylor people.
Baugh gave millions to Baylor over the decades, but none of it was what I’d call political. He made a $10 million gift that allowed them to launch the George Truett Seminary (moderate). He gave money to start a center at BU to support family-owned businesses.
He also gave money to Houston Baptist University, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
Comment by Wilson R. on July 9, 2025 at 8:16 pm
I’ve been in touch with a lot of Baylor folks today. This is my hunch about what happened and why.
Baylor has sent mixed signals in recent years about how welcoming they intend to be to LGBTQ students and on-campus organizations. Their official policy is that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian practice, but they also say they want to be welcoming and nurturing to LGBTQ students.
Linda Livingstone got her job as president because the old boys who ran the school made such a mess of the issue of sexual assaults on campus. They basically denied that it was even an issue. They were one of the last campuses in America to install emergency phone boxes because Baptist parents didn’t want to even consider the possibility their daughters might have to use them some night. They stalled in opening a Title IX office for years, then made it almost impossible for the experienced TItle IX coordinator they hired to do her job. When they finally got the office fully operational, they had 400 sexual assault complaints filed the very first day. They had tried to blame the whole problem on the football program when it was institution-wide. When the reckoning finally came, for the sake of optics they felt like they had to hire a woman to clean up the boys’ mess.
Livingstone started under a cloud of suspicion by the old guard because (a) she was a woman and (b) she had a mandate to clean things up. She is perceived as more liberal than her predecessors but had tried not to push the university in an overtly liberal direction.
But she also doesn’t want Baylor to have the image of a school like Liberty U. The students are fairly conservative but also, I suspect, more accepting of LGBTQ students than their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. It’s just not that big a deal to them, because, unlike the older generations, they’ve known kids who are out of the closet since they were in HS or even junior high. They don’t want to be overtly discriminatory.
I think Livingstone recognized this. But it appears she badly underestimated the predictable amount of opposition accepting this grant would cause. Now she has surrendered in the face of the blowback. Reading her message, which as an alum I received in an email, one might infer that the dean of the social work school accepted this grant without her knowledge. I doubt that’s what actually happened, but if it did, not informing your boss of a grant that was bound to cause controversy would be an offense that would demand a resignation. I think more likely that Livingstone knew and the dean just let himself be thrown under the bus.
In any event, this will weaken her position, and I expect the howler monkeys on the board from places like Prestonwood Baptist in Dallas will now try to use this to force her out and replace her with one of their own. That would be damaging to Baylor overall, regardless of what you think about the particular issue of LGBTQ students and organizations on campus.
Comment by Thomas on July 9, 2025 at 8:49 pm
Very good news. Real inclusion of people with same-sex attraction means rejection of sin. These people are called to chastity. Baylor University did the correct thing.
Comment by Cal on July 9, 2025 at 10:56 pm
The very name of this — to study the alleged “disenfranchisement and exclusion of LGBTQIA+ individuals and women in the church” — is so nakedly tendentious that it was obviously going to be a piece of woke advocacy. As a generic Christian I am glad to see it rejected, but it is surprising it ever got this far.
Comment by Wilson R. on July 11, 2025 at 11:41 am
For whatever it’s worth, I saw a statement from the Baugh Foundation. Here is what seems to me the most relevant paragraph:
“Our foundation is rooted in Baptist distinctives that include church autonomy and the priesthood of every believer. Not all Baptist believers or churches are aligned on every interpretation of scripture concerning women or LGBTQIA+ individuals, but churches need evidence-based research. We believe that all humans are created in God’s image and deserve a loving spiritual home. The purpose of this research was not to dictate theology, but to better understand the disenfranchisement that LGBTQIA+ individuals and women often face in the church. This research held the potential to speak to urgent challenges facing the Church today, such as the growing loneliness epidemic among young people and the steady decline in church membership, by offering insights rooted in compassion, community, and belonging.”
In other words, the purpose of the grant was to study how churches could best minister to the LGBTQ members already in their pews. Of course, there will be some who think churches shouldn’t try to minister to these people at all, or even let them feel welcomed in their midst while still regarding their lifestyle/orientation as sin. But this has not historically been the position of Baptists, who insist they believe in loving the sinner while hating the sin.
Where I would fault Dr. Livingstone is not in trying to impose some agenda on Texas Baptists. It was in failing to recognize how this would play out once the grant was announced. Anything that says “gay” without immediate statements of condemnation is going to get represented (or misrepresented) as pro-gay, and then the backlash would follow. Livingstone should have known Baylor would have had to say no eventually, so better to say no on the front end. ‘
There have always been gay kids at Baylor, closeted and otherwise, and there have always been gay kids there who want to follow Jesus, and there have always been gay Jesus followers who suffered because they were made to feel uniquely evil in ways that, say, male divorcees or pastors who molested girls were not. Just as “abstinence-only” sex education has been shown to produce more teenage pregnancies than more scientific approaches, there ought to be ways to minister to LGBTQ Christians beyond just “pray away the gay” conversion therapy.
Comment by Douglas E Ehrhardt on July 11, 2025 at 12:19 pm
Pray away the gay conversion therapy . More nonsense from liberals again. Really ?
..
Comment by Thomas on July 11, 2025 at 12:56 pm
There are Christian ministries for people with same-sex attraction that have worked out very well, both Courage International and Living Out.
Comment by Joe M on July 12, 2025 at 1:06 pm
This reminds of the scuffle at World Vision years back. On the question of sexuality, there are really just two options: either the traditional take that identifies certain behavior as explicitly sinful, or the modern take that says same-sex coupling isn’t that big of a deal and people need to be loved and affirmed where they are. Position one will guarantee getting labeled as a fundamentalist/bigot; position two will get you admittance into mainstream playing fields. Baylor leadership obviously wants to be in the mainstream.
“human sexuality as a gift from God, expressed through purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman…” I wonder if the school’s health service provides birth control.
Comment by Wilson R. on July 15, 2025 at 11:12 am
I can pretty well guarantee you that the school’s health services do NOT provide birth control. Sex between students outside of marriage can get you expelled, according to Baylor’s longstanding Student Handbook policy. Not that they go around trying rigorously to enforce this, but it’s on the books–which is what the fundamentalists most care about. One reason their Title IX had so many complaints when it finally got up and running was that, prior to that, women who reported sexual assaults and rapes by male students were subjected to an inquisition from deans at the school about their own sexual histories and behavior.