by Shem R.W
Evergreen’s New Christian Ministry
@TESC_CRU
“Cru is a Christian college ministry on over 700 campuses nation-wide. We are taking steps to start it at [The] Evergreen State College.”
We have all participated in a little bit of e-stalking. That’s exactly what I was doing one afternoon this summer, when I was scrolling through the following tabs of my classmates’ Instagram profiles in an attempt to get to know them better.
One thing about me is that I am incredibly, unabashedly, and inconsolably obsessed with Evangelical Christianity. I have dedicated years and years to observing the culture and beliefs of these children of Christ. Somehow I had never heard of Cru before, though, and now it’s moving into my own backyard? My interest was piqued at this point, so naturally I spent the next few hours looking for what I could find out about it online. Here is what I could dredge up.
First of all, the name itself was curious to me. At first I thought it was an acronym, as in, CRU. It’s actually much stranger than that. From its founding in 1951 up until 2011 it was the Campus Crusade for Christ. Why did they change such a beautiful name, you ask? Well, there was pushback from Muslims against the use of the word ‘crusade’ in the early 2010s, and as a result they officially changed their web domains and all associated materials to be under the name Cru.
This isn’t the only time Cru has had conflict with Islam and Muslim peoples. You can read testimony on their website purporting to be from Iranian immigrants about the blessings God gave them, including being granted work visas and escaping an addiction to barbiturates, after attending a Christian aerobics class. There are stories you can find on older deconstructionist forums about Cru holding interfaith meetings with Muslims and using cherry picked verses from the Quran to harass them. According to CruPress in their publication “Five Hurdles between Muslims and the Gospel”, where they describe step-by-step instructions on how to convert Muslims through theological debate: “no other religion hates the cross like Islam.”
In one of their theology guides, “Leading in a Complex Moral Environment”, they also have many choice words about the LGBT community and intersex individuals. Here’s the breakdown. Homosexuality is scripturally proven to be an abomination, transgenderism is too, and through conversion therapy (which Cru has been affiliated with in the past, in the form of Exodus International) you can be redeemed- if not freed- from these sexual sins. God created male and female using intelligent design, and though gender roles may vary across cultures, they are meant to be abided by according to birth sex. They list homosexuality on a list of different forms of ‘sexual brokenness’ next to child molestation, rape, incest, prostitution and sex trafficking (as well as, on a lighter note, specifically listing polyamory).
Rollins University had a conflict with Cru in 2018 when it was discovered that Cru does not allow members who experience homosexual desire to take leadership roles and thus the college did not recognize them as a student group. There are reports of sexual abuse between older and younger men on church trips, stalking of members suspected or known to frequent gay bars, and social isolation of lesbian members from the gender-segregated womens’ groups that Cru facilitates. You can read more about this in Chelsy Albertsons’ thesis paper ‘Cru’d: Lesbian Identity Tension in Campus Crusade for Christ’. Their family ministry, FamilyLife, backed California’s Proposition 22 to outlaw gay marriage in the early aughts. They’re not explicit about any of these things, of course. But in the guide I mentioned before, Cru leadership describes how to lead their queer targets to join the ministry and convert to Christianity- slowly make them feel comfortable and safe in the group, before beginning to spiritually abuse them through ‘redirecting’ towards defining their identity through Christ in search of salvation. How dangerous would that be for the population here? There are queer Christians on Evergreen campus- I have met them. I found on Cru’s Instagram when first perusing it that they follow many students I know to be queer or who have pronouns that suggest transness listed in their bios. I genuinely worry for how Cru could harm them in the future, not to mention what anti-gay sentiment could be stirred up among the insular group, considering the reports that those who join often don’t have much of a life outside it. On a campus so heavily queer, in such close proximity to the fascist arm of PNW politics present in Olympia, I wonder what that could boil over into.
Cru has connections to the likes of Bob Jones and Bill Graham, as well as ministries like Focus on the Family and the Moral Majority; all major players in the Christian Right of the Raegan era that has infected the US and continues to rot it from the inside out. They take colonialist mission trips to places like South America and East Asia, including illegal ones to China, a country that has laws against unregistered missionary work. One of these trips to Kazakhstan in 2011 ended in a student found dead in his hotel room with a plastic bag over his head after the group unlawfully entered the country. Then there’s their targeting of minority groups like Hispanic, Korean, and Black Americans, the rampant sexual misconduct (“It’s only gay if you suck it”, one male student was told by a higher up in the group, later being told “welcome to the club” when he told female members of the sexual harassment he was enduring), and the promotion of Young-Earth Creationism.
This ministry has a history from the day it was founded of being anti-Communist. Cru participated in outreach that targeted the New Left in the nineteen sixties to seventies, using their work as their strawman organization the Christian World Liberation Front- a name clearly lifted from the actual radical coalition Third World Liberation Front in an attempt to ingratiate themselves to their political contemporaries- to provide places for drug addicts to couchsurf as they brought them to Christ. They attended the DNC in Chicago in 1968 to evangelize and infiltrated SDS meetings, both in attempts to draw student radicals away from direct action. Is that really the energy we want on Evergreen campus so soon after Floyd? Do we really want to give these people the opportunity to continue that tradition here- especially considering the FBI’s past infiltration of Evergreen’s own chapter of SDS and other radical groups?
Though I have a morbid fascination with Evangelical Christians and their insane antics (see: the Rodrigues family, Bethany Beal, Paul Olliges, Kelly Havens and Brittany Dawn), I can’t help but feel extremely apprehensive at the concept of this group having a presence at my school. This campus is home to many vulnerable people whom I would hate to see swept up in Cru’s egregious rebuke of everything this institution should be standing for. They have been known to target student athletes the most out of any social group as well, and considering how isolated that population is at Evergreen, I also worry about our more athletically-minded peers being suckered into something like this in place of connecting with the rest of Evergreen campus who should be welcoming them into our fold.
I don’t want this article to fuel the persecution complex many American Evangelicals have. I have Christian family members that were some of the kindest and purest souls I have ever known. Cru is just not full of those Christians. There have been Catholic Worker’s organizations and LGBT-friendly Christian clubs on campus in the past- I simply do not want to see Evergreen poisoned by this specific one’s colonialist, complementarian, Christo-fascist, anti-gay bullshit, the way they’ve poisoned hundreds of other campuses across the US. They started posting content on their Evergreen branch’s Instagram in May of 2023. I am sure we will be seeing more from them as fall quarter draws closer.
I’ll be keeping my eye on this story as it develops. Expect to hear more about it over the next school year, because I’m afraid with my predilections I will not be able to look away.
