Alas, the symbol of Duke is also a symbol of how many Christian-founded universities ain’t what they used to be.

In December, Duke declared the cathedral open to same-sex "commitment ceremonies" for students, staff, faculty and alumni. Now as it happens, the university is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, which forbids homosexual "marriages" in its churches. Duke officials got around this on a technicality (the chapel itself "is not tied to a particular denomination," a press release said). But the Methodist school’s top brass obviously approve of the practice. In a joint letter, President Nan Keohane and the chapel’s dean, William Willimon (the latter a Methodist minister), hailed "this liturgical innovation" as an example of the college’s "wonderful tradition of rich religious diversity." And that was that; the powers that be had spoken.

Not that everyone is taking the ruling lying down. The Duke Conservative Union, a student group, says it’s received hundred of letters and e-mails supporting its "Save the Chapel" campaign and is alerting alumni to the new policy (Duke is in the midst of a fundraising campaign). Alumni letters to local newspapers have also been critical.

Fact is, though, this is just the latest step in the de-Christianizing of Duke — a process which is largely complete. For some time the university has performed abortions in its medical facilities and provided same-sex "partner" benefits. "Duke does not consider itself a southern university; its second-largest group of students comes from New York," says the university’s Roman Catholic chaplain, Edward Vetter. "Duke tries to compete with the Ivy League schools. Its message is, ‘We are not provincial; we are politically liberal.’"

Duke is just the latest example of a Christian-founded school to swing leftward with the rest of academia. A lot of those aforementioned Ivy Leaguers — places like Harvard and Yale, which to this day retain divinity schools — did it long ago (see William F. Buckley’s 1951 book God and Man at Yale). Duke is just the latest Christian-founded school that’s opened its chapel to homosexual couples; places like Harvard, Stanford and Emory beat them to the punch.

There’s a lot that should bother Christians about stories like this. But the worst aspect of the stories isn’t that the schools are abandoning their Christian heritage. It’s that they’re simultaneously pretending they’re still Christian at all.

Scripture, after all, could hardly be clearer on issues like homosexuality, which it repeatedly condemns in the strongest terms. (Words like "abomination" don’t leave much wiggle room.) If you reject that view, then as a matter of sheer intellectual consistency, it seems the obvious course of action is to reject Scripture itself — to simply and forthrightly declare yourself in opposition to Christianity.

Remarkably few people do that, though. More often, they end up talking like sex educator Debra Haffner, who spent a semester at liberal Yale Divinity School and then announced her discovery that the Bible has nothing against "committed, consensual same-gender relationships" and even looks favorably on them. (She gets that from passages like 2 Samuel 1:26, where David laments that his just-slain friend Jonathan’s "love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women" — though as Denver Seminary professor Craig Blomberg has noted, "David’s whole point in this text is that Jonathan was his ‘blood brother’ with a loyalty that surpassed that which mere eroticism creates.")

Why go through such contortions? I think there are a couple of reasons. Some people no doubt are driven by the practical consideration that open opposition to Christianity will provoke more opposition than slick subversion. But the larger number, I suspect, simply don’t want to face their radical break with God. It’s much easier to replace Him with a god of their own invention who tells them what they want to hear — lots of talk about "celebrating diversity" and "alternative lifestyles" that fits conveniently into our do-whatever-you-feel-like culture.

If you actually sit down and read Scripture, though, you won’t get far before you notice that’s not how the God of the Bible talks. He speaks the language of truth, and nowhere will you find Him celebrating the "rich religious diversity" of the pagans. In the Old and New Testaments alike, He’s full of thunder against sin of all sorts, including the sexual kinds that fixate our society: fornication, adultery, homosexuality and just plain lust.

To be sure, He also speaks the language of forgiveness. But that language draws its power from the very gravity of our sin—the fact that we need His forgiveness so very much and deserve it not at all. That’s what makes God’s grace such a wonderful act of love. We only cherish it when we hear the message of repentance.

Once upon a time, a lot of people heard that message in places like Duke Chapel. That’s how you knew it was a chapel. At the rate things are going it looks like all that will be left soon is the architecture. But the chapel will continue to dwell in other places--the ones where God's Word is still taught.