ABSTRACT

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, several incidents occurred on UK campuses that highlighted tensions between evangelical Christian students, Students’ Unions and university authorities about publicly expressed views on gender roles and homosexuality. Controversy surrounded the evangelical Christian Union at Bristol, where an attempt was made to limit opportunities for female speakers; at Exeter and Birmingham, the issue was inclusion of LGBT students. These incidents illustrate that university campuses can be sites in which conservative, counter-cultural forms of religion emerge or even thrive, an observation that sits uncomfortably alongside the common assumption that higher education is a driver of secularisation (Berger 1999; Guest et al. 2013a).