Looking Back to Move Things Forward

By the time John Bagley graduated from Wheaton College in 2010, he was disillusioned with his faith and his alma mater. Bagley said the predominantly white, evangelical Illinois college—which was named the most LGBTQ-unfriendly campus by The Princeton Review in 2010, 2012 and 2016—was a difficult place to be a gay Black student. He’d come out to his friends and had even occasionally led the college’s chapel worship once a month as an underclassman, but his once-strong belief in Christianity had been eroded by what he saw as Wheaton’s refusal to accept him for who he was.