This is not an isolated issue. A service my freshman year focused on ways to be environmentally friendly. One of the speakers blurted out the phrase “and just like we worship God, we also need to worship the Earth.”

No, actually we do not. This is a Christian university, not a pantheistic one. Baylor has made a concerted effort recently to be greener, which is fine. However, using Chapel as a platform to promote this view is tasteless.

In fact, Chapel is not the right venue for any political discourse. Chapel is not a random event hosted by a group on campus in which students are free to attend or ignore. This is Chapel, an event required of all Baylor students to receive a degree. If Baylor wants to host a secular panel, that’s absolutely fine and they have every right to do so. But Chapel is not the place or time for that, and no student should be forced to attend what boils down to political indoctrination. It’s a time to, as Baylor has stated on its own website, “focus on both the god who made them and the universe in which they live.”

You would be hard-pressed to find a church in our area that would ever pass off a panel discussion on Black Lives Matter or a session promoting environmentalism as a traditional Sunday service. Yet Baylor has no problem doing so, even going so far as to say attending is our duty as Christians.