Under One God: Bible Studies Across Harvard’s Campus

Anna G. Dean ’25 wasn’t “necessarily Christian” at Harvard, despite being raised as one — until she came across a poster in the Yard advertising Queer-Affirming and Feminist Bible Study for Students and decided to attend the meeting.

Now, Dean is an organizer and facilitator for the group, which meets weekly at Memorial Church and applies a queer or feminist reading to Biblical teachings.

“For me, it was really one of the first places that I felt validated in my doubts of Christianity, but also loved and able to still be a Christian, even with certain concerns about patriarchy or queerness,” she says.

This group is just one of many affinity-based Bible study groups on Harvard’s campus. Others include the Jewish-Christian Bible Study and the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship. Whether they read the Bible with a feminist lens or with a literary one, the groups reflect the manifold ways Harvard students explore Christianity on campus.

For many minority groups on campus, these groups are also a space to grapple with the text and their identities.

At the Queer-Affirming and Feminist Bible Study for Students, members often interpret certain characters as queer or transgender in an effort to find representation in the Bible that is otherwise lacking. The group is “paying attention to the context of when things were written, but also interpreting them in a way that is empowering for women but also for queer folks,” according to Dean.

“We’re just Christians who are having a progressive interpretation of the Bible and believe in the root of love within Christianity, and the love of Jesus,” she says.

This semester, they have chosen to focus largely on the Book of Mark, a testament with “a lot of social justice underpinnings,” in the aftermath of Trump’s election.

“A lot of us were kind of feeling down and upset about the election, and so Mark has been a great place to read,” Dean says.

At the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship, members also find ways to apply scriptures to their identity. For example, they analyze discussions of familial affection and the dynamics of love in the scripture.

“Let’s say we’re reading a Bible passage that talks about expressing God’s love to other people,” Matthew Zhang ’27, an AACF member, says. “A big trend in Asian American families is that our parents don't always like to express love as directly as we want them to. So then an application question might be ‘how can we do a better job of expressing love to our family members according to what we learned?’”

The shared commonality in cultural background allows them to discuss such issues and form intimate connections. On their website, you’ll find images of AACF members apple-picking and enjoying hikes or game nights. Many of them are friends outside of the organization and attribute this to the communal space created by AACF meetings.

“The way we try to build community is through vulnerability. It’s being honest about who we are, being ourselves, sharing about what we’re going through,” Zhang says.

“There’s a lot of friend groups that form within the fellowship. I think that’s really beautiful because it means that our approach to vulnerability is working in the sense that they’re establishing connections that extend beyond the official meetings,” he adds.

In addition to providing engaging social spaces, Bible studies across campus contribute to the academic fabric of the school. As Harvard embraces intellectual vitality, many students view their organizations as ways to hold productive, open conversations outside of class.

Yona T. Sperling-Milner ’27, a co-facilitator of Jewish-Christian Bible Study and a Crimson Associate Editorial editor, says, “In Harvard, there’s often this critical distance between yourself and whatever you’re learning, to the extent that people don’t quite talk about what really motivates their day to day philosophical grapplings.”

For Yona, academic structures often prevent people with different perspectives from coming together and having open discussions, instead encouraging individualistic educational experiences.

“I think at Harvard, learning is often an individualized or even atomized experience — you’re studying stats, I’m studying CS, and we’re each on our different paths,” Sperling-Milner says.

“We are trying to build a community of searchers or seekers, and to do that, you have to get involved in other people’s business,” Sperling-Milner says.

Despite hosting mainly affinity-based Bible studies, all the leaders I spoke to expressed a desire to include students from different theological backgrounds.

At the Jewish-Christian Bible Study, the differing backgrounds between Jewish and Christian students often result in different or even conflicting perspectives.

“I think the Jewish participants, myself included, will often pull a narrative from Genesis and explore it in a more literary way — talk about the motivations of the characters, the psychological effects going on,” Sperling-Milner says.

“And when Christian students lead the studies, they’ll often choose something from Psalms, which I think is really interesting, something more instructive,” she adds.

However, despite their varying approaches to the scripture, they manage to wrestle with it meaningfully.

“The Jewish students often will take a different tack and push the Christian participants also to be like, ‘Okay, but this is confusing. What is it supposed to mean?’” she says.

The Queer-Affirming and Feminist Bible Study for Students has also attracted a wide audience, including those who do not necessarily identify as queer or as progressive Christians.

“They come and they realize, ‘Oh, this is really cool.’ And then they stick around,” Dean says.

For Sperling-Milner, the target audience for her group is “anyone who is curious about different ways of reading the Bible, about theological questions, about literary questions.”

“The Bible is, in many ways, the bedrock of Western civilization. We ought to interrogate what’s going on there. It’s not just for Jews and Christians,” she says.

Caleb A. Chung ’27, Sperling-Milner’s co-facilitator for the Jewish-Christian Bible Study, also finds merit in a diverse religious environment.

“All of the members come from different reading traditions, different faith backgrounds, yet we all view the text as sacred. Really, the goal is through spending time together on the shared text, and by sharing these different interpretations, that all of us can just have a better understanding of the Hebrew Bible,” Chung says.

As Dean looks back at her college career and her transition from not identifying as a Christian to leading the Queer-Affirming and Feminist Bible Study for Students, she emphasizes how validating it was to be around others who shared her beliefs.

“I went to this Bible study and finally felt seen and finally felt like there were other people like me who were questioning certain things we were taught growing up,” she says.