For over a century the “Chautauqua on Lake Michigan,” perched on a hillside overlooking a particularly scenic expanse of coastline, has served as a local cultural center and sacred retreat for families like Sheaffer’s, who mostly have been visiting for generations. But for the past decade idyllic, serene Bay View has been embroiled in a bitter internal conflict that’s sharply divided the tight-knit community and—because of its echoes of the ugly housing discrimination fights of past decades—resonated far beyond, tapping a nerve in the country’s culture wars and the broader debate about the role of religion in American life. The core of this dispute is that while anyone is welcome to visit Bay View or participate in its events—and many outsiders do—for decades only Christians have been allowed to actually own cottages and act as voting community members. In early August, after years of escalating tension, members voted to finally amend the bylaws to allow non-Christians to own property, but the dispute remains ongoing. A group of plaintiffs, arguing the new provisions still amount to religious discrimination, are forging ahead with a federal lawsuit against the Bay View Association.[...]
Bay View was clearly established as a Protestant retreat. Members opposed to changing the requirements point to its mission statement outlining the centrality of Christian values, and to historical documents that suggest the founders’ religious intent. “We did not enter this wilderness to make money, nor build a city of pleasure,” one 1900 brochure reads. “We came to worship God, to establish a center of Christian influence.”[...]
At the time he joined, Duquette liked Bay View’s Christian association, he said, but he didn’t give the membership requirements much thought until the mid-00s, when the dispute started catching fire. One member, poking around in the archives, discovered that Bay View’s explicit Christian-only requirement didn’t originate with its founding but was actually added around 1942, when the board adopted a resolution that members must be “of the white race and a Christian.” (By 1959 Bay View had dropped the race requirement; from the 1960s to 1980s it implemented a 10 percent quota on Catholics. Bylaws later changed “Christian” to “Christian persuasion.”) [...]
This summer’s vote was billed as a kind of compromise that would finally end the dispute. The “Christian persuasion” and minister-letter requirements would be removed, although a new amendment would require prospective members to agree to “respect the principles of the United Methodist Church” and support Bay View’s Christian mission. It would also add a requirement that a majority of the nine-person board is Methodist.
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