Faith in school: as mainstream churches continue to wrestle with homosexuality, some religious colleges are taking an increasingly welcoming attitude toward gay students.

After graduating from a Roman Catholic high school in Aurora, Colo., Scott Shields decided to attend Regis University, a Jesuit-run school with a conservative Catholic environment, located in nearby Denver. And despite the church's continued opposition to homosexuality, Shields also decided to come out of the closet.

"There have been times when I wished I had gone to a state school," the 21-year-old says today. "It's more open. There's more of a gay presence. But going from Regis High School to Regis University, I knew what I was getting. I needed to be a name, not a number."

Indeed, Shields has since become prominent on campus: Last spring the junior communications major was elected student body president. His election is evidence that being openly gay at Regis comes with few obstacles, Shields says. And while he continues to get into debates at school about the church's antigay policies, many people on campus have accepted his sexual orientation. "A lot of people come up to me and ask questions," Shields says. "They have told me that I'm the first person they've ever known who is gay."

Openly gay students attending religious colleges are not only increasingly accepted, they are accepted despite their religions' antigay ideologies. Many religious schools, acknowledging the need for qualified students, are welcoming gay students even as debate about gays' acceptance by churches rages on.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church America, which is affiliated with 28 colleges and universities in the Unite States, is just one of the mainstream d nominations grappling with homosexuality. At an annual conference earlier this year, church leaders refused to allow the ordination of noncelibate gay or lesbian pastors.

Students and professors at Lutheran universities have been active participants in the ongoing controversy. For example, Paul Egertson, a pro-gay professor at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, was asked to resign from his role as bishop after ordaining a lesbian pastor.

While the prohibition on gay clergy has engendered contentious debate Cal Lutheran, the overall climate is a progressive one, says Nick Gordon, a 21-year-old junior. "I think gay and lesbian students are accepted and soon will be treated as if they're not any different," he says.

Gordon heads the school's gay straight alliance, now in its third year And like Shields, he is providing a positive example for those religiously conservative students still uneasy about gay issues. One student who was strongly opposed to homosexuality once asker Gordon to discuss the subject over coffee. "I don't know if my talking to bin changed his opinion," Gordon says, "but I think it helped, because he never knew anyone who was gay."

At Emory University in Atlanta, gay students enjoy an accepting environment once thought impossible at the school with long-standing ties to the United Methodist Church. Students say this environment reflects, in part, the church's waning influence at the school, but they're careful to point out that the church still has an important presence on campus. In 1997, for example, a gay couple attending the school were told they could not use a university chapel for a commitment ceremony because the Methodist Church did not recognize same-sex unions.

That chapel now allows gay ration ceremonies, but another, more prominent church on campus, Glenn Memorial, does not. "It's hard that [gay students] cannot get married at Glenn Memorial, because it's beautiful," says Julius "Chaka" Jessup, a 22-year-old sociology major. "It goes against the whole tolerant atmosphere at Emory. It goes to show the hold that the Methodist Church has on Emory."

Ami Mattison, 37, a graduate student in queer studies at Emory, agrees that it's wrong for the church to exclude gay unions from the chapel, but she lauds the school's turn toward acceptance. "There's still homophobia and there are still problems, but the administration has been able to give the queer community most of what we've asked for," she says.

Of course, there are still many religious-based colleges where antigay policies are still very much in effect. One such school, Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., was founded by the evangelical Brethren in Christ. Bria Grace, 19, an out lesbian sophomore at Messiah, says the school makes no secret of its antigay stance. "If you are found to be in a gay or lesbian relationship, you must seek counseling," she says. "You have to recognize that what you did was wrong."

Last year a group of "ex-gays" spoke at a forum at Messiah. Grace says some school leaders were angered when the speakers appeared too accepting of homosexuality. "They didn't come from a position of 'It's bad and you need to change' but rather 'This is our story,'" she says. "That caused a firestorm."

Grace wasn't aware of the school's antigay policies until after she started attending Messiah. Before that, what she saw was a Christian school that had a lot to offer her. "It's a beautiful campus," she says. "The level of education you get is great." But now Grace, fired of having to limit her social life to clandestine meetings with other gay students at Messiah, is considering transferring. "I live in constant fear that somebody's going to find out, that somebody's going to target me," she says.

At Regis, Shields is gearing up for a challenging school year. "As the student body president of a Catholic university, I have to uphold the mission of this school," he says. "I will never openly bash the Catholic Church, but I will let people know I do not believe everything the church says. I hope to have an open debate about the church's standpoint on homosexuality."

Despite his school's connection to a church that continues to label homosexuality as "inherently evil," Shields hasn't lost sight of why he chose Regis. "I'm going to be the first one in my family to graduate from college," he says. "I wanted to do it for my parents. I wanted to go to somewhat of a prestigious school. I wanted them to be proud."