here we go again

I’ve had to write this quickly and may be revisiting or expanding it later. Stay tuned.

On my first official day as an employee of Wheaton College, in the summer of 1984, I attended an orientation session for new faculty. We heard from various people who worked for the college in various endeavors; they gave us outlines of what they do and why they do it and how they might be a resource for faculty members. One of them was a man who oversaw a program that sent Wheaton students overseas, primarily to the global South and (in those long-ago days) behind the Iron Curtain, to see how Christians lived there, what they needed, how we could learn from them and how we could help them. It sounded like a wonderful program. During the break after his presentation, we were standing around drinking coffee, and he casually asked me whether I knew whom I would vote for in the upcoming Presidential election. I told him that I supported the reelection of President Reagan. He cocked his head at me and said, “You’re really going to vote for that warmongering racist? I think you should reconsider that decision.”

I was pretty surprised by this because I had assumed that the evangelical Christianity of Wheaton would be accompanied — perhaps not exclusively but dominantly — by political conservatism. It turned out that matters were a little more complicated. Wheaton certainly had far more Republicans (and other kinds of political conservative) than almost any other American college or university campus, but the overall political orientation of the faculty was pretty similar to that of the country as a whole. It wasn’t far from a 50–50 split, and I think that variability of political stances has been consistent throughout the modern history of Wheaton.

And it should, shouldn’t it? The question of how the teachings of Jesus and the more general witness of the Bible translates into political belief and action is a notoriously difficult one. Only for the dim-witted or bigoted (on the Left and the Right) is it utterly obvious. The more we know about the history of Christian faith, practice, and teaching the more cautious we will be, I think, about assuming that we can map our Christian beliefs directly onto the political options available to us in our time and place.

But over the past half-century or more we’ve seen a great many people who think that evangelical Christianity should directly correspond to the policies of the Republican party, whatever they happen to be at any given time. (They are quite different now from what they were in the time of Ronald Reagan.) So some 30 years ago, as a professor who taught a class in literary theory, was the subject of the same kind of hit piece that Daniel Davis has just written for First Things about current Wheaton professors, though in my case the piece appeared in World magazine. It was my view that my students, almost all of whom were English and philosophy majors, needed to understand trends in recent thought about literature and interpretation, and needed to be able to assess those ideas from a theologically informed perspective. But this meant reading controversial figures generously, to try to understand not only what they say but what they are trying to accomplish in saying it, and then to ask ourselves whether, even if in the end we must strongly dissent from their key claims, we might learn something from them.

It was this that my critic found unforgivable: my job, he felt, was to teach students only what I agreed with and thought they should agree with. My failure to hold to this practice made me a kind of Judas, a betrayer of trust.

My reasonably well-informed guess is that my former colleague Keith Johnson – whom I have heard in public conversations making strong defenses of both the uniqueness and the universality of the gospel of Jesus Christ – does the same kind of thing I do. But of course, I certainly wouldn’t be able to know that from this article. Davis writes: “Keith Johnson, assigns (and commends) liberation and feminist theology for reading” — but I’d like to know what liberation and feminist theology he assigns, why he assigns it, and if he does indeed commend it, on what grounds. But Davis isn’t going to tell us that because this isn’t a piece meant to inform us of anything; it’s just a smear. I also might ask Davis whether he thinks that people who study theology at Wheaton need to emerge without knowing what liberation and feminist theologians actually say. Is ignorance bliss? Or is it for Davis, perhaps, merely virtue?

Similarly, I don’t know what Davis thinks “critical race theory” is or what it says — I’ve written about this problem at some length — but the phrase, in his usage, isn’t meant to convey any specific content, it’s just meant to scare the children. Ditto the title the piece bears — meant to echo William F. Buckley’s critique of his alma mater, Yale — which nicely elides the rather significant fact that, whatever their politics might happen to be, everyone employed by Wheaton signs a robust and classically orthodox statement of Christian faith. (But then, perhaps the Christian God isn’t the God Davis feels that Wheaton has betrayed. Hard to say.) 

At this juncture I find myself remembering the many students I advised who participated that program that sent them overseas. I remember one young woman, very conservative theologically, who came to my office on the first day of a new semester, just having returned from six months in Mozambique. She greeted me, sat down — and burst into tears. The abrupt transition from six months among a great many very poor but very joyful Christians to our beautiful, well-appointed, technologically sophisticated, and extremely clean campus was more than she could handle. She would spend the next few months, and probably the next few years, grappling with the implications of an evangelical Christianity that flourished more powerfully in the global South than in the United States, even with almost none of the resources we enjoy.

This kind of experience is a characteristic result not just of that program but more generally of the liberal-arts education on offer at Wheaton, which is always based on the understanding that, if the evangelical movement started in Europe, it has spread throughout the world, and we in the West neither own it nor control it. The job of liberal education, especially in a Christian context, is never simply to confirm us in what we already know, or believe we know, but to challenge and push us to deeper and wider understanding, and to do so with confidence, because we ground our pursuit of learning in the conviction that “in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

(I use the first-person plural here not because I still teach at Wheaton — I left eleven years ago — but because I learned at Wheaton how to think in this way, thanks to the tutelage of many wise saints, and I hold today to the convictions I developed there.)

The faculty and administration at Wheaton understand this, and therefore see that the American evangelical movement has not always acknowledged its debts to cultures beyond our own, has not always been willing to learn from Christians whose experiences are very different from ours, and has not always made welcome people from outside a certain and rather narrow cultural context. (Some of the people who have felt unwelcome are Wheaton students, including many who love the place with what seems like an unrequited love.) It is the picture of evangelical Christianity as a truly global phenomenon that has led Wheaton to try to reckon with the blind spots in its own history, and to make amends to what Dostoevsky called “the insulted and the injured” when amends are called for.

In trying to make this reckoning, I think Wheaton has made mistakes. For instance, I think it got on board with a DEI regime that may look superficially like a Christian form of reconciliation but in fact is a very different beast, and the college deserves to be criticized for that. But I’d rather a Christian college make mistakes in trying to follow Christ more closely, more faithfully, than to sit back in the smug confidence that it knows everything and has no one outside its own orbit to learn from.