Crossroads -- Exploring the ongoing Wheaton College wars

These fights are about doctrine, culture and politics, but doctrine comes first

If you are interested in debates about politics and religion, then you might remember this name — Russell Vought.

The first time this politico was in the news was 2017, when he faced a jury of U.S. senators in a confirmation hearing before serving as deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. That was in the first Donald Trump administration, of course.

Now, Vought is in the news because of fierce criticism from other graduates of Wheaton College, his alma mater. The problem is that Vought was recently approved to direct the White House Office of Management and Budget in the second Trump team and, believe it or not, college leaders posted a note of congratulations, while encouraging prayers for him. Hold that thought, since news coverage of this Wheaton firestorm served as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast.

But first, let’s flash back to this 2017 exchange between Vought and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The big question: Is the clash rooted in religion, politics or both? Here is how I described the scene in an “On Religion” column, when Sanders questioned a Vought letter about a Wheaton professor’s claims that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

As a Wheaton graduate, Vought argued that salvation was found through Jesus — period.

Thus, Sanders said: "You wrote, 'Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, His Son and they stand condemned.' Do you believe that that statement is Islamophobic?"

The nominee repeated his defense of this ancient Christian doctrine. Sanders kept asking if Vought believed that Muslims "stand condemned."

Once again, Vought said: "Senator, I'm a Christian …"

Sanders shouted him down: "I understand you are a Christian! But this country is made of people who are not. … Do you think that people who are not Christians are going to be condemned?" Sanders concluded that he would reject Vought because, "this nominee is really not someone who this country is supposed to be about."

Vought asked if there was evidence that his Christian beliefs had, in any way, led to conflicts in his relationships with colleagues and others. Sanders heard from critics claiming that he had attacked Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which says "no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

This brings us to 2025. Here is a key chunk of a Religion News Service report with this headline: “Wheaton College clash over Russell Vought escalates, exposing evangelical fault lines.”

After Wheaton posted its Feb. 7 statement asking for prayers for Vought, alumni and others answered on social media, objecting to Vought’s work as an architect of Project 2025, the proposed agenda for a second Trump administration. … Wheaton soon withdrew its statement, saying the flap had rendered its congratulations more political than it intended.

On Feb. 10, an open letter signed by hundreds of alumni appeared, calling Vought’s positions “antithetical to Christian charity.” The signers, including alumni who are on the faculty at New York University and Baylor University, agreed to “publicly distance” themselves from Vought’s work and “reaffirm our commitment to the Gospel’s radical call to justice, mercy, and humility.”

On Monday (Feb. 17), a second alumni letter appeared, accusing the college of stifling conservative viewpoints, capitulating to “the spirit of our age” and upholding a “DEI regime.” It concludes with a list of demands, including that the college audit “every single faculty and staff member’s commitment to the Statement of Faith and Community Covenant.”

The key to the “For Wheaton” letter from conservative alumni was its focus on moral and cultural trends that have existed for several decades. This led to the document’s most aggressive demand — asking trustees to examine whether many faculty members and staffers had, in effect, signed the college’s doctrinal and moral covenants with their fingers crossed.

Here is a crucial summary statement in a complex, nuanced report at The Atlantic: “A Fistfight Over Donald Trump at the Evangelical Version of Harvard.”

The past decade of partisan politics has badly fractured the evangelical world. “Wheaton in particular finds itself at the center of an intra-evangelical culture war that is defined by Trump,” Bryan McGraw, a dean and professor of politics at Wheaton, told me. In the postwar period, Wheaton represented a particular strain of evangelicalism: intellectually rigorous, unafraid of the modern world, and keenly interested in cultivating mainstream legitimacy and prestige. This wasn’t the fire and brimstone of fundamentalism; this was the joyful, big-tent-style Christianity of Billy Graham. While Wheaton always fashioned itself as theologically conservative, it was never overtly partisan. But maintaining that posture has become increasingly difficult. “The complexity the college is caught in is that it wants to remain useful for everybody who calls themselves evangelical,” Mark Noll, a historian of evangelicalism and Wheaton alumnus, told me. “That maybe is a little bit naïve, since what it means theologically to be an evangelical is contested, what it means to be evangelical culturally is contested, and obviously the political implication is contested.”

Truth is, the Trump era has poured gasoline on fires that have existed in Christian higher education for decades.

In other words, Trump didn’t cause the divisions between trustees, faculty, alumni, parents, students and churches tied to Wheaton and many, many other colleges, universities and seminaries. The Trump era has created a news hook that, for journalists, made some of these conflicts newsworthy.

Note the sequence in that Noll quote, which noted that theological tensions lead to debates about cultural issues that are then linked to politics.

The Vought story isn’t really about Orange Man Bad. For decades, these conflicts have been about theology, with trustees doing everything they can to keep the fighting behind closed doors. This is one reason why many Christian college administrators worry about student newspapers having online editions.

I would suggest that journalists digging into conflicts at Wheaton and similar elite Christian campuses (hello Calvin University) focus on the three doctrinal questions at the heart of this 2014 GetReligion post: “Flashback to George Gallup, Jr., and very early roots of the tmatt trio.”

* Are biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this happen?

* Is salvation found through Jesus, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

* Is sex outside of marriage a sin?

With these doctrinal fault lines in mind, reporters will then be ready to parse the doctrinal statements and community covenants that define the borders of these voluntary, private, academic communities. There is no way to cover conflicts on these campuses without a quote or two from documents of this kind.

For example, here are a few bites from the Wheaton Statement of Faith and Educational Purpose, which was originally drafted in 1924. I added bold text to highlight some flash points:

WE BELIEVE that God has revealed Himself and His truth in the created order, in the Scriptures, and supremely in Jesus Christ; and that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are verbally inspired by God and inerrant in the original writing, so that they are fully trustworthy and of supreme and final authority in all they say. …

WE BELIEVE that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race; and that they were created in His own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness. …

WE BELIEVE that the Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, as a representative and substitutionary sacrifice, triumphing over all evil; and that all who believe in Him are justified by His shed blood and forgiven of all their sins. …

WE BELIEVE in the blessed hope that Jesus Christ will soon return to this earth, personally, visibly, and unexpectedly, in power and great glory, to gather His elect, to raise the dead, to judge the nations, and to bring His Kingdom to fulfillment.

How about the community lifestyle covenant? That Wheaton document opens with with a statement that includes:

… (W)hile the College is not a church, it is yet a community of Christians who seek to live according to biblical standards laid down by Jesus Christ for his body, the church. Or again, while the College is not a religious order, it yet demonstrates some features that are similar to religious orders, communities wherein, for the sake of fulfilling the community’s purposes, its members voluntarily enter into a social compact. …

For Wheaton’s community covenant to service its stated purpose, it is crucial that each member of the College family understand it clearly and embrace it sincerely.

That leads to some bullet points that are relevant to the current debates and divisions at Wheaton (and elsewhere). Community members should:

* uphold the God-given worth of human beings, from conception to death, as the unique image-bearers of God (Gen. 1:27; Psalm 8:3-8; 139:13-16);

* pursue unity and embrace ethnic diversity as part of God’s design for humanity and practice racial reconciliation as one of his redemptive purposes in Christ (Isa. 56:6-7; John 17:20-23; Acts 17:26; Eph. 2:11-18; Col. 3:11; Rev. 7:9-10);

* uphold chastity among the unmarried (1 Cor. 6:18) and the sanctity of marriage between a man and woman (Heb. 13:4);

In terms of the “tmatt trio,” note that this covenant stresses that “Scripture condemns the following” …

* sexual immorality, such as the use of pornography (Matt. 5:27-28), pre-marital sex, adultery, homosexual behavior and all other sexual relations outside the bounds of marriage between a man and woman (Rom. 1:21-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gen. 2:24; Eph. 5:31).

Near the end, Wheaton leaders note that:

Christian integrity dictates that if we have voluntarily placed ourselves under Wheaton's community covenant, we must make every effort to fulfill our commitment by living accordingly. Keeping our covenant may also on occasion require that we take steps to hold one another accountable, confronting one another in love as we work together to live in faithfulness both to God's Word and to our own word.

In conclusion, is the Wheaton war about Donald Trump? Yes, and no. Accurate reporting requires information noting that campus conflicts of this kind have been raging — yes, often behind the scenes and out of the headlines — for decades.

The conflicts are doctrinal, cultural and sometimes political. But doctrine is the most crucial reality in these voluntary, private, academic communities.

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