It may be more about protestants oppressing other protestants because they agreed with the Pope, but nothing in the College’s 1924 Statement of Faith seems to have been violated, rather it is the political discourse interpreted by the college’s ruling powers that is at risk as is freedom of inquiry appropriate to a liberal arts college.
Like the brief of the fired Florida Atlantic University professor where student complaints, normally part of community moderation and due process, have trumped tenure rights. This should have speech protections even in an institution that requires an oath to the institution’s religious origins text, which is relatively conventional compared to the doctrines of some other fundmentalist institutions.
One could even say that, contrary it would seem to the totalizing discourse of Christianity that a faculty member of color and the first tenured African American faculty member is not free to make a small symbolic point that in fact demonstrates greater personal faith consonant with the academic goals of the institution. OTOH it may simply be a reactionary attempt to elevate a covert racism to the level of personnel policies using the recent manufacture of cultural micro-aggressions on various college/university campuses.
Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, was placed on administrative leave on Tuesday after suggesting that believers in the two faiths do indeed follow the same God. Hawkins has also been wearing a hijab—the headscarf worn by many Muslim women—as a gesture of what she calls “embodied solidarity” with Muslims this month. She pledged to wear it throughout the Advent season, including while she teaches at the Illinois liberal-arts college, and while flying to her home state of Oklahoma, which in 2010 passed a constitutional amendment banning its courts from considering Islamic Sharia law in decisions…
In a statement posted to Facebook on December 10, Hawkins explained the gesture this way:
I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American.
I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity.
I stand in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor because we are formed of the same primordial clay, descendants of the same cradle of humankind--a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa that I had the privilege to descend into to plumb the depths of our common humanity in 2014.
I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.
Wheaton’s official objection is Hawkins’s conflation of the gods of Christianity and Islam. One level, it is a question of semantics: If there is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God, he can at least hear the prayers of everyone on earth, even if they are misdirected. Still, the question is an important one for many believers, because it is related to the question of whether all faiths are equal paths to God...
When it comes to academic freedom, religiously affiliated colleges occupy a space of perpetual tension. Those which are serious academic institutions—and Wheaton is one—want to nurture scholarship and free inquiry just like any other college does.
But they also want to cultivate a community oriented around one particular worldview, and everyone who studies and works there understands that. What that looks like in practice can be a source of discord within that community, and at times like this, a source of bafflement and mockery to outsiders. Within the past decade, Wheaton has dismissed a professor who converted to Catholicism, and another for declining to discuss his divorce.
It seems that the South African origins and culture Wheaton recognizes is an Apartheid one.
In a statement posted to Facebook on December 10, Hawkins explained the gesture this way:
I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American.
I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity.
I stand in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor because we are formed of the same primordial clay, descendants of the same cradle of humankind--a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa that I had the privilege to descend into to plumb the depths of our common humanity in 2014.
I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.
Hard to believe for example that Catholics might find this controversial or even threatened by one statement by the Pope.
Educational Purpose
Committed to the principle that truth is revealed by God through Christ "in Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," Wheaton College seeks to relate Christian liberal arts education to the needs of contemporary society. The curricular approach is designed to combine faith and learning in order to produce a biblical perspective needed to relate Christian experience to the demands of those needs...
WE BELIEVE that the one, holy, universal Church is the body of Christ and is composed of the communities of Christ’s people. The task of Christ’s people in this world is to be God’s redeemed community, embodying His love by worshipping God with confession, prayer, and praise; by proclaiming the gospel of God’s redemptive love through our Lord Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth by word and deed; by caring for all of God’s creation and actively seeking the good of everyone, especially the poor and needy.