Larycia A. Hawkins, a tenured professor of political science at Wheaton College of Illinois, was recently placed on administrative leave following statements she made about Muslim and Christian relations. Her statements included a claim on Facebook last month that has especially concerned Wheaton’s administration: that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Professor Hawkins was deeply moved by the growing vilification and abuse of Muslims in the United States following terrorist killings in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. Her comments (and gesture of solidarity — wearing a hijab during Advent) were meant to express solidarity and underscore the common bond of the two religions “of the book.”
Wheaton characterized her remarks as theological in nature (a claim she contests) and potentially at odds with the evangelical college’s understanding of Christian doctrine, as expressed in its Statement of Faith and Community Covenant, which all Wheaton employees must sign. When talks to reach a mutually satisfying clarification of her statements broke down, she was placed on leave, and the college began proceedings to fire her. (I know Wheaton’s president in a professional capacity and once spoke at the college.)
The case of Larycia Hawkins resonates beyond the Illinois campus because it’s a cautionary tale for all institutions, faith-based and secular, that seek to protect their core beliefs.
In the month since the conflict erupted, Wheaton has found itself embroiled in the sort of public-relations nightmare that the presidents of all religious colleges dread — attacked by conservative alumni and friends for risking the institution’s foundational commitment to its core principles, and pilloried by free-speech advocates for taking what they view as blatantly authoritarian, illiberal actions to silence and remove a popular professor. Campus demonstrations involving students, faculty, and staff, pro and con, have ensued, covered dutifully by the news media. Wheaton finds itself thrust into an unwelcome and distracting light, bearing a burden that any religious institution would find difficult, let alone one with Wheaton’s reputation as one of the nation’s top evangelical colleges.
It is important to see what the conflict is not. Despite its appearance as a fight over freedom of speech, Wheaton is not a public institution, bound by the First Amendment. It may limit permissible speech on its campus — and does. The Statement of Faith “reaffirms salient features of the historic Christian creeds,” including the belief “in one sovereign God, eternally existing in three persons” who “has revealed Himself and His truth in the created order, in the Scriptures, and supremely in Jesus Christ.” The Community Covenant, which establishes the template for a Christian life at Wheaton, warns that “if we do not wish to live under the provisions of this compact, we should not agree to it.”
The Statement of Faith and Community Covenant not only set out what Wheaton community members believe; they implicitly set the boundaries for conduct and speech that are beyond the pale, assertions allegedly like those of Professor Hawkins that may not be spoken without risking adverse consequences.
In short, this is not a fight pitting liberal and illiberal organizations and principles against each other. It is a dispute over what is necessary to become and remain a member of the Wheaton evangelical community. To resolve the matter short of capitulation will require the community’s leadership to assess what the core — or in Christian parlance, kerygma — of Wheaton College is. It is ultimately a serious game of hermeneutics with very high stakes for the players.
Seen in that light, arguments over free speech, academic freedom, employee due process, and the like for campuses like Wheaton are the very real but secondary effects of what is at heart an internal, theological debate. At the meta level, the debate raises questions about the norms and authorities for interpreting the Statement of Faith and Community Covenant, and thus deciding both the kerygma and the fate of Ms. Hawkins as an employee.
What place, if any, do the customary norms of Western democracy, substantive and procedural, have in the decision-making process? What place does evidence of the history of Muslim and Christian thought have in assessing whether we “worship the same God”? Do the urgent needs of suffering people for understanding and protection constitute an authority for theological work? Do we “worship the same God” when we join with other faiths to alleviate that suffering?
Faced with their foundational commitments, all college communities are challenged to understand themselves and their world anew, to interpret their self-identity, and to decide, often in a crisis, what is essential to their collective existence and what is not, to specify their institutional kerygma within the messy contingencies of a new situation.
As a Catholic, I am acutely aware of the importance of tradition as a resource for identifying and articulating our deepest religious principles. Along with Pope Francis’ well-known question “Who am I to judge?” those holding administrative authority must ask “How am I to judge?” — how should I interrogate Scripture and tradition under the present circumstances to make evident the kerygma of my institution?
A saying wrongly attributed by some to St. Augustine — “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, in all things charity” — acknowledges that no statement of faith, no creed, no doctrine is interpreted once and for all. Essential does not mean timeless; it means that which makes us us, here and now. It may be that what is essential today in Wheaton’s core documents may permit the implication that we “people of the book” — Christians, Muslims, and Jews — worship the same God. Or it may not.
That’s for Wheaton’s community to decide as it works to define its religious identity in a world where American Muslims are increasingly the targets of dangerous rhetoric and much worse.
At colleges that are premised on religious commitments, the interpretive conversation goes on every day, just as it does for institutions founded on secular, liberal democratic principles, which are no less opaque than religious principles. See, for example, the intense and apparently endless litigation and scholarship over the scope of “modern” constitutional rights, such as the right to privacy and the right to human dignity, as well as fights over an old reliable like the right to bear arms. The spirited interpretation of foundational texts, whether the U.S. Constitution or the Statement of Faith and Community Covenant, is an intrinsic possibility at all institutions and a sign of their social vitality.
That is why the story of Wheaton College and Professor Hawkins resonates beyond Illinois and beyond evangelical Christians and Muslims. It is a cautionary tale for all whose job it is to patrol the boundaries of the essential, and for those who would expand them, to remember that discerning the kerygma of a college or any institution is a never-ending process. But at the same time, as the Scholastic theologians would remind us, debemus distinguere — we must make distinctions.
S. Alan Ray is a former president and professor of religion and society at Elmhurst College, in Illinois. This academic year he is a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.
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