(OPINION) Wheaton College is often called the “Harvard of Christian Schools” due to its academic rigor being relatively comparable to the Ivy League titan. Its graduates of note range from Billy Graham to Dan Coates, former Director of National Intelligence and U.S. senator.
But recently, the school in the leafy suburb west of Chicago has begun to mimic Harvard’s wokeness. Banning biblical words, teaching critical race theory, and psychologizing gender identity issues may not seem extreme in modern academia.
But for a school which houses the works of Rev. Graham, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, it is adrift from its orthodox, Christian moorings. But this isn’t a recent drift.
In the 2000s, the education department commended the teachings of Marxists. In 2016, 78 faculty members voiced support for a fellow professor who stated Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
And five years later, the school held its first ceremony recognizing graduating minority students sans White students. And currently, Wheaton permits its professors to teach critical race theory.
Marxism, religious syncretism and segregation are incompatible with Christian teaching. But its most blatant offense against Christianity is banning certain biblical words that are key to the faith’s foundation.
In this year’s curriculum for freshman, students are informed about opportunities to meet the needs of those less fortunate. This is commonly known as the act of service.
Wheaton, however, instructs the students not to use the word, “service.” Instead, they are to use “sacrificial co-laboring.” The reason given is service “may invoke power dynamics across socio-economic, racial, and cultural lines.”
Why would Wheaton sideline a word (or its derivatives) used throughout the Bible and by Jesus himself? For those in the Christian faith and outside of it, the existence of an unbalanced power dynamic is the very reason for service. Furthermore, the crux of Jesus’ ministry on earth was serving. And his service erased the superficial lines dividing people and united them around himself. (READ MORE)
