Evangelicals Shame Wheaton After Woke College Deletes Post Praising Trump Appointee
Billy Graham’s alma mater betrays alumnus who faced attacks when he stood for the school’s biblical principles
Evangelicals are excoriating Wheaton College for its progressive slide down the slope of “woke” ideology after the evangelical institution deleted a social media post congratulating alumnus Russ Vought on his second appointment as the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in a Trump administration.
In a post published Saturday, Wheaton College expressed remorse for “a congratulations and call to prayer” message it had posted for “an alumnus who received confirmation to a White House post.” The post did not name Vought or his confirmation as director of the OMB.
On Friday, the evangelical college had posted a brief message on social media stating: “Wheaton College congratulates and prays for 1998 graduate Russell Vought regarding his senatorial confirmation to serve as the White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget.”
The OMB is the largest office within the executive branch of the U.S. government. It administers the federal budget and oversees the performance of federal agencies. Vought, a faithful evangelical Christian, secured a thumping majority with all 53 Senate Republicans voting in his favor.
Wheaton Defends Deleted Tweet
Wheaton spokesman Joseph Moore admitted that the school deleted the post because it “created a distracting amount of conflict on our social media channel,” even though “offering prayers and congratulations is not a political endorsement.”
“The recognition and prayer is something we would typically do for any graduate who reached that level of government,” Wheaton explained in its retraction. “However, the political situation surrounding [Vought’s] appointment led to a significant concern expressed online.
“It was not our intention to embroil the College in a political discussion or dispute,” the school added, noting that “as a non-profit institution, [it] does not make political endorsements.”
Evangelicals blasted Wheaton for capitulating to the “woke mob,” especially to anti-Trump alumni who attacked the school for congratulating Vought. Several high-profile evangelicals bombarded the school for continuing to plummet down the precipice of “woke” theology.
Wheaton Betrays Its Alumnus
Discovery Institute Vice President John G. West slammed the school for betraying Vought:
What makes this especially ignoble is that Vought faced egregious attacks during his 2017 confirmation battle because he had defended Wheaton’s right to fire a professor who no longer held Christian views. So Vought defended Wheaton publicly at great personal cost. Yet Wheaton now treats him like a leper, withdrawing even the courtesy of the same treatment they would accord another prominent alumnus.
Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science at Wheaton, was sacked after she began wearing a headscarf to show solidarity with Muslims as part of her Advent devotion. Hawkins claimed that Muslims “like me, a Christian, are people of the book.”
In defense of Wheaton, Vought wrote in an article for the conservative website The Resurgent that “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.”
During the confirmation hearing, Democrat senators repeatedly accused Vought of being Islamophobic; Bernie Sanders evencited the above remark to the committee. Vought replied that he had written the article as a Christian alumnus of Wheaton, which “has a statement of faith that speaks clearly with regard to the centrality of Jesus Christ in salvation.”
“An Act of Cowardice”
Eric Teetsel, executive vice president of the Center for Renewing America and a Wheaton alumnus, said that he “could not in good conscience” encourage two of his daughters to attend his alma mater.
Vought’s is “arguably the most significant government post an alum has ever held,” but “in an act of cowardice, the college kowtowed to a small number of progressive alums who went into an unhinged rage in response to the post,” Teetsel observed.
“For years now Wheaton has led the way in the false ‘nice’ Christianity that feminized the churches and let the Dems destroy our country. Wheaton and Christianity Today and churches that don’t stand clearly against evil are the fig tree that Jesus cursed,” warned bestselling author and radio host Eric Metaxas. “Wheaton has been pathetic and woke for some time now. Send your kids to Hillsdale or Grand Canyon U or Liberty or Palm Beach Atlantic or any number of solid Christian schools — but do NOT send your kids to Wheaton.”.
Wheaton’s Surrender to DEI
While it gained fame for being evangelist Billy Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton “has recently adopted harmful strategies in its approach to race,” writes Fr. Gerald McDermott, editor of Race and Covenant: Recovering the Religious Roots for American Reconciliation.
In 2021, the school held its first “Racialized Minorities Recognition Ceremony” with Sheila Caldwell, Wheaton’s chief diversity officer, complaining that she had been “imprisoned by a racialized caste system . . . and was expected to be deferential to the patriarchy” around her.
In the same year, Wheaton sparked controversy after it reworded a plaque celebrating the life of famous missionaries Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming, who were killed in 1956 while preaching the Gospel to a primitive tribe in Ecuador.
The plaque read: “For generations, all strangers were killed by these savage Indians.” Wheaton changed the wording describing the Waorani as “a people who had never heard the gospel message. Known for their violence to encroaching outsiders and for internal cycles of vengeance killing, they were among the most feared indigenous peoples in South America at the time.”
In a statement, the Illinois-based school explained that the “reworded plaque” will honor the martyred missionaries while also “respecting the Waorani people with whom they shared the gospel of the love of Christ.”
“Specifically, the word ‘savage’ is now recognized as being inherently pejorative and having been often used historically to dehumanize and mistreat native peoples around the world,” it stressed.
Known as “the Harvard of the Christian schools,” Wheaton published a 122-page Historical Review Task Force Report in September 2023 that took its simmering wokeness to full boil.
Multicultural Development at Wheaton
While acknowledging that it was founded in 1853 by “outspoken abolitionists” like Jonathan Blanchard and was “passionately committed to the immediate eradication of slavery,” the report lamented that its “principled opposition to slavery was not synonymous with a commitment to promote racial equality in all respects.”
The report published a litany of “institutional transgressions” the school had committed, including legally acquiring land which had once belonged to the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Lakota peoples.
“We lament the College’s lack of courage by declining to take a more vocal role in opposing widespread forms of racism and white supremacy that dominated American culture, including evangelical communities throughout the 20th century,” the authors wrote.
Wheaton boasts that it now has an Office of Multicultural Development which “exists as a home for students of color and for students committed to a greater understanding of Christ-centered diversity and biblical justice, particularly in terms of racial identity development and relationships, as a reflection of the imago dei.”
Pushing the Jab
The school came under fire during the COVID-19 crisis for pushing the abortion-tainted experimental mRNA vaccine.
Dr. Jamie Aten, who at the time was director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, told The New York Times, “If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to.”
In April 2018, Wheaton angered conservative evangelicals after it hosted a closed-door meeting of around 50 evangelical leaders, including Tim Keller, A.R. Bernard, and Ed Stetzer, who reportedly used the occasion to attack Trump.
Bernard, a black pastor of the 40,000-member Christian Cultural Center Megachurch in Brooklyn, said he feared that white evangelical supporters of Trump had endangered the reputation of American Christianity.
“This presidency has exposed the spiritual, moral and racial condition of this nation,” Bernard said. “The racial divides go deep in this country, and they’ve invaded the church.”
The college, which has a Sexual and Gender Identity Institute, sparked outrage for hosting a dialogue between celibate gay Episcopal priest Wesley Hill and Karen Keen, author of Scripture, Ethics and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships.
“When evangelicals come to an engagement like this, they always come wrapped in the mantle of a prevenient surrender of the central point,” evangelical writer Douglas Wilson lamented in an April 2022 article complaining that “all is not well at Wheaton.”
Vought responded to Wheaton’s cancellation of him with a one-word tweet: “Sad.”
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.