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Wheaton College and creationism (ongoing)

Wheaton College and creationism (ongoing)

Last updated on: January 22, 2016 at 4:47 pm by Fred Clark

Wheaton College and creationism (ongoing) 2016-01-22T16:47:27-05:00 Fred Clark

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Here’s what I first wrote back in December when Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins first wrote about her gesture of embodied solidarity with Muslim Americans facing a wave of hateful bigotry:

It’s not often that I read the same story — with the same reaction — from both Scot McKnight and TBogg, but they both flagged this story, praising Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins for her call for solidarity with Muslim women. Hawkins’ Facebook post is getting widely read, and I think that’s a good thing — I just hope that attention doesn’t get her in hot water over the bit in there about Sterkfontein.

Nothing about Hawkins’ “worship the same God” comment raised any red flags for me at the time because it was obvious that no one could credibly object to that innocuous statement.

“Mrs. Ples” is one of the most famous H. naledi fossils found in the caves of Sterkfontein. Just looking at this photograph puts you in violation of Wheaton College’s Statement of Faith.

Yes, it would have been troublesome and trouble-making if Hawkins had written that Christianity and Islam were indistinguishable and that any religious distinction between them was irrelevant, but that was not what she said and obviously not what she meant. And there was no way for even the most willfully obtuse person to pretend that was what she might have meant. Surely no one could be as stupid or as transparently, dishonestly tendentious as to claim otherwise.

But then Wheaton’s provost, president, and trustees spent the next several weeks demonstrating that they were, in fact, exactly that transparently, dishonestly tendentious — even despite numerous statements and clarifications from Hawkins herself that this hostile twisting of her words had nothing to do with anything she said or meant, or ever would say or mean.

They maintained this pretense throughout the holidays until, finally, it collapsed when emails between the provost and faculty members revealed that their purported indignation over the “worship the same God” business was a fabrication. These good Christian white men had been caught in a lie.

Since then, renewed attention is being paid to the part of Hawkins’ statement that I initially flagged as potentially troublesome for a creationist school that wants to maintain a reputation for academic credibility: “the bit in there about Sterkfontein.” Here is that bit:

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.

The Sterkfontein caves are part of the Cradle of Humankind, home to the early hominid Homo naledi — one of humanity’s earliest ancestors. The caves are a World Heritage Site, an invaluable marvel, and a tremendous source of information about the origin of our species. And their existence is officially and explicitly denied by Wheaton College’s Statement of Faith.

The sentence in that Statement of Faith that applies is this: “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.” Which translates, basically, into: “We do not believe in H. naledi, or in human evolution, or in the caves of Sterkfontein, and we refuse to acknowledge their existence lalalalala I can’t hear you lalalalala.”

That’s not an exaggeration, as Andrew Chignell documented when describing the process involving inserting that sentence into Wheaton’s Statement of Faith in the 1990s:

[Wheaton’s] scientists were thus required to clarify whether they (1) “reject the idea that Adam and Eve were created from pre-existing humanlike creatures, or hominids”; (2) are neutral or “unsure” on the hominid theory; (3) affirm that “God gave a human spirit to a pair of pre-existing human-like creatures, or hominids”; or (4) deny the historicity of Adam and Eve and think of Genesis as a wholly “theological document.” (3) and (4) were deemed inconsistent with ongoing employment. Those who affirmed (2) were given one year to change their view to (1), or else they too would be asked to seek employment elsewhere.

So here we have a strange situation. DocHawk’s “worship the same God” comment was in no way a violation of Wheaton’s Statement of Faith — a fact acknowledged behind closed doors even by the provost intent on punishing her for it. Her reference to Sterkfontein, however, may have been. You may, like me, think that it’s appallingly stupid, theologically wretched, and disqualifying of any claim to academic legitimacy that the word “Sterkfontein” should constitute a violation of a college’s official policy, but none of that changes the fact that it does, in fact, seem to be such a violation.

Why, then, did Wheaton’s administrators choose to make her a scapegoat on the baseless pretext of the former rather than going after her on the latter issue where they could credibly claim a more substantive case?

John Gleim wrestles with this puzzle in an insightful Religion Dispatches essay, “Larycia Hawkins’ Actual Violation of Wheaton’s Statement of Faith Hints at the School’s True Intentions.”* Gleim discusses how the anti-evolution language in Wheaton’s Statement of Faith seems more like a performative tribal totem than something meant to provide scientific or theological guidance for its faculty:

This passage from Wheaton’s creed is packed with buzzwords and coded language borrowed from the lexicon of evolution-denying young-Earth creationism. Among many evangelicals, to say that God “directly created Adam and Eve” is actually a coded denial that human beings were produced through evolutionary processes — even if these were guided by God’s providence, as in the Christian concept of intelligent design. At the same time, to insist that Adam and Eve are humanity’s “historical parents” excludes any allegorical or mythical interpretation of Genesis’ creation narrative.

… Its continued presence in the college’s official Statement of Faith … helps Wheaton vouch for its own conservative bona fides. This is the case in spite of the fact that Wheaton — like most other reputable Christian colleges — does teach the science of human evolution in its biology classrooms (though, when compared to other elite Christian schools like Pepperdine University and Calvin College, Wheaton is alone in explicitly touting the “limitations of biology as a scientific endeavor” on its biology department’s webpage).

Appreciate Wheaton’s conundrum here. On the one hand, the Wheaton community includes a host of intelligent, educated people who want to educate students — to teach them the truth and to prepare them for legitimate work in the sciences. They also want to maintain a reputation for academic excellence — and that would be impossible if they hired Ken Ham to teach Old Testament or Biology. These folks are also not outright thieves. They don’t want to take $40,000 in tuition from students in exchange for nothing but the collection of shoddy lies that make up creationist “science” and creationist biblical studies. That would be stealing. That would be fraud.

So, yes, absolutely, Wheaton “does teach the science of human evolution in its biology classrooms.” And professors are expected to tell students the truth in Old Testament classes as well. If some student asks “Who did Cain marry?” or “Who were these people Cain was afraid of?” the professor will answer honestly, rather than babbling the sort of fabricated folklore that anti-evolution sentence in the Statement of Faith would seem to require.

But at the same time, Wheaton is also infamously concerned with what it refers to as its “constituency”** — the right-wing donors, trustees, and parents of potential future students. That constituency fears any hint of evolution and needs to be reassured that nothing so dangerous and frightening will be allowed at Wheaton.

Thus this weird duplicity of a public official stance affirming creationism in the Statement of Faith alongside a private “faculty lounge” approach in which the truth is allowed to be told, discreetly, in the classroom.

Here’s the conclusion of Gleim’s essay. It’s depressing, but it rings true:

Coded language like this is actually a key part of how Wheaton operates as it seeks to balance its academic ambitions with the demands of its core constituency on the evangelical right. At the same time, however, this leaves Wheaton divided between two very different institutional identities and cultures — it’s not easy, after all, to cultivate a reputation for top-flight scholarship while simultaneously signaling common cause with evolution-denying right-wing conservatism.

Given the emptiness of Wheaton’s theological censure of Dr. Hawkins, it seems even more unlikely that Wheaton’s move to fire Dr. Hawkins is a principled defense of evangelical orthodoxy. In fact, it seems fair to presume that the optics of this situation are deliberate — Dr. Hawkins’ censure has all the marks of a carefully crafted dog-whistle meant to confirm, for Wheaton’s conservative Christian observers (and erstwhile critics) on the political far right that Wheaton shares their offense at a Christian college professor publicly advocating solidarity with Muslims.

Far from being a PR disaster, Wheaton’s treatment of Dr. Hawkins was intended all along to broadcast the college’s displeasure at the sight of a black woman wearing a hijab in one of its classrooms — a strategy, we should all take note, that in the end will have worked whether or not Larycia Hawkins keeps her job.

Wheaton’s only real vulnerability with its right-wing constituency is its whispered teaching of actual science behind closed doors. That’s not something it can change if it wants to maintain its accreditation or its reputation, or if it wants to avoid descending into outright fraudulent theft. So publicly punishing a tenured professor for saying “Sterkfontein” isn’t really an option. It would draw unwanted attention to what is actually being taught in Biology classrooms. And it would be embarrassing — forcing the school to defend the indefensible.

So to defend this vulnerability, Wheaton has to change the subject. If they appear to be insufficiently “conservative” when it comes to evolution, they’ll need to demonstrate that they’re undeniably conservative in other ways.

“Conservative” here is a blurry construct, conflating theological orthodoxy — meaning, for fundamentalists, literalist heterodoxy — with political partisanship, cultural signifiers, and even crudely reactionary racism and sexism. Any of those will do when the goal is simply to signal conservative identity. Whenever the constituency gets nervous, the college responds with a big, showy display of something ultra-conservative to reassure them.

If the constituency is fretting about the recent decision to permit off-campus dancing or about a professor’s well-regarded books suggesting that Genesis wasn’t a product of divine dictation to Moses on Sinai, then the constituency can be mollified by changing the subject to a ridiculous lawsuit claiming Wheaton’s religious liberty right to believe that human personhood begins at ejaculation.

And if the constituency gets nervous about Wheaton students challenging Jerry Falwell Jr.’s gun-toting eliminationist rhetoric about Muslims, then Wheaton’s administrators can reassure them by doing their best impression of Jerry Jr’s buddy, Donald Trump, and making a big public show of scapegoating a black woman in a hijab.

Trumpish racism may be ugly, hateful, stupid, and anti-Christ, but it’s undeniably conservative. And thus the constituency can be satisfied without jeopardizing Wheaton’s accreditation.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* It’s dismaying that a phrase like “hints at the school’s true intentions” has become necessary when discussing the behavior of Wheaton’s administrators. But it is necessary. Collecting and deducing from “hints” of their “true intentions” is the best we can do when dealing with people who have been so demonstrably duplicitous and disingenuous. We cannot trust them to tell us the truth about their intentions. We cannot take their words or their actions at face value.

The fact that it is now necessary to trace “hints” of the “school’s true intentions” also suggests it is now necessary for Wheaton to replace its current president, Philip Ryken, with a person of integrity.

** Please note what a horrifying betrayal it is for a university to think of its “constituency” in these terms. This means the students are not the college’s primary constituency. Nor are the disciplines of the various faculty allowed to be constituents to whom those faculty owe the obligations of craft and integrity. When the students and the academic disciplines themselves are not the primary constituencies of concern for a college, it doesn’t bode well for teaching, for scholarship, or for the honest pursuit of truth.

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