Some of you may recall our May 2024 post on Matthew Warner, a communication professor who was fired by Grace College, an evangelical school in Winona Lake, Indiana. Warner was targeted by the Christian Right because he published some tweets supporting gay marriage. One of his critics was Evan Kilgore. Here is what we wrote about Kilgore back in May:
In June 20, 2017, Grace College and Theological Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana fired three white employees after they posed for a racially insensitive mock rap album cover. The photo of the “album cover” was posted on Facebook. Read more about that incident here.
Evan Kilgore, the college’s special projects director at the time, was one of the employees fired. You can find him on the left of the image below with “Thug Life” written on his fingers:
Kilgore appears to have parlayed his firing at Grace into a career as a right-wing commentator. He was a former ambassador for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization. (His TPUSA bio says he was “‘canceled’ from his marketing job by the woke outrage mob” and has been “retweeted by President Trump multiple times.”) Now he appears to be an independent political commentator with 79,200 X (Twitter) followers...
Back in October, Kilgore turned his sights on Matthew Warner, a first year communications professor at Grace.
Read Kilgore’s Facebook post on Warner here. Kathryn Post also covered this story at Religion News Service.
Here is more of my response to this story back in May:
I am disgusted by the way the Christian Right–Kilgore, Boyer, Grace Moms, etc.–targeted Warner and sabotaged his career at Grace. I am even more disgusted by the way the Grace administration appears to have folded under these right-wing attacks. I don’t know the full story, but they seem to have made little effort to help Warner “move forward” in the wake of these attacks. Granted, Warner’s pre-Grace tweets were pretty angry (we were all pretty angry about what was happening to evangelicalism in the Trump and immediate post-Trump years), but I am not sure they merited his firing.
Today we learn more about Evan Kilgore:
Many Christian colleges and universities today are in such a fragile state financially that they need to cave to Holocaust deniers and their friends to keep some of their constituency happy and thus keep the doors open. Christian colleges and universities must do better than this.
Yes!