Have you heard about this dustup? Read Kathryn Post’s piece at Religion News Service. Here is a taste:
On Friday (Feb. 7), Wheaton College, the evangelical Christian school outside Chicago, publicly congratulated Russell Vought, a conservative activist and architect of Project 2025 who attended the school, for his confirmation by the U.S. Senate as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Within hours, hundreds of Vought’s fellow alumni had complained that Vought’s agenda contradicted the values they had been taught at Wheaton.
By Saturday morning, the college had deleted the post, and a new social media barrage, this time from Vought’s supporters, had begun.
The college has defended its original post, and its subsequent pivot, as “deliberately non-partisan,” as its institutional commitments demand.
“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!” said the now-deleted social media post on Friday.
One commenter responded that Vought was not only working at cross-purposes to Christian values but to his fellow alums: “The work that he is doing negatively and directly impacts countless other Wheaton alum who are seeking to be the hands and feet of Jesus in this country and around the rest of the world,” the commenter said, per screenshots of the exchanges that were deleted along with the original post but obtained by RNS.
After deleting the post, the college backpedaled, writing, “On Friday, Wheaton College posted a congratulations and a call to prayer for an alumnus who received confirmation to a White House post.” On Saturday morning, it wrote, “The recognition and prayer is something we would typically do for any graduate who reached that level of government. However, the political situation surrounding the appointment led to a significant concern expressed online. It was not our intention to embroil the College in a political discussion or dispute.”
In an email to RNS, Wheaton College spokesperson Joseph Moore said the deletion of the initial post was “in no way an apology for having expressed congratulations or for suggesting prayers for our alumnus.”
“The social media post led to more than 1,000 hostile comments, primarily incendiary, unchristian comments about Mr. Vought, in just a few hours,” wrote Moore. “It was not our intention to embroil the College or Mr. Vought in a political discussion or dispute. Thus, we removed the post, rather than allow it to become an ongoing online distraction.”
Read the rest here.
This dustup is yet another example of the growing chasm that has emerged in American evangelicalism since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. To be fair, not all of these major divisions in the evangelical community have to do with Trump. They have been around for a few decades. But they were exacerbated during the pandemic, the George Floyd summer of 2020, and the Biden presidency. The combination of Trump and social media, as I told The Holy Post Podcast in 2021, unveiled the dark side of evangelicalism.
Below you will find the social media responses to Wheaton College’s decision to delete a Facebook post congratulating alumnus Russell Vought. Trump appointed Vought director of the Office of Management and Budget. He is a self-professed Christian nationalist who was involved in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
What strikes me about the posts I’ve gather below are their attacks on longstanding evangelical institutions such as Wheaton College. The posts mirror the anti-institutionalism of Donald Trump. As someone recently wrote on my Facebook author’s page: “…the shocking thing about this era is how much [Trump’s] Christian followers have become more like him instead of them converting him.” Many of these anti-Wheaton critics are not part of longstanding evangelical institutions. They are the product of social media. They use their feeds to cash-in on the politics of grievance. While the president and his cronies are cutting billions of dollars in humanitarian aid and threatening to roundup migrants seeking refuge in churches, these writers are attacking Wheaton College, Christianity Today, and other evangelical institutions that are trying to be faithful to biblical teachings in a pluralistic democracy.
Take, for example, the conservative Daily Wire. They are running Megan Basham’s piece, “Christian College Caves to Woke Mob.” Her piece starts with these words: “Illinois’ Wheaton College has long traded on its reputation as a doctrinally conservative Christian institution. Its landing page promises prospective students that they will “find [their] Christ-centered calling” at the school. And its alumni list reads like who’s who of evangelical leaders. But the college is unwilling to honor the accomplishments of one famous son because of his association with the Trump administration.”
Eric Metaxas is fired-up. Of course he is. This is his brand. If the Wheaton dustup never happened, Metaxas would need to invent something similar. By the way, you can buy his latest book!:
The Democrats are destroying our country and Wheaton College, of all places, is to blame:
Metaxas retweeted this exchange:
Eric prefers other Christian colleges. I know some folks at Palm Beach Atlantic who would not want to be included on this list:
Hillsdale College, which took a hard MAGA turn in 2016, takes the “high road”:
A Hillsdale history professor:
Eric Teetsel, a Wheaton alum who ran the evangelical outreach for Marco Rubio’s campaign for president in 2016, has gone full MAGA since then:
Mention the names Curtis Chang, David French, Russell Moore, or “The After Party” and you will inevitably get a negative response from the MAGA evangelical crowd:
“Hijacked by the Left”:
I am not sure the “rest of the world has moved on.” Maybe the rest of Aaron Renn’s world has moved on, but Donald Trump didn’t even get 50% of the popular vote in the 2024 election.
Andrew T. Walker of Albert Mohler’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:
Another Mohler’s disciple and SBTS theobro: