This article has been updated to include information about Wheaton College professor Amy Peeler.
The saga of Wheaton College’s steady leftward slither returned to the news recently due to Wheaton’s unforced error of rescinding a short public expression of congratulations to and call for prayers for alumnus Russell Vought following his confirmation to serve as the White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Issuing this kind of apolitical, nonpartisan public congratulations is Wheaton’s typical practice when alumni have “reached that level of government.” Rescinding its congratulations was a wildly atypical, partisan act for which Wheaton has once again gotten its woke knuckles rapped.
Sadly, that was just one event in a long litany of leftist events that have surfaced.
Just days before Wheaton College’s blunder nonpareil regarding Vought, leftist activist/anthropology professor Brian Howell called in to uber-leftist Illinois Congressman Sean Casten’s Telephone Townhall Meeting on Feb. 6:
I’m a professor at Wheaton College. … What are some things that college students who are interested in these issues could be doing to support you in the work you are doing to push back on many of these [Trump’s] illegal actions?
Enquiring minds would love to know what Howell planned to do with the activist tips he sought from Casten for college students—presumably, Wheaton College students.
For those less familiar with Casten, he has long made clear his disdain for expressions of faith from government leaders, mocking both Mike Pompeo and Marco Rubio for their occasional public postings of Bible verses, calling Rubio’s posting of Luke 16:10 a “weird” “cry for help.”
When asked in 2018 to name a leader who inspires him, Casten shocked many by naming the vile, malicious homosexual writer Dan Savage.
Casten, mocker of faith and admirer of the perverse, is the person from whom a Wheaton professor seeks advice to pass on to college students.
Howell just can’t stop himself from exposing his leftist side to the public. In 2021, Howell twice tweeted that an article published in First Things Magazine by Gerald McDermott on “Woke Theory at Evangelical Colleges,” was “lamentable.” Howell then tried to turn the public’s attention to the lamentable response of another angry faculty leftist at Wheaton, Vince Bacote, to McDermott’s warranted warning.
As I wrote at the time,
In a measured tone, McDermott warns Christian parents who “assume that evangelical institutions are free from” secular ideologies like CRT to look more closely at such institutions given some recent events at Wheaton College, Baylor University, and Samford University. He provides specific evidence to justify his concerns.
Bacote begins his “thoughtful response” by expressing his “exasperation and anger” about McDermott’s “lamentable” article, which Bacote claims suffers from “minimal evidence, anonymous voices, and suggestions of infidelity to the faith.”
Bacote describes the article as “ephemeral” and “thin, because the article seems not to be the result of an effort to know what is really happening at institutions like my own and others.” Bacote “wonders whether McDermott thought to go to the sources of purported wokeness at Wheaton, Baylor, and Samford, instead of merely to the voices of concern or worry.”
Bacote also acknowledged the temptation to take the “road of holy rage,” but decided instead to write “from a place of lament.” Yeah, right.
Bacote blames the adoption of a “secular gospel” by “evangelical institutions” … on the failure of these institutions “to become places founded on the biblical truth of a God who wants His people to be agents of justice … places filled with kingdom citizens who love their neighbors as themselves … places whose members seek a sanctified life expressed by forms of public engagement that help our country become a place of flourishing for all citizens.”
Ironically, Bacote didn’t provide any evidence for his rather breathtaking indictment of evangelical institutions. He didn’t even try to prove that evangelical institutions have failed to become places founded on the biblical truth of a God who wants His people to become agents of justice or that they have failed to become places filled with kingdom citizens who love their neighbors as themselves. Bacote provides less evidence for his expansive charges than McDermott does for his limited claims.
Theology professor Bacote is best known as director of Wheaton’s Center for Applied Christian Ethics (CACE), which long-time watchers have noted has a decidedly leftist tilt. Case in point: Just two weeks before early voting began for the historic 2024 General Election, Bacote arranged for two anti-Trump speakers to speak to students: Curtis Chang—bosom buddy of David French, Russell, Moore, and Francis Collins—and Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta.
Curtis Chang began the discussion by citing Wheaton’s Vice President of Student Development, Paul Chelson, who purportedly told Chang that “Wheaton is a centrist institution.” Chang defines a centrist institution as one that “has centered itself … on the central matters that matter most. … The center derives from the Latin ‘crux,’ [as in] the crux of the matter … and ‘crux’ of course derives from the cross.”
So far, so good, but then Chang gets slippery:
That’s Wheaton at its best. It has planted itself on saying, we will stand for what is central to our faith, and we will stand on that. And then, from that center, [Wheaton will] be a center, and by that I mean a center, a gathering center, a place in the center, in the middle where people who hold other views on frankly non-central matters including politics, can actually gather and find each other at a gathering place, at a center, at a meeting point, even if they don’t agree or hold all the same beliefs on the non-central matters, because there is a center.
Whoa, Nelly. Let’s take a moment to wade through the Kamala-esque deep thoughts here to see more clearly what those non-central, political issues are.
Is the intrinsic value of human life from conception to natural death non-central and political? Is state-sanctioned killing of innocent human life non-central and political?
What about sexual ethics?
What about marriage?
What about the sexual integration of sports and private spaces that is based on the view that sexual embodiment has no intrinsic meaning?
What about discrimination based on race? What about race-based admission policies that Wheaton recently changed its library name over?
Does Scripture speak to those issues or not?
When the left drags issues that are foundationally biblical threw the mud and out into the public square, are those issues suddenly non-central and, therefore, Wheaton has no role other than providing a gathering place for confabulation?
During the Q & A time following Chang’s and Alberta’s jawboning, the first question from an audience member was, according to Bacote, “How can a Christian support Democrats if they’re so clearly zealously talking about reproductive rights?” But before Alberta or Chang had a chance to answer, Bacote chose to reframe the question because as “an African American believe me, I can tell you reasons why people are Democrats.”
Whoomp, there it is, Wheaton College “centrism.”
Here’s how Bacote reframed the audience member’s question: “So, the question is, if people are thinking ‘how could you be a Democrat or how could you be a Republican,’ how do we think through that?”
Chang’s answer was illuminating in that, following his demurrals about not trying to persuade listeners how to vote, he made clear that his calculus regarding the lives of the unborn takes into account climate change:
If you believe as I do … that actually climate change is a real thing that will threaten generations of unborn—especially those living in coastal communities … and third world … developing communities, there are unborn lives right now that are going to be jeopardized if we don’t actually try to address climate change. … That’s a legitimate lens also to use to say we should value the lives of the unborn living in these Caribbean countries.
Apparently, Chang sees no moral difference between the direct, deliberate, targeting killing—sanctioned by the government—of unborn babies and the possible, unintentional deaths of unborn children due to climate change–deaths predicted by disputed climate models.
In 2014, there was the disastrous and controversial recruitment of celibate lesbian Julie Rodgers to work as an “associate for spiritual care” within the chaplain’s office. Rodgers resigned after one academic year, posting, “I’ve quietly supported same-sex relationships for a while now.” The warning signs of Rodgers’ growing faithlessness were there for any discerning eye to see before she was hired. Within three years, she was married to a woman and divorced. At the end of 2024, Rodgers had her breasts sliced off.
In 2016, Wheaton fired its Hajib-wearing professor, Larycia Hawkins, who claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. For the act of expecting faculty members to distinguish between the false god Allah and the one true God, the administration drew the ire of leftist faculty members who draw a line at theological line-drawing. A petition was signed by 78 faculty members opposing her termination.
In 2021, Wheaton kowtowed to “a dozen students and staff” who griped about a word on a plaque honoring missionary martyrs Wheaton alumni Jim Elliot and Ed McCully. They wanted the wholly accurate adjective “savage” removed from the description of the Waorani savages that brutally speared the young fathers to death. When a small handful of leftists say, “bowdlerize,” President Phil Ryken says, “which words.”
In 2022, anthropology professor Christine Jeske had a classroom slide show that only a CRT/DEI proponent could love. It included slides with these messages:
- Race is a concept that was created by white people to gain social and economic privileges.
- “Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’ (Peggy McIntosh)
- whiteness—A normative structure in society that marginalizes People of Color and privileges White People
- Assumed racial comfort of whiteness—the habitus of whiteness learned in the United States includes: ▫ white people being able to avoid thinking about race ▫ white fragility
More recently, the name “Buswell” was removed from the campus library because Wheaton College President James Oliver Buswell Jr. hadn’t stood firm enough in the 1930’s against intense pressure to restrict admission of black students. Since the woke mind virus devours context and nuance for rage fuel, here’s something omitted from Wheaton College’s Historical Report Task Force Report.
At the same time that Buswell was president of Wheaton College, he was also president of Wheaton Academy’s Junior Academy where his young daughter was a student. In a 1934 class photo, seated behind Jane Buswell is M. Coiley, a black student. This was twenty years before Brown v. Board of Education. Seems like Mr. Buswell was downright progressive for his time.
In a September 2023 public Facebook comment, Wheaton College music professor Shawn Okpebholo asked,
Do you believe people who disregard our past should work [at Wheaton College]? Or those who support a man for president who incited an insurrection against our government, is a serial sexual abuser, a liar, and a promoter of hate, that they should teach at Wheaton? Or individuals who embrace Christian nationalism?
What is notably absent in Okpebholo’s comment is concern about the presence of professors at a college long-believed to be theologically orthodox who have abandoned biblically based racial impartiality, who have adopted anti-biblical second and third-wave feminism, who have embraced whole or partial hog malignant heterodox beliefs on gender, family, marriage, and homosexuality—er, I mean “sexual orientation.”
The endlessly controversial leftist, admirer of Marxists, and devotee of Critical Race Theory, philosophy professor Nathan Cartagena assigned his class to write a paper on “the glories of socialism,” which, obviously, assumes there are glories associated with socialism and requires students to give assent to that arguable assumption.
Psychology professor Mark Yarhouse heads up Wheaton College’s Sexual and Gender Identity Institute. He’s notorious for advocating for the use of incorrect pronouns for men and women who reject their God-ordained sex, a position to which writer and former lesbian Rosaria Butterfield strongly objects:
My [former] use of transgendered pronouns was not a mistake; it was sin. … Mark Yarhouse, David French … and any parachurch ministry that elevates “being winsome” as the endgame … nod in the direction of traditional values but then swap biblical clarity for postmodern pluralism, thus burning to the ground any legitimate theological bridge to gospel grace. Transgenderism is satanic. We who once promoted “pronoun hospitality” lent false credibility to a wolfish theology that fails to protect the sheep. Instead, it eats them alive.
Yarhouse also opposes bans on quack chemical and surgical “treatments” for gender dysphoria in minor children and supports the sexual integration of girls’ and women’s sports.
Wheaton College’s leftist New Testament professor, Reverend Amy Peeler, authored a doozy of a feminist-infused book titled Women and the Gender of God, described variously as “disturbing” and “bizarre” by Marcus Johnson, and “theologically tortured” by Anne Kennedy. Theologian Denny Burk writes that Peeler “extrapolates a number of other points that are controversial—including elements that implicate trinitarianism, Christology, and the ordination of women.” Multiple critics note Peeler’s admiration for Judith Butler, “a postmodern feminist whose work erases the distinction between sex and gender by arguing that both sex and gender are socially constructed.”
Moody Bible Institute theologian John C. Clark writing in Touchstone Magazine exposes the wokishness that infuses Peeler’s book:
Peeler does little to distinguish the masculine from the toxic, playing on the tedious cultural commonplace that toxic masculinity is ubiquitous and incessant, advancing overtly or subconsciously always and everywhere.
And Clark warns about the implications of Peeler’s presence at Wheaton College:
[Peeler’s book] is one among many in that trendy, boutique genre of academic-types intent on recasting Christian doctrine to fit their own presumptuous and provincial agendas. This book commands attention because its author is a professor at a bellwether evangelical institution, testifying yet again to the internal confusion and collapse of evangelicalism that will require more to remedy than benign collegiality and convenient ignorance.
Reports I’ve received from diverse sources indicate that between 70-90 percent of faculty members are leftists. Reports I’ve received indicate that the Wheaton Board of Trustees has only two or possibly three conservative board members. For many or most theologically orthodox Christians, sending their children to a school where 70-90 percent of the faculty and most of the trustee board are leftists is anathema.
Parents have a right to information on the theological, moral, and political orientation of faculty members before they spend thousands of dollars to send their children to Wheaton. If Wheaton administrators and trustees have any integrity, they will stop the evasions and obfuscations and admit openly how many left-of-center faculty members there are.
If Wheaton administrators, trustees, and donors approve of the direction Wheaton is moving—if they want Wheaton to become the Columbia/Brown of Christian schools—then go for it. Just admit it. Openly embrace your new identity so that conservative, theologically orthodox parents can move on to greener pastures.
Perhaps in the service of honesty and transparency, leftist professors could add some indicator of their political leanings on their faculty bios. Surely, they will rejoice at being sprung from their closets where they hide when the press comes sniffing around. What they likely will feel less happy about is discussing the environment many of them have created for their conservative students and colleagues.
President Ryken has had fourteen years to get Wheaton’s messy, left-leaning Ivory Tower cleaned and righted. He has failed. Instead of standing firm against immense culture pressures from the left both in-house and out, he, like President Buswell, has gone all wobbly-kneed and bendy-spined. Wheaton’s restoration will require a DOGE-like housecleaning.
What happens next may depend on actions taken by donors and parents of prospective students.