Over the past month, the story of Lacycia Hawkins has gained national attention. She is the tenured professor at Wheaton College, a prominent Evangelical college, who announced on Facebook in December that she was going to wear a hajib for month over Christmas to show her love and support for her Muslim neighbor. Wheaton College moved to question whether or not she was in violation of the school’s statement of faith, and as it turns out, they are now moving to fire her.
The Further Dividing of the Divide
Not surprisingly, given the current climate in our country these days, this situation has provoked very vocal and very intense reactions on both sides of the political aisle, and the divide between “progressive Christians” and “conservative Christians” has become just a little wider. Wheaton College has been denounced by liberals and progressive Christians of being bigoted, intolerant, and possibly racist, and unchristian. After all, Jesus reached out to Samaritans, Romans, and anyone whom the Jews considered “other.” He didn’t wait for the Samaritan woman at the well to renounce what the Jews considered to be the corrupted understanding of God by the Samaritans before he would reach out and talk with her.
Now, though I wouldn’t throw around charges of bigotry or racism, that is a valid point. I really doubt Jesus would have fired her for that.
On the other hand, the response from conservative Christians has been quite different: Muslims do not worship the same God; they don’t consider Jesus to be God; they denounce the Trinity. When Ms. Hawkins said what she said, she was stating something theologically problematic, and as an employee of a private Christian college, her comments possibly violated the college’s statement of faith.
Technically, that is true too. I doubt, though, Ms. Hawkins was trying to put forth a ground-breaking theological statement on her Facebook page. Let’s face it, at the very least, on a very general, superficial way, what she said is considered true: Muslims, Jews, and Christians all claim to worship the God of Abraham—that would mean they worship the same God. Of course they believe different things about that same God, and of course they think the other religions are wrong in what they claim about that same God, but saying they all worship the same God is hardly a surprising and shocking thing to say.
Ultimately, I think that Ms. Hawkins’ comments and statements might have been a bit ill-thought out, but certainly not something to raise a stink over. And yet Wheaton College decided to make this mole hill into a mountain, and the result has been a media firestorm, and a whole lot of anger and condemnation coming from all sides. Not too smart of a move, in my opinion.
But There’s More…Enter Enns, and Evolution
Last week, though, Peter Enns shared a very insightful post on his blog on this issue of Ms. Hawkins and Wheaton College. He pointed out that reader had pointed out to him that there might be more to the issue. When you read Ms. Hawkins comments regarding out Muslims and Christians worship the same God, she also said:
I don’t love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American. I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity. 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. . . .
Basically, she had affirmed the common humanity she as a Christian shares with her Muslim neighbor, but she couched her comments using the language of evolution. If she would have said, “I love my Muslim neighbor because we are all created in God’s image (Genesis 1:26), I doubt any of this would have happened. But she said “primordial clay,” essentially affirmed the findings of the Human Genome Project, and claimed descent from the “cradle of humanity,” and not Adam and Eve. And that was the cause for the dust up…or at least a significant contributing factor.
Enns went on to point out that Wheaton’s statement of faith clearly affirms human descent from Adam and Eve, and that a number of Wheaton College faculty members “have found ways of adhering to Wheaton’s faith statement while still acknowledging biological evolution in a manner that is either acceptable to Wheaton’s culture or flies under the radar.” The difference is that Hawkins openly stated it on Facebook.
Enns then related Hawkins’ situation to that of Alex Bolyanatz, a former professor at Wheaton who was not granted tenure because of his stance on the origins debate. The provost had felt that even though Bolyanatz wasn’t required to advocate creationism, the problem was that he wasn’t treating it with enough respect in his classroom. Even though he said he never doubted Bolyanatz’s sincerity in subscribing to Wheaton’s statement of faith, the provost said that Bolyanatz had undermined the “thoughtful engagement of theology” in his classroom.
You can read Enns full comments in his post, but his observation regarding Hawkins was simple, and probably true: “It would seem that publicly assuming the evolutionary narrative for human origins in her expression of human solidarity with Muslims plays a role in Wheaton’s response to Hawkins’s public comments.”
It seemed the issue for Bolyanatz came down to the fact that the provost felt he was being too harsh on creationism, and that meant he was undermining the “thoughtful engagement of theology.” And in the case of Hawkins, the issue came down to the fact that she had expressed a love for Muslims and an affirmation of evolution in the same sentence.
Okay, So What’s My Reaction?
My reaction to this story has been slow-forming. I know one thing: right from the beginning, I did not agree with either of the knee-jerk condemnations from progressives, or justifications from conservatives. The issue is not that simple. Yes, Hawkins’ comments, given her position as a professor at Wheaton College, were probably ill-advised, yet they were hardly grounds for getting fired.
I also think Peter Enns’ observations on how the theory of biological evolution probably played a part in all of this…and for that matter, the debate over the historicity of Genesis 1-11. Given what had happened to me at my previous school, the comments about Bolyanatz hit home: “No one is questioning the sincerity of your faith, but you’re undermining the Bible…theology, etc.” I think it goes without saying that it is very probable that the Wheaton College administration viewed both Bolyanatz and Hawkins as “too liberal.” And, as I’ve read elsewhere, it seems that some influential “gate-keepers” with deep pockets probably applied some pressure in both cases.
I have to ask, though (because I don’t know if it has really ever been asked), “Why is evolution such a big deal? Why is it seen as such a threat to a significant portion of Evangelicalism?” I know the likes of Ken Ham and Al Mohler claim it is an issue of biblical authority, but their remarkably inconsistent interpretation of the Bible (i.e. we’ll hold up the historicity of Genesis 1-11 as paramount, but then we’ll conveniently ignore the strict adherence to other parts of the Bible like stoning adulterers, geo-centrism, women speaking at all in church, etc.) tells me that it’s really not about biblical authority for them, despite what they claim.
No, I think the real reason is politics, or more properly speaking, political idolatry. Right-wing Evangelical gate-keepers like Ken Ham and Al Mohler are fighting a culture war, and they are convinced that the historicity of Genesis 1-11 and the theory of evolution is ground zero in that culture war. The thinking goes something like this:
If you say Genesis 1-11 isn’t historical, then you are saying the Bible is full of errors; saying the Bible is full of errors is to undermine the authority of the Bible, and that means you just pick and choose which parts of the Bible you want to obey, and probably question Jesus’ miracles and his resurrection as well. Therefore, that must mean you in rebellion against God’s Law, have an “anything goes” attitude toward morality, and compromise on issues like abortion, racism, gay marriage, pornography, and a host of other evils of secular society.
They feel if you deny the historicity of Genesis 1-11, then that opens the door for evolution, which opens the door to immorality, atheism, liberalism, and the Democratic party. This mindset has fostered a paranoia throughout many segments of Evangelicalism that thinks if we “compromise” on Genesis, then we’ll lose the culture war, our society descend into moral anarchy, and conservative Christians will be rounded up and put in camps. So you need to repent, stand on God’s Word, proclaim the flood really happened, and save our culture!
The problem, though, is that the question of the proper interpretation of Genesis 1-11 is not a political or cultural issue—it is an exegetical issue. For that matter, the question of evolution isn’t a political or cultural issue either—it is a scientific issue.
If you make Genesis 1-11 into a political and cultural issue, you are allowing, in fact, God’s Word to be manipulated to serve the political agendas of this world. You are no longer fighting against the rulers, authorities and cosmic powers of this present darkness (Ephesians 6:12); you are allowing yourself to be their pawn. I actually agree with Ken Ham that we are becoming a more secular and godless society; I agree that there are serious moral problems in our culture that stem from the fact that we are essentially a post-Christian culture.
Yet I believe that the proof we are becoming a more godless society is not that we are becoming either more liberal or more conservative. It’s that we are becoming more politically idolatrous. And this cuts both ways, with both Conservative Christians and Progressive Christians.
But that will take another post to tease out. Stay tuned…
