Further Thoughts on Wheaton College's Institutional Fidelity

In a previous article I criticized Wheaton College for asserting it remains committed to historic Christian faith and practice while also doing things that bring such claims into question (e.g., employing women who are ordained as ministers as professors of theology). There is more to be said upon the matter. Wheaton’s great fault is that it attempts to meet the world on its own terms, as shown in at least two other points.

Refuge

Refuge is a group for “undergraduate students personally navigating same-sex sexuality and/or gender identity.” There is also a Refuge small group through Wheaton’s chaplain’s office. It is not clear what they purport to be a refuge from, but both groups are exclusive and secretive, limiting membership to people who identify as experiencing aberrant sexual identity or desires, requiring approval for participation from leadership, and meeting largely in secret. It is rather strange that people who profess to want to be able to live openly with full social acceptance then keep so much to themselves.

However that may be, Refuge’s mission statement is essentially that of the Revoice conference that roiled the Presbyterian Church in America: one has but to substitute ‘college’ for ‘church,’ and ‘students’ for ‘Christians’ for them to be functionally interchangeable. (Revoice also has some exclusive tendencies, restricting ‘allies’ from one of this year’s pre-conferences.) And like that conference, its participants prefer worldly terminology to describe themselves. The college’s approval of Refuge’s current iteration was contingent upon not using such terms at one point (per the Wheaton Record), but that has apparently changed, since they openly use them now.

Whatever the reasons for that, there is danger in such an approach. Christian institutions are to call people to repentance from their sin, not encourage them to faith while remaining in it; and insofar as such things have a cause in mental illness, our effort should be to encourage people to sanity. Wheaton would say that the point of Refuge is to teach such people to embrace the faith in truth, and highlights – even on Refuge’s home page – that it remains committed to scriptural notions of sexual morality. That largely misses the point. The current obsession with self-identity increasingly has little relation to behavior: I’m not sure that actual sex is more than about two percent of it even for many of the people caught up in it who do not share our faith. The key thing is that one’s self-conception or membership in a category is recognized by other people.

The Problem With This

That assertion of the preeminence of one’s self-conceived identity is where the fault lies. Granting that the people associated with Refuge and Revoice are sincere when they say they obey God’s commands against various forms of sexual immorality and respect marriage as between a man and a woman, they are still wrong. They rebel against God by openly controverting his established order by asserting a departure from it as an essential, immutable part of their persons, and encouraging others to do likewise by organizing on this account. And in some cases this means more explicit rebellion against God’s commands, as when people mutilate themselves to attempt to make themselves into a different sex than they truly are, or by acting as though they are that sex without undergoing such procedures.

If it be doubted this behavior is wrong, consider that God forbids crossdressing (Deut. 22:5). If it is an evil for a man to take upon himself a woman’s clothes, dare we think it any less egregious if he permanently alters his body by donning a woman’s physique? Is this not the ultimate rebellion, the refusal to be what one actually is in favor of what one prefers to be? God says “each one should remain in the condition in which he was called” (1 Cor. 7:20), referring primarily to socio-economic station and cultural identity as Jew or Gentile (vv. 17-24): should people not much more retain their nature as men or women?

And not only that, but God forbids lying. If a person has a Y chromosome and a man’s physique and goes about calling himself a woman, he is lying—and liars have no place in the Kingdom of God (Rev. 21:8). When he then demands others join him in his pretense, he is enticing them to sin, and Christ has strong words for those that do so (Lk. 17:1-2), especially where they do so to the vulnerable (young, mentally afflicted, etc.), as is common in these matters.

And granting that people are sometimes afflicted with a mental confusion that causes them to imagine their sex is opposite to what it actually is, we should not encourage them to embrace that fantasy when it entangles them in such sin and woe. To do so is unloving, and not at all in accord with the desire for them to abide in the truth about themselves, in which lies their only hope of health and a right relation to Christ. Encouraging or abetting madness or sin is always wrong. That movement that finds expression in such things as Refuge and Revoice is sinful, because it regards identity as all-important, and because it regards sexual desire and self-conception as constituent parts of one’s person.

The contemporary obsession with identity is really a religious impulse, the idolatrous worship of self. It is so whether it appears with reference to sexual desires or identity, or in other matters (e.g., matters of ethnicity). Refuge goes along with that false religion and seeks to import it into the Christian faith. If this be doubted, consider this statement from Refuge’s FAQs: “The Chaplain’s Office continues as a key resource for students seeking to individually or corporately develop their faith in light of their sexual attractions and gender identity.” So it is one’s faith that is to be developed in light of one’s attractions and identity, not one’s attractions and identity that are to be developed in light of one’s faith: sexual identity is really the central element, to which faith is therefore subordinate.

A Second Example

Similar concerns attach to the efforts of Wheaton’s Sexual and Gender Identity Institute. A full critique is not possible here, but notice that it adopts the world’s concepts and attempts to reconcile them with Christian faith, even in its very name. Until living memory gender and sex both referred to the physical quality of being male or female, and were synonyms when used in this way. Sexuality, for its part, formerly referred to the fact of being male or female (i.e., being sexed) or to a thing’s capability of sexual feelings, not to one’s sexual identity as described by their desires. It is now considered a constituent part of Man, and what was formerly asserted of sex is now asserted of gender and sexuality.

Formerly sex was thought to be sacrosanct, immutable, and the determinant of how one ought to act in society and the bedroom. Now sexuality is thought to be immutable (more or less), the result of a fixed orientation outside one’s will which must be ‘given expression’ if one is to be healthy and happy, and which thereby governs one’s behavior. Gender, which now means one’s conception of what one is, i.e., one’s mental/emotional perception of maleness or femaleness (or combination or lack thereof), is thought to be sacrosanct and preeminent, even where it is mutable (‘fluid’). The result is that society thinks it wise, safe, and just for one’s physical being to be mutilated to match one’s mental ideas, or for one’s self-conception to be regarded as determinative of one’s treatment by others in the same way as one’s physical sex would have been regarded as such previously; further, that anything (laws, taboos, etc.) that seeks to restrain one’s sexuality is ipso facto dangerous and oppressive.

Things have been turned upside down, in other words, and all this has occurred because people dreamt up new concepts and redefined words to mean something vastly different than they previously meant. It is the essential fault of the Sexual and Gender Identity Institute (SGI) that it uses these terms, apart from which the present mess would not be possible. It foregoes a simple male/female distinction (and a distinction between one’s person and one’s behavior) in favor of these concepts of gender, gender identity, and sexuality that we should forego, and produces books such as Emerging Gender Identities. Some idea of the book may be gleaned from its endorsement by Caryn Lemur, “a male-to-female transsexual and a follower of the words and life of Jesus” (per the endorsement itself). Here’s a sample quote from a section (“Discovering Superordinate Goals”) on “the value of building bridges with the LGBTQ+ community”:

How can we join with Manny in advocating for the protection of people who adopt an emerging gender identity, even if we believe that certain areas of their life and decision-making are outside of God’s best for humanity? This is an important question to answer. If theologically conservative Christians were as committed as politically active LGBTQ+ people are to developing and upholding policies that protect all people, including vulnerable transgender people, in matters like bathroom access and workplace violence, perhaps our current polarization could be attenuated, even if we still experience disagreements about human anthropology and the like. (118)

(Manny is an ‘activist’ working for change in the local school system (112) who has an unabashed hatred of Christianity (117).) In one fell swoop the command “to take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness” (Eph. 5:11) is brushed aside in favor of open alliance with wrongdoers (comp. 2 Cor. 6:14-18); behavior that will lead people to earthly misery (and probable suicide) and an eternity in hell is reduced to only being “outside of God’s best for humanity”; faithful believers are criticized for having the audacity to think that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world (Jn. 18:36) and does not require political activism of any stripe, least of all in conjunction with our enemies; it is naively ignored that allowing biological men into women’s bathrooms, far from protecting all people, would be to expose women and little girls to immense discomfort and possible rape; it is wholly disregarded that with many ‘trans’ people any speech that disagrees with their behavior is deemed ‘violence,’ such that policies ostensibly meant to protect them from violence would actually just stifle all dissent with termination in the workplace and criminal punishment in society; and this contemporary struggle over the meaning of sex, which has such terrible human consequences, is just a needlessly polarized disagreement over “human anthropology.”

Recall that this book is promoted as a helpful resource on SGI’s Wheaton website, and then ask: was Pres. Ryken giving an accurate summary of the actual state of affairs when he said that “Wheaton College remains fully committed . . . to biblical orthodoxy and Christ-centered education, including in matters of human sexuality, [and] gender identity”?

Application

Now it is not enough to be informed of such things, nor to criticize them digitally. Action is needed. I for one would neither attend Wheaton, nor recommend others do so just now, but if you read this you probably did not do so for college advice, so let’s focus on three practical things we can all do.

One, as this was a rather long polemic article that covered some seedy territory, balance it out with a large dose of something edifying. I think a good proportion is at least five to one: if it took 15 minutes to read this, at least 75 minutes of something faith-building (and non-polemic) should be imbibed to accompany it. I have recently been reading Luther’s expositions of the Psalms and listening to William Still and Martyn Lloyd Jones on Galatians and Romans, and can commend them, but anything that ‘builds up’ (a la Eph. 4:29 or 1 Thess. 5:11) is desirable.

Two, pray that Wheaton and its associated faculty will abide in the truth, and that there will be repentance where needed on this point.

Three, banish any thoughts of despair or unrighteous wrath. It is disappointing that a prominent college that professes our faith is stumbling, yes, but it could be worse, there are still lots of people keeping the faith, and there is a real possibility that in spite of this God will bring people to repentance (2 Tim. 2:25), as well the certainty that he will somehow accomplish good from all this by his most wise (if mysterious) providence.

Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Greenville Co., SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at tomhervey@substack.com. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation.