Wheaton College, a flagship Protestant evangelical institution of higher education, routinely faces two sorts of criticism from its constituents. One is that it has abandoned its theological moorings and “gone liberal.” The other is that it fails to live up to its stated moral and intellectual commitments to social justice and love of neighbor. Wheaton’s latest controversy involves both.

Recently, Wheaton publicly congratulated Russell Vought, an alumnus appointed by the Trump administration to direct the White House Office of Management and Budget. Vought is a key architect of Project 2025, an almost comically villainous and quasi-fascist blueprint of white Christian nationalism that appears to inform many of Trump’s recent executive actions. 

Wheaton’s willingness to honor Vought resulted in outrage from constituents concerned about Wheaton’s alignment with his radically right-wing agenda. That, in turn, prompted another Wheaton alumnus, Daniel Davis, to decry Wheaton’s tolerance for the infiltration of “woke” culture among its faculty.

Watching these denunciations of Wheaton’s allegedly compromised capitulation to “woke culture,” I have found deep sympathy and solidarity with faculty friends there. Schools like Wheaton, such as Gordon College and Westmont College, increasingly face similar attacks on their integrity as scholars and teachers.

It is demanding enough to teach, mentor, research and publish without having to defend their excellent work against “anti-woke” drivel. These faculty friends insist that teaching or writing on critical race theory, queer literary theory or liberation theology is simply part of their academic responsibility to students and their field.

They emphasize that none of this entails endorsement, just critical engagement that can be done in a manner consistent with Wheaton’s evangelical mission and commitments. Yet these routine cycles of criticism and self-defense that plague evangelical institutions of higher education ignore the reality that these institutions cannot be places of genuinely free and open academic inquiry.

Gordon, Westmont, and Wheaton all impose strict intellectual and moral constraints on the questions that can be asked and the answers that can be offered. They do this by appealing to institutionally defined standards of “orthodox” evangelicalism– standards that come with rigidly established boundaries for “ethical teaching” that must be endorsed by all its members.

Of course, a balance must be struck between an institutionally shared moral and religious consensus and the freedom of faculty members to subject the consensus to critical scrutiny. However, there are at least two challenges to negotiating this balance in evangelical higher education.

First, when the required theological and ethical consensus leads to fixed positions on controversial matters of Christian significance, the “freedom” to engage opposing viewpoints is subject to severe corruption. Policing the consensus incentivizes “falling in line” to keep a job or maintain social capital.

This creates cultures of fear. It is why these institutions have reputations as oppressive environments for certain kinds of critical scholarship, even when they give lip service to the compatibility of such scholarship with the institutional mission.

Second, the alleged “evangelical orthodoxy” the consensus proclaims is inevitably dubious. Evangelicals are not Roman Catholics with a magisterium. Schools like Gordon, Westmont and Wheaton even lack denominational identities to define their boundaries.

Self-described evangelicals disagree with almost everything they might call an “essential” of their evangelical identity, as well as what would exclude one from that identity.

These schools fill this vacuum with shared cultural commitments, usually ones that best serve their market position and financial interests. For most of these institutions associated with the Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities, their commitments align with white, politically conservative evangelical culture. It is that culture that is adopted and policed as “evangelical orthodoxy.”

When these institutions are accused of “mission drift,” it is usually an attempt to mobilize the power of the “evangelical orthodoxy” held by school donors to ensure the institution’s doors remain open.

Managing these criticisms requires several strategies, mainly related to accreditation and brand management. Highly qualified faculty must be hired. This makes it difficult to filter out scholars whose competencies include critical methodologies and perspectives that threaten accepted interpretations of the evangelical orthodoxies. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and similar matters must be addressed, with costly legal or fiduciary consequences for failing to do so. Multiple constituencies, both public and academic, must be catered to. Cross-pressures like these regularly create conditions that are in tension with these schools’ evangelical “orthodoxies.”

Adapting to these pressures can create a false impression of openness to institutional revision or reform. Evangelical schools end up suspended between these conflicting interests. Faculty whose scholarship intersects with the doctrinal and moral consensus live and work on the knife’s edge and are especially vulnerable to laceration in the vital organs of their work.

The harms this policing creates to faculty are not bugs but features of evangelical academic culture. They are baked into the structure. 

The only thing that changes is the subject being policed, which shifts depending on what “consensus” is currently in question. Most faculty members experience this not as a consensus but as Sauron’s lidless eye, anxious to recover and protect the source of his power from the threat of it being wielded by woke faculty hobbits.

Just ask Larycia Hawkins—the first black woman tenured at Wheaton–who was disciplined and pushed to leave a community she loved for expressing Christian solidarity with Muslims. Westmont has recently seen a number of faculty and staff departures with similar stories.

There are support groups for the trauma inflicted on former faculty who were harassed and purged in these environments. Many current faculty members would attest to these oppressive dynamics if they weren’t afraid of reprisals for doing so. As in the Hawkins case, correcting these built-in harms requires massive, usually public, institutional disruption because resistance to self-criticism and revision is deeply institutionalized.

More intellectually open and generous educational philosophies like those of Jesuit institutions, many university divinity schools, and my current institution get this right. Tightly intellectually controlled evangelical institutions like Wheaton, Westmont and Gordon get it wrong.

This is not an indictment of the faculty at these schools whose terrific work within their institutional guardrails exhibits clear and admirable integrity. I just worry about the broader structure and culture where their good work is embedded and the inherently conflicted and embattled system of incentives and norms it creates.

These systems guarantee bad-faith relationships between its administrators, trustees, faculty, constituents and donors.

The problem with evangelical higher education is not, as it so frequently tells itself, that it takes up a “courageous middle.” That is just an attempt to rebrand the structural flaw I’ve described as an opportunity rather than a cost. It is a seductive lie that enables these schools to continue to wear American white evangelicalism’s one ring of power, even if it means distancing themselves from the Gollum of their more unsightly MAGA constituents.

The problem is that predominantly white evangelical higher education exists to leverage a virulent form of cultural dominance into a (pseudo) academic business model. This is why the likes of Daniel Davis shouldn’t worry too much about the “woke faculty.” 

That faculty is ultimately subordinate to an institutional context that literally cannot afford to alienate the 80+% of evangelicals who gave us the political outcome its professors are being criticized for challenging.