GetReligion
Thursday, April 17, 2025

Wheaton College

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Chicago Tribune reporting on Wheaton College hazing incident seems solid, but pay close attention

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Infuriating.

That's the only way to describe the reported circumstances of a hazing incident involving football players at Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical college in the Chicago area.

I say "reported circumstances" because we don't know all the facts at this point.

But what do know makes one's blood boil: Let's start at the top of the Chicago Tribune's front-page story, which seems extremely solid:

Five Wheaton College football players face felony charges after being accused of a 2016 hazing incident in which a freshman teammate was restrained with duct tape, beaten and left half-naked with two torn shoulders on a baseball field.
A DuPage County judge signed arrest warrants and set $50,000 bonds against the players — James Cooksey, Kyler Kregel, Benjamin Pettway, Noah Spielman and Samuel TeBos — late Monday afternoon. Prosecutors charged the athletes with aggravated battery, mob action and unlawful restraint.
They are expected to turn themselves in to authorities this week.

Keep reading, and here is the part that doesn't make sense to me: The accused are still playing — or have been playing — football for Wheaton:

The victim, who the Tribune is not naming, left the conservative Christian school shortly after the incident and now attends college in Indiana.
"This has had a devastating effect on my life," he said in a statement to the Tribune. "What was done to me should never occur in connection with a football program or any other activity. ... I am confident that the criminal prosecution will provide a fair and just punishment to the men who attacked me."
The college released a statement late Monday saying it was "deeply troubled" by the allegations because it strives to provide an educational environment free from hazing and reflective of the school's religious values. The school said it hired a third party to investigate the allegation last year and took "corrective actions," but officials declined to provide details on any punishment, citing federal privacy laws.
Sources told the Tribune that several players were required to perform 50 hours of community service and write an eight-page essay reflecting on their behavior.

Over at the American Conservative, Rod "Friend of this Blog" Dreher opines:


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Reuters tackles faith-based investing, omitting voices while inserting unsourced opinions

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When not reporting the news in a straight-up manner, the Reuters news agency often pops up as offering a caricature of what a news service does.

Most notable, perhaps, was the post-9/11 memo by the agency's then-global news editor, Stephen Jukes, in which he declared: “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist.” There was blowback a-plenty, and Jukes should be very glad Twitter didn't exist at the time.

Today's bit of palaver from Reuters comes on a subject they should know well: money and investing. Reuters did, after all, begin life as a service shuttling stock market prices around Europe, at first by carrier pigeon and then by telegraph. (It is perhaps the only journalistic enterprise in history to have been immortalized by actor Edward G. Robinson on the silver screen.)

That was then, and this is now. Reuters has come upon an interesting trend, that of stock investments based on religious principles. They then proceed to do a rather shallow reporting job that omits voices and inserts unsourced opinion as a factual statement.

This isn't straight-up journalism. It's reporting with a dose of opinion, which would seem antithetical to Reuters' origins.

In this story, titled "Gotta have faith: The rise of religious ETFs," we read:

Making money in the markets is tricky enough on its own. Try doing it while staying faithful to your religious beliefs.
That challenge hasn’t discouraged some investors from trying. Indeed, there is a growing number of faith-based exchange-traded funds that attempt to marry moneymaking with principles that are deeper and more meaningful than those of your typical trader.


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Major news events among Episcopalians and American Anglicans: Still worth covering?

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It’s been more than 10 years since the conservative portions of various Episcopal dioceses began the Great Split-Off. That is, they left dioceses – some of which had been around since the 18th century – to form a new entity, the Anglican Church in North America, that billed itself as the truest representation of Anglicanism on the North American continent.

This didn’t go over too well with The Episcopal Church (TEC), as you may imagine, and many were the lawsuits filed by TEC leaders to keep their property, most of which they won. I covered churches in northern Virginia that lost everything in this battle. One church lost property they had already bought on which to build a new sanctuary. Another church lost millions of dollars in property that dated back to colonial times.

This was a big, big story year after year – receiving major coverage from many major newspapers and wire services.

Take, 2007 for example. I was able to cover one of the ACNA’s formative sessions in Pittsburgh in 2008 and their inaugural assembly in 2009 in Bedford, Texas. As the two sides have drifted further apart and the Episcopal Church has continued losing membership, the secular media has almost stopped covering this story. Religion News Service is the one exception.

This is a shame, in that there’s still news going on.

The conservative Anglican journalist David Virtue, who has followed this story since the beginning, chronicled what happened at a recent gathering at Wheaton College near Chicago.

The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is planting one new church a week, Archbishop Foley Beach told delegates to the triennial gathering of some 1400 Anglicans, at Wheaton College, in the heartland of America's Bible belt. The ACNA also officially received The Anglican Diocese of South Carolina as the newest diocese with some 9,000 members – the largest of 31 dioceses in the orthodox Anglican body. The diocese broke away from the Episcopal Church over the authority of Scripture and TEC's embrace of homosexuality and gay marriage in defiance of Lambeth resolution 1.10. ...


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How fares Protestantism upon its 500th anniversary? Depends on where you look

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How fares Protestantism upon its 500th anniversary? Depends on where you look

Ed Stetzer of Wheaton College (Illinois) furrowed many a brow with an April 28 Washington Post warning that “if current trends continue” without letup, Americans active in “Mainline” Protestant churches will reach zero by Easter 2039.

Talk about timing.

That bleak forecast – mitigated by U.S. “Evangelical” Protestants’ relative stability – comes in the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation. This massive split in Christianity was sparked by a protest petition posted by 34-year-old German friar and professor Martin Luther on All Souls’ Eve (October 31) of 1517.

The Protestant scenario is rosy at the world level, however, according to anniversary tabulations by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a standard resource for statistics and trend lines from 1900 to the present (media contact here).

Director Todd Johnson scanned the situation for Stetzer’s blog at ChristianityToday.com with a 500-year infographic summary (.pdf here).

The CSGC anniversary report is especially useful because Pew Research Center’s comprehensive April update on world religions had numbers for Christianity as a whole but did not break out the Protestant segment. Pew does offer an estimate that 37 percent of the world’s Christians are Protestant if you include Anglicans and the burgeoning “Independents” in the developing world.

CSGC counts Anglicans as Protestant but treats the Independents, non-existent until the 20th Century, as a new, large, expanding and separate Christian branch from Protestantism. Despite some similarities, such churches lack direct ties with historic Protestant denominations.

From its 1517 start, Protestantism grew to claim 133 million followers in 1900, nearly doubled that by 1970, and more than doubled again to reach an estimated 560 million this year, with a projected 626 million by 2025. The faith exists in nearly all the globe’s 234 nations and territories.


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Charmaine Yoest is a complex personality. Why can't reporters figure that out?

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Is it just my imagination, or are President Donald Trump’s female picks creating a lot more news-media hysteria than his male nominees?

Whether it’s Paula White as one of his six clergy speakers at his inauguration or Betsy DeVos as education secretary or now Charmaine Yoest as assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, the screaming is over the top.

I’ve never met Charmaine Yoest, although I heard her speak at the 2009 meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association and was impressed at the time. And for the record, my sympathies are with anyone who must work in the Humphrey building, a nasty piece of Brutalist architecture completed in 1977 that serves as HHS headquarters down the street from the Capitol. The one time I was inside was not a pleasant experience.

Back to the react. I’ll use Politico’s opening salvo as an example:

President Donald Trump on Friday said he would name one of the most prominent anti-abortion activists in the country to a top communications post at HHS.
Charmaine Yoest, tapped to be assistant secretary of public affairs, is a senior fellow at American Values. She is the former president of Americans United for Life, which has been instrumental in advancing anti-abortion legislation at the state level to restrict access to the procedure.
Her appointment was quickly panned by Democratic lawmakers and prominent abortion rights organizations. The assistant secretary of public affairs shapes communications efforts for the entire agency.
“Ms. Yoest has a long record of seeking to undermine women’s access to health care and safe, legal abortion by distorting the facts, and her selection shows yet again that this administration is pandering to extreme conservatives and ignoring the millions of men and women nationwide who support women’s constitutionally protected health care rights and don’t want to go backward," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement.
AUL’s website – which states that the group offers state lawmakers 32 different pieces of model legislation to restrict access to abortion – characterizes Yoest as “public enemy #1” for abortion rights organizations.

Betcha can’t guess where Politico stands on this appointment (or on abortion issues) can you?


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Weekend thinking about old-line Protestant demographics, doctrine and future Easters

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If you follow religion news closely (which would make you the kind of person who frequents this website), then you know that there are two major, overarching trends taking place in modern America that are affecting all kinds of religious organizations.

This is certainly true in Christianity and also in Judaism. The same trends may be affecting Muslims and members of other major world religions, but I am not sure – in part because I have not seen enough research in those communities.

The first major trend – which has generated massive amounts of coverage – is the rapidly rising tide of Americans identifying themselves as "religiously unaffiliated," meaning that they claim no ties to any particular religious tradition. Yes, these are the "Nones." This does not mean that they are pure secularists, although many are (while some are "spiritual but not religious"). The stats for atheists and agnostics are on the rise, as well.

The second trend, in tension with the first, is that the large slice of the American population that practices traditional forms of religious faith does not appear to be declining, or not at a rapid rate. True, some of these believers have been switching from one sanctuary to another.

It is also significant, in terms of demographics, that people in more doctrinally conservative forms of faith tend to (a) have more children and (b) take part in efforts to win converts to their faith. See, for example, the numbers for Pentecostal Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Compare the birth rates for Orthodox and Reform Jews.

What is shrinking is the "mushy middle" of the spectrum, the lukewarm believers and those in faiths that make weaker demands on their time and convictions. Yes, this same theme showed up in that recent flurry of online discussions about the future of the religious left.

This brings us to a trend that researchers have been discussing for nearly 50 years – the statistical decline of the "seven sisters" denominations in old-line Protestantism. And that, in turn, brings us to this weekend's think piece on a topic close to the religion beat – an "Acts of Faith" essay in The Washington Post by Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

The headline is a grabber: "If it doesn’t stem its decline, mainline Protestantism has just 23 Easters left."


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Crossroads podcast: A Muslim at an Episcopal altar? Face it, that's a complicated story

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Sometimes the issue flares up in a major religious denomination. Take, for example, the 2007 case of an Episcopal priest who declared, "I am both Muslim and Christian." She was eventually defrocked. Coverage of that story led to some interesting discussions here at GetReligion.

Quite some time ago, there was the case of a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor who was disciplined for taking part in a post-Sept. 11 service that involved praying with Oprah Winfrey, as well as leaders from a wide spectrum of religious traditions, including Islam and Hinduism.

Or maybe we're talking about a professor at a major evangelical Protestant school – like Wheaton College – who not only wore a hijab in support of oppressed Muslims, but took to social media to declare that she believes that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. She quoted the pope, when making that point.

These kinds of news reports loomed in the background during this week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in), which focused on a recent Holy Week Mass in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, during which the clergy renewed their ordination vows.

The bottom line: Stories about interfaith work and worship almost always raise complicated theological issues and, nine times out of 10, there are more than two camps of believers involved in the debates. Hold that thought.

Key details about the new Holy Week story: A Muslim interfaith leader preached during the rite, in the normal point in the liturgy dedicated to the sermon. A passage from the Quran was read, before the Gospel. The preacher stood with the bishop and others at the altar during the consecration prayers and she received the consecrated bread during Holy Communion.

All of this was discussed in my Universal syndicate "On Religion" column this week. Here is a sample of that column, which included material from contacts with Bishop Robert C. Wright, as well as the preacher, Soumaya Khalifah.


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Thinking about that whole 'evangelical' definition thing, with historian Mark Noll

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So how many times has GetReligion published posts about people – journalists, academics, politicos, you name it – struggling to define the term "evangelical"?

That's hard to say, because the question keeps evolving as the term grows more and more political, at least as it is used in the mainstream press. Here is a GetReligion search page that offers you 16 of these post in one handy collection.

This issue shows up in all kinds of settings, but it's clear that the political angle – #DUH – is the key here. Here is how I expressed that in a post a few years ago focusing on a familiar question: Why do journalists keep getting confused about the faith practiced by former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum?

A decade ago, the editors of Time magazine decided – during one of the many "Who the heck are these born-gain people?" moments in the recent life of the mainstream press – to do a cover story focusing on the 25 most influential evangelical Protestants in American life.
It was an interesting list. However, one name in particular raised many eyebrows – Sen. Rick Santorum. The issue? Santorum was and is a very conservative Roman Catholic.
This struck me as interesting, so I did some background research on this issue. The consensus was that the Time team realized that Santorum was not a Protestant – and thus, not an evangelical – but the larger truth was that he, well, "voted evangelical."

That "voted evangelical" came from a magazine spokesperson. It's a classic.

Now, if I was going to point journalists toward an authoritative voice on this topic, historian Mark Noll would be right at the top of this list. Here is the intro to a Q&A interview with Noll published by the The Record, the student newspaper at Wheaton College.

For 27 years, Dr. Mark Noll served on the History Department faculty, ending his tenure as McManis Professor of Christian Thought in 2006. In 2016, he retired from The University of Notre Dame after teaching for 10 years. Mark Noll’s book “The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind” (1994) earned him a lasting place in evangelical scholarship. In 2005, Time Magazine named Noll one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.

You knew the following question had to come up. Right?


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Heresy in headlines: Raising questions about our social-media addiction and online buzz

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Heresy in headlines: Raising questions about our social-media addiction and online buzz

They say most American Christians have little interest in doctrine. Perhaps the upcoming 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation will briefly change that. Yet theological debates can produce lively news stories, and lately heresy has been in the headlines.

Emily McFarlan Miller, a Protestant-beat specialist with Religion News Service, proposed the “Top 5 ‘heresies’ of 2016” in an interesting December 29 piece. Then a January 3 Washington Post article by theologian Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary-California associated the H-word with President-elect Donald Trump because he favors Paula White and other “prosperity evangelists who cheerfully attack basic Christian doctrines.”

Miller’s list has two items that got considerable mainstream media ink:( 1) The ruckus over ousted Wheaton College Professor Larycia Hawkins and whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. (2) Contentions that an ambiguous 2016 decree from Pope Francis means Catholics who remarry without annulments can receive Communion.

The other three debates were mostly limited to evangelical Protestant circles. Philadelphia Pastor Liam Goligher accused theologian Wayne Grudem and other “complementarians” who see wives as subordinate to husbands of heresy in also subordinating Jesus the divine Son to God the Father. The two other disputes involve Georgia Southern Baptist Andy Stanley, said to undercut the Bible’s unique authority and the centrality of Jesus’ Virgin Birth.

Horton spurns the “word of faith” or “prosperity gospel” movement as a merger between the “new thought” typified by Christian Science and Norman Vincent Peale’s “positive thinking.” In addition to White, Horton targets Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, T.D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, and Joel Osteen. (White, who will pray at Trump’s inauguration – see this recent Julia Duin post here at GetReligion – rejects the “prosperity” label for herself.)

This theological news causes the Religion Guy to contemplate our omnipresent social media.


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