History matters with everything touching upon morality and religion. And so it is with the dramatic racial reckoning in a candid and thorough self-examination released Sept. 14 by Wheaton College in Illinois.
The implications command news media attention because the 163-year-old school is among the most highly influential and respected institutions in U.S. evangelical Protestantism. This is, after all, the alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham.
By coincidence, the power of history was underscored the very next day at an emotional worship service to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the racist terror bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls ages 11 to 14 as they donned Sunday choir robes. Perhaps more than any other episode of the civil rights era, this eroded white southern churchgoers’ remaining tolerance toward Jim Crow segregation.
History is “our best teacher,” said the service’s keynote speaker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court (video here starting at 1:30), who quoted I Corinthians 15:10 and Hebrews 11:1 and said “with God’s grace” ongoing racial justice efforts will succeed. Though “parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about” and “difficult to remember and re-live,” she said, “it is dangerous to forget them.”
Precisely for that reason, Wheaton’s Historical Review Task Force, recommended by President Philip Ryken and approved by its Board of Trustees, began investigating past campus race relations in October, 2021. The result is the 122-page accounting that the trustees endorsed and issued last week (click here for text).
The report is important because, as the student newspaper reported, “Wheaton is one of the first Christian colleges to conduct such a review” of the sort seen at some non-religious campuses. One notable predecessor was the 2018 report (document here) on the racial history of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a school that’s one year older than Wheaton.
The task force, made up of trustee, faculty, administration, student and alumni representatives, declared, “We repent of all forms of racism and favoritism in our institutional history, whether conscious or unconscious” and pledged follow-up actions.
The first big example is the trustees’ decision to immediately remove from the library the name that honored J. Oliver Buswell Jr., in response to long-running student protests.
