A Fist-Fight Over Donald Trump at the Evangelical Version of Harvard

In early February, Wheaton College, a well-known evangelical school outside of Chicago, made a seemingly innocuous post on social media, giving a shout-out to one of its own for getting a prestigious job. An alumnus, Russell Vought, had just been confirmed as the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. “Wheaton College congratulates and prays for 1998 graduate Russell Vought,” the post read. Vought, who also served at the O.M.B. in Donald Trump’s first Administration, has been credited as one of the intellectual architects of the President’s comeback: he contributed to the most recent Republican platform and helped establish the D.C. infrastructure for the MAGA-movement-in-waiting over the past four years. He also wrote the chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for this Administration, about executive power.

Within a few hours, there were more than a thousand replies to the post, “primarily incendiary, unchristian comments about Mr. Vought,” a spokesperson told Religion News Service. So the college backpedalled. “The recognition and prayer is something we would typically do for any graduate who reached that level of government,” the college wrote in a statement the next day. “However, the political situation surrounding the appointment led to a significant concern expressed online.” In order to avoid a political dispute and honor the college’s commitment to nonpartisanship, the post was removed.

With that, what might have been a small dustup turned into a full-on war that reached far beyond Wheaton’s students and alumni. “For years now Wheaton has led the way in the false ‘nice’ Christianity that feminized the churches and let the Dems destroy our country,” Eric Metaxas, an evangelical radio host, wrote on X. Franklin Graham, a son of Billy Graham—one of the most prominent evangelists in American history, who went to Wheaton and has a center named for him on campus—posted on Facebook, “Shame on them for backing down and having no backbone. I wish the leadership of this Christian school would stand firm with what is right and not be intimidated or moved by the winds of wokeness.” Hillsdale College, a conservative liberal-arts school, trolled Wheaton from its X account: “Trigger warning: We will not be deleting our earlier post congratulating @RussVought.”

The past decade of partisan politics has badly fractured the evangelical world. “Wheaton in particular finds itself at the center of an intra-evangelical culture war that is defined by Trump,” Bryan McGraw, a dean and professor of politics at Wheaton, told me. In the postwar period, Wheaton represented a particular strain of evangelicalism: intellectually rigorous, unafraid of the modern world, and keenly interested in cultivating mainstream legitimacy and prestige. This wasn’t the fire and brimstone of fundamentalism; this was the joyful, big-tent-style Christianity of Billy Graham. While Wheaton always fashioned itself as theologically conservative, it was never overtly partisan. But maintaining that posture has become increasingly difficult. “The complexity the college is caught in is that it wants to remain useful for everybody who calls themselves evangelical,” Mark Noll, a historian of evangelicalism and Wheaton alumnus, told me. “That maybe is a little bit naïve, since what it means theologically to be an evangelical is contested, what it means to be evangelical culturally is contested, and obviously the political implication is contested.” As McGraw put it, “There’s probably some comedy sketch out there, where there’s a guy who has his legs on two logs, and they’re getting further and further apart. Wheaton sometimes feels like that.”

After the college withdrew its original congratulatory post, a group of roughly fifteen alumni put together a letter outlining their concerns about Vought. “We find Vought’s vision for government, as outlined in Project 2025, to be antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to the mission of Wheaton College,” they wrote. They cited crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, rollbacks on protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people, and abortion policies that go “far beyond humanitarian restrictions” as examples of policies that “target marginalized communities.” Tyler Streckert, a 2015 graduate who helped draft the letter, told me that many Wheaton alumni work at places like U.S.A.I.D., which has all but ceased its operations under this Trump Administration. “Many alumni, and many employees of Wheaton College, many current students, do not support the priorities of Russ Vought or the Trump Administration, or even see the principles of Christianity being lived out through those policies,” he said. “What we’re trying to ask is, What kinds of voices and what kinds of individuals does the college want to hold up as examples of what a successful Wheaton alumnus is?” Instead of focussing on people like Vought, he said, “the college could be concentrating on elevating organizations and leaders who are the hands and feet of Christ.”

Among conservative alumni and observers of the college, however, the perception of Wheaton is entirely different. Eric Teetsel, who just replaced Vought as the head of Vought’s advocacy organization, the Center for Renewing America, told me, “Russ and I have joked for some time that it’s sort of wild that they seem to have forgotten that he exists.” He gave some examples: no campus invitations, no profiles in the alumni magazine, no offers to speak in chapel. “That’s not the reason he does this—he’s not eager for accolades,” Teetsel said. But, especially at such a small, tight-knit school, Teetsel added, “it is notable, almost like it would have to be an intentional choice.” Wheaton’s actions may have stung in particular because Vought has publicly defended the college in the past. In 2016, the school made the controversial decision to ask a popular professor, Larycia Hawkins, to step down after she declared her intention to wear a hijab during Advent in solidarity with Muslims. Vought wrote an article supporting Wheaton’s position, and, during the confirmation hearings for his first stint at the O.M.B., he was grilled about it by Senator Bernie Sanders, who called Vought’s views “hateful,” “Islamophobic,” and “an insult to over a billion Muslims throughout the world.”

When Wheaton took the post about Vought down, Teetsel saw it as giving “in to the heckler’s veto,” he said. “The faithful thing to do, the Biblical thing to do, would have been to turn off the comments and stand by what you had originally done, which was perfectly consistent with a Christian witness to the world.” He pointed out that Christians are obligated to pray for their leaders, no matter whether they are Democrats or Republicans; he saw the post as nothing more than an embrace of that Biblical imperative. Now, however, the post has become about something bigger. When I spoke to Teetsel, he and some other conservative alumni were preparing to release their own letter, addressed to the board of trustees, about what they see as the college’s liberal drift. “Wheaton is a symbol,” Teetsel told me. “It’s bigger than just an institution. It is, and has been, the banner of evangelical higher education.” He went on, “Even people who didn’t go there recognize that if a place like Wheaton can succumb to the same story that Harvard University and Princeton University and Yale and so many other schools that started with an explicitly faith-based mission and succumb to the world—if that can happen at Wheaton, we’ve lost something bigger than just Wheaton.”

Noll, the historian, pointed out that fracture among American evangelicals is not new. Christian abolitionists and slaveholders, for example, despised and critiqued one another on Biblical terms. But, for institutions like Wheaton that have long clung to the vision that evangelicals can be part of the secular world while remaining theologically distinctive and unified, the cross-pressures are only growing more intense. In Noll’s view, both camps in the Vought social-media battle are mistaken. “They are forgetting that the Wheaton motto is ‘for Christ and his Kingdom,’ ” Noll wrote to me, “and not ‘for Christ as part of MAGA’ or ‘for Christ as anti-MAGA.’ ” ♦