Wheaton College President Philip Ryken accused Fox News of failing “to meet minimal standards for journalistic accuracy” in a statement on Wednesday (Jan. 31) after the news organization ran an opinion piece in which freelance writer Tim Scheiderer alleged that the Christian liberal arts college had gone “woke.”
In his opinion piece published on Wednesday morning, Scheiderer argued that Wheaton, which has been referred to as “The Harvard of Christian Schools,” “has begun to mimic Harvard’s wokeness.”
“Banning biblical words, teaching critical race theory, and psychologizing gender identity issues may not seem extreme in modern academia,” Scheiderer wrote. “But for a school which houses the works of Rev. [Billy] Graham, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, it is adrift from its orthodox, Christian moorings.”
Scheiderer went on to accuse Wheaton of promoting “Marxism, religious syncretism, and segregation.” He criticized a piece of literature published by the school that emphasized using the word “co-laboring” instead of “service” to better reflect the idea’s intended meaning and avoid invoking “power dynamics across socio-economic, racial, and cultural lines.”
Scheiderer also found fault with the school for using the word “humanity” instead of “mankind” to be more gender inclusive. He went as far as to allege that Wheaton had “prohibited” the use of certain words.
Scheiderer also accused Wheaton of having compromised on the traditional understanding of sexuality and gender identity, despite admitting that “an endowed chair in Wheaton’s psychology program believes this is the ideal way for humans to exist: men identifying as men and women as women.”
“In light of these shifts away from the Bible, would Billy Graham, the most influential 20th-century evangelical, endorse his alma mater?” Scheiderer wrote. “At Wheaton, the biblical belief in only two sexes is being tainted. With this and the other shifts mentioned, it may seem like a slow drift. But a gentle tide can carry a boat far from its dock.”
Later in the day, Wheaton College published a statement in which President Philip Ryken said that a number of Scheiderer’s accusations were “either false or misleading.”
“The mischaracterizing post seems to be cobbled from out-of-context items found on the Internet. The author does not name any sources or give any citations for his many contentions,” Ryken said.
Ryken went on to say that Scheiderer had reached out to Wheaton’s marketing department for comment a month earlier. According to Ryken, Scheiderer claimed he was a writer for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said that his writing deadline was the end of the day.
Upon being pressed, Scheiderer admitted that he did not work for the WSJ but was a freelance writer hoping to pitch an article to the newspaper. “Although the WSJ did not run his piece, evidently he was able to have it appear on a FOX News page,” Ryken said.
