Being Different in Wheaton
It’s always amazing to me how faith and the Underground Railroad seem to always pop up together in contemporary news articles. For example, in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about values at religious universities, we get this:
Being different is nothing new for Wheaton. The most famous building on campus was once a way station on the Underground Railroad. That was a time when abolitionist evangelicals were out of touch with the reality of slavery in a nation whose claim to liberty rested on God-given truths about human dignity. Today Wheaton advances a proposition that may be equally radical, at least in the groves of modern academe: That character is as important as chemistry and that teachers have some obligations as role models for their students.
I think the important issue explored in this article, from an historical perspective, is how early 19th Century abolitionists were so out of touch with the popular morals of that era.
Slavery, after all, was sanctioned by law in about half of the then-United States, so protesting the continued existence of slavery was viewed as a radical, if not anarchic, position.
The Journal article places this counter cultural matter in another context — a college determined to stick to its religious beliefs even if it is viewed by the majority as rigid and out-of-touch with modern sensibilities.
Wheaton College wouldn’t be my preference as a place for my kids. But its rigorous commitment to a set of beliefs and principles seems not unlike the relentless focus of the anti-slavery zealots of pre-Civil War America.