Steve Jordahl | January 16, 2019
(One News Now) – Family advocates and conservatives are concerned about Wheaton College after student leaders sent a letter to the student body criticizing on-campus comments by a black pro-life speaker.
In November, Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation – at the invitation of one of the conservative groups at Wheaton – spoke about racism in the abortion industry. The title of his presentation was “Black Live Matter In and Out of the Womb.” After the event, the student activities office distributed a campus-wide email saying that some of Bomberger’s comments “made many students, staff, and faculty of color feel unheard, underrepresented, and unsafe” on the campus of the self-described “distinctly Christian” liberal arts college.
A statement to OneNewsNow from the college said the offending comments came after the speech. Bomberger says that’s bunk.
“The myths and the narratives created about the post- Q-and-A discussion are all lies,” he tells OneNewsNow. “The issue is that they had a brown person come on campus who did not uphold their sacred ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.”
As for those “of color” feeling unheard, underrepresented, and unsafe, Bamberger points out that didn’t seem to matter last year when the philosophy department hosted Dr. George Yancy, whose obscenity-laced presentation contained these comments:
Yancy: “What if to be white at Wheaton College is to be a racist? In short, I argue that whiteness is anti-theological. And if holiness has kept the Wheaton College Christian community from looking at its white racism, then I would suggest that Wheaton College needs to become unholy.”
The statement from Wheaton says while Bomberger’s speech didn’t generate a campus-wide email, there was plenty of “heated conversations” and “dissent.” Still, the contrast in speeches has some concerned conservatives wondering if the school still deserves the label “Christian.”