Wheaton College, Larycia Hawkins, and the Question of Whether Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God

The other day, Wheaton College initiated termination proceedings against Larycia Hawkins, the tenured Wheaton political science professor who has been wearing a hijab in solidarity with her Muslim neighbors. She was suspended late last year for social media statements in which she explained her actions. Among other things, she said that Christians and Muslims "worship the same God," and it was for this claim that her employment was jeopardized. According to Wheaton officials, the concern was that this claim is incompatible with the statement of faith that all Wheaton faculty must agree to.

Apparently, the provost was convinced that, indeed, there is a conflict between Wheaton's statement of faith and the view that Christians and Muslims worship the same God--convinced enough to recommend termination. That recommendation must be reviewed by a number of parties before it results in an actual termination, so there may yet be time to salvage the situation.

I say "salvage" the situation because--unless there is something that both Wheaton and Hawkins are keeping secret--it seems puzzling at best, and marginally crazy at worst, to say that there is a conflict between Wheaton's statement of faith and Hawkins' claim.

Certainly, there is no direct contradiction. Troll through Wheaton's statement of faith all day, and you will not find the claim that Christians and Muslims worship different Gods. It's just not there. Wheaton officials will surely concede as much. What they'll likely say is that there is an implicit contradiction. In other words, what they're saying is that if you accept Wheaton's statement of faith in all its parts, an unstated implication of that acceptance is that Christians and Muslims worship different Gods.

But this is almost as indefensible as claiming there is a direct contradiction. Now, there is something that follows immediately from the understanding of God spelled out in Wheaton's statement of faith, and which has implications for the relationship between Christianity and Islam. What follows is this: Christians and Muslims have very different beliefs about God, including some that are about God's essential nature.

Among other things, Christians believe that God is essentially triune, whereas Muslims reject this.

But to get from this (rather obvious) fact to the conclusion that Christians and Muslims worship a different God, you need to add some premises about the nature of linguistic reference. That is, you need to delve into the philosophy of language. To put it simply, if you adopt a fairly standard view about the nature of linguistic reference--one that was laid out quite beautifully by Edward Feser in a post at the end of December--you get the conclusion that despite the very important differences in belief about God, Christians and Muslims are referring to the same individual being when they speak of God. To get the contradiction that Wheaton administrators claim is there, it seems you'd need to deny this fairly standard view about the nature of linguistic reference.

I don't want to rehearse here all the details of Feser's essay, but let me offer the following simple argument just to clarify the thinking involved: There is one supreme being, creator and sustainer of all reality. This is God. Muslims devote their lives to the worship of this being--and they have a bunch of beliefs about what this being is like. Christians devote their lives to the worship of this being--and have some very different beliefs about what this being is like. But insofar as both direct their worship to that being who is the supreme source of everything else, they direct their worship towards the same entity, even if they disagree in important ways about the nature of that entity. In short, when they speak of God and worship God, they are orienting their talk and their praise towards the same entity, even if they have different beliefs about what that entity is like.

This line of argument is fairly easy to understand, I think, and it is premised on certain views about the nature of language and reference. Put simply, the referent of "God" becomes fixed by certain key elements that establish a shared referent in the face of disagreement about what the object under discussion is like. Central to this view about the nature of language is a distinction between the "sense" of a term (the conceptual ideas we attach to it) and its "referent" (what actual entity or entities the term points to). To say that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, it is sufficient that they have the same referent for "God"--that is, they are pointing in the same direction, even if they have divergent ideas about what the being they're pointing at is like.

And lest anyone think that disagreements about what is essential undercut a shared reference, consider the following example. Suppose I have two students who are doing an independent study with me. The first is a fairly typical college student (let's call her Mary), but the second (Martha) suffers from a delusional disorder that leads her to believe that I am an alien from another world--a Vulcan, let's say. She has a number of other strange beliefs that go along with this--for example, that I underwent ear surgery to remove my pointy ears and that I pluck my eyebrows every morning to obscure their upward sweep.

Now, being human is certainly essential to who I am. But when Mary and Martha are talking about me, are they referring to the same individual? Of course. When Martha says, "He's an alien" and Mary says, "No he's not," they're disagreeing with each other--and the only way they can disagree with each other is if they are talking about the same individual. Furthermore, when they sit in my office for the independent study, aren't they studying under the same professor? Aren't they talking to the same professor when they ask him questions? Aren't they submitting assignments to the same professor? If Martha turned in a final paper, would I be justified in giving her a zero because she hadn't turned it in to me, since "she thought she was submitting it to an alien, and I'm not an alien"?

You get the idea. Given a fairly standard philosophy of language, it is possible to have very different beliefs about an individual--even differences about what is essential--and still be referring to the same individual. You'd need a pretty unconventional philosophy of language to avoid this outcome.

In short, to derive a contradiction between what Hawkins said and the statement of faith she is required to endorse, you need to deny the fairly standard philosophy of language claims explained by Feser in favor of some alternative (and less standard) philosophy of language. There is no reason to suppose that Hawkins endorses this non-standard philosophy of language. In fact, her remarks explaining her views all but imply that she endorses the standard view described by Feser. (Consider the following statement: "In no way did I make a moral equivalency between Jesus and Muhammad or Islam and Christianity. That would be offensive to my Muslim friends and to my Christian friends to pretend that the religions are the same, that they're not different, either in practice or theology.")

Now, were a non-standard philosophy of language part of Wheaton's statement of faith, such that all Wheaton faculty are required to endorse this non-standard philosophy of language as part of their employment agreement, then there would be a problem for Hawkins. But I invite you to read through Wheaton's statement of faith carefully. Is a distinctive philosophy of language that rejects standard ideas about reference clearly laid out as an article of faith that Wheaton faculty must endorse? No? Then Hawkins needn't endorse any such thing in order to be in line with the statement of faith. So, she is free to adopt the standard view--which it seems she does. And when you combine the standard view with Wheaton's statement of faith, guess what? Hawkins' claim about Muslims and Christians worshiping the same God is wholly consistent with standing by that statement of faith.

In other words, Wheaton officials are flat out wrong if they assert that there is a conflict between what Hawkins said and what Wheaton's statement of faith requires Hawkins to endorse. Let me say that again: they are flat-out wrong. This is not some matter of opinion where there is no clear answer. It is a matter of logic. And they are wrong about the logic.

 To avoid an error of logic, they might say the following: "There is a conflict between Wheaton's statement of faith and the conjunction of Hawkins' claim with an unconventional philosophy of language that we have no reason to suppose Hawkins endorses." But saying this does not get them very far. It certainly does not warrant termination proceedings.

Let me summarize as plainly as I can. Whether there is a conflict between a complex statement of faith and a few social media remarks is a question of logical consistency. In the case at hand, there is no direct conflict. To get such a conflict, you need to combine the statement of faith and Hawkins' remarks with certain additional claims about linguistic reference--philosophical claims about the nature of language that Wheaton (wisely) does not require its faculty to endorse, and which there is no good reason to think Hawkins endorses.

Hence, as a matter of logic, there is no good reason to suppose that Hawkins' remarks commit her to standing against Wheaton's statement of faith. Said another way, there is absolutely no good reason to think, based on Hawkins' social media comments about Muslims and Christians, that Hawkins was in any way questioning or rethinking her allegiance to Wheaton's statement of faith. But surely termination proceedings of the sort Wheaton's provost has initiated call for good reasons.

Admittedly, it takes some clear thinking to see this point. And not everyone thinks clearly all the time. I saw a cartoon recently in which the author tried to argue that it was obvious that Christians and Muslims don't worship the same God. But the whole thrust of the argument was that Christians believe different things about God than Muslims do--including several things that are essential (especially the Doctrine of the Trinity). It is worth noting that no one takes these considerations as sufficient to show that Christians and contemporary Jews worship different Gods--but that point aside, it should be clear from what I have said above that the cartoon's author, like Wheaton's leadership, are conflating two distinct claims:

Claim 1: Muslims and Christians believe very different things about the God they worship (as well as some very similar things, too, of course).

Claim 2: Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God.

An argument that establishes Claim 1 does not establish Claim 2. And to get from Claim 1 to Claim 2, you need to introduce additional premises--premises that Hawkins doesn't seem to endorse and isn't required to endorse by her allegiance to Wheaton's statement of faith.

Put simply, Wheaton's leaders (and our cartoonist) are confused. They take there to be a conflict because they are either conflating Claim 1 with Claim 2 or because they think the inference from Claim 1 to Claim 2 is straightforward and uncontroversial, which it is not.

Hence, if Hawkins' public statements about Christianity and Islam really are the basis for the termination proceedings that have begun, the proceedings have been initiated for very bad reasons indeed. But something as serious as initiating termination proceedings for a tenured professor must be rooted in good reasons. Because of this, I hope for more than just that the proceedings end up with a "not guilty" verdict and Hawkins getting to keep her job. What I hope for--at least if Wheaton's reasons for moving ahead with termination proceedings are what they appear to be--is that Wheaton suspends the proceedings as soon as possible and extends to Hawkins a sincere apology.

My reasons for thinking this are implicit in what I've already said, I think. But let me spell it out. As noted above, what Hawkins said would be in conflict with Wheaton's statement of faith only when combined with a controversial set of views about the nature of linguistic reference that Hawkins almost certainly does not hold. It violates the principle of charity to attribute to someone views they almost certainly don't hold in order to fabricate a problem that wouldn't exist absent such an attribution. And it violates basic decency to try to fire someone from their job based on such fabricated problems.

To permit that sort of thing is to open the door to witch hunts. As soon as we allow bad reasons to justify suspensions and termination hearings, we are setting a precedent by which anyone can be subjected to termination hearings based on tenuous grounds. When you open the door to witch hunts, the witch hunters rub their hands together with glee. Accusations begin to fly, and the community becomes infected by paranoia. The spirit of charity and love that is supposed to be the hallmark of a Christian community is lost as members of that community become increasingly motivated by the fear of being kicked out for trivial reasons and trumped-up charges. They begin pointing fingers at others in the hope of deflecting attention from themselves.

It is for the sake of preserving Wheaton's community from the specter of witch hunts that I believe the administration should quickly rescind their actions, admit they made a mistake, and ask Hawkins for forgiveness.

I suspect she'll give it. After all, every sign indicates that she is a Christian, and that's what Christians do.

Falling into Wells

This morning, my pastor sent me an e-mail calling my attention to the inaugural essay in a new forum in the New York Times, "The Stone," which aims to offer a series of readable philosophical pieces by "contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." The opening sally is Simon Critchley's amusing and erudite take on what it means to be a philosopher.

Critchley takes his cue from Plato, who shares in The Theaetetus a story about Thales (taken by some to be the first philosopher). Thales was said to have fallen into a well while looking at the stars, prompting a servant girl to quip that he was so focused on trying to understand the heavens above that he failed to notice what was right at his feet. This anecdote is, in effect, offered as a metaphor for what it means to be a philosopher.

For this blog, I'd like to focus on one remark from Critchley's essay that I think may help to make a distinction I've been thinking about quite a bit recently--namely, the difference between being a Christian philosopher and an apologist. Here's Critchley's remark:

"Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention (sic), rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous."

Certainly, this has been my own experience as a philosopher. In business ethics classes, I refuse to honor the old American gods of capitalism and consumerism, leading the business majors and more economically conservative students in class to view me with suspicion. In my introductory philosophy classes, I make a special effort to introduce my students to arguments that call into question the dominant assumptions of the local culture. There has rarely been a church I've attended in which I haven't at some point challenged the pervasive views of the congregation (this is even true of the liberal UCC congregation I attended for several years).

But since writing Is God a Delusion?, I've found myself on more than one occasion referred to not as a philosopher writing about religion but as "an apologist" or "a Christian apologist." And this is a label that does not sit comfortably with me. I think of myself as a philosopher, and I think that being a philosopher is in a profound way incompatible with being an apologist.

Interestingly, at the same time that I've been called an apologist, I've been repeatedly accused of doing apologetics in a slippery way, by "redefining religion" so as to make it immune to new atheist challenges while at the same time making it unlike "actual" religion (if you look at the reviews of my work on Amazon, you'll see that this is a recurring theme among the more negative ones).

I suspect this accusation may not be uncommon for philosophers of religion whose views are in some broad sense sympathetic to religion. More precisely, I think they become the targets of this accusation when they're taken to be apologists. And as I said, I think there's crucial differences between being a philosopher and being an apologist.

This is not to say that a philosopher might not end up invoking many of the same arguments that an apologist invokes, or endorsing many of the same conclusions. But the apologist (at least as I understand "apologist" in its contemporary use) begins with a commitment to the sanctity of certain "gods"--by which, of course, both Critchley and I mean the normative presuppositions and commitments that define a practice or way of life, allegiance to which is necessary in order to engage in that practice or participate in that way of life. The apologist is one who guards these gods against various challenges, especially those coming from the outside (that is, from those who cleave to different gods).

And so we can have not only religious apologists but apologists for figure skating as a competitive sport, or apologists for associative advertising, or apologists for science or philosophy or even (one might suppose) for apologetics itself. In each of these cases, what characterizes the apologist is a commitment to guarding and protecting the practice and its "gods" from various challenges, especially ones that come from the outside, that is, from those who cleave to opposing gods. And a favored apologetic strategy is to attack the rival gods without mercy, as if the defeat of those rivals would amount to the victory of one's own.

The philosopher, however, begins from a different place and is pursuing different ends. To understand the difference, it's worth asking why philosophers fall into wells. The reason is because--at least to the extent that they are being philosophers (and no one is a philosopher about everything all the time)--they're not engaging in a practice or way of life but are instead critically assessing the normative assumptions which underlie it. They've paused from the task of actually living their life in order to evaluate its foundations. The more comprehensive this evaluation becomes, the less you will be capable of engaging in any practical task (because every practical task depends on taking certain things for granted). And so you may start falling into wells.

Or, perhaps, getting tackled. As anyone who's ever been on an American football field will tell you, it's hard to play football if you're actively re-evaluating the rules and objectives of the game or its value as a sport. If you're busy trying to decide whether the game might be improved by tweaking its rules (or whether a different game altogether might be somehow intrinsically more worthwhile), not only won't you help your team but you're likely to get smacked into the turf.

The star football player, in order to play the game well, has to honor the football gods--something which is achieved by taking them for granted so that the player can focus on engaging in the practice defined by these "gods." In the face of challenges that become too vocal to ignore, the player has several choices. One is to seek out the kind of reassurance that will enable him to return to the game unimpeded by doubts about its very viability.

This is what the football apologist provides. The apologist defends the game against its critics, in effect reassuring the players of their right to play the game just as it is.

The philosopher of football provides something else, something that only the rare player will actively seek out. The philosopher of the game will critically explore it and its rules, asking questions that do not take for granted the legitimacy of football as a human pursuit. Of course, such philosophical interrogation of the football gods can be pursued by someone whose stance is presumptively sympathetic--and it can be pursued by someone who is presumptively unsympathetic. It can be done by a lover of the game or by someone who experiences a visceral suspicion of any enterprise in which knocking people to the ground in pursuit of a zero-sum victory is an accepted practice.

So, consider a somewaht fleshed-out example. A lover of football hears the accusation that football reinforces stereotypical gender traits which in turn perpetuate oppressive patriarchy. Suppose the football lover responds by falling into a fiercely defensive posture, never asking whether the charge is justified but marshalling every available resource to vindicate the game in its current form. Much of that defense, we might suppose, takes the form of attacking feminism in order to show that its "gods" are unworthy of allegiance.

Such a person is a football apologist. But suppose someone hears the same challenge and is inspired by it to reflect critically on the football "gods." In that case one has a philosopher of football--even if, as may be the case, the process of reflection leads to the conclusion that the challenge misses the mark or (as is usually more likely) has some merit but calls only for revisions in the way the game is currently played as opposed to its abandonment.

It should be obvious that someone could be both a football player and a philosopher of football--but probably not at the very same moment. One might suppose that a football player would, by virtue of being personally invested in the game, suffer from potential biases that would interfere with a sound philosophical assessment of the game. But at the same time, a player would also enjoy certain insights that would add to the philosophical analysis. I know that I wouldn't want to do philosophy of sport without including players of the sport in the philosophical conversation. And while I'd probably generally prefer the perspectives of those players who are attempting to be philosophers rather than mere apologists, apologetic arguments are often worth listening to and may express the kinds of insights that only a passionate defender of the game would see. Philosophers can and do make use of apologetic arguments while doing philosophy.

In any event, if a Christian is also a philosopher about Christianity, we'd expect the philosophical analysis to be sympathetic, potentially influenced by biases but also by unique and helpful insights. And while there's no a priori guarantee that the outcome of a genuine philosophical analysis wouldn't be a total vindication of inherited Christian doctrine (of the sort apologists strive for), the fact is that the philosopher does not take this outcome as a given and then tailor arguments to that end. And so it is possible for the outcome of a Christian's philosophical engagement with Christianity to be the rejection of its "gods" (in the metaphorical sense being used here). But the more likely outcome is somewhat more modest--namely, a revised or modified version of the faith.

I say that this is the more likely outcome largely because I do not think it is possible for human beings, no matter how philosophical, to critically reflect on our "gods" in an utterly impartial domain occupied by nothing but uninterpreted objective evidence. But that this kind of impartial critical reflection is impossible doesn't mean that some sort of critical reflection on our gods is impossible. The best philosophy is an exercize in self-transcendence, in which human beings who are embedded in an array of communities and practices turn their critical attention inward. They look at and wrestle with some of the presuppositions which have so far defined who they are and how they live; and as a result of this introspection--inevitably shaped by the totality of these very presuppositions--they revise or modify some subset.

Religion as a "Bifurcated Essentially Contested Concept"

It occured to me that at least a few readers of this blog might be interested in the core section of an e-mail that I recently sent to a philosophical colleague--in which I briefly describe the more technical philosophical idea that was percolating beneath the surface of my recent Religion Dispatches article reflecting on the Hitchens-Sewell interview. In briefest terms, I've become increasingly convinced that the concept of religion operates in a rather strange way in contemporary discourse. I've decided to call it a "Bifurcated Essentially Contested Concept."

In fact, the first draft of the RD article included a brief discussion of this more technical idea, but I decided that it didn't work for that venue. I'd either need to go into so much depth expositing the relevant ideas in the philosophy of language that the article would have this distractingly dry academic portion in the middle, or I'd end up underexplaining these ideas so much that they wouldn't be helpful.

But for those interested in the more academic side of my work, the note to my colleague is brief enough to fit in a blog but detailed enought to offer a sense of one of the philosophical projects I'm am developing. So here is what I wrote:

In brief, (the philosophical project) involves an analysis of the concept “religion” that makes use of W. B. Gallie’s notion of “essentially contested concepts.” In case you’re unfamiliar with Gallie, he understands essentially contested concepts to be characterized by (a) a shared set of complex paradigms, (b) a common appraisive meaning, and (c) disagreement over which features of the paradigms justify the appraisive judgment. Since the appraisal has become an ineradicable feature of the term’s use in ordinary language, any proposed definition takes sides in a moral dispute: by fixing the extension of the term, the definition makes a judgment about which entities should be subject to the normative appraisal that goes with the use of the term, and which shouldn’t. According to Gallie, preserving the essential contestability of a concept—that is, characterizing the “language game” of proper usage in terms of (a) and (b) and, arguably, paradigmatic examples of things that fall outside the extension of the term, rather than in terms of a conventional definition—prevents normative disputes from being ended by definitional fiat (and thereby having certain moral perspectives illegitimately silenced).

What I’ve been thinking as I get increasingly caught up in the current “God debates” is that “religion” operates today as an essentially contested concept with a twist. The twist is that, although there is a shared set of complex paradigms, there are two competing appraisive meanings—one positive and the other pejorative—and hence two communities of discourse—one disagreeing over which features of the paradigms justify the POSITIVE appraisal they attach to the term “religion,” the other disagreeing over which features of the paradigms justify the NEGATIVE appraisal they attach to the term. Thus conceived, Sewell is in the same community of discourse as, say, Pat Robertson, but fundamentally disagrees with him about which features of religious paradigms justify positive appraisal because they are operating from deeply opposed normative frameworks. Hitchens, by contrast, is in the opposing community of discourse, but is operating with very similar normative lenses as Sewell. The result is that her understanding of religion, derived from her culling from the paradigms that which justifies a positive judgment, falls entirely outside the scope of Hitchens’ definition of “religion” precisely BECAUSE it has been stripped of all the things that justify a NEGATIVE appraisal. But they agree about so many things that one might even start to think of Hitchens as a closet Unitarian.

Since this passage from my e-mail explicates Gallie's "essentially contested concepts" rather quickly, without the help of clarifying examples, let me just add two examples for the sake of my readers here. First, there is "work of art." We all agree that DaVinci's Mona Lisa is a work of art, and that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a work of art, etc. That is, there is a shared set of paradigms that we can all agree fall within the extension of the term. And we all attach a positive appraisive sense to the term "work of art." That is, for something to be properly called a work of art, it needs to exemplify an achievement of a certain sort. So, we agree that the paradigms exemplify this achievement. But when it comes to, say, certain post-modern creations on display in modern art museums, some will call them works of art and others will vociferously disagree. Why? Because to call it a work of art is to say that it achieves something--something of the same sort that the Mona Lisa achieves. Perhaps not in the same measure, but enough so that they both deserved to be classed as works of art.

The result is that you have clear cases of works of art--in which there is general agreement that this or that is a work of art--and borderline cases (which some will call works of art and others won't). Gallie's point is that this is well and proper, because to insist upon a strict definition with precise boundaries would be to illegitimately shut down an ongoing normative disagreement about which features of the paradigms justify the positive appraisive judgment that attaches to the term "work of art."

Here's the second example: the concept "terrorism." This one works in very much the same way, except that the appraisal that goes along with the use of the term is strongly negative. There are, again, a bunch of agreed paradigms--the 9/11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, etc.--as well as a range of contested cases. The disagreement turns on which features of the paradigms of terrorism justify the negative judgment that "terrorism" implies.

So anyway, my working theory, from my observation of the way "religion" has come to be used, is that it fits the model of essential contestability in a number of important ways--except that, crucially, some attach to the term a positive appraisive sense while others attach to it a negative one. This fact may imply other differences. Part of my current work is to tease out in a systematic way precisely WHAT other differences are entailed.