Breaking news: Wheaton College suspends King Christian X of Denmark for suggesting Christians and Jews worship the same God

You may have heard the famous urban legend about King Christian X of Denmark, whose reign was interrupted by the German conquest and occupation of his country in 1942.

The legend has it that the Nazis ordered Jewish Danes to wear a yellow Star of David, as had happened in other countries overrun by Germany in the second World War. The king said that if the order applied to one Dane, it applied to them all and then he donned a yellow star himself. Soon, the legend goes, all of the people followed his example and the entire country was wearing the symbol, making it impossible for the conquering Germans to segregate and murder Denmark’s Jews.

That didn’t happen.

But the legend remains popular because it provides a way of explaining what did happen in Denmark after the German conquest, which was, perhaps, even more remarkable and inspiring. In his book The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, Dave Gushee describes that event as a “mass smuggling operation involving thousands of people and two governments” that resulted in “the astonishing rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943”:

Warned of the imminent deportation of the Danish Jews … Danish government officials helped to mobilize seemingly the whole Danish people along with the eight thousand Jews in Denmark for an escape. Between September 29 and October 1, nearly every single one of these Jews was hidden and then ferried under the Germans’ noses to Sweden, where the government welcomed them.

Christian X never donned a yellow star, but he did help to fund and negotiate this rescue conspiracy. And, although the Germans never imposed the wearing of the star on Jewish Danes, the king had written this in his diary, earlier in the occupation:

When you look at the inhumane treatment of Jews, not only in Germany but occupied countries as well, you start worrying that such a demand might also be put on us, but we must clearly refuse such this due to their protection under the Danish constitution. I stated that I could not meet such a demand towards Danish citizens. If such a demand is made, we would best meet it by all wearing the Star of David.

So the famous legend is not historically accurate, but it’s not altogether misleading either. It’s a fictional story that captures the spirit of the facts of history.

The facts of that history, and the spirit of that legend, resonate in the recent decision by Dr. Larycia Hawkins, a black Christian professor at the white evangelical Wheaton College, to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women here in America. Dr. Hawkins wrote:

Theoretical solidarity is not solidarity at all. Thus, beginning tonight, my solidarity has become embodied solidarity.

As part of my Advent Worship, I will wear the hijab to work at Wheaton College, to play in Chi-town, in the airport and on the airplane to my home state that initiated one of the first anti-Sharia laws (read: unconstitutional and Islamophobic), and at church.

I invite all women into the narrative that is embodied, hijab-wearing solidarity with our Muslim sisters.

What prompted this expression of solidarity? If you have to ask that, you’re not paying attention. America is convulsing in a wave of ugly anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry. The governors of 31 states announced that they would refuse to welcome Syrian refugees. The anti-Muslim and anti-refugee statements from Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush reached such a fever pitch that also-ran Republican candidate John Kasich, as Scott Paeth put it, went “full Niemöller” in response:

But that stark statement — and a statement of concern from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — didn’t make a dent in the escalating anti-Muslim rhetoric of Trump and the candidates scurrying to keep up with him. Trump’s call to shut down American mosques led to Marco Rubio’s one-better (worse) call to shut down Muslim-owned restaurants and cafes. Trump’s call to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. — including American citizens returning home from abroad — caused him to surge further ahead in the polls.

And all this rhetoric is bearing fruit in real violence against real people. “Hate attacks on U.S. Muslims are spiking,” Ben Norton reports at Salon. Mosques are being burned, vandalized and threatened by armed mobs of angry whites. Muslim Americans are being randomly assaulted and shot.

That is the context.

And how did the white evangelical administrators of Wheaton College respond to this gesture in this context?

By immediately suspending the first-ever black woman tenured professor in the 155-year history of the college.

This suspension, Wheaton’s leaders feebly suggest, was due to theological concerns that Hawkins is somehow rejecting distinctive Christian doctrines and blurring the line between Christianity and Islam because her Facebook post also included this:

I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.

This is not “controversial,” unless one is determinedly obtuse. To clarify her meaning, Hawkins cited the respected theologian Miroslav Volf, but this did nothing to satisfy the purported “concerns” of the Wheaton administrators.

The only explanation for their continuing dissatisfaction is that their purported “concerns” were not their actual concerns, i.e., that they were arguing in bad faith. It simply isn’t possible or credible to conclude otherwise. Their semantic hair-splitting is based on a willfully hostile, perversely disingenuous determination to read Hawkins’ remarks in the worst possible light while ignoring her larger statements. Sorry, Alan Jacobs, but suspending a professor based on such willful, voluntary hostility is not “civil” or “charitable” or decent. (Oh, and as we say in Philly, bloviate this.)

But set that aside for the moment, because there’s another, larger problem here beyond the Wheaton administrators’ incivility and dishonesty.

Let’s pretend it were somehow possible that they were being genuine and arguing in good faith. That would mean that, given the context of escalating violent, hideous anti-Muslim bigotry, these Wheaton leaders have decided their top priority should be a monomaniacal focus on semantic nitpicking.

If these folks were in Denmark in 1942, they would be criticizing King Christian X for suggesting that Christians should don the Star of David alongside their Jewish neighbors. That threatens to blur the lines between Christianity and Judaism. Jews don’t believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, or that Jesus was the Messiah. Those are core Christian beliefs — essential doctrines reaffirmed by Wheaton’s “Statement of Faith”!

That would be a remarkably silly, stupid and irrelevant argument in 1942. It is just as silly, stupid and irrelevant in 2015.

Wheaton administrators’ insistence on elevating such a ridiculous argument is, alone, sufficient to cast them all into disgrace. But the fact that they demonstrably aren’t even making this weak argument in good faith compounds their sin.