Dec. 21--As it turns out, Donald Trump doesn't have a patent on anti-Muslim bigotry.
Administrators at Wheaton College, a private evangelical Christian school in suburban Chicago, showed us last week just how easy it is to try and pass off religious intolerance as doctrine. That's exactly what they attempted by suspending Larycia Hawkins, a tenured political science professor, for posting on Facebook that Muslims and Christians served the same God.
"I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book," she wrote. "And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God."
Hawkins, like many of us, is tired of the constant degradation of Muslims since the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. This, along with wearing a hijab, was her way of standing up to the bullies.
It was a simple gesture, one that most Americans would find endearing. But some evangelicals claimed it went against the university's written statement of faith. There are fundamental differences between the two religions, they said, and Hawkins should have spelled them out in her Facebook post.
So the college relieved Hawkins of teaching duties for six months as she was grading papers before the Christmas break.
While Wheaton might have had a legal right to suspend Hawkins, it cast the liberal arts college in a bad light in the midst of a heated national debate over how Muslims should be treated in America. Instead of opening the door to an exchange of ideas, the college slammed it shut on any meaningful discussion.
We are used to Trump's coalition of anti-Muslim crusaders spewing hatred and painting anyone who follows Islam as a potential terrorist. Most Americans loathe their loud, ruthless rhetoric and reject their mission to cultivate fear.
But when bigotry comes disguised as theology, it can throw us off guard.
It reminds us, though, that there is a quiet undercurrent of anti-Muslim sentiment operating in some religious circles, one that rejects any reference to similarities between Islam and Christianity. It places Islam, the fastest-growing religion in the world, in a cultlike realm and admonishes anyone who dares to refer to God as Allah.
To accept it as a religion of equal standing would mean those who want to paint all Muslims as terrorists would be forced to acknowledge that Islam isn't the real problem. It's the extremists who have hijacked the religion.
These extremists are no different than so-called Christians who use religion as an excuse to burn down black churches in the South, shoot victims outside a Jewish community center in Kansas or plant a fake bomb inside a Virginia mosque.
