Wheaton Professor Larycia Hawkins

Wheaton Prof. Wears Hijab, Says Christians and Muslims “Worship the Same God”

on December 14, 2015

An associate professor at the evangelical Wheaton College triggered controversy over the weekend amid her decision to wear a hijab during Advent. The Christian Post reported Larycia Hawkins, who has served as a political science professor at the Christian college since 2007, hopes her hijab will show solidarity with Muslims.

On Thursday, Hawkins took to her Facebook page to declare, “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.”

Hawkins said she stands in 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.”

Such statements do not sound like the theology of a Wheaton College professor. To be sure, other Christians noticed the same inconsistency.

Carol Brown pushed back against Hawkins’ controversial statements in her American Thinker opinion piece, writing, “The Christians God is a God of love. The Muslim God is a God of hate. Love. Hate. Not the same.”

Brown continued on, “That Hawkins feels no need to stand with fellow Christians in the Middle East who are being driven from their homes, tortured, kidnapped, raped, and slaughtered at the hands of Islamic supremacists is sad and disgusting.”

On Sunday, Hawkins acknowledged the controversy surrounding her Advent campaign. “The pushback has primarily centered on the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God,” Hawkins wrote on her Facebook page. “Please find a cogent analysis of the basis for my claim in the link below…”

The link Hawkins offers is a Huffington Post blog titled, “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?.” You can read the blog post for yourself here. But it’s not exactly the religious text from which we’d expect Wheaton professors to draw their authority.

“My wearing of the hijab as an act of advent devotion has certainly caused some to question the sincerity of my devotion. To those who question the authenticity of my faith,” Hawkins acknowledged. “I love you.”

What do you think Juicy Ecumenism readers? Do you agree with Hawkins’ solidarity movement? Do you disagree thatChristians and Muslims worship the same God?

This is sure to lend to an interesting discussion. So please leave your comments below.

  1. Comment by Eddie Gooch on December 14, 2015 at 1:37 pm

    Hawkins is wrong. True Christians worship the LORD God Almighty as He has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The false moon god called “allah” said that he does not have a son. Followers of this false god are commanded in their book to conduct jihad against infidels who do not convert to islam. Hawkins should remember what Jesus said, ” No one comes to the Father but by Me.”

  2. Comment by Mike Ryan on December 14, 2015 at 4:58 pm

    I understand the urge to show solidarity, particularly given the state of muslim’s in america today. Islamaphobia is certainly real. All this being true, the concept of a follower of Islam believing in the same God as Christians is probably offense to a significant population in both camps. I am certain their are Muslim people who are wonderful and share the same moral values and beliefs as I do, but I dont think we worship the same God, or such a serious divide between the faiths would not exist. Then again the Pope said I am wrong, so who knows?

  3. Comment by Dan on December 14, 2015 at 6:13 pm

    Interesting that the Huffington Post post made no theological arguments, just a bunch of “person A said this and person A is a great religious leader so it must be true” arguments. Let’s see, since Allah is supreme and Mohammed is his prophet and Jesus Christ is just an earlier, albeit incomplete prophet, according to Islam, how can we possibly worship the same God. This is just more feel good, syncretistic, psycho-babble. Obviously, the Wheaton faculty must not have to ascribe to any kind of orthodox Christian faith statement to teach there. If they do, this women should be summarily jettisoned.

    I guess the biggest difference is that while Christians believe God to have a preeminent claim on our worship, and that the Holy Trinity as revealed represents the one true faith, we are content to use suasion with our evangelism of others, while millions of Muslims around the world believe infidels like us have to submit to dhimmitude or suffer the sword. Yeah, certainly sounds like the same God to me.

    My term for professors such as this one and her ilk is dhummies. I know it’s not nice, but it is accurate.

  4. Comment by Mike Ward on December 14, 2015 at 9:20 pm

    What did she expect? She wanted attention; she got attention.

  5. Comment by OhJay on December 14, 2015 at 10:43 pm

    I believe that we do worship the same God, but our side understands God a heck of a lot better because we know, love, and honor His son, Jesus. I view Judaism, for all its wonderful traditions, much the same way. Usually when I tell people that, they look at me the way they look at a Baggie of dog poop and tell me how arrogant I must be. But I’m not ashamed of the Gospel.

  6. Comment by Stephanie Potts on December 14, 2015 at 11:42 pm

    Muslims want Christians to think we worship the same God. But how can we when Muslims deny the Trinity? They deny that Jesus was the Son of God, and that he was crucified. How can the Pope say this?

  7. Comment by Natalie Dormer on December 15, 2015 at 9:32 am

    I remember when Wheaton fired a professor a few years back because he converted to Catholicism.

    I hope this prof is dusting off her resume.

  8. Comment by dogged on December 15, 2015 at 3:03 pm

    Sorry Prof. The hijab is OK. But the same God? Not to the jihadists. I see no similarity to their “Allah” and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The jihadist Allah is vindictive, bloodthirsty & tyrannical. More like the Satan than YHWH.

  9. Comment by calhou on December 15, 2015 at 3:29 pm

    People are stupid AND insane. Allah and God of Abraham are clearly different. People say that we worship the same God merely because Mohammed mentioned biblical characters in his Koran, but retold the stories to make jews and Christians look bad. On top of that he forbade all muslims from reading a Jewish Torah or a Christian Bible (or any other holy book of any religion). That is why they so aggressively confiscate anything of a religious nature upon entering a muslim country. Islam co-opted the God of Abraham from Jews and Christians in order to give their cult legitimacy…….and justification for the conquest of said Jews and Christians. As history tells, Allah was originally a moon god worshipped in Mecca by pagans. There is no similarity between Islam’s God of death and Christianity’s God of Love.

  10. Comment by James Richard Holt on December 16, 2015 at 12:14 am

    As it turns out she is partially right and partially very wrong. Moslems do worship the God of Abraham as do we and our Jewish brothers and sisters but there is a very serious dichotomy of thought as to the characteristics of God from the point of view of Judaeo-Christians and Moslems. We the Judaeo-Christians believe God or G-d is an all loving all good all forgiving just God or G-d but the Moslems who claim Abraham’s God as theirs as well believe that God in their view can be capricious. They believe in a scripture that does permit the unequal treatment of women it permits the enslavement of non Moslems. Some portions of Islam for 1376 years have been at war with well virtually everyone in the world that is either not Moslem or in their eyes Moslem enough. The Crusades as odious as they are to us today were at least partially in retaliation for the Moorish invasion of the Iberian peninsula in the 700s their continued conquest as far north as Tours in 732 before being stopped by Charles Martel and his Frankish army. The Moors when they captured a city they took over all the Christian and Jewish houses of worship and converted them to mosques. Let us take one of their mosques and the Moslem world screams bloody murder but the other way around is perfectly OK. Do you know why they wanted to name their Islamic Cultural center in New York Cordoba House? When they captured Cordoba Spain after the slaughter of Christians and Jews they converted all the houses of worship into mosques as one of their proclamation of the victory of Islam over Christianity. At roughly the same time Moors and I think elements of the Ottomans invade and capture Sicily and then leap over into southern Italy and march northwards as far as Naples planing on converting St. Peters in the Vatican and all the Catholic and Jewish houses of worship into Mosques. In 1453 the Ottoman Empire Moslems finally captured Constantinople killing off the last of the Roman Empire. They rode their horses into the knave of Hagia Sophia, St. Sophia, slaughtering the women and children that had taken refuge there. One of the accounts of that spry of blood letting said the blood and gore was waist high. From Constantinople now they had a toe hold on the eastern European continent. Twice they were at the gates of Vienna. One of the Christian Nobles who frightened them the most was a fellow named Vlad the Impaler. Also known today as Count Dracula. Yes Dracula in that context was a hero! A hero who liked to slowly kill his captives by slowly lower them onto a sharpened stake sticking straight up out of the ground. His hobby was to make Shish Kabobs of his enemies. Vlad was one of the few barbaric enough to scare the Ottomans into leaving his Fiefdom alone at least for a time. The plan the Ottomans had was spread across the Balkans then across the Adriatic Sea into eastern Italy and to take Austria and spread southwards into Italy while they also attacked westwards into Germany, France the low countries of the Benelux and ultimately invade England. The last time they were defeated at the gates of Vienna was in 1683. They were at the gates of Vienna 1529. These invasions were parts of campaigns all aimed at domination of the western world but they also invaded north towards Poland and into the Ukraine and northeast into Bulgaria and Romania.

    Yes they do worship they claim the God of Abraham whom they call Ibrahim. They claim that Ishmael Abraham’s son by Sari is the direct ancestor of the prophet Mohamed and they also claim that Abraham blessed Ishmael instead of turning him and his mother out after the birth of Issac by Abraham’s wife Sarah. That Ishmael inherited his father’s wealth not Issac. They reverse the Old Testament Story of Abraham and Issac to their purposes. Yet is it thought that Abraham was a contemporary or near contemporary of Hammurabi who lived from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. So if Abraham was roughly a contemporary Hammurabi’s then the story of Abraham and Isaac and his half brother Ishmael predates the foundation of Islam by 2,420 years. And now Moslems demand control of what God promised to Abraham and his descendants.

  11. Comment by ZG on December 17, 2015 at 4:33 pm

    I am surprised that some Christian thinkers such as Olson, Beckwith, and Volf disagree with Wheaton’s actions:
    https://zgreport.wordpress.com/2015/12/17/wheaton-college-and-hawkins/

  12. Comment by Jay__Money on December 21, 2015 at 9:05 pm

    80% of America is Christian
    1% is Muslim
    So it does not have any statistical meaningfulness!
    But to humor you, NO not the same God!

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