(RNS) — On Friday (Feb. 7), Wheaton College, the evangelical Christian school outside Chicago, publicly congratulated Russell Vought, a conservative activist and architect of Project 2025 who attended the school, for his confirmation by the U.S. Senate as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Within hours, hundreds of Vought’s fellow alumni had complained that Vought’s agenda contradicted the values they had been taught at Wheaton.
By Saturday morning, the college had deleted the post, and a new social media barrage, this time from Vought’s supporters, had begun.
The college has defended its original post, and its subsequent pivot, as “deliberately non-partisan,” as its institutional commitments demand.
“Wheaton College congratulates and prays for 1998 graduate Russell Vought regarding his senatorial confirmation to serve as the White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget!” said the now-deleted social media post on Friday.
One commenter responded that Vought was not only working at cross-purposes to Christian values but to his fellow alums: “The work that he is doing negatively and directly impacts countless other Wheaton alum who are seeking to be the hands and feet of Jesus in this country and around the rest of the world,” the commenter said, per screenshots of the exchanges that were deleted along with the original post but obtained by RNS.
After deleting the post, the college backpedaled, writing, “On Friday, Wheaton College posted a congratulations and a call to prayer for an alumnus who received confirmation to a White House post.” On Saturday morning, it wrote, “The recognition and prayer is something we would typically do for any graduate who reached that level of government. However, the political situation surrounding the appointment led to a significant concern expressed online. It was not our intention to embroil the College in a political discussion or dispute.”
In an email to RNS, Wheaton College spokesperson Joseph Moore said the deletion of the initial post was “in no way an apology for having expressed congratulations or for suggesting prayers for our alumnus.”
“The social media post led to more than 1,000 hostile comments, primarily incendiary, unchristian comments about Mr. Vought, in just a few hours,” wrote Moore. “It was not our intention to embroil the College or Mr. Vought in a political discussion or dispute. Thus, we removed the post, rather than allow it to become an ongoing online distraction.”
The decision, however, led to further backlash from conservative alumni and activists. Wheaton alumnus Eric Teetsel, chief executive officer of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank founded by Vought in 2021 and credited for advising on Project 2025, called the decision an “act of cowardice.”
“Nothing about (the school’s) behavior was biblical or resembled the values Wheaton purports to stand for, and by deleting the post and apologizing the school has — yet again — compromised instead of standing firm for what is good, right, and true,” wrote Teetsel on social media site X, citing recent appearances at the school by Christian figures who oppose Trump.
Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget at the end of President Donald Trump’s first term, is listed as an author of Project 2025, a blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second term in office, and has recently spoken about his desire to traumatize federal workers and to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, according to ProPublica. Last week, the Atlantic reported that while Project 2025 called for limiting USAID’s funding, the president’s actions to shut down the agency and freeze foreign aid went beyond what was included in the proposal.
Vought has also been a behind-the-scenes leader in opposing critical race theory in churches and school boards and has openly supported forms of Christian nationalism.
One Wheaton graduate who has worked on foreign assistance inside and outside the federal government said she agreed with Wheaton’s decision to delete their congratulatory post. “There are Wheaton alumni out there who really do follow Jesus’ teaching in the gospel, but they aren’t always the ones who are powerful, and so it’s incredibly frustrating to see those who, I think, don’t necessarily embody the gospel taking power in the Trump administration,” she said.
As an example, she cited Vought’s support of freezing foreign assistance and decision to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from predatory practices, as “deeply against the letter and spirit of the whole biblical witness.”
