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Why
Change Wheaton's Mascot?  Forgive
me if I must make the following account personal, but since I'm the one
initiating a change in Wheaton's mascot I want you to understand the reasons.At the outset let me dispel two potential misunderstandings: First, I am not being pressured to make this change. There have been in every generation those within Wheaton's constituency who wished to see such a change take place, and this remains the case today, but I have not received undue pressure. If I were not convinced this was the right thing to do, I would not be bringing this forward. Second, this change is not about "political correctness." I am utterly unmoved by such arguments--in fact, those who know me well will tell you that I am tone deaf to this sort of thinking. As you will see below, none of what I am about to say is driven by fears of what is or is not "P.C." What, then, are the reasons? Very simple. Wheaton College exists, so we claim, "for Christ and His Kingdom." I have become convinced that making this change is a simple matter of faithfulness to Christ. If this seems at first to take a small matter--a College mascot--and freight it with undue significance, let me explain what I mean.
The answer is, two things have changed, seemingly right before our eyes. First, our environment has changed. We live in a world vastly more aware of itself than ever before. Revolutions in the fields of transportation and communications have transformed everything. No longer do the world's peoples live in isolated enclaves. Today a war breaks out and the entire globe watches it in real-time on CNN. Jets whisk us to new continents in hours; missiles reach the far side of the globe in minutes; a telephone puts us in touch with distant lands in seconds. And then there's the Internet. Its global transactions occur in nanoseconds; your e-mail reaches me as quickly from India as from down the hall. Today as never before music and movies and athletics are universal media; celebrities become international figures, from Tiger Woods to Madonna to Billy Graham. Sometimes it seems as if everyone now knows what everyone else is doing. We can watch British television in Beijing or reruns of "The Beverly Hillbillies" in Beirut. No previous generation has lived in anything like our world-sized fish bowl. As a result, secondly, we also have changed. In our globalized environment others are constantly exposed to us, and we to them. We discover a steady flow of viewpoints other than our own, viewpoints we might otherwise never have glimpsed. These perspectives are sometimes pressed upon us, whether we want them or not. Where before we were oblivious to our differences, we can be oblivious no more. Our new environment forces us into a consciousness of how other people think, including how they think about us. Often this is delightful, sometimes it is painful, but always it is educational. When we see through other eyes we often wind up seeing differently. My own understanding of the Crusades is a case in point. Throughout my education I covered the history of the Crusades several times. Yet my images of the Crusades remained fairly idealized. It was not until I became aware of how offensive the image of the Crusades is to large segments of the world that I was forced to take another look at these historical events, and what I discovered was anything but ideal. Christians massacring Muslims; Muslims massacring Christians; Western Christians killing Eastern Christians and vice versa. We are hard-pressed to find anything in these disastrous waves of fighting that our Lord might have approved, despite the fact that the conflict was ostensibly carried out in His name. Try, as I did, reading up on the Crusades, searching for anything with which you would be willing to identify; you will find it an eye-opening exercise. It is little wonder that so many view these unfortunate historical episodes so negatively.
Here, then, is our dilemma. Though we do not intend it thus, our Crusader mascot inevitably conjures up for significant numbers of people, including some within our own community, troubling images of the historical Crusades. They view the Crusades as negatively as most of us view the infamous Spanish Inquisition, and they can no more understand choosing a mascot that seems to glorify the Crusades than we could a mascot related to the Inquisition. The question we must answer is, What does such a situation require of a community of Christians dedicated to "Christ and His Kingdom"? One response might be to protest that not everyone views the Crusades so negatively. This is certainly the case, but also not very helpful, since our difficulty lies with the many who do. Another response
might be to point out that the cross is offensive too; are we going to
abandon that? To which, of course, the answer is no. We will stand or
fall with the scandal of the cross. But we must not complicate that scandal
by introducing our own scandals into the equation, scandals that may block
others from seeing Jesus in our midst. Or again we might protest that these negative associations are not what we mean by "Crusader." We intend only positive associations. But the problem here is that symbols do not work this way. We would not, for instance, throw around four-letter words and then, when our listeners take offense, protest that we mean them differently. We cannot legislate what symbols mean. It is in the nature of symbols that they are defined by usage, and there can be little doubt that for large numbers of people, particularly overseas, the symbol of a Crusader is an unrelievedly negative one, one that clouds in their minds what Wheaton College stands for.Or yet again, we might conclude that if someone is offended by our mascot, it's their problem; we have a right to select whatever mascot we desire. But how could we justify such a response? Can we think of a single passage of Scripture that urges us to insist on our own rights? Surely God's Word, not to mention Christ's own example, calls for just the opposite:
I am initiating a change in Wheaton's mascot because I'm convinced a Christlike response to our changed situation requires it. None of my predecessors and no earlier generations of the Wheaton family faced quite what we face; ours is in many ways a new environment, one that calls for new responses. As never before we are striving to develop students into globally minded Christians who, as our mission statement has it, "will impact church and society worldwide for Christ and His Kingdom." If we are to fulfill this stewardship in the 21st century, we must not demand our own rights; we must put others' interests before our own. Let us change our mascot to one that, even if it does not communicate all that we are--that would be asking too much of a mascot, I think--it at least does not hinder a watching world from seeing Christ among us. |
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So
far as anyone seems to know, there never was any formal decision to adopt
"Crusaders" as Wheaton's mascot. It happened by default; the
label just caught on. From the beginning there were those who were troubled
by some of its associations, but the questions were deemed minor. Each
president from at least Dr. Edman's time forward has wrestled with whether
or not to keep the Crusader mascot, but until now none has considered
it necessary to make the transition. What, then, has changed?
