Nightmare at Wheaton

Imagine Wes Craven, the Hollywood provocateur who died last week, as a student at Wheaton College in the 1960s. This was a Wheaton that was easily as pietistic and fundamentalist as it was evangelical. President Raymond Edman, a gentle devotional writer, died while delivering a chapel sermon entitled “In the Presence of the King.” His successor, Hudson Armerding, a naval commander in World War II, ran the college like it was the military. Seeing ROTC as an incubator for submission to authority, leadership training and spiritual ministry, Armerding mandated that all freshmen and sophomore male students participate.