Ben Carson weighs in on college that suspended professor for saying Christians and Muslims worship the ‘same God’
Ben Carson speaks to the press after last week’s Republican presidential debate. (Photo: John Locher/AP)
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Ben Carson weighed in on a controversy that erupted in the Christian community in a brief conversation with Yahoo News on Monday.
On Dec. 16, Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian school in Illinois, announced that one of its political science professors, Larycia Hawkins, had been put on “paid administrative leave in order to give more time to explore theological implications of her recent public statements concerning Christianity and Islam.” In a Facebook post published six days before she was placed on leave, Hawkins wrote that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Hawkins had also taken to wearing an Islamic headscarf on campus in what she described as a gesture of “embodied solidarity” with Muslims.
Carson is an outspoken Christian, and support from evangelicals has helped make him one of the leaders in the GOP presidential primary. Yahoo asked him about the idea that Christians and Muslims worship the “same” God.
“Let me put it this way, I believe there is only one God. OK?” Carson said, adding, “A lot of people have different impressions and different ideals of who that is, and some people have perhaps distorted the character, but I believe there’s one God.”
Yahoo also asked Carson whether he thought Wheaton was right to discipline Hawkins. He suggested the school should be fostering “dialogue.”
“I think the school really should have people engage in dialogue about it, dialogue about their different ideals and philosophies,” said Carson. “That’s the only way you make progress. To get in your separate corners and throw daggers at each other is never going to work.”
