There has been plenty of misleading, and even flat-out false, coverage of Hawkins’s suspension; headlines like “A Christian College Placed a Professor on Leave for Wearing a Hijab” are apparently too clickable to resist. But although the statements of Wheaton’s administration have not been particularly warm to Hawkins’s experiment, it has not publicly expressed any objection to it. The school’s expanded statement confirmed her right as a faculty member to wear the head scarf “as a gesture of care and compassion,” and clarified that her suspension “is in no way related to her race, gender or commitment to wear a hijab during Advent.” Hawkins is the first African-American woman to become a tenured professor at Wheaton.

It’s actually progressives, and not theological conservatives, who seem more troubled by the gesture itself. Hawkins, whose research focuses on the black church and public policy, seems aware that she was stepping into a minefield of cultural appropriation. She wrote that she approached the Council on American Islamic Relations for input, asking whether a non-Muslim wearing the hijab was patronizing, offensive, or forbidden. CAIR-Chicago apparently gave her the go-ahead. Slate asked some Muslim women who wear the hijab what they thought of Hawkins’s gesture, and found responses both wary and welcoming. And some progressive Christians found it uncomfortable, pointing out that “trying on” oppression is not the same thing as experiencing it.

Wheaton’s official objection is Hawkins’s conflation of the gods of Christianity and Islam. One level, it is a question of semantics: If there is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God, he can at least hear the prayers of everyone on earth, even if they are misdirected. Still, the question is an important one for many believers, because it is related to the question of whether all faiths are equal paths to God.

The phrase “people of the book,” which Hawkins deployed in her statement, is used in the Koran to describe Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who are all said to worship the Abrahamic God. But this is still a matter of significant disagreement among Christians, with many conservative believers resistant to the idea that followers of other religions are pointing their prayers at the God of the Bible. In 2008, Wheaton’s then-president and two other administrators removed their signatures from a letter of solidarity with Muslim leaders, on the grounds that it came too close to suggesting Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

When it comes to academic freedom, religiously affiliated colleges occupy a space of perpetual tension. Those which are serious academic institutions—and Wheaton is one—want to nurture scholarship and free inquiry just like any other college does.

But they also want to cultivate a community oriented around one particular worldview, and everyone who studies and works there understands that. What that looks like in practice can be a source of discord within that community, and at times like this, a source of bafflement and mockery to outsiders. Within the past decade, Wheaton has dismissed a professor who converted to Catholicism, and another for declining to discuss his divorce. The school’s particular strain of evangelicalism is not for everyone—it does not even please all of its students and alumni—but it is also not a secret. (I have a political science degree from Wheaton, but I do not know Hawkins, who arrived there after I graduated.)