Peter Carlson: Is Bob Jones University Changing?

Peter Carlson, in the Washington Post (5-5-05):

Is Bob Jones University going to the Devil?

Could America's most famous bastion of hard-core Christian fundamentalism and pugnacious political conservatism be getting a little . . . soft? There are signs, portents.

In 2000, Bob Jones III, president of the university and grandson of the Founder, announced on "Larry King Live" that the school was ending its ban on interracial dating, long defended because "God has separated people for His own purpose."

In 2003, the school ended the practice of ringing the dorm bells at 6:55 a.m. to rouse students for daily room inspections.

Last year, the university applied for (and received) accreditation, a process it had always avoided because, as Bob Jones III once said, "accrediting associations will not approve our educational process if it does not include the worship of their gods."

And on Saturday, for the first time in its 78-year history, Bob Jones University will inaugurate a president not named Bob Jones.

For eight decades, BJU has been led by three generations of Bob Joneses -- preachers who pioneered a combative and highly political form of fundamentalism that gave rise to the "Christian Right." The Joneses became famous touting politicians they liked -- George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, George W. Bush -- while hurling thunderbolts of quotable vitriol at apostates, back-sliders and liberals.

Bob Jones, the hellfire-and-brimstone evangelist who founded the nondenominational Protestant school in 1927, railed against the Catholic Church, which stands, he said, "for ignorance and superstition and the slavery of the human soul."

Bob Jones Jr. pilloried Secretary of State Alexander Haig as "a monster in human flesh" and publicly prayed that God would "smite him hip and thigh, bone and marrow, heart and lungs."

Bob Jones III denounced Ronald Reagan as "a traitor to God's people" for the sin of choosing as his vice president George H.W. Bush, whom Jones called "a devil."

But at Saturday's graduation ceremony, the presidency will pass to Stephen B. Jones, 35, the Founder's great-grandson, a mild-mannered fellow who describes himself as "laid-back" and says he doubts that he'll be calling on God to smite anyone.

"I don't think so," he says, laughing. "I will be praying for the opposition." ...

Bob Jones preached his first sermons to the rear ends of mules as he plowed his daddy's Alabama peanut farm.

Jones was born in 1883, and born again 11 years later, saved at a revival meeting. Soon he was preaching. At 14, he preached so powerfully a Methodist group voted to ordain him on the spot.

By the 1920s, Bob Jones was one of America's biggest evangelists, second only to Billy Sunday. Jones denounced the evils of the age: liquor, jazz, "picture shows," flappers, makeup, big cities packed with "degenerate, unassimilated foreigners," and Al Smith, the New York Catholic who ran for president in 1928. Jones believed the Catholic church was particularly evil because it set up a hierarchy, including the "Antichrist" pope, between God and man.

"The things that made America great," Bob Jones said, "are the very things Al Smith's religion opposes."

In the '20s, America's Protestant denominations split in what David Beale, a BJU professor and religious historian, calls "a vicious battle between fundamentalists and modernists" over evolution, which modernists accepted but fundamentalists rejected because it conflicted with the biblical story of creation. The modernists won, Beale says, retaining control of most mainline religious institutions, and fundamentalists left to create their own.

Bob Jones created Bob Jones College, outside Panama City, Fla. It was devoted to strict separation from religious liberals -- and from fundamentalists who associated with liberals. On opening day in 1927, 85 students watched as the faculty marched up to publicly sign a creed that renounced "all atheistic, agnostic, pagan . . . adulterations of the gospel."

On the verge of bankruptcy in 1933, the college moved to Cleveland, Tenn. By 1947, it had outgrown its campus and moved to Greenville, S.C. ...

Bob Jr. was also as fiery a fundamentalist as his father. He denounced the National Council of Churches as "satanic" and the National Association of Evangelicals as "traitors to the cause of Christ."

When Gov. George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent a black student from registering, Bob Jr. awarded him an honorary doctorate and praised him as "David, warring against the giant, Tyranny."

In 1964, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, Bob Jr. refused to sign a document promising not to discriminate, denouncing it as a "highhanded scheme to force all educational institutions under the control of a federal agency." ...