The cruelty is the point, friends. Never forget that.
A colleague at Furman said to me yesterday, "It's so obvious that this whole thing at BJU is being cooked up in Bob Jones III's living room."
This is no different, my dear friends, than what happened in 1957. Do you know the story?
Billy Graham attended Bob Jones College in Tennessee. He hated it. Too many rules.
He left and attended Florida Bible Institute. When he left Bob Jones, Sr. yelled at him and said that he'd never amount to anything.
But eventually, BJU claimed him and bragged on him as their own. They were all cozy.
In 1953 at his Chattanooga Crusade, Billy Graham personally and physically pulled down the ropes racially segregating his audience. He told two ushers, “either these ropes stay down or you can go on and have the revival without me.” The head usher resigned in protest, and the Chattanooga papers were silent on the matter.
Throughout the following weeks, Graham downplayed the move, but the ropes never returned for that Crusade. Within three years, President Eisenhower would ask Graham to convince Southern clergy to soften their ecclesiastical segregationism.
In February 1956, Graham was the leading story on the front page of the fundamentalist Sword of the Lord, with a passionate defense of him from editor John R. Rice. Graham sat on the Sword “cooperating board” with a Who’s-Who list of fundamentalist power players: Richard Clearwaters, M. R. Dehaan, Bob and Jack Shuler, Pat and Bernie Zondervan, and both Joneses. Only 20% of the twenty board members were from South of the Mason-Dixon line.
But by July 1956, Graham was off the Sword, condemned for being too “worldly” and too “inoffensive” and was starting his own publication with Carl F. H. Henry, Christianity Today. A year later, Graham had Martin Luther King, Jr. open a New York City crusade event in prayer.
And it was all over at that point. That's when BJU, inc. "separated" from Billy Graham. BJU alone coded "segregation" as "separation." Do you get what that means?
We were sold a bill of goods by the Bob Jones family. When we were told to "separate" from evangelicals, underlying that story was racial segregation. It's a white supremacist story we were told, all cloaked in religious language. It was never religious. It was never about separation. It was always about miscegenation.
And the vitriol Bob Jones, Sr. and Bob Jones, Jr. spewed at Billy Graham in this time is astonishing. I have 209 documents from just 1957 related to BJU and Billy Graham, and I don't know where to start for this brief overview. Look at what a current BJU student said in March 1957 -- right after Bible Conference:
You and I know that the situation here in Bob Jones University is unbelievable. Our parents do not know it or they would not have sent us here.
Instead of a Christian institution where we are taught to love God, His Word and His people, we are being fed on hate and misrepresentation day after day. We are being brainwashed and you know it. We cannot think our own thoughts or make our own decisions. We cannot even pray fora a Christian leader like Billy Graham whom God is using so much.
The so-called "Bible Conference" was mostly one prolonged smear campaign against Billy Graham. Some of the speakers said things they knew were untrue and we knew it too.
The student attached an article from Bob Jones, Jr. about Billy Graham. I've got the whole thing, of course, but just look how it starts:
A San Francisco Telecast of Liberal Opinion on the Forthcoming Graham Crusade
Bible-believing Christians who condone Billy Graham's unscriptural modernistic sponsorship should have their eyes opened as to the true facts in regard to the Billy Graham can1paigns by an article which appeared in the OAKLAND TRIBUNE on Tuesday, December 17, 1957.
These same gullible Bible-believing fundamental Christians, strangely enough, seem to have been as deaf to Dr. Graham's innuendos and jibes at Fundamentalists as they have been blind to his fawning attitude toward modernists, infidels, and Unitarians. Slowly but surely these folks are becoming less gullible and the scales have fallen from the eyes of many. This article should increase that number.
Bob Jones, Jr. is petulant and ugly in just these first paragraphs -- cruel to his fellow Christians. He's name-calling. He's angry.
Let's be blunt. He's acting like a malignant narcissist. And the family business lets him rule the roost just like it did with Senior. It's a family trait.
III is acting exactly the same right now. All you Boomer and Gen-X BJU graduates, you remember how Third would have tantrums. Lots of us in the Fine Arts department, at least, have been the recipient of those tantrums. Remember them? Remember how you'd sweat and break out into hives? Remember how small you felt? Remember how you were numb for days after (a sign of trauma, my friends)?
You've probably blocked it. But you need to remember it.
That rage is documented as part of a personality disorder. History proves that Senior did it. Junior did it. You see it up above. And many of us were the target when III did it. You know that.
The entire organization of Bob Jones University for the last century is built on this rage. This irrational, frightening, brutal rage is what fuels Bob Jones University. You cannot detach BJU from this megalomania. You can't.
So if Pettit has been the recipient of that rage from Bob Jones III and his toady John Lewis, why are you surprised? You were too. Why are you defending Pettit now when he has profited off this rage for his entire public career?
I know why. Fundamentalism loves powerful men, and we were taught to defer to those powerful men. So when an affable Pettit says, "THEY ARE RAGING AT ME!" (and no doubt they are), we good little fundies all run to his defense because he's a powerful man too.
But when a sexual assault victim says, "Chuck Phelps put me up for church discipline!" what do we do? When a 300-page document says, "Jim Berg did not follow the law for mandatory reporting," what do we do? When Bob Jones III rages at us, what do we do?
Stop doing that. Wake up.
The cruelty is the point at Bob Jones University. It always has been. Face it, friends.
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