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Show Beyond BJU: Exposing Fundamentalism, Ep Ep. 7 - Growing Up at BJU, GRACE Report - Erin Burchwell - Apr 15, 2024
And then there's Erin McCauley Burchwell's story. I learned many things from her conversation that I had never heard before. It's worth a listen.
Two of us in Andrew Pledger's podcast, in describing the surveillance culture at Bob Jones University and Liberty University, reference Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as interpreted through Michel Foucault.
I used to teach this concept when I was at BJU. I doubt anyone is teaching this now. I still teach it in my current position. It's a standard way of understanding culture.
Here's what Foucault says in Discipline and Punish (201-02):
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.
Essentially, BJU surveils to the point that you never know when you are being scrutinized, and so you end up disciplining yourself.
It's a "perfect" system, yes? Except it will kill you. For more of an explanation, see this Purdue professor's post.
When listening to Episode #8 of the Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult podcast, I was struck by the account of the survivor of sexual assault after the GRACE Report.
Apparently Deneen Lawson has a habit of saying to female BJU students that, if they have no place to go after expulsion:
There's always a homeless shelter.
Do you want your daughter to experience that? If not, then don't send her to Bob Jones University!
Listening to Andrew Pledger's Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult is impressing all of us Gen X alumni.
Nothing has changed.
BJU is the same abusive place that it's always been. Hearing from these young folks who just graduated that BJU is still hurting people is overwhelming.
Rich Merritt shared this 2005 video with WutBJU. His statement that gets me is:
I had to put up a façade, and it just wore me out.
BJU is still acting in the same ignoble, hurtful way.
BJU is NOT safe.
In Andrew Pledger's Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult podcast, Erin Burchwell remembers an untimely death at the BJU farm, Pleasant Pastures. I had never heard about it:
When Andrew Pledger and I were talking on his podcast, Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult, he mentioned a sermon he heard from a BJU ministerial student that told his nursing home resident audience that Satan lived in them.
I was kind of shocked that this heresy is still getting repeated at BJU.
I found that statement in Jim Berg's heretical Changed into His Image. The exact statement on page 36 is:
There can be little doubt that God sees our independent spirit--the very thing that the world considers a virtue--as the root problem of man. Our heart says, 'I will make life work my own way!' It raises a clenched fist toward the heavens and asserts, 'I will do it my way!' . . . Here then is the defiance of our flesh. . . . This fleshly nature is perpetually at war with God. It will not be subject. It will not be ruled. It is no wonder, then, that when we begin to submit to the Spirit of God as He works in our lives that our flesh rises up and resists that work of God. We possess within us a clone of Satan's own nature, and it violently opposes God
That's anti-Scriptural. Look for it. It's not there. It's actually a variation on the Bulgarian heresy, a kind of Manichean yin-yang.
It's anti-Gospel.
I first discovered this in 2005 and posted this on my old Xanga blog. Jim Berg heard about it, and he was not pleased. So we met at the Atlanta Bread Company in Cherrydale. I told him this statement was not Scriptural. He claimed it was just "literary flourish." He pretended to write down what I was saying. He ignored it all, of course.
When I brought this up again with Stephen Jones and Gary Weier in July 2007, Stephen said something like, "Oh, I never really paid attention when I was reading that. I just ignored it." Lonnie Polson told me the same thing.
Nobody pays attention, you see. Nobody. That's how heresy gets repeated over and over and over so that even Andrew Pledger -- some 17 years after the fact -- is traumatized by the same heresy from a ministerial student.
I compiled all the heresies from Jim Berg in a post in 2008, and I summarized it all as follows:
The redeemed are inhabited both by Satan's clone and God's Spirit, and these bitter enemies are at war inside us. "The world" joins the battle and attacks us with a sort of biochemical warfare where even casual and unprotected contact puts us at risk. Spiritual "surgical gloves" are necessary to protect our spiritual lives. Adding to the crisis, even in childhood the flesh/sin is a cancer eating away at our souls so that we need spiritual chemotherapy very early if God will use us at all. And if all goes well--if the clone gets resisted, the gloves are regularly used, and the chemotherapy works--ideally, we'll become God's submissive pet.
That is not at all what the Bible teaches. That is not the Good News!
What does the Bible actually say? See Romans 8. Paul says that the battle was over at the cross, and we're just cleaning up the damage now. We're through and through God's children, not His pets! He doesn't withhold His love waiting for us to act like we should. No father would! He loves us first just because He's chosen to.
THAT is Good News. BJU preaches the opposite.
Show Speaking Up with Andrew Pledger, Ep My Story - Apr 21, 2022
Bob Jones University Class of 2022 graduate Andrew Pledger has started his own podcast to talk about BJU and cults and religious trauma. Tune in!
Podcast Episode · Beyond BJU: Exposing Fundamentalism · 07/21/2025 · 46m
Make sure you listen to Shielagh Clark's conversation with Andrew Pledger. It is not to be missed!
