#Klandamentalism

[wutbju]

Avoid "all lives matter" rhetoric at all costs.

[bojopalooza]

The Vintage 2017 logo went through several versions. This was the first. After February 15, they decided against it.

Here’s the original size. 

[wutbju]

BREAKING NEWS: Bob Jones University employees were instructed that they have until the beginning of the 2024-25 school year to leave churches in the Presbyterian Church of America denomination and the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians.

Information is pouring in. Faculty are mad. Many, many faculty have found solace in churches that are outside BJU's maw. Churches that are not pastored by BJU graduates and churches that preach the Good News.

First Presbyterian, for instance, is part of the ECO and has a boatload of BJU graduates on staff. But you see, that denomination ordains women, so it's outside BJU's standard.

But the PCA is the more conservative of those two. I attend a PCA church, btw. I see BJU employees attending there all the time. They are in the choir and our orchestra. I'm glad they are hearing the Good News like I am.

Even Steve Pettit attended a PCA church when he was here. He attended Second Presbyterian.

And good ol' Sam Horn was consorting with the PCAers too.

But no more. No more non-BJU-approved churches.

The Black List is back, folks.

[wutbju]

It is Holy Week. It's time to remember the sins that put Jesus on the cross.

On Monday, April 1, 1957, at Bible Conference, Bob Jones Sr. manipulated the student body and faculty at Bob Jones University to sing about the "Old Time Religion."

But what he really meant by all that was white male supremacy. This is the semester he was expelling students for PRAYING for Billy Graham's 1957 NYC revival. Billy Graham, you see, was not believing in the "old time religion" because Martin Luther King, Jr. was scheduled to pray at that Crusade. Billy Graham did not believe in the "old time religion" because he integrated his crusades in the audience too.

The "old time religion" was Klandamentalism pure and simple. It always was for Bob Jones University.

The next day on April 2, Bob Jones, Sr. said as much:

[wutbju]

Can’t have those fragile white evangelical students seeing the truth of America’s racist past and present . . . and, especially, can’t have their fragile white evangelical parents realizing that their children are learning the truth about America’s racist past and present.

[wutbju]

You gotta read this. If you attended a BJU-orbit Christian school, you gotta read this.

My fifth-grade teacher told us that if Jesus were alive in Alabama he would have been a white Dixiecrat, that God frowns on what she called race mixing and that children who are the products of interracial marriages are to be pitied because they’re mistakes. (I wonder now how she would have treated me if she knew that I was the product of an interracial marriage — which, as an adoptee, I found out only well after I graduated.)

I don’t know which textbook Nikki Haley’s school used, but I know just by virtue of the fact that she attended a segregation academy that her understanding of the Civil War was shaped by white teachers and administrators who were not inclined to grapple with the evils of slavery.

When conservatives talk about education and indoctrination, I think of it as the most obvious kind of projection, because the environment in which I was educated was carefully constructed to give me the message that white, conservative, Christian Southerners were the true Americans, chosen by God.

How does Candidate Haley sound like BJU History Faculty Member, Gene Fisher?

[wutbju]

Four decades ago, Senator Ted Kennedy focused on Bob Jones University at a dinner honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

He said:

Bigotry is not the message of Jesus Christ. We will insist that in reality, Bob Jones University is nothing more than Jim Crow University, and that such a school can never win a tax exemption.

And he's right. He's absolutely right. Maybe we can argue that BJU was low-hanging fruit for him. But it's still true.

This is Bob Jones University.

[wutbju]

BJU's own Ellen Weaver has proven herself a shill for the hate group, Moms for Liberty.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The State Board of Education is considering a universal definition of “age appropriate” educational materials in South Carolina schools and libraries that would bar descriptions or visual depictions of what it deems sexual conduct, and items that are “obscene” or “indecent.” The regulation is the latest effort from conservative policymakers to restrict public school students’ access to books covering topics of race, gender identity and sexual orientation. A vote Tuesday to advance the policy is just the beginning of the process. Final approval is expected to be decided next year before the Republican-led state Legislature can then take up the proposal. A similar bill currently sits in a conference committee of state lawmakers. People packed into a conference room in Columbia, South Carolina, on Tuesday afternoon. Some wore shirts for Moms for Liberty, a conservative group behind many book bans nationwide, while others donned buttons supporting local organizations that promote diversity in literature.

[wutbju]

So this is the second half of David Innes’ 1994 BJU Chapel handout on separation. You can view the whole thing here.

What do you notice about these categories? The most obvious thing is how he has set up Fundamentalists as the center of the universe.

[wutbju]

David Innes gives 11 levels for separation.

ELEVEN.

It looks a little like a bingo card, but if you’d like to see the whole thing up close, click here.

[wutbju]

This was the handout that David C. Innes passed out in chapel in 1994 to explain the always-important doctrine of separation. Here are the passages he cites:

Ephesians 5:7-11

Titus 1:13

I John 4:1-3

II Timothy 3:5

II John 7-11

Galatians 1:6-9

II Corinthians 6:14-18

II Thessalonians 3:6, 14, 15

Titus 3:10

Romans 16:17-20

For Innes, the last three are directed at fellow believers: the disobedient, the false-teaching-embracers, and the divisive. In response, he says, we should withdraw from them, reject them, and mark & avoid them.

If you read the whole passages in context, however, only II Thessalonians talks about fellow Christians. And it’s not that they are disobedient. They are lazy. That’s a little different.

[wutbju]

Being a Black Christian in this nation often means pushing back against attempts from white evangelicals and fundamentalists to speak for all Christians, or to shroud their harm in scripture. In the words of Psalm 106:3, I speak out for those students who have gone on to adulthood, still wounded by an institution that proclaimed Christ while rejecting those that were made in His image:  "Blessed are they who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times!" 

[wutbju]

Klandamentalism is alive and well among the BJU theobros.

[wutbju]

Michael Harriot has written a lengthy and detailed documentation of South Carolina's War on Education. Make a cup of tea before you settle in to digest it. There are four parts: part one above, two, three, and four.

If you scroll down to Harriot's screenshot of the endnotes on the anti-CRT primer, you see his highlighting of Christopher Rufo. But a sharp WutBJU reader saw something else. All BJU students from the 1990s would see it too:

Joshua Matthew Dunn, BJU Class of 1995.

Professor Dunn doesn't like to highlight his BJU connections, but they are all over his scholarship.

His dad, Professor Charles W. Dunn, was well known for "preaching" in his Clemson classroom. WYFF would always highlight Professor Dunn at election time. If you want to read his not-yet-quaint screeds against President Obama, you can go to his old blogger blog.

Who's surprised that Charles Dunn's progeny would be part of the next wave of Klandamentalism?

God help us all.

[wutbju]

If you want to understand Bob Jones, Sr.’s appeal from the 1920s, just watch Mark Driscoll in 2010s. They are exactly the same.

[wutbju]

In the 1990s it was thing to have every variation on the Monopoly theme. There was some vendor who could adapt to your school or location.

But BJU made their own version, of course. I have that version. There are some really weird gems in this thing.

I mean, Bibb Graves Hall? Where do we start?