I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  “Dr.” Bob Jones Sr. was the founder and first president of Bob Jones University. Born Robert Davis Reynolds Jones in 1883 in Alabama, Bob was the eleventh of twelve children and grew up working on his family’s farm. The family attended the local Methodist church, and Bob’s father encouraged him to memorize and recite Bible verses. Though he was initially shy about public speaking, he turned out to have a remarkable natural talent for it. When he was twelve, he held his first revival meeting. A year later, he organized his own congregation of fifty-four members. By the time he was fifteen he was a licensed preacher for the Alabama Methodist Conference, traversing the state to give sermons. He graduated from high school and attended Southern College, continuing to preach when he wasn’t studying. He soon found his fiery sermons in such great demand that he decided to leave college and devote himself to preaching full-time to help support his family. By the 1920s, Jones had become one of the country’s best-known evangelists and among its first to broadcast over the radio.

  The Roaring Twenties, however, were tumultuous years in American Christianity. Theologians, clergy members, and ordinary churchgoers were clashing bitterly over whether a liberal or a conservative approach to Christianity was right. Everything from the virgin birth of Jesus to the role religion should play in American culture was hotly debated. Of course, philosophical differences still exist among Christians today and probably always will, but the rift of the 1920s and 1930s was significant enough that religious leaders were hired and fired, churches split, and new denominations formed. Scholars call the schism the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. “Dr.” Bob Jones Sr. and other leaders in his movement have described his ideology as “militant fundamentalism,” founded for the purpose of doing “battle royal for the Christian faith.”

  This was also the era of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, when the state of Tennessee prosecuted public school teacher John Scopes for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. The national furor the trial sparked in 1925 showed just how deep the divide was between Americans who believed in a “biblical” approach to education and those who favored an exclusively “scientific” one. There were plenty of churchgoers in the latter camp even then.

  “Dr.” Bob Jones Sr. deemed Darwin’s theory an abomination, and was dismayed by what he saw as the secularization of higher education in the United States. So he decided to fight back. In the fall of 1925, he created a college of his own, where faith would be honored in every aspect of the curriculum. Its first location was near Lynn Haven, Florida, though the school moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1933. It eventually outgrew its space there and the Jones family broke ground on the current campus in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1947.

  Jones founded his namesake college on a thorough rejection of secular humanism and on the creed that the Bible was divinely inspired and not open to modernistic-liberal interpretation. As Jones put it: If the Bible says so, it is so.

  The Furor over Billy Graham

  Jones’s hallmark Doctrine of Separation emerged a few decades later, and the catalyst for it was prominent evangelist Billy Graham. Graham gained a national following in the late 1940s and early 1950s through his sermons, which were first broadcast on radio, like Jones’s, and then on TV.

  Before his rise to fame, Graham spent a semester at Bob Jones College in Tennessee in the fall of 1936 and Jones became a mentor to him. He was among the first to encourage Graham to use his voice to help people find God, and his college even conferred an honorary doctorate on Graham in 1948.

  But Graham gradually started distancing himself from fundamentalism and advocating a greater degree of unity among Christians everywhere, rejecting the Doctrine of Separation. Jones was as opposed to this idea as he was to teaching evolution. He thought if conservative and liberal Christians joined forces in any way this would compromise the word of the Lord. He warned his followers that Graham was “muddying the gospel” by including “liberal mainline” clergy from Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, and other churches in his crusades. He urged them to warn others about the dangers of Graham’s “watered-down” message and to oppose the man’s nationwide crusades in the late 1950s. Thousands of IFB pastors took his advice and condemned Graham.

  Jones’s harsher critics speculate that his hatred of Graham stemmed from jealousy. Graham had amassed a huge following. He was on a first-name basis with presidents including Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. In many ways, his fame had eclipsed Jones’s.

  The fact that Graham advocated integration and shared the pulpit with Martin Luther King Jr. probably further antagonized Jones, who was no civil rights activist. In a 1960 radio broadcast, Jones told his listeners that God was the author of segregation and opposing it was tantamount to opposing Him. (Bob Jones University later came under fire about the segregation issue and began admitting African American students in 1970. However, the school lost its tax-exempt status in 1983 because it refused to allow interracial dating among its students. Finally, BJU dropped this ban on interracial dating in 2000, though students were still told at that time that they had to get signed permission from their parents to date a student of another race.)

  Whatever the real motivation for their animosity, Jones and Graham were both prominent religious leaders, and their battle split believers into two groups: the evangelicals, who supported Graham and his message of cooperation among all conservative Christians, and the fundamentalists, who embraced Jones’s Doctrine of Separation from such compromisers.

  The last straw for the fundamentalists was Graham’s famous 1957 crusade in New York, where he included both Martin Luther King and the prominent liberal Christian leader Norman Vincent Peale. From then on, Bob Jones University drew clear lines of separation from Graham, and shortly thereafter any pastor or congregation associated with him. The school drafted a long list of “acceptable churches” and students were barred from attending any that weren’t on the list. Those who got caught worshipping at forbidden evangelical churches received demerits and even risked expulsion if they continued.

  All this separatism paved the way for the emergence of the IFB, with its isolationist philosophy and its condemnation of all other Christian churches. Today the cult has even codified the degrees of separation it deems necessary. First-degree separation is from liberals. Second-degree separation is from evangelical leaders like Graham who refuse to separate from liberals. Third-degree separation is from Christians who refuse to separate from leaders like Graham. And fourth-degree separation is from Christians who refuse to separate from fellow Christians who refuse to separate from Graham and his ilk.

  As proof of the enduring animosity the Jones family harbors toward Graham, when my husband was on staff at BJU from 1993 to 1995, “Dr.” Bob Jones III told a thousand employees, “Billy Graham has done more damage to Christianity than any other person in the twentieth century.”

  Tightening the Reins

  By the 1970s, the IFB was urging its members toward even stricter separation. The sect’s rules for living grew more rigid. Christian Contemporary Music was on the rise in America at the time, and churches across the country were embracing artists like Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, Sandi Patty, and Bill Gaither. “Dr.” Bob Jones Jr. and his associates seized on this as proof that American churches were growing more liberal. No IFB pastor who was true to the gospel would allow a rock beat into his music, they warned. Such tunes were of the devil, and it was a perversion of the gospel to mix good, godly words with melodies so demonic.

  BJU students were forbidden to attend churches where “worldly” Christian rock bands performed. Friends of mine were expelled from the university for sneaking off to see a local Christian contemporary music concert. Frank Garlock, founder of a company called Majesty Music, traveled around the country warning IFB audiences that the syncopated beat in rock music originated in séances held by African witch doctors. He said laboratory tests had proven that the rock beat killed plants and that long-term exposure to it would damage the human heart. We were
all scared to death of the stuff after hearing him talk.

  The 1980s and 1990s cemented the rift between the IFB and the rest of the Christian world. At this point, the argument erupted over what version of the Bible believers should read. Hard-line IFBers even claimed a person could only be “saved” after having read the King James Version (KJV), specifically the edition published in 1611. Naturally, churches that let their members read other versions of the Good Book were on the path to damnation.

  More moderate thinkers in the IFB (though this is an oxymoron) said they preferred the KJV but the Bible version used didn’t matter; the only thing that did was to truly mean it when you prayed to have Jesus come into your heart. Even today, there is fierce debate over the issue, and mentioning it still roils IFBers, who are more or less split down the middle. One evangelist even wrote a song about the Bible version debate (nonrock, of course) called “The Bible Bookstore,” commenting ironically on the multiplicity of competing Bibles:

  Well, I went down to the bookstore, just the other day.

  I went to buy a Bible, for I had just got saved,

  When I asked to see a Bible, I could not understand,

  They had a shelf-full ten feet long, each one a different brand.

  After noting many of the different Bibles:

  They had the ASV, RSV, Good News for Modern Man,

  They seemed to have a Bible, for every cult and clan.

  The song humorously blames the devil and Satan for the conflict, concluding that “all of this was part of Satan’s plan.”

  Thanks to the KJV controversy and clashes over other minor religious points, infighting became rampant in the IFB and battle lines that still exist today were drawn between prominent IFB colleges. It’s grown into a sort of religious Hatfield and McCoy feud. IFB members align themselves with the prominent IFB leader whose personality or point of view they like best. Some follow “Dr.” Bob Jones III or “Dr.” Bill Gothard, while others are loyal to men like “Dr.” Jack Schaap, who pastored the country’s largest IFB church (fifteen thousand in attendance weekly) until he was caught having a sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old church member in July of 2012.

  Prominent IFB leaders run Bible colleges, seminaries, or institutes, which often enables them to indoctrinate young adult followers and keep them loyal for life. IFB colleges and universities bring in millions annually in the form of tuition, grants, and endowments from wealthy alums. Many receive significant funding from the federal government too, while disparaging it at the same time.

  Every IFB college has its own pet issue, whether it’s the right Bible version to use, the right style of music to play, or the correct definition of “modest” dress for women, or “short hair” for men. Its leaders harp on the issue repeatedly to disparage rival IFB leaders who preach contradictory messages. The goal is to make students wary of the competition so they won’t dare explore other viewpoints and get tempted to stray from the flock.

  Technically speaking, there are some members of the group today who are not part of any Baptist denomination. In fact, “Dr.” Bob Jones Sr. himself was a Methodist until his death in 1968. However, at present, the overwhelming majority of churches that support BJU’s Doctrine of Separation are Baptist and the acronym “IFB” is commonly accepted by those inside and outside the group to refer to this belief system. Page 36 of the 2011 BJU faculty handbook sums up the Doctrine of Separation for their employees as follows:

  Employees may not be members or regular attenders of churches affiliated denominationally with the National Council of Churches or the National Association of Evangelicals. Employees or their dependent children may not attend churches which are liberal or affiliated with or sympathetic to the new evangelical, charismatic, contemporary, liturgical or emergent church movements. This prohibition includes churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America. While we respect the efforts of conservatives to rescue Christian organizations from within, our teaching practice is to separate from false teaching and teachers rather than to tolerate and cooperate with them.… For your reference, a list of partner churches that students may attend is available on the intranet under “Life at BJU.”

  Everyone raised in the IFB knows “the rules”—to remain in the good graces of the unofficial, but universally recognized, pope of the cult (“Dr.” Bob Jones III), you must follow the guidelines of the Doctrine of Separation above or risk being permanently shunned. Here are some specific examples of current conservative evangelical leaders with whom IFB members are strictly forbidden to associate or cooperate in any way: Rick Warren, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell Jr., John Piper, John MacArthur, James Dobson, and Mark Driscoll. These men would be deemed “compromising Christians” by BJU.

  My parents were unusual by IFB standards because they bought into the views of nearly every IFB faction at one time or another. As a result, I was exposed to the whole spectrum of its patriarchal ideology. Until I was ten, we followed “Dr.” Jack Hyles and “Dr.” Peter Ruckman, and we attended “Dr.” Bill Gothard’s seminars whenever he was in town. When I turned eleven, we joined a BJU church, and “Dr.” Bob Jones III became our new “man of God.” After we were married and needed marital counseling, my husband and I turned to “Dr.” Jim Van Gelderen (vice president of Baptist College of Ministry in Wisconsin). Jim and his family were all BJU grads and his late father was a former board member at the university. After my own children reached school age—or, rather, homeschool age—I started listening to men like Michael Pearl, Doug Wilson, Doug Phillips, Michael Farris, Reb Bradley, S. M. Davis, and Richard Fugate. Beneth Jones (wife of “Dr.” Bob Jones III), Mary Pride, Nancy Campbell, and Debi Pearl, wife of IFB spanking guru Michael Pearl, became my heroines.

  Conservative politics and IFB membership went hand in hand, so the only news we watched came from Fox. My father was a huge fan of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, and he used to rave about how wonderful both men were for exposing the government’s wrongs. After listening to him, I started delving into the conspiracy theories of an extremist named Alex Jones, who advocated building bunkers and stockpiling food. I had friends at Northland Baptist Bible College, when my husband was on faculty there, who actually did those things. They also refused to get Social Security numbers or birth certificates for their children to protect them for the future, convinced that all Christians would be herded off to concentration camps.

  Many members of the IFB gravitate toward conspiracy theories and doomsday thinking, and their pastors encourage it. Despite their rivalry, all the IFB leaders embrace Jones’s Doctrine of Separation and they all know the best way to keep their congregants separate is to keep them frightened, uninformed, and isolated. It certainly worked on me when I was growing up. You name it, I was afraid of it.

  4

  THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE IFB CHURCH

  God is looking for an army. The greatest threat to Satan in this world is godly parents who understand God’s intentions and who will bring forth and train a godly seed to fulfill His eternal plans. God’s people have unwittingly decreased God’s army in this hour. The womb is a powerful weapon against Satan!

  —Nancy Campbell, Above Rubies blog

  The Church and Sermons

  When my childhood pastor, Harley Keck, at First Bible Baptist Church wasn’t describing the eternal torment awaiting sinners, he could lapse into long diatribes that were nearly impossible for us to understand as little kids. We sat through them Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday evenings each week without fail. To a seven-year-old, an hour-long talk dragged on for an eternity, and we were expected to sit perfectly still the entire time. I joke now that if those sermons were an accurate depiction of what’s waiting for us in Heaven, I might prefer Hell.

  One morning, I remember hearing a noise and glancing down the church aisle to find its source. I caught sight of my sister Melissa with the spine of the church hymnal wedged between her legs. She was moving rhythmically
and breathing heavily. I suddenly realized she was using the book to masturbate. Curious, I picked up my own hymnal and tried it too. But it hurt, so I gave up. Eventually, my mother spotted my sister and realized what she was doing. “Stop it!” she whispered in disgust. “Put that down.”

  My sister did this so often; my mother was mortified and she eventually stocked all the hymnals under her chair and made Melissa sit next to her. But I had to give my sister credit, at least she had found a way to relieve the monotony of Harley Keck’s sermons.

  An even more bizarre event took place during one Sunday night service. Pastor Keck was in the middle of one of his usual rants, shouting, pointing his finger at us, and banging his fist on the pulpit. All of a sudden a dark-haired man leapt to his feet and started racing in circles around the church, yelling and chanting at the top of his lungs.

  “Quick! Get under the chairs!” my mother barked. As always, we did exactly as we were told.

  Maybe Pastor Keck’s endless descriptions of Hell had gotten to the guy and pushed him over the edge. I peered curiously over the seat of the chair I was huddling under and saw the man grab a potted plant from the front of the church. He resumed his maniacal sprint around the chairs, this time with the pot hoisted above his head, the plant’s leaves waving like some bizarre headpiece.

  At last the deacons wrestled him into submission and hustled him out the back of the church. Pastor Keck instructed us to take our seats again and, to our astonishment, he resumed his sermon as if nothing had happened. He merely raised his voice to make sure he could be heard over the still audible din in the lobby.