Bob Jones University: Faith, Fundamentalism, and a Decades-Long Reckoning

Bob Jones University began not in Greenville but in Florida, founded in nineteen twenty-seven by evangelist Bob Jones Senior during the height of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. Jones watched what he believed was the secularization of American higher education and decided to build a counter-institution, one dedicated to biblical literalism and strict separation from theological liberalism. The university moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, and then in nineteen forty-seven relocated here to Greenville, to the campus it still occupies on Wade Hampton Boulevard.

For decades Bob Jones University was among the most influential fundamentalist institutions in the country, graduating thousands of ministers, missionaries, and educators. It produced its share of prominent alumni, including Billy Graham, who attended briefly before transferring to Wheaton College after a disagreement with the university's strict separatist policies. The rift between Jones and Graham over whether conservative Christians should cooperate with mainline denominations became one of the defining fractures in American evangelical history.

But the institution's most consequential controversy involved race. Bob Jones University did not admit Black students at all until nineteen seventy-one, and then only under significant federal pressure. Even after admitting Black students, the university continued to ban interracial dating and interracial marriage. That policy cost the school its tax-exempt status in nineteen seventy-six, and the case went to the United States Supreme Court. In Bob Jones University versus the United States, decided in nineteen eighty-three, the court ruled eight to one that the Internal Revenue Service had the authority to revoke the tax exemption of a school that practiced racial discrimination, even a religious institution.

The ban on interracial dating was not repealed until two thousand, when the university's president announced the change in a television interview. In two thousand eight, university leadership issued a formal apology for what they called racially hurtful policies, which they acknowledged were un-Christian. It took eighty years to say it.