A Time to Laugh

Here are the conditions to make this work:

• People who develop Greenville Syndrome often view the authority figure as giving success — vocational, spiritual, social — by simply not destroying it. Thus, the authority figure becomes in control of the person’s success.
• A person endures physical or ideological separation from outside people and groups so that only the authority figure’s perspective is available. Leaders routinely keep information from their people — specifically outsider’s views of the leader’s actions. This isolation keeps the person totally dependent on the leader for information.
• The authority figure threatens to cut-off the person from his approval, his property (“campus”), or his fellowship. That person judges it safer and easier to align with the authority, endure the difficulties of separation, and obey rather than to disagree and face utter failure.
• The person sees the authority figure as showing some degree of affection. A simple positive gesture of attention (“being gracious” or “being nice”) is the cornerstone of Greenville Syndrome; the condition will not develop unless the authority exhibits some affection toward the person. However, people often misinterpret a lack of negative attention as affection and may even develop feelings of appreciation for this perceived benevolence — “He’s always been nice to me.” If the authority figure were purely evil and abusive, a person would respond with hatred. But if the authority figure offers some positive attention — an emailed compliment, a “we really like you here” –  a person will submerge the anger s/he feels in response to the threat of failure and desperately concentrate on the authority figure’s “good side” to protect themselves.

While the difference between mortal and venial sin seems obvious, don’t be fooled. There is more to this than meets the eye. What is really bad and what isn’t? And who decides?

Here is a routine situation that every Catholic of my generation had to deal with: You are at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium on a Friday night in June 1950. Catholics are forbidden to eat meat under penalty of mortal sin. But you want a hot dog. Now, just considering eating meat on Friday is a venial sin; wanting to is another. You have not moved in your seat and you have already sinned twice. What if you actually ate one? Aside from the risk of choking on forbidden food and getting punished right on the spot, have you committed a mortal sin or a venial sin? Well, if you think it’s mortal, it may be mortal; and if you think it’s venial, it still may be mortal. After much thought, you decide it’s venial. You call the hot dog vendor, you take the money out of your pocket, and you buy a hot dog. This is clearly an act of free will. You figure you can go confess your sin to the priest on Saturday night. But wait! Does a venial sin become mortal when you commit it deliberately? That’s a chance you take. What if you’ve forgotten it’s Friday? In that case, eating the hot dog may not be a sin, but forgetting it’s Friday is. What if you remember it’s Friday halfway through the hot dog? Is it a venial sin to finish it? If you throw it away, is wasting food a sin? Within five minutes you have committed enough sins to land you in purgatory for a million years. The safest thing to do is not to take any chances–stay away from Yankee Stadium on Fridays.

The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning

It might be funny if it didn’t sound so familiar.

I’ve taken my own sort of vow of poverty. I’ve participated in endless cumin-dividing discussions about the fine arts (as if “fine” had more to do with its size than character). I’ve “done devotions” with every sort of program, cutesy name, and innovative strategy since early elementary school. I’ve been lured to strive for that “higher life” monastic upper-class known in my world as “full-time Christian service.” I’ve endured endless preaching where justification by faith is just a brusque bro-hug that gets you in the sanctification-by-works club. And we think we’re so different from the “Romish” church?

The crazy-making internal conversation cum tailspin that Manning describes is the life of a fundamentalist. That’s it.

What stuns me is how we do it together.

Just like the Shakers. Really. The Shakers’ individual (tail)spinning and twitching developed over time (due to outside criticism) into a full-fledged communal performance. I look at that picture and imagine how easy it is to get swooped away into the spin. The individual must persist with the dance because well . . . people are watching, and it’d be a bad testimony for . . . the group. You wouldn’t want to be “ungracious.”

I got shoved out of the spin. But I’m not sitting in the crowd watching on the left either. I don’t know yet where I am, but I’m kind of amazed at how many people keep calling me back to the dance. Or back to the prison, as Steve Brown would say.

But when you hear and accept this it is not your power, but God’s grace, that renders the Gospel fruitful in you, so that you believe that you and your works are nothing. For you see how few there are who accept it, so that Christ weeps over Jerusalem and, as now the Papists are doing, not only refuse it, but condemn such doctrine, for they will not have all their works to be sin, they desire to lay the first stone and rage and fume against the Gospel.

Luther’s First Sunday of Advent Sermon

I wish you could see what I see sitting here. In my reading nook. Next to me a sweet schnauzer warms my legs. In the next room, a gentle husband snoozes. Upstairs the sleepy preschooler has conked out for his Sunday afternoon coma, and the silly kindergartner tries his best to keep quiet in his own room. But I hear the leaping off the bed and the happy dancing directly above me.

I see our Christmas tree. Lit. A miracle in itself since just last night the sentimentally appointed pinester was dark due to a malfunction somewhere in its dozen strands of light. From my point of view, the Hubby divined the exact problem (blown light fuse) and fixed it effortlessly. Yesterday’s dead car battery, however, needed Geico’s help. And the vintage Lionel that usually circles the tree couldn’t be fixed without parts, so it waits for us next year. We were electrical Schleprocks yesterday.

But between me and the tree, I see, for the first time in our home, a single advent candle burning brightly. The Candle of Hope. I cobbled together a wreath of velvet leaves I made for Elise’s birth nine years ago and some wool leaves I cut from my old felted sweater. An evergreen of a different sort. All leaves intended for another purpose, resurrected for celebration.

We sang Christmas songs this morning at church. Imagine that — singing Christmas songs during the Christmas season. If you’ve never been a independent, fundamental Baptist, you have no idea what a gift that is. You see, Advent is a big no-no. And you don’t sing Christmas songs until the week of Christmas. Or maybe the two weeks before. And even then, the truly spiritual sing them almost grudgingly. Because Christmas is Catholic (i.e. pagan) and extending the Christmas season is commercial, we really should just ignore it altogether. The pious do!

I can’t even tell you how many Christians I know who refuse to celebrate the holiday at all. I think, in fact, Charles Dickens wrote a novel about just such a person.

But deep down, we want to anticipate and celebrate. We want an old ritual that connects us all to a Story grander than just our own. We want to sing!

Last night, we watched an old Ken Burns special on the Shakers – the mostly 19th-century agrarian sect which took in orphans and made the most simplistically elegant furniture imaginable. Burns’ hagiography brushed past all their ideological problems — that Mother Ann taught that Original Sin was sexual intercourse (and so they were celibate) and that God was both male and female with Jesus being the male manifestation and Mother Ann being the final female manifestation and Christ’s Bride. And, of course, that they must discipline their evil Body in order to let the wholly good Spirit reign.

Instead Burns highlighted their seemingly beautiful straining, struggling, and striving toward perfection. And in 1840 it looked like they had made it. They were booming. They were taking in the poor and homeless. Their industry and craftsmanship was admired and profitable. Their ethic, however, was tailored to a 19th-century agrarianism and could not survive life in the industrialized 20th century. And now in the 21st century, there are only three living Shakers left.

Sound familiar? It’s eerily familiar to me. Scarily familiar. In grad school, I read all about the Shakers and all the utopian sects born out of the Second Great Awakening (most of whom came from the Burned-Over District). And I empathize with all of them. I understand the appeal of perfection — that if I make my work pristine enough and sincere enough, I’ll build an American ziggurat to God. I understand the appeal of the bifurcated thinking — that the world is evil and that my industrious piety is righteous. I understand the appeal of defining sin as out there instead of in here – that my containing evil makes my perfection attainable. I understand the appeal of being peculiar — that doing the hard thing and the unexpected thing will woo people to me/us/God. Whether the hard thing is celibacy or modesty or Scroogery.

What a different Story I heard this morning! That God comes to me and I don’t work my way toward Him. That His love is greater than my sin. That doing good comes because Jesus has made us good. That the first Advent guarantees the second. That Jesus is King. Now!

There’s no room for the curmudgeon in that Story!

The kindergartner has just been freed from his quietness. Daddy bounded down the stairs carrying him piggyback. And the preschooler followed with a big case of bed head. We all have the evening to rest together (and fix the lights on the tree again because another fuse just blew). Three years ago on this day we would have already been headed to a church service or a rehearsal or some such duty. Straining, struggling, and striving toward some illusion of perfection.

I laugh at the irony. Our reactionary anti-Catholic shunning of all things Advent has still duplicated the identical medieval religious feudalism. And our dispensationalist adventism won’t touch an extended celebration of the first Advent.

But I’ll light my Candle of Irony on another day. Today is the Candle of Hope.

This is what is meant by “Thy king cometh.” You do not seek him, but he seeks you. You do not find him, he finds you. For the preachers come from him, not from you; their sermons come from him, not from you; your faith comes from him, not from you; everything that faith works in you comes from him, not from you; and where he does not come, you remain outside; and where there is no Gospel there is no God, but only sin and damnation, free will may do, suffer, work and live as it may and can. Therefore you should not ask, where to begin to be godly; there is no beginning, except where the king enters and is proclaimed.

I am presenting this paper at the annual National Communication Association Convention today. Check it out!

2009 NCA Standing Without And Within Apologia

1954MercerStatementToBJUBoard

This would be Ted Mercer’s final post to his blog (if he had one in the 1950s). But, of course, the story continues without him.

In his final “post,” Mercer is plainly exasperated. Bob Jones Sr. has called him more than just “inefficient” and “disloyal,” more than just “criminally insane” and “demon possessed.” In numerous private conversations with students, alumni, staff, and constituency, Jones has called Mercer a homosexual. And in this document, Mercer is trying to set the record straight (pun intended).

It’s hard to imagine the weight of this accusation today. I’m not going to deconstruct it anymore than to say that Jones’ “poisoning the well” for Mercer’s reputation is despicable and shameful.

A few people to note:

• Mr. James H. Price was “a member of the executive committee” and “attorney for Dr. Jones [Sr.].” He still resides in Greenville, and his son is a local attorney.
• Mrs. Keefer, Dean Keefer’s wife, worked at the Dining Common.
• Glen Lockwood told Mercer the exact numbers of enrollment (in contrast to the published numbers in the Sword) and was subsequently expelled for “[supplying] information to an enemy of the institution” (20). I believe he’s preached recently at Reformed Presbyterian Church, Southside in Indianapolis.
• Another faculty member is mentioned as resigning — Mr. Warwick.
• Matt and Millie Weld resigned because of BJSr.’s accusations against Mercer.

Alice Mercer, Ted Mercer’s wife, provides an honest and shoot-from-the-hip rebuke of Jones Sr. She clarifies what have been only fuzzy glimpses of the Family for those of us who followed her.

• She describes the more Pentecostal ethic in BJSr. with his “biblical discernment of spirits and of character” claim degenerating into a simple and blatant accusation of his argumentative opponents.
• She points up the double-standard on the “beverage use of alcohol” among the administrators — specifically that “little bottle” that BJSr. “[carries] around and take[s] sips from” (14).
• She draws the obvious connection (for the times) between BJU and the USSR.

Ted Mercer’s most startling and eerily-resonant statement in the whole document:

Your failure as individuals to support what I and hundreds of others believe is a reasonable request (for Dr. Jones to retract and apologize or to grant an open hearing to determine the guilty ones in this controversy) will only serve to prolong and intensify the controversy. The alumni have spoken. I have more than a thousand letters which the Board may inspect under the conditions of a hearing. These tell abundantly what many alumni think about these matters (5).

This explains much of the BJU official reaction to the Please-Reconcile movement a year ago. It was completely an alumni-driven effort to coax BJU to apologize for what was clearly institutional racism. While BJU did apologize, their spokesman, Gary Weier, went to great pains to explain that the alumni had nothing to do with their statement. No one, of course, believed him. So the question becomes why does BJU work so hard at proving that the alumni and faculty are irrelevant?

Habit may be one explanation.

Mercer included an “Additional Statement” with his first to the BJU Board of Trustees.

1953(2)MercerAdditionalStatement

He mentions several people most of whom resigned just before or after his firing. For the record, I’ll list them here with a summary of Mercer’s (alleged, for you legal types) description and any additional information I’ve found:

• Bronkema had been kicked out of Princeton for being too fundamentalist. He taught Bible at BJU and had annoyed BJSr. to the point that he asked Mercer to find something bad on him to use against him.
• Karl Keefer, Dean of Fine Arts, resigned and Dwight Gustafson replaced him. The Sword of the Lord in 7 October 1955 (4) lists him as dean at Washington Bible Institute.
• Robert Schaper was a popular Bible teacher, former Dean of Men, former Director of Religious Activities (extension). He was the Dean of the School of Religion when he resigned, Gilbert Stenholm took his place. Schaper has written several books since.
• Grace Haight, after whom the current BJU Nursing building is named, had angered the Joneses for speaking up about their treatment of Mary Gaston’s elderly aunt. BJSr. “had set out to find something against Dr. Haight so that he could punish her.” Jones wanted her to stop teaching. No one had the heart to do it — not even BJSr.! — because she was so well-loved. She finally agreed to edit the periodical Fellowship News instead.
• Ernest Qvarnstrom was the BJU’s Maintenance Engineer and was fired for “inefficiency” even though the Joneses had a publicly-and-frequently-stated policy that “no one who is loyal is dismissed for inefficiency” (6). Mercer claims that Qvarnstrom’s firing was the beginning of the then-recent faculty “unhappiness.”
• Dr. [Leila R. ??] Custard earned $200/month. Mr. Hitchcock earned $150/month. Mercer and his wife got $160/month.
• R. K. “Lefty” Johnson, long-time business manager and current BJU CFO’s grandfather, enjoyed the unfortunate position of being both a Jones sycophant and a Jones irritant. BJSr. described him as not “mind[ing] telling a lie.” He was known to “pad” the numbers for salaries and educational expenditures (14).
• Attending Virginia Hendrickson’s funeral in Spartanburg in 1951 was a sore-spot for the Joneses.
• John R. Robinson, M.D. was an OB in Greenville who refused to care for his maternity patients at Barge because of its inadequate facilities.
• Morton Brown taught History and resigned because he objected to the Jones’s treatment of Dr. Robinson. He submitted his resignation before the April 1 deadline, but the Joneses fired him immediately. Due to this unusual timing, Brown wrote his students explaining his resignation. BJSr. was angered at this and corrected Brown’s statements in a closed-door meeting with his students
• Fred Holmes “was exhumed” in that meeting. He had objected to the faculty salaries and was fired. Fred Holmes and his wife (who taught piano) received $160/month even though BJSr. claimed it was $300/month to the students in the Brown meeting.
• Leo Patterson took the BJSr. at his word when he claimed that anyone who wanted “[Southern] Association” salary could get it if he just asked. Patterson asked. He, too, was fired in the middle of the Spring semester.
• Van Laar sympathized with Patterson and didn’t stand in one of the frequent “loyalty meetings” and so was fired.
• Hal Carruth, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, resigned.
• Ciliberto taught in the School of Commerce.
• Stout, head of the science dept, called its facilities “primitive” and was nearly fired. The Science building did get an update following, however.
• Students attending John Dunlap’s church in Norfolk had to affirm a loyalty statement in April 1953.
• Laird Lewis, Dean of School of Education, resigned some time before this, I gather, and had died by the time of Mercer’s statement.

Other statistics:

• Registrations were 2724 in the 1952 Fall semester despite what is reported in The Sword.
• The salary system is to pay “according to his ‘need’” with a strategy to keep the prospective employee “on the defensive” (7).
• 70 full-time faculty members had left at the end of the 1951-1952 school year.
• Mercer was one of the top salaries at $3600/year. College professors in 1953 got $6384, and the average wage nationally was $4K/year. Dr. Jones kept padding the salaries by about 40% (16).
• Dr. Jones (Sr)’s arguments against accreditation are “something of a joke” outside BJU’s constituency (10).
• On faculty loads, “Dr. Jones Sr. has always insisted should be heavy, his philosophy being ‘work them so hard when they go home at night they’ll be too tired to complain about anything’” (12).

Read Mercer’s description of faculty salaries and treatment, the Joneses’ attitude toward accreditation, their capricious and egocentric rule, their tendency for hyperbole, and their habit of playing good-cop-bad-cop with the younger Jones vs. the elder Jones. Just change the dates and the people or the suffix on the end of the administrator’s name. The lack of difference is startling.

For the record (and for the search engines), here are the quotations of note:

It is only fair to say also that I have been urged by some of the finest people I know to let the entire matter drop. Having weight the situation and considered all the advice pro and con, I have decided to release this report (2).

It was our system of living and our salary system which made it difficult to get faculty (3).

I told him frankly that I made it a practice never to ask both of them about the same matter (4).

It was evident Dr. Jones liked anyone who didn’t want much money; but anyone who asked more than usual had many things wrong with him–his appearance, his religious background, his having moved about before, etc. (7).

Many of them left, however, to escape the unhappy and unsatisfactory conditions prevailing in the University and some left because their friends were either being fired or were resigning. . . . For many days in this period, Dr. Jones conducted a series of conferences large and small of faculty and staff demanding to know who had been heard to complain about housing, salary, the firings, etc. These inquisitorial meetings seemed for the first time to open the eyes of many of the faculty (9).

Needless to say, all these events produced a terrible mental and emotional climate on the campus. Dr. Jones saw to it that all was glossed over by chapel announcement and sermon, those who were fired being denominated ‘crooks’ and instruments of the devil and those who were leaving by resignation being slurred in one way or another (9).

I came to see that the stated reasons were a thin tissue of fabrication and that the real reason was two-fold: first, to be accredited by any regional or national govt, the business setup of the University as it relates to faculty and staff would have to be changed; and second, Dr. Jones could not run the school in the same ironhanded manner if the University were in an association, to wit, he could not fire summarily an employee, and any dismissed employee would be entitled to a hearing before an impartial group. Now Dr. Jones made clear to me these real reasons gradually and he emphasized to me that these reasons could not be divulged publicly but that we must keep it on the basis of an administrative polity that to join an association would destroy us spiritually. In effect and in practically these words, Dr. Jones said, ‘When they want you to do something that you don’t want to do, tell them you can’t do it because of your religious convictions; and then if they put pressure on you to do it, cry “religious persecution” and they’ll leave you alone. People in this country are scared of religious persecution.’ Dr. Jones did not confine his indoctrination to me alone, for Mr. Laird Lewis, late Dean of Education before he resigned, came to me in open-mouthed astonishment and told me, asking me if I knew it. This practice of having one reason for doing something, yet publicly announcing another, is a characteristic of Dr. Jones’s policy of dealing with people as well as situations (10-11).

All the [accreditation] committees (including the one from the University of South Carolina) commended Dr. Jones on the spiritual and religious contribution of the school, the attractiveness of its physical plant, its cultural emphasis, etc., but at the same time the committees did not find corresponding strength in the matter of faculty stability, training and degrees of the faculty, faculty loads, certain aspects of the instructional program including parts of the library collection, and the science setup as regards space, equipment, etc. They all seemed to feel the ‘Show Window’ was most inviting but that educationally, by prevailing standard of measure, there were notable weaknesses and gaps (12).

Although on the administrative level and in chapel with the students, Dr. Jones emphasizes vigilance in preserving orthodoxy and evangelism, in preserving discipline, and in getting students[,] and urges that nothing be taken for granted in these matters; yet he repeatedly says to the faculty that it is taken for granted that they are doing a good job of teaching and that we have high academic standards. No real effort is made to secure and keep faculty members. If BJU took toward students the same attitude it takes toward faculty, its enrollment would be greatly curtailed in a very short time (19).

The construction of the handsome museum and art building and the talk of a multi-million dollar hospital sit heavily on the minds of those who know the inadequacy of faculty housing, no only in number of units but also in part in quality of housing (20).

It is to be regretted that a school with such a far-flung Christian testimony and with such an impact on its students in the art of Christian living is sadly lacking in Christ-like management. All who disagree in any matter, institutional or personal, are ‘crooks’ or part of a Satanic attack against the school. Those who get in the limelight meet with disfavor whether they be in the evangelistic world — Billy Graham, for example, about whom to the University administrators it was said that he was shallow, superficial, and not having real revival, won’t last — or in Bob Jones University’s world — Dr. Schaper, for example, who was the object of disapproval because the students requested him as a speaker for the Washington, D.C., and Jackson, Mississippi, banquets in 1951, because students asked him to perform their wedding ceremonies, and students made frequent request for him to preach on the campus. It is also to be regretted that in a school where the first rule for students is ‘Griping not tolerated’ that criticism of others (intimate friends not excluded) is freely meted out, that where the students are told ‘It is never right to do wrong in order to get a chance to do right’ those in authority who any means necessary to accomplish their end, including character assassination of those whom they oppose (21).

Since my statements were prepared, there have been other developments which presage the future relative to these matters. An organization which was considering employing me was served an ultimatum that it would be boycotted and blacklisted openly if it did so. Two secretaries at the University have written me letters, one denying the compliment paid the Records Office which Miss Luetgens told me, and the other, raising a question as to whether I did not carry off certain letters and reports belonging to the University. I recall when Dr. Jones was seeking something against Dr. Bronkema some years ago and I responded I knew nothing against him, Dr. Jones responded, ‘Well, go find something on him!” (24).

1953(1)MercerStatementConcerningDismissal

Mercer sent this “Statement Concerning my Dismissal from Bob Jones University” to BJU Board of Trustees after his firing on June 15, 1953.

For those of you unfamiliar with BJU, the statement is a snoozer, so you can head over here. For those of you currently associated with BJU, you’ll dismiss it as some crackpot with an agenda who just needs to “shut up.” He even mentions that — that people wanted him to “crawl off into a hole after being fired.” So you can mosey over here.

But if you’ve ever found yourself on the other side of a BJU administrator’s desk feeling the ax hovering above your neck, the statement reads eerily prophetic.

The litany of accusations against him are mostly familiar. We’ve all been called the same whether in front of or behind our backs — “avowed enemy of the school,” unfaithful, inefficient, deceitful, “one of the greatest crooks in the history of the school,” demon-possessed, “the devil.” Mercer euphemizes the most intense accusation of homosexuality under the term “my moral character” — an accusation that still lingers in contemporary BJU histories (more on that later).

You’ll want to look at the list of BJU Board Members near the end. It’s at the very least intriguing. There’s Homer Rodeheaver and Jack Wyrtzen. There’s Mordecai Ham and Ernest Reveal. And you see some familiar fathers there. Look. There’s Ted Mercer’s dad, Jim. And John MacArthur, Sr. (father of the John MacArthur, Jr.). and William Piper (father of John Piper).

BJU apparently was undergoing an enormous faculty turnover in the 1952-53 school year — a movement that would only continue into the years to come. Mercer includes one letter of resignation in the end of his pamphlet from Karl E. Keefer. We who have been associated with BJU since 1952 don’t know Dr. Keefer. We do know his replacement very well — a 24-year-old Dwight Gustafson.

I’ve had a blog post about 1952-53 in my drafts folder for about a year. Really. I’ve been trying to get a bead on that time period for awhile. That same anxiety that we’re all feeling in the air right now in the US, I think people were feeling back then too. And the seeds of our own undoing were planted then. Here are some facts I’ve gathered:

• Thomas Nelson released its second edition of the Revised Standard Version in 1952, this time including the Old Testament. To religious conservatives, the translators were pretty sloppy, seeming to highlight contradictions between the Old and New Testaments.
• The first conservative evangelical Christian school started in 1952 down in Florida — Keswick Christian School. One of its alumni wrote about her experience in My Fundamentalist Education.
• In 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of 58,000 and 35,000 polio cases, respectively, up from a typical number of some 20,000 cases a year.
• President Eisenhower started the “Back to God” campaign.
• The Army-McCarthy hearings were just starting in 1953.
• The babies were still booming.
• I Love Lucy was in its second season.
• The Korean War continued as a hotter part of the ongoing Cold War.
• “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, thanks to the efforts of the Knights of Columbus, appealing to a newly-baptized Eisenhower.
• The Supreme Court heard Zorach v. Clauson, and released-time religious instruction diminished after that.
• Dr. Spock dominated the parenting-advice market.

And that’s the way it was . . . back in those blissful 1950s. When television couples slept in separate beds and the “coloreds” drank from separate drinking fountains and “fundamentalism” was not-yet-separated from “evangelicalism.”

This is the world in which Ted Mercer was writing.

They didn’t have blogs back in the day. They had speeches. They had theses. They had pamphlets. They had tracts. They had samizdat. To get to a lot of those documents you either have to choose a famous one — like I just did in that listing — or know how to operate a microfiche machine or just hang out in library archives. If you’re lucky, they are permanent — somewhere.

Blogs are more fleeting. There are more spelling errors, more goofy lolcat pictures, more viral videos. But they are more . . . present than any of the others. And more dangerous.

You probably don’t know who Ted Mercer is. The first time I heard about him was ~1993 when I was listening to my first graduate audition in the Division of Speech. A young man from Bryan College was applying for a graduate assistantship. And one of the senior, hoary-headed members of our faculty said to us all (something like), “Are we sure we should let him in? He is, after all, from Bryan.” Her words were pregnant with a mysterious and sinister meaning.

Now I was the youngest faculty member in this group. And . . . I’m a little bit clueless as I’ve said before. So, in typical fashion, I just asked earnestly, “What do you mean? What’s wrong with Bryan?” Another less-junior-than-I colleague nodded and agreed, “Yeah, I’d like to know too! I have no idea.” And the senior member just sighed and shook her head, disappointed with these children these days about how they know nothing of the past. . . . I think. I don’t know why she was sighing. But I never heard the details that day.

So I’m going to tell you the story. With the actual documents themselves. A friend just passed them along to me last night, and I stayed up too late reading them.

If Ted were alive today and had been fired from Bob Jones University, he’d have his own blog where he’d publish such things. But in 1953, all he had was a mimeograph machine and an address book. So let’s take a look. . . .

That’s the sticker they robotically glue on the inside flyleaf of every book you buy at the BJU Campus Store. Even the Bibles!

That’s their litigious-ish way of washing their hands of your presumed offense at their dangerously idea-laden books.

So this is mine.

I’ve had another project brewing for some time. A project whose research got me so blue last May that I had to stop reading. I’m ready to start up again. And this is my sticker:

Disclaimer: I’m not talking about you. No, really. I’m not.

I’m talking about us. Which does include you. And me. And millions of other people who fall under the umbrella of Evangelicalism — from fundies to Pentecostals, from Calvinists to Arminians, from soul-patch-wearing-and-coffee-drinking types to their culotte-donning opposites.

But if you think I have you and yours in mind, you’re incorrect. I don’t. So forget the nitty-gritty you and think about the more abstract-and-one-contemporary-sliver-of-the-invisible-Church us. Or stop reading. That’s always an option.

In fact, this whole project could fall under the heading of “It’s Not About You.” So that we Evangelicals get so easily offended at point-blank critique or that we can think of one exception to the general rule or that we can turn every critique into a tu quoque fallacy . . . well, that is really proof of the problem.

But I’ll save that more for a later post.

Consider yourself warned.