BJU’s lgbtquia+ alumni respond to “Gay Chapel Week”

by Jeffrey Hoffman

Bob Jones University has a perception problem.

There are indications that at least some on the Administration at BJU are aware that there is a perception problem: a recent flurry of public relations activity, the recent launch of a re-branding campaign – a new logo, an expensive inter-collegiate sports program, discontinuance of the previously required on-campus Sunday morning “Church” service (BJU is not a church and does not have an on-campus church, but throughout its lifetime required student attendance at a formal campus-wide “church service” on Sunday mornings) so that BJU students may visibly attend approved local churches in the Greenville community – and a massive advertising initiative including what appears to be paid placement on Janet Mefferd’s popular Christian radio show, full-page ads in Christianity Today, and other more mainstream evangelical media outlets BJU deliberately avoided for many years.

BJU’s problem, though, isn’t public perception, which is largely polite, bewildered indulgence; the sort of response one might have to the eccentric neighbor who clings to quaint hairstyles and  outmoded fashions, expounding oddball theories in awkward conversations best-avoided whenever possible. Such a public perception has been carefully cultivated by the Jones family and other principals at BJU for decades. Remember, this is the school that long billed itself as “the World’s Most Unusual University” and regularly issued dispatches that no, in fact, they didn’t have separate pink and blue sidewalks for “boys” and “girls” to walk on. (Has any BJU alumnus ever had anyone ask her if that was actually true?) But BJU wields tremendous political influence in local and regional politics in Upstate South Carolina through former faculty and staff members and other alumni who hold key positions in elected government.

BJU’s perception problem is a self-perception problem.

Bob Jones University has existed within its own echo chamber, practicing extreme academic insularity and remaining unchallenged from within its own community for so long that it has never practiced any serious self-criticism, brooked no serious introspection, had no gestalt moment of self-awareness, and, as a result, remains incapable of much-needed substantive reform.

To wit:

In last week’s “Gay Chapel Week” (my term, but it’s an apt one), Dr. Stephen Jones introduced the topic by reading an anonymous letter supposedly received by the administration from the student to whom it had allegedly been written. While many of us wonder whether such a letter actually exists — the Jones preachers have a long-standing habit of “finding” a letter that says exactly what they wanted it to say to make a point they themselves were planning to make: a typical fundamentalist “sermon illustration” parlor trick — but even if such a letter exists, please notice this peculiar statement Dr. Jones made:

“And I am telling whoever wrote it even if it is the person himself looking for attention, you have 24 hours to talk to your supervisor about it and own up to it. If you don’t, … you won’t be part of this student body because that represents nothing of the spirit of Christ…”

Last week, we published Rachel Sherwin’s story. Allow me to call attention to something Rachel said in her story:

“So I did what you’re supposed to do at BJ if you have a ‘sin’ problem. Reach out for help. In the dorm supervisor’s office, I was told that I was just trying to get attention by saying that I had feelings for girls.”

In his talk on Wednesday morning last week, BJU’s Jon Daulton described being gay as

“It’s about me getting attention, being made to feel special, distracting myself from my chronic dissatisfaction with life through parties and through other high-animation activities such as the gay community offers on its well-known drug-saturated party circuits.”

Lest the reader think that this trope of “you’re just trying to get attention” is coincidental, last week Al Jazeera’s flagship America Tonight program published an in-depth look into “How the ‘Fortress of Fundamentalism’ handles sexual assault” about Bob Jones University’s response to sexual abuse and sexual assault disclosures. While I was personally interviewed for this article, I do not know everyone else who was interviewed. A BJU alumnus named Rebekah (I do not know her) is quoted as saying:

“I absolutely think they didn’t believe her. I don’t think they took her seriously at all…and everything she did was therefore for attention, and not because she was hurting.“

(In each of these quotes, the emphasis was mine).

The irony that these distorted accusations of narcissism come from administrators of a university whose founder was humble enough to name the college for himself and whose President has always had the last name Jones — and nearly always the first name Bob (Bob Jones, Sr., Jr. and III) —  is not lost on me. That the administrators of BJU would misunderstand and misapply psychological terminology when dealing with hurting people comes as no surprise when we consider that the chair of BJU’s psychology department, lacking the usual credentials for such a position, has gone on record calling things like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder “worship disorders.” This is a school, after all, whose underlying philosophy for child-rearing has always been that a child’s will must be broken. Psychology clearly isn’t their strong suit.

When I heard Jon Daulton’s remarks, I couldn’t help thinking of BJUnity board member Edward Wagoner  (Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Americas for Jones Lang LaSalle), Lance Weldy, Ph. D., the Rev. Curt Allison, the Rev. Teresa Hrab, the late Rev. Dr. Wayne Mouritzen (who died in September, R.I.P.) and many, many others within BJUnity whose lives elude Mr. Daulton’s grotesque mischaracterization as drug-addled attention-seekers. I also thought of Rich Merritt and others who have candidly and publicly shared their own struggles with substance abuse and the recovery they have found, not because of BJU, but in spite of BJU. And then I thought of the Ninth Commandment. If Mr. Daulton has been paying attention to BJUnity’s “who we are” posts over these past two years, and we have reason to believe that he has, then he knows he was not telling the truth. Speaking for myself, I have lived in New York City for more than 20 years as an out gay man and I have yet to attend a single one of those circuit parties Mr. Daulton seems to know so much about… and so what if I had? Would that activity define me more than my extensive body of work in the Church and an entire career spent as a classical and liturgical musician?

Bob Jones University has a depth-perception problem.

Bob Jones University has little or no regard for its alumni, especially for those who disagree with its dogmatic pronouncements and untenable positions.  Three times in the past few years, groups of alumni have circulated petitions calling for repentance and requesting apologies for positions the University has long held that those many alumni believe to be out of step with the Word of God and with godly Christian living, or just immoral and deeply embarrassing. Each time they have been met with stony silence from the University.

When alumni called on the University to apologize for its previous policies of racial discrimination, the University did not respond. Instead, it issued its “Statement about Race” which amounts to little more than a passive-voice and long-winded excuse for the past: this “we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful,” for this!

When another alumni petition requesting that Pastor Chuck Phelps be removed from Bob Jones University’s board because he publicly slandered a rape victim who had been a minor under his pastoral care at the time of her rape for a year leading up to her rapist’s trial, Bob Jones, III told a woman who asked to speak with him that it was “consensual rape” and that Chuck Phelps owed no one an apology. Eventually, Mr. Phelps resigned from the board, but BJU never issued an apology to the victim, though the rapist remains in prison, his conviction upheld on appeal.

Nearly two years ago, the group of alumni who later formed BJUnity began circulating our petition for an apology from Bob Jones University and its Chancellor, Bob Jones, III for three decades of violent hate speech against LGBT+ people from the pulpit and even on the steps of the White House. When BJUnity launched (read our mission statement here), members of the media asked for Bob Jones University’s response. This was their statement in response to our launch: there is not one mention of the serious issue of violent rhetoric that our petition addresses, no direct response to BJUnity’s mission statement and message to the BJU community; but rather an oblique bit of boiler-plate about a political position regarding marriage equality that seemed copied and pasted from the Roman Catholic-dominated National Organization for Marriage implying that our purpose for launching BJUnity was to jump on board the Marriage Equality bandwagon. (While marriage rights are important to very many of us, there are a number of excellent organizations already doing that work. Our mission speaks to a more specific and immediate concern at Bob Jones University).

Bob Jones University ignores its alumni with whom it disagrees (when it isn’t making outrageous or dismissive statements about them), so it comes as no surprise that the speakers at last week’s event seem to be largely ignorant of many decades’ worth of work on the topic of “homosexuality” in the church by several of BJU’s alumni, Ralph Blair, Ph. D. (former BJU classmate of Bob Jones, III and founder of Evangelicals Concerned, who has been researching and writing about this topic for more than fifty years), Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Ph. D.  (co-author in 1978 of Is the Homosexual My Neighbor and linguistic consultant to the American Bible Society’s New International Version translation team) and Rev. Jeff Miner (author of The Children Are Free and pastor of Life Journey Church in Indianapolis ). But this past summer, a BJU graduate in the local community seems to have discovered the “ex-gay” movement just as Exodus International was closing its doors, and suddenly there is a “new” approach? (I’m reserving my views on the actual book in question until I’ve had a chance to fully read my copy, but so far in reading it, I’ve not yet found anything new).

BJUnity offers some new perspectives

There isn’t much that might have served to rally the many constituents of BJUnity more than BJU’s clandestine announcement of “Gay Chapel Week,” which leaked to us from a source on campus. You see, almost every one of us remembers sitting through those kinds of chapels, and those memories are extremely painful for all of us. It’s no surprise to us that a questioning student reportedly felt “guilty, worthless, hopeless” during last week’s series. The kind of lazy theology that would read Ezekiel chapter 16 and say “Sodom wasn’t just destroyed for the sin of ‘homosexuality'” or that tells gay people to “find your identity in Christ;” the kind of outmoded psychology that clings to long-abandoned Freudian “dominant mother/absent father” theories of sexual orientation and psycho-sexual development or that makes false equations between addiction and sexual orientation; the sort of political moralizing that disregards the experience of gay people to tell us that sexual orientation doesn’t exist, exasperatingly insisting on an activity-based definition of sexual orientation rather than the accepted definition that is grounded in many years of multi-disciplinary work since Alfred Kinsey first published his research: these things offer no hope to a student who secretly knows or questions their sexual orientation. Absent an apology for decades of administrative harassment and violent rhetoric from the pulpit, nothing at BJU will have changed: Bob Jones University is not and will not be a safe place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, or questioning — those “struggling with same sex attraction” — students.

As we listen and evaluate these messages — an ongoing work — we will respond to offer different perspectives and new information (thanks to our friends at BJU News for these “bootleg” recordings and for publishing transcripts of all the sessions when it appeared BJU wasn’t going to make any of this public).

A monologue isn’t a conversation. Cherry-picking sources to support a fore-drawn conclusion while simultaneously excluding those folks with particular insights into your chosen topic because their views don’t coincide with yours isn’t a very healthy way to have a conversation. Many of our people have undertaken the work of analysis and response to “Gay Chapel Week,” and over the coming days and weeks, we will offer their many perspectives: theological, philosophical, existential, scientific, and psychological in an effort to further an ongoing conversation about our lives as LGBT+ people from the fundamentalist environment of Bob Jones University. There is hope for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, or intersex student or alumnus of Bob Jones University. Part of that hope is in offering a conversation that engages truth, not as we wish it were, but as it is.

Housekeeping note: in order to keep our home-page tidy, we only link the two most recent articles and a coming out story at any given point in time. However, all of our posts are categorized and those in this ongoing series of responses will all be available at any time here: http://bjunity.org/responses-to-chapel-week/

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