Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric ofReligious Fundamentalism (Studies in Rhetoric and Religion)

Romancing the Difference

Studies in Rhetoric and Religion 4

Editorial Board Martin J. Medhurst Editorial Board Chair Baylor University Vanessa B. Beasley University of Georgia Randall L. Bytwerk Calvin College Michael W. Casey Pepperdine University James M. Farrell University of New Hampshire James A. Herrick Hope College Michael J. Hyde Wake Forest University Thomas M. Lessl University of Georgia

Romancing the Difference Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism

Camille Kaminski Lewis

Baylor University Press

© 2007 by Baylor University Press Waco, Texas 76798 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press. Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Cover design by Cynthia Dunne, Blue Farm Graphics Cover illustration is Vashti Refuses the King’s Summons, Edwin Long, R.A., from the Bob Jones University Collection. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lewis, Camille Kaminski. Romancing the difference : Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the rhetoric of religious fundamentalism / Camille Kaminski Lewis. p. cm. -- (Studies in rhetoric and religion ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60258-003-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Fundamentalism. 2. Rhetoric--Philosophy. 3. English language--United States--Rhetoric. 4. Bob Jones University. 5. Burke, Kenneth, 1897-1993. I. Title. BT82.2.L49 2007 230'.04626--dc22 2007029189

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper with a minimum of 30% pcw content.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Ecclesiastes 3:11 Dedicated to Isaac and Gavin So that you would know That beauty resides not in a word or a creed; The Beauty lives within you since you have believed.

contents Preface

xi

1

Imagining Tragedy, Comedy, and Romance

1

2

Cenotaphs and Photographs

13

3

The Romantic Pied Piper

39

4

Curing the Culture with Homeopathy, Allopathy, and Sympathy

65

5

Unfit Fitness

87

Conclusion

127

Notes

133

Bibliography

147

Index

159

ix

preface The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.

z James Madison, Federalist Paper #10 Fear of religious talk in the public sphere is not new to American politics. The orthodox have always made the pundits uncomfortable. Zeal does not a good law make, we assume. The private should not be public. Faction versus Reason, Whitefield versus Madison, passionate religious zealots versus rational liberal democrats—the original founders as well as contemporary scholars predictably frame ardent religion as the most defiant rival to Enlightened goals. When scholars theorize public discourse, this most divisive and, thus, most private of interests is frequently ignored, often bracketed out, rarely accommodated, and habitually misunderstood. Even those social theorists who imagine ideal speaking situations still define religious talk as too cantankerous to promote a healthy public sphere. Those attempting to embrace agonism in public discourse usually cannot help but resist including certain religious voices. Even religious scholars themselves are baffled by those disruptive fundamentalists who seem to defy cultural norms.

xi

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preface

Yet if we are to take the goals of robust democratic practice seriously, we must include even the most resistant religious separatist in our visions of the public sphere. In the spirit of Kenneth Burke’s comic critique, we must be students of the zealots in order to be students of ourselves. We must frame the separatist as not a vicious enemy to be feared and expunged, but as a mistaken adversary to be countered and included. Understanding this differing political style or mysterious prophetic voice will enrich political discourse and further strengthen our democratic practice. Imagining how to include the most irritating, secures our own place in the political conversation. Since religious separatists are at best overlooked or misinterpreted and at worst maligned or removed from our notions of public discourse, we must create a new workable vocabulary to understand religious sectarian rhetoric. My goal in this book is to craft that vocabulary building on Kenneth’s Burke’s notions of tragedy and comedy. I argue that religious sectarian discourse falls outside the tragic or comic frames of acceptance, operating instead within a third frame—romance. Although neither tragically goaded by nor comically amused by the dream, the religious separatist seeks to embody “whatsoever things are lovely” in order to woo their lonely Other. While this metaphor of romance may be potentially applicable to other separatist groups, I focus on one representative anecdote in evangelical fundamentalism: Bob Jones University. Called “ultraseparatist” by historians,1 Bob Jones University, seventy-three years after its founding and nearly two decades after its infamous Supreme Court trial, was thrust into the center of national presidential politics, media derision, and even an unsuccessful congressional censure.2 A cursory look at the university’s discourse might prompt a hasty conclusion that this group of separatists is simply tragic. But a deeper probing into their public texts reveals that Bob Jones University is fully operating within the third frame of romantic acceptance. This book maps the trajectory of the university’s public discourse in order to more fully expand the vocabulary of sectarian romance by examining its histories, its art collection, its community outreaches, its talk within Campaign 2000, and its response to the tragedies of September 11th.

Chapter 1 imagining tragedy, comedy, and romance When our frames of acceptance become brittle enough to shatter, Kenneth Burke would not have us reify them but relax and expand them. When we stiffen our necks, Burke wants to massage the tension away. Idealizing only leads to guilt and eventually to victimage—an idyllic but tragic cycle. Burke resists this impulse which he labels “tragic” with his notion of the “comic” corrective. From his definition of (hu)man to his distinction between identification and division, Burke continually urges the critic to stop the conventional tragedy through an unconventional comedy. For Kenneth Burke, a human being is “the symbol-making, symbol-using, symbol-misusing animal, inventor of the negative, separated from our natural condition by instruments of our own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, acquiring foreknowledge of death and rotten with perfection.”1 Burke argues, then, that human beings are unique from animals since they name, act, divide, imagine the negative, classify, organize, privilege, and prod each other toward an ideal. We can act (as opposed to mere visceral movement), recognize absence (as opposed to mere presence), order (as opposed to mere experience), and feel guilty. These human habits are “natural,” to Burke, and even inevitable. Burke’s definition may be as much a metanarrative on the impulse to define as it is a definition. He calls this definition more descriptive than prescriptive but insists that the prescription is inherent. By acknowledging what is “natural” to human beings, Burke hopes to offer what is unnatural, incongruent, or “comic,” since the “natural” promises violence. Burke never assumes that we can reverse the “normal”— only resist it. We can “muddle through,” cobble together, sew “bits of political patchwork here and there” to stop conventional victimage. Thus, Burke’s foundational definition of humanity implies his critical definitions of tragedy and comedy. Human beings are trapped in a cycle of tragedy, a series of divisions and conflicts “wherein millions 

 romancing the difference

of co-operative acts go into the preparation for one single destructive act . . . war.”2 Burke describes the tragic cycle as follows: Here are the steps In the Iron Law of History That weld Order to Sacrifice: Order leads to Guilt (for who can keep the commandments!) Guilt needs Redemption (for who would not be cleansed) Redemption needs a Redeemer (which is to say, a Victim!). Order through Guilt To Victimage (hence: Cult of the Kill)3

That is, since human beings are motivated to perfect moral order, they are necessarily obligated to feel guilty. The christological reference in Burke’s tragedy is prominent. For Burke, Christian theology is the premier archetype in Western culture and shapes his view of all human action. “With the evidence of the Crucifixion before us, we cannot deny that consubstantiality is established by common involvement in a killing.”4 Although particularly religious, the tragic cycle, according to Burke is inherent in all human interaction. “When someone is straining to do something, look for evidence of the tragic mechanism.”5 Goaded by perfect unity, human beings must expunge the unruly element, the Other, and heroically purify the community. From “orthodoxy,” then, proceeds “dispossession,” “rejection,” all toward “transcendence”— order, guilt, purification, redemption. This victimage cycle is heroic, tragic, and inevitable.6 This tragic cycle begins with the human need to identify with an ideal order. This “identification is compensatory to division.” That is, to identify with someone or something essentially means to dissociate from an Other. Within every attempt of identification is an ironic and contrary division. “If men [sic] were not apart from one another, there



imagining tragedy, comedy, and romance



would be no need for the rhetoric to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man’s very essence.”7 Thus, the goal of the tragic cycle is to purify the culture of the Evil Enemy. While operating within a rigid frame of acceptance, the tragic’s proverb is “Kick the bums out!” Since this flawless ideal irritates or goads humanity rather than comforts, the tragic dreams of this ideal slip uncontrollably into victimage. By assuming that everyone can participate in the reach towards perfection, the tragic can justify expunging its Evil Other. To use Burke’s dramatistic pentad, the central tragic act is to kill; the primary agent is the hero whose purpose is to cleanse by defining someone as evil within the scene of a rigid frame of acceptance. The tragic hero looks up to transcend his situation and then around to expel any Other obstacles. Burke’s comic critic, however, looks inward at its own humanity and laughs, poking fun at the foolishness we all share. The comic frame of acceptance “transcends” by admitting its own flaws, making it pliant enough to contain opposing elements. While the tragic is continual and “natural,” Burke hopes to resist its inescapability at periodic moments through a comic frame of reference. Humor, in Burke’s view, is the opposite of the tragically heroic. While the hero glorifies and puffs up in order to strengthen the nonhero, comedy inverts the progression. Humor “takes up the slack between the momentousness of the situation and the feebleness of those in the situation by dwarfing the situation.” While the heroic “converts upwards,” the humorous “converts downwards.”8 Rather than define its Other as evil, the comic frames its Other as mistaken. This comic frame “relieves the pressure” for perfection. It foregrounds the imperfections in all humanity and laughs. Enemies are redeemed from viciousness to mistakenness. “When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.”9 That is, the Other’s maladies are not necessarily cause for expulsion, but rather a reminder to look inward for the same flaw. Burke sees this comedy as an avenue for social criticism since it exhorts us to be self-reflexive scholars of human behavior:

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The comic frame, in making a man the student of himself, makes it possible for him to “transcend” occasions when he has been tricked or cheated, since he can readily put such discouragements in his “assets” column, under the head of “experience.” Thus we “win” by subtly changing the rules of the game—and by a mere trick of bookkeeping, like the accountants for big utility corporations, we make “assets” out of “liabilities.” And can we, in our humbleness, do better than apply in our own way the wise devices of these leviathans, thereby “democratizing” a salvation device as we encourage it to filter from the top-down? In sum, the comic frame should enable people to be observers of themselves, while acting. Its ultimate would not be passiveness, but maximum consciousness. One would “transcend” himself by noting his own foibles. He would provide a rationale for locating the irrational and the nonrational.10

Rather than expunge, the comic critic jokes and includes, but without losing this corrective edge. That is, the critic may passionately critique but will never utterly destroy. Thus, reframing the Other and critiquing the self are the comic critic’s method. Instead of purification, the comedian seeks correction. The prominent proverb is “Heads I win, tails you lose” since the comedian temporarily juggles the cultural books to create a win-win situation. The evil enemy is refashioned into a mistaken opponent. The rigid frame is relaxed until it is supple. The comedian will overturn the aggravating ideal to poke fun and to include all with the hopes of momentarily pushing humanity away from the precipice of victimage. While the tragic assumes that all worthy people can participate in the culture, the comic assumes that everyone wants to participate. Within Burke’s dramatistic pentad, the comic critic acts to overturn in order to correct by making fun within a supple frame of reference. Burke’s comedians, then, are reflexive while being active, manipulating the cultural “books” to interpret losses as “assets.” Every attempt is made to prevent violence.11 Chantal Mouffe offers a complementary metaphor that expands Burke’s comic corrective. Together, Burke and Mouffe offer a grand picture for including even the peskiest citizens in our notions of public discourse. By welcoming agonism (rather than dialogism), privileging flexibility (rather than universalism), and featuring a rhetorical creativity, the scholar may be able to craft a vocabulary to understand religious sectarians.



imagining tragedy, comedy, and romance



Rejecting the Enlightenment creation of a separate public sphere, Mouffe wants to broaden the political into a ubiquitous dimension of the social. Arguing that the political is a necessary element in all human relationships, Mouffe assumes that agonism is equally essential. She describes a conflicted world in which our “opponent should be considered not as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an adversary whose existence is legitimate and must be tolerated.” Expunging an Other, then, is forgotten, and arguing against the Other is assumed. We learn to fight with our words and not our hands.12 Mouffe dismisses the idea that conflict resolution is our goal. She claims: “to believe that a final resolution of conflicts is eventually possible—even if it is seen as an asymptotic approach to the regulative idea of a rational consensus—far from providing the necessary horizon of the democratic project, is something that puts it at risk.”13 Like Burke, she sees any attempt at a permanent, stable peace tragically doomed to fail. Instead she embraces the agon and encourages its creativity. Caught between identity and difference, a robust democracy must welcome Mouffe’s adversarial forces (rather than squelch them). The political, then, is not neat and ordered, but messy—multiple, conflicted, and contested—and far from any dream of unity. Mouffe reminds us that idealizing uniformity only hinders democracy since an absence of conflict is only a disguise for a “disquieting apathy.”14 By privileging the agon, the comic critic must welcome the Other— even the religious separatist—into the argument. Mouffe continues to theorize the Other as particular, universal, and internal. That is, Others are malleable and ubiquitous even within ourselves. Every identity is contingent, complex and correlative—the “constituted outside” of multiple Other identities. Healthy competition can remain comic. Nevertheless, when the Other “begins to be perceived as negating our identity, as putting in question our very existence,” tragedy is eminent.15 Mouffe reminds us that every citizen is already a set of paradoxical and complex constructions, residents in a range of communities, “precariously and temporarily sutured at the intersection of those subject positions.” Every singular identity must be awkwardly pieced together with conflicting identities that later will be cut and resewn. Democracy, therefore, must allow for retailoring identities in order to be “truly plural.”16

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Only by refusing homogeneous visions as tragic fictions that require expulsion can democracy thrive. Only by remembering that our Other reflects our own humanity can the critic restore democracy. Only by reframing our enemies as adversarial but symbiotic, only by revising the tension between identification and division can we stop victimage. While being agonistic, the comic critic must also be flexible. Within a historical frame of acceptance, casuistic stretching is the introduction of new ideas while still holding the old. Burke urges us to have as “well-rounded” and as supple a frame as possible. This would require perpetual critique.17 Mouffe points out that “since the constituted outside is present within the inside as its always real possibility, every identity becomes purely contingent.” Rather than seeing splintering and homogenizing forces within cultures as unfortunate, Mouffe identifies them as inevitable and sites for comic critique.18 The mutability of identities, then, would complicate them and forestall destruction. The more complex the connections, the more broadly they extend and the less likely will we expunge them. If democracy is to be contested and contingent, the critic must also be rhetorically creative. To make identification possible when division is inescapable, “you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric.”19 Burke’s comic critic, then, creates a web of ambiguous and temporary linguistic bridges to make the connections. Mouffe also foregrounds rhetorical strategies or “metaphoric redescriptions” as the social theorist’s primary focus. Most social theories merely galvanize hegemony or explore wilderness. If democracy, however, is so complex and conflicted, cemented ideologies will only crack with the on-the-bias tensions. Instead, we need varying articulations of democratic principles to broaden and deepen “the range of democratic practices to the creation of new subject positions within a democratic matrix.”20 To the democratic theorist and comic critic, then, Mouffe would join Burke in urging us to be agonistic, flexible, and rhetorically creative. All three themes suggest a democratic solution. Within agon, the critic resists admiring unity for the sake of unity—an easier and more comfortable position—but strives for continuously oppositional and necessarily creative positions. Within flexibility, the critic shuns a lazy stability and exercises to maintain those agile and robustly democratic muscles. Within rhetorical creativity, the critic can shine at creating newly ambiguous and humorous linguistic turns to push us away from the precipice of victimage.



imagining tragedy, comedy, and romance



Despite the comic’s antagonism, agility, and cunning, however, the religious remains a fearful mystery. Perhaps because separatist narratives are so unfamiliar, Mouffe and Burke reject religious sectarians as easily as James Madison. Mouffe will not tolerate “those who do not accept the democratic ‘rules of the game’ and thereby exclude themselves from a political community.”21 Being willing to participate is a prerequisite to being heard and engaged. Playing by the presumed rules, then, is the only hope to be heard. Leaving the field means you forfeit. Burke defines the sectarian impulse as an inevitable result of rigid frames of acceptance. Pliant comic frames would broaden and disarm separatist tendencies. Perhaps, then, inflexible hegemony unavoidably leads to fragmentation. Burke theorizes sectarianism as a defensive “splintering” within a tragic frame that seeks more unity, but breeds more resistance. Separatist groups feel “driven into a corner” and resist by constructing a new community or “colony.” “Their cooperation gives them a new positive campaign base, from which they may sally forth to steal the recognized symbols of authority from their opponents.” When separation is their primary trope, fracturing will continue since, according to Burke, they constitute their frame as purely rigid.22 Romancing the Sphere: A Third Frame of Acceptance While Kenneth Burke’s notion of comic corrective allows the critic to wrestle out of the grip of the deliberative hegemony that excludes certain religious voices, the metanarrative itself provides few specifics to help map the trajectory of religious sectarian discourse. That is, Burke, as well as Mouffe, gives the rhetorical scholar the “go ahead” to resist the dominant’s tragedy, but construct no precise vocabularies to understand particular publics such as religious sectarians. Neither the notion of the tragic nor of the comic seems to explain satisfactorily the separatist motive in public discourse. However, in The Rhetoric of Motives, Burke describes a “courtier” as a persuasive rhetor who seeks to “transcend” “social estrangement.” Within this courtly metaphor, a possibility does exist to supplement Burke’s usual tragic and comic dichotomy. Wooing is one way to fashion identification out of undeniable division. Even communication itself is a “generalized form of love,” and love is a “communion of

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estranged entities.” “Courtship” is only possible “insofar as there is division. Hence only through interference could one court continually.”23 Implicit in this courting is a sense of mystery when “‘different kinds of beings’ communicate with each other.” Courtship is implicitly “dialectical” (not absolute) and ambiguous as imagined in Socratic education. In Burke’s view, this courting position is neither necessarily tragic nor comic but is one way to negotiate estrangement. For the scholar searching for ways to include religious sectarians in public discourse, both Burke and Mouffe lack the agonism, flexibility, and creativity necessary to imagine these pesky citizens as part of the public sphere. For Mouffe, a citizen can either play by the “democratic ‘rules of the game’” or get off the field. For Burke, a group can be either tragic or comic—either purify through scapegoating or correct through humor. Burke aptly pictures the sectarian as driven into a corner within a rigid frame but fails to theorize the zealot’s next move. Since Mouffe and Burke encourage conflicted, contingent, and rhetorical moves for the sake of a more robust democratic practice and since Burke does include a courtier as one means of persuasion, a third frame of acceptance can be theorized to accommodate the religious sectarian motive—the romantic suitor. After being “cornered,” the sectarian creates a new tactic—separation. But the separatist never moves very far, making sure to be in full view of the dominant frame. Burke mentions courtship as a mysterious “transcending of social estrangement.”24 To woo, the courtier need not purify or necessarily correct the Other. Instead, s/he attracts. What the tragic kills and the comic critiques, the lover charms. The tragic’s proverb is “Kick the bums out!”; the comic’s proverb is “Heads I win, tails you lose”;25 but the romantic claims “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” What the hero defines as an evil enemy and the critic as a mistaken adversary, the suitor defines as a lonely but potential mate. To begin the wooing cycle, courtiers must first separate. They work to earn the gaze of the forsaken by making the idealistic dream a reality. While the dream goads the tragic and is overturned by the comic, the romantic embodies it. They seek identification not through victimage or comedy, but through consummation—a physical union that joins the Other to themselves and pushes the Other away from the dominant. This third position aptly describes the religious sectarian’s motive. Religious separatism is not simply concerned with identifying with the divine—if it were, it would completely remove itself from the view



imagining tragedy, comedy, and romance



of the dominant. Instead separatists leave the field but remain within the gaze of the mainstream. Their position is tenuous since they must continually negotiate their separateness while still appearing attractive. They prove their worth by mastering the cultural ideals. The religious sectarians then tease the mainstream. When they leave the field and refuse to play by the customary rules, they start their own game and make it look more exhilarating than the original. When the dominant frame of reference rigidly restricts them, they step just outside of it, or place another tangent to it. The sectarian leaves the frame, but steps up on a pedestal so that the dominant can get a good look when glancing toward the transcendent ideal. This romantic position is a Burkean frame of acceptance rather than a frame of rejection. To Burke, a frame of acceptance must be a “well-rounded” but sufficiently “organized system of meanings by which a thinking man gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it.” On the other hand, a frame of rejection is “partial”—both in the sense of “partisan” and unfinished. In other words, it is singular and simplistic. The distinction between frames of acceptance and rejection are not clear since all identification is a division or “the ‘acceptance’ of A involving the ‘rejection’ of non-A.” Burke does describe the tragic and comic frames as leaning more toward acceptance while the burlesque, the satire, and the grotesque tilt more toward rejection. The more predominantly rejecting frame is “preponderantly transitional” and less developed.26 Yet the former frames of acceptance can be stretched, critiqued, amplified, and even transcended. This book reveals how the romantic frame of acceptance is like the tragic and comic in its thoroughness, organization, and flexibility. That is, the romantic does more than merely reject the dominant. It does not simply construct a hard-shelled carapace to resist the winds of change. The romantic adapts and stretches, always seeking to be separate and chaste and yet trying to be beautiful and attractive. This conflicted position prompts the romantic to craft a wide range of rhetorical options. Thus, the religious separatist is not merely the irrational zealot— fracturing and destroying democracy—or the irritatingly rigid conservative who lazily rests on the comfortable structure of liberalism. As a romantic suitor, religious sectarianism has found another way to express difference while attempting identification—to participate by withdrawing.

10 romancing the difference

Separating while Attracting: Bob Jones University Thus, this text explores this vocabulary of romance as a way to interpret religious sectarian rhetoric specifically demonstrated in the public discourse of Bob Jones University. Chapter 2 centers on romantic memory-making. In their museums, Bob Jones University resists politicized histories that persist throughout modernity and offers an alternative history that seems peculiar to the dominant. As opposed to Benedict Anderson’s cenotaph, this romantic history is more like a photograph—painfully detailed and naïvely unframed with political baggage. While its romantic histories stand in direct contrast to the dominant’s tragic memory, imagining a Burkean comic solution to either romance or tragedy is difficult. Burke might, however, find comic relief to memory-making in art’s naturally resistant polyvocality. In chapter 3, I argue that the Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery articulates a Burkean hybrid of romantic comedy. Like Burke’s pied piper, the museum and gallery pipes a beautiful albeit separatist tune to woo their secular Other away from their vermin-infested lives. Yet the tune changes its players as well, and this collection of sacred art “prevents” these sectarians “from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly” themselves.27 As an aesthetic argument, the museum and gallery aptly presents an attractive picture of sectarianism. But when these romantics leave the idyllic and enter the social, their beauty seems passé. In chapter 4, I critique the university’s community outreaches. According to Burke, tragedy is a homeopathic medic, prescribing cures that resemble the malady they hope to solve. Burke imagines the comic alternative as allopathic, curing with dramatic opposites to social troubles. The romantic sectarians see both approaches as negligent and offer communion as therapy. While tragedy offers homeopathy and comedy offers allopathy to cure a sickened culture, romance simply offers sympathy. The university’s sympathetic talk in community affairs seems euphemistic when viewed through a Burkean lens. But in chapter 5, I consider Bob Jones University’s reaction to the media and political firestorm in Campaign 2000. While on the surface these romantics may seem to talk like Burke’s euphemistic mystics, a full mapping of their rhetoric reveals a different path. While political and media voices are speaking fully within the tragic dominant, the romantics talk dif-



imagining tragedy, comedy, and romance

11

ferently, worrying that their beauty has faded and struggling to appear attractively timely. All the voices in Campaign 2000 seem “unfitted by being fit in unfit fitness.” Within the conflicts between tragic passivity and scapegoating and romantic inopportunity, Burke’s comedy may provide a timely relief. Identifying the romantic motive in the rhetoric of Bob Jones University is useful to rhetorical and religious scholars because it nuances an understanding of these seemingly divisive separatists. The romantic’s lure may become tedious and slide into a dysfunctional relationship. Like the tragic hero, the romantic suitor needs the comic critic to correct fatalistic behavior. While Burke’s comic corrective does not sufficiently describe the religious sectarian, the comic critic is still the best hope for prescribing to the tragic and romantic a way to laugh at our humanity. The comic frame alone can ease the friction between and within the tragic and romantic frames. If critics understand the motive behind the religious romantic, they can more successfully prevent scapegoating this Other and more likely include it in a robust democratic practice. This text does not aspire to be a mere apologia for Bob Jones University or a sheer deconstruction of its talk. Nor will it seek to uncover nonpublic documents or reiterate standard outsider criticisms. In the Burkean spirit of agonistic pluralism, radical flexibility, and rhetorical creativity, I hope to shake off hasty generalizations and resist hackneyed dismissals of anything sectarian. Since my audience is not religious separatists per se but scholars in rhetorical and religious fields, my goal is to take seriously the values of robust democratic practice and to test their limits by including even these most divisive voices. If we scholars reaching for a more egalitarian public sphere can imagine a way to include even the religious separatist, then hope remains to include other frequently silenced voices.

Chapter 2 Cenotaphs and Photographs

Bob Jones University’s Articulation of Romantic Memory No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity, one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busybody who “discovered” the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.

z Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities Every October, Bob Jones University honors its Founder, his family, or influential faculty on Heritage Day with an elaborately produced program of music, readings, and film. In 1999 the Heritage Day program honored Bob Jones Jr. by highlighting his epitaph: “a prophet’s eye, a poet’s voice, a servant’s hand, a ransomed soul.”1 That year’s program director, William Moose, stressed that he wanted the students to be able to visualize the late chancellor. “Rather than talking about him, I would like them to see him.” Thus, video clips, songs, and recordings meticulously detailed and tightly focused on Jones without framing his life in contextual specifics were presented. The students experienced Jones not as someone who had passed but as someone whose ministry continues. When he spoke on the videos, he spoke to them directly. When he preached on the recording, he was not speaking to a chapel audience from years past; he was speaking to the current student body. It was not there and then, but here and now. Jones was not really gone but present. 13

14

ROMANCING THE DIFFERENCE

This romantic sectarian memory seems different from the usual tragic memory, and Benedict Anderson offers a metaphor to explain the contrast between them. In Imagined Communities Anderson describes cenotaphs—monuments or empty tombs that honor a dead person whose remains are elsewhere—as unique to modern nations. Framing Anderson within a Burkean critique, the cenotaph clearly becomes a product of modern national tragedy. When looking at the past, the tragic dominant sees history cenotaphically—as available for political use, as an empty structure ready to mold current contests, as a distant event to which they have little connection or obligation. These empty tombs of Unknown Soldiers benefit the modern nation because their contents are ambiguous and their structures are piously stable. Citizens may equally “fill” the void with their memory and may remember the past as distant but still important. They may vicariously acquire the hero’s redemption and absolve themselves of cultural guilt. These cenotaphs are like picture frames sitting on a dime-store shelf, filled with vague but not unattractive models that invite consumption and tragic redemption. Citizens would like to keep the cenotaph empty and the picture frame unpurchased so that the next onlooker might also be moved. We piously embrace the structure of the tomb—its mausoleum walls, its symbolic eternal flame, its ritualized honor—since this form helps us to remember past social struggles. But we want the contents themselves to remain unfixed and malleable. Romantic sectarians, however, have a contrary attitude toward history. They remember, but not in the same way modern citizens remember. Sectarians see the past as complete, as a finished portrait to be honored, as a near and ongoing event to which they have deep connections and obligations. To them, history is not a distant event but an ongoing battle. When they remember the Founder, for instance, their memorials are not an empty frame to be filled, but an unframed photograph, vibrant with fine detail and sharp focus. With Founder’s Day being an annual event, other memory-making punctuates these sectarians’ presentation to the outside world. When first visiting Bob Jones University, outsiders are encouraged to view the school’s history in three small museums: the Jerusalem Chamber, the Archives Room, and the Evangelism Museum. In the Jerusalem Chamber, guests are taken back to early Anglo-Protestant history to imagine the 1611 translation of the English Bible. A few steps away,



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the Archives Room memorializes the familial ties that preserve the school. And just next door, the Evangelism Museum remembers recent ministerial classes as well as past American Protestants who privilege separatism in their creed. When viewed together, the museums clearly articulate the romantic view of history. For these romantics, being beautiful to the world must accompany their decision to be separate from the world, and this lovely separation, they hope, can woo the lonely secular outsider towards themselves. When they talk about the past, however, these contemporary fundamentalists are like Anderson’s busybody. They want to fill the cenotaph with “real” (and thus to them, beautiful) remains. They want to consume the picture frame, own it, and fill it with what they perceive to be a “real” picture, a “real” memory. They are piously nostalgic for the past—pained that those around them cannot see it with the clarity they find so obvious. As a result, in their history-writing, authenticity is paramount. The purpose of this chapter is to identify and map the trajectory of romantic sectarian histories in order to theorize a separatist notion of memory-making. I argue that tragic history embraces a modern nation-time and, thus, finds power in cultural cenotaphs; yet religious sectarians cling to the premodern, romantic notion of sacred time and, thus, use authenticity to fill the empty monuments in order to craft a separated attraction. Conservative evangelical memory straightforwardly rejects the empty framework notion of the past. Their dramatic interpretation of history treats the primary event as a “real” and seemingly recent experience that deserves the most authentic portrayal. Memories as Cenotaphs or Photographs In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson argues that the modern notion of “nationhood” became possible only with the fading of three dominant ideas: that truth was contained in a particular written language, that society was organically centered on single elites, and that the past and the present were indistinguishable.2 Once the vernacular became prominent,3 society became decentralized,4 and time became linear. Peoples could imagine themselves as separate “nation states.” In other words, the cultural forces of language, society, and even notions of time allowed communities to construct themselves as nations.5

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Before the modern notion of nation, time was not linear, but more cyclical. The past was not “before,” and the future was not “after.” Past, present, and future were intimately connected, not in a simple progressive line but in a complex, mystical, divine plan. Anderson describes this as “a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical.”6 Thus, when the notion of a divine plan was no longer assumed, separate nations could identify their own past, their own memories, their own futures, and their own destinies. For the premodern human being, then, the past was not unimportant or indistinguishable. Simply put, the past never “was,” but continuously “is.”7 When time became indexed as past, present, and future, nationdefined collective memories were available. An official “past” or a collective memory was identifiable. Imagining nations was possible. Modernity, then, shook the divinity out of language, society, and time and created separate nations. The common tongue became preferred, and the common citizen became equal. Imagining something German as different from French or Italian was possible. But more important for my argument here, time became progressive and linear. With a “past” no longer near, the nation had to define it as essential. A “past” was delineated in order for a nation to be conceived. Memory, as a result, was born. With the past, according to Anderson, as “before,” a nation could craft a unique identity, a collective memory that connects to the common citizen rather than a divine plan. These broad sweeping changes, however, could not be universal. By wrenching language, society, and time out of the hands of the perceived divine, nations may be able to define themselves and capture their own destiny while leaving certain religious peoples in their wake. For these, language would remain sacred, society divinely organized, and time would continue to be cyclical. Contemporary fundamentalists perpetuate this devotion to the divine in their memories. Striving to identify with the sacred and to separate from the secular, they embrace a sacred time that to them is not progressive but recurring. They abide not by nation-time, as Anderson describes it, but by devout-time. The past is not far, but near. The past is still important but is not distant. Remembering is not as privileged as reviving. Telling Old Testament stories is not remembering a distant people and remote conflicts but rehearsing God’s continuous care. Telling their conversion narratives is not remembering a vague



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event but practicing contemporaneous worship. Even the future is not distinct since they discuss eschatological, apocalyptic end times as if they are existing forces at hand. This premodern, prenation notion of time perpetuates their desired separation from the dominant culture. And the three historical museums at Bob Jones University—the Jerusalem Chamber, the Evangelism Museum, and the Archives Room—demonstrate this peculiar sacred time. The first, the Jerusalem Chamber, clearly articulates the sectarian’s assumption that the past is near and ongoing. The Jerusalem Chamber plainly illustrates a desire to cling to photographic detail and uses “accuracy” as the dominant trope throughout. The Meticulously Detailed Photograph in Romantic Memory On September 6, 1980, Bob Jones University dedicated their 68,000 square foot expansion of the Mack Library.8 While increasing room for study areas, book storage, and computer use, the renovation also articulated the university’s separatist and photographic view of the past. Former New York Astor Hotel chandeliers grace the foyer and century-old Tiffany windows hang in the boardroom. Yet the newly constructed Jerusalem Chamber stands as a “foundation” for the library, reminding patrons of the group’s essential devotion to biblical texts. The Jerusalem Chamber is a replica of the Westminster Abbey room in which the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible, or “King James Version,” was translated. The room is a “faithful representation” of the original English Chamber.9 Bob Jones Jr., the school’s chancellor, visited the English Abbey and took meticulous measurements and made detailed sketches so that the room would look “as it must have been” in the English Tudor seventeenth century.10 Meant to more than merely house the university’s collection of ancient Bibles, the room takes the visitor back to a pivotal moment in Anglo-Protestant religious history. Bibles alone occupy the room’s displays. That the designers so scrupulously measured an antiquated place in order to photographically reproduce it on a different continent under different ideologies and with differing religious doctrines, indicates their devotion to the accuracy trope. To them, every detail must be preserved, and in this scrupulous preservation, the meaning emerges. Unlike the cenotaphic memory, the structure itself is insignificant for these romantics. Like

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Anderson’s busybody, without the details, the room is hollow. With them, however, the memory is made. Opposite the university archives display, the chamber rests several steps below the main library floor. Large, ornately carved wooden doors and noisy wooden floors proclaim the room as sharply different from the library surrounds. Although large, amber, diamond-patterned stained glass windows dominate the walls, the chamber is dimly lit—a sharp contrast from the library’s bright fluorescent lighting. The walls are textured to appear aged and stone-like, and the fireplace is made of dark wood paneling elaborately carved. A massive but shadowy sixteenth-century tapestry and a nineteenth-century woodcut of the original chamber are the only wall décor. Though the room feels somewhat different from a modern library, it resides only a few steps from the usual study areas. The room occupies a “foundational” position in relation to the rest of the library since the chamber is “sunken.” As a detailed tribute to the Anglo-Protestant Scriptures, the exhibit, in a sense, architecturally supports all the remaining library floors as the Scriptures, to these sectarians, support all human study. The central displays of original biblical texts and facsimiles draw the visitor’s attention. Poised as wooden desks with faint individual lamps, the display cases encourage the observer to stoop over and squint, like a scribe, to make out the original text. The displays provide very little information about each Bible—usually only the name, date, publisher, or donor. Instead, the Bibles seem to speak for themselves. Included in the display are fourth-century versions of the Greek New Testament: Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Sinaiticus. The textual mapping then leaps to the sixteenth century with leaves from the Luther Bible, the Great Bible, the Matthew Bible, the Bishops Bible, and the Breeches Bible. When descriptive stories are incorporated, they center on themes of protest, reform, and success. The contemporary fundamentalist feels at one with the medieval reformer and the American patriot. The connection is not labored or entertaining, but almost casual. The visitor must fill in the contemporary application, thus implying that the connection to struggles of the past is obvious and assumed. The process of protest, reform, and success seems an inevitable one for any truly noble separatist who remains true to the Text. The Luther Bible, for instance, was once suppressed for its newly created Protestant theology, but later became a “best seller” and made High German the



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national language. The Matthew Bible included parts from a “condemned” Tyndale Bible. The Bishops Bible’s translators are hailed as “pioneers.” The Breeches Bible was the text for the Puritans and was “never sanctioned by the church or state.” The Dutch Bible includes a lengthy explanation from the university Bible historian, David Beale, who links the text to John Calvin. American printings also dominate with a German Bible printed in 1776 by Germantown resident Christoph Sauer. Unbound pages from Sauer’s text were legendarily used as wadding and cartridge covers by both sides in the American Revolution. Yet the chamber’s description of this “Gun Wad Bible,” the first acknowledged printing of the Scriptures in America, only identifies it with the American cause. The chamber’s history stops with the Aitken Bible of 1781. No later texts are mentioned or included. A linear genealogy that might be useful within a tragic cenotaphic view of the past is not necessary in this romantic photograph. Simply featuring these periodic protests against compromise is enough. The visitor must connect the points and find that the story is not a progression but a repetitive portrayal of identical separatist commitments and motivations. The central object of the museum is an original 1611 translation on the far wall. Alone in a display case, it is simply labeled “KING JAMES VERSION 1611 Original Presented by Claude Q. Falligant.” The Bible is open to Ezekiel 40:1-44 with the super title: “The measuring of the Temple and of the Building of it.” As the ancient Hebrew thoroughly calculated and constructed the temple, so the twentiethcentury fundamentalist has carefully calculated and constructed this temple to the Anglo-Protestant Bible. The religious sectarians’ struggles continue to be the same as the Hebrews’ struggles. Thus, these fundamentalists see themselves as following in the footsteps of the ancient Hebrew prophets who carefully calculated and engineered their temple for the sake of their God. For both, maintaining painstaking details pleases the divine. When the newly renovated Mack Library along with the Jerusalem Chamber was dedicated in 1980, the university administration articulated devotion to the Holy Writ alongside their devotion to accuracy. For them, the Bible is not merely one text in the library, but a complete, correct, and ageless library in itself. Not only was it exact when it was written, the Scriptures continue to be precise and timeless. These separatists’ devotion to the text alone perpetuates their accuracy trope within their view of the past. At the dedication address, the

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president of the school, Bob Jones III, describes the Bible as “the most important book in this library.” He continues: It’s the only timeless book in this library. Every other book has to be updated. The volume of man’s knowledge is changing so rapidly that scarcely is a book off the press and well-broken-in than it’s already out of date. The Word of God where it speaks on matters of science is scientifically correct. In matters of history it is historically correct. It is archeologically correct. Geographically correct. The Word of God is forever settled in heaven. The other books we can take or leave. This book is the foundation of all that we believe and all that we live for. And we want to give the Word of God the central place of honor.11

Thus, the Jerusalem Chamber is more than a quaint nod to a centuries-old space on a distant continent. It is an integral part of the fundamentalist foundation for all study. Even their devotion to the Holy Writ rests on its accuracy while becoming a means to accuracy. That is, both as a means and an end, scriptural accuracy satisfies the romantic history. The university chancellor, Bob Jones Jr., reiterates the accuracy trope: The greatest library in the world is one volume with 66 books—the Word of God. It contains history, and it’s history that’s absolutely accurate. In fact, men have found that they can check their ideas of history and their archeological discoveries by the history of the Word of God. It’s a book that’s full of philosophy. And it’s accurate philosophy for it’s dictated by the God who established the laws upon which the best relationships and the final knowledge of man are founded. It’s full of poetry. There’s no more beautiful poetry than the Psalms and some of the chapters in the Prophets. It’s full of human wisdom and knowledge because God who made men’s minds can describe what man is like. It’s the best book in the world on psychology.

Whether exactly reproducing, meticulously preserving, or periodically citing, these romantics remember through photographic detail. There are no empty cenotaphs, but excruciatingly accurate snapshots that ground their histories. Their devotion to the past parallels their devotion to Scripture. Both must be remembered only with accuracy, and both are intimately connected to contemporary issues.



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Thus, the Jerusalem Chamber stands as a detailed photograph in romantic sectarian history. Just like Anderson’s busybody who seeks to fill the cenotaph with the most “real” remains, these fundamentalists strain to remember each detail of their past with accuracy. Kenneth Burke on the Cenotaph and Photograph Although this photograph accentuates the romantic positioning, Anderson’s cenotaph seems to feature Kenneth Burke’s tragedy. Its vacant interior and its mere substitution for an existing hero, position the cenotaph as tragic. The cenotaph is a substituted memorial to distant war heroes that encourages vicarious atonement for modernity’s citizens. In Attitudes Toward History Burke describes the tragic motive as “lend[ing] dignity to the necessities of existence, ‘advertising’ courage and individual sacrifice for group advantage . . . . [and] enabl[ing] the humble man to share the worth of the hero by the process of ‘identification.’”12 In this case, the cenotaph ambiguously imparts nobility to the mundane necessities of modern warfare. It advocates the individual’s subordination to the group. It empowers the average citizen to create and identify with a cryptic but lost identity. This lending, advertising, and enabling, according to Burke, all work toward the tragic’s goal of redemption from cultural guilt. As Anderson’s cenotaph occupant need not be known or even present for the grave to maintain its cultural power, so Burke’s tragic hero need not be “real” to represent the collective sacrifice so that “others might be vicariously heroic.”13 The hero’s vague identity gives the cenotaph its power. The unidentified occupant guarantees that any citizen may be imagined or substituted. In fact, cementing the identity of the cenotaph’s contents verges on blasphemy since it implies an impiety toward the cultural values that the cenotaph supports. That is, the cenotaph is valuable for the modern nation only when its structure is sound but its contents are imprecise. Within tragedy, then, the cenotaph makes the modern citizen both humble and glorified. “This sense of one’s limitations (in comparison with the mighty figure of the legend) provides one with a realistic attitude for gauging his personal resources, while his vicarious kinship with the figure gives him the distinction necessary for the needs of self-justification.”14 While admiring an imprecise hero, the citizen

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can move from subordination to the larger-than-life hero, to affiliating with the hero’s values. From timidity to confidence, from admiration to identification, from surrender to victory—only a fuzzy character could allow this vacillation among equally essential national values. As an empty sepulcher the cenotaph, like the tragic hero, is another “variant of the symbolic cluster in Christianity whereby the victim of original sin could share vicariously in the perfection of Christ by his membership in the Church, the corpus Christi.”15 The archetypal Christ’s tomb is vacant, so the modern nation’s cenotaph is empty and ready to be filled with needed remembrances. The tomb no longer houses the hero but merely remembers him. Thus, the edifice itself becomes sacred since the contents no longer need to be present. The tragic nation is pious toward the structure of the unfilled tomb—its alabaster foundation, its ubiquitous honor guard—but is impious towards its contents. The cenotaph’s ambiguity, its metonymy, and its archetypal similarity to Christ’s tomb all place it squarely in Burke’s tragic frame. Clearly, through the act of remembering, the pious citizens of a modern tragic nation use the cenotaph to preserve the national identity. As viewed in the Jerusalem Chamber, however, the romantic’s photograph does not resemble the tragic’s cenotaph. While the tragic vaguely remembers, the romantic actively resurrects the tomb’s contents. As Anderson’s “busybody” dissects and microscopically analyzes the DNA of the Unknown Soldier, so Bob Jones University’s histories assiduously preserve the meticulous details of the past. The Jerusalem Chamber shows that the romantic act of reproduction uses photographic detail to maintain their outsider identity and resurrect sacredtime. As a photograph, the romantic sectarian’s memories are exacting but two-dimensional. In the Evangelism Museum, for instance, they are as pious toward the past as the tragic, but pinpoint their focus so strictly that detailed representations are paramount. While the tragic insists that the cenotaph’s frame be unfilled, the romantic nearly insists that their historical photographs be unframed. In the Archives Room, their photographs are shown independent of context, free of causes or effects. Their detail alone is their nostalgic appeal, as their connection with contemporary conflicts seems obvious to their sectarian photographers. While the tragic and romantic remember differently, similarities do exist between them. The romantic act parallels the tragic in that both



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are piously searching the catacombs in order to perfect their cultural systems. Both the tragic and the romantic look to the past for solutions to contemporary troubles. Burke describes human nature as “naturally” seeking “for some immovable ‘rock’ upon which a structure of certainties can be erected.” When cultural systems seem unstable, citizens and sectarians explore “in the cosmos or in the catacombs some undeniable body of criteria. They try to salvage whatever values, still intact, may serve as the basis of new exhortations and judgments.”16 In the cultural tombs, the tragic and romantic search for foundations. When problems seem to shake their confidence, people dig deeper for cultural treasures that will salve and unify. In delving into those historical “catacombs,” both tragedy and romance “attempt to interpret history by ambitiously driven analogical extensions” in the push to stress “factors in history that can be called recurrent.” That is, in their search for foundations, citizens and sectarians create fuzzy connections that imply patterns of behavior. They shape their discoveries so that these discoveries punctuate and illustrate their view of the past. Yet Burke warns that “one can note the recurrent only by abstracting certain qualities from the given historical complexities.”17 That is, in their discovery and interpretation of the past, both the tragic and the romantic discount particulars to make their perspective cohere. While each may overlook opposite features, both are making historical complexities overly simple. Both are straining for recurrence. Both are grave-digging. This piety toward finding foundations and recurring consequences is an attempt made by both the romantic and the tragic to build their “system,” “to round” it out, and “to fit experiences together into a unified whole.” When faced with the constraints of their frame of acceptance, the tragic and the romantic must make their brittle perspectives more limber to resist the quaking earth. They tie more “pious linkages” to make their “interpretive network” more “complex.”18 By digging deeper, they hope to stand firmer. Thus the simplification, the recurrence, and the catacomb-raiding within their acts of history are parallel in both tragedy and romance. Yet the romantic differs from the tragic in its purpose and agency. The romantic clings to photographic accuracy which seems nostalgic to outsider audiences and which makes the past seem near rather than far. The Bob Jones University historical texts highlight this contrast. Their attention to meticulous detail as in the Jerusalem Chamber, their

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tight focus in the Evangelism Museum, and their unframed portrayals such as in the Archives Room make their memories stand outside the cenotaphic norm as well as reinforce their reach for a beautiful but isolated nostalgia. Overall, painstaking photographic detail dominates the romantic’s portrayal of the past. Within the culture of Bob Jones University, juxtaposing the uniformity of the past with contemporary efforts reinforces their assumption that, since the past is so close, it need not be recalled, but merely reinforced. The Tightly Focused Photograph in Romantic Memory Perceiving the finest details accurately is only possible with a tightly restricted focus. That is, while the cenotaph offers a structural piety, the photograph insists on a focal piety. The tragic history seeks encompassment and assimilation, but romantic history reaches for resistance and isolation. Only with a narrow, concentrated look at the past can these romantics maintain their alternative photographic memory. A Burkean interpretation of histories would highlight their “faithful reflections of reality” which are, in essence, “selections of reality” and which “must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.” As the historical narrative “meets the needs of reflection, we can say it has the necessary scope. In its selectivity, it is a reduction. Its scope and reduction become a deflection when the given terminology, or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter which it is designed to calculate.”19 In Burke’s view, then, any history—tragic or romantic— reflects, selects, and deflects reality. All mirror the ideological eccentricities of their own cultures. All sift out the most useful events and facts. All ignore distracting or undesirable specifics. Yet the tragic and romantic histories fundamentally differ in their historical focus. As Burke describes it, the tragic mechanism attempts to focus on meaning as “a set of concentric circles, of wider and wider scope. Those of wider diameter do not categorically eliminate those of narrower diameter. There is, rather, a progressive encompassment.”20 Yet the romantics’ focus becomes narrower and tighter. Instead of circumjacence, the romantic seeks convergence. Rather than expand its borders, the romantic studies the nucleus. In lieu of writing an epic, the romantic creates a maxim. Intead of pursuing assimilation, the romantic seeks a more beautiful isolation.



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The latest addition to the university’s memory is the Rotunda of the Bob Jones Jr. Seminary building. Named an “Evangelism Museum,” the exhibit is a strategic crafting of the romantic’s tight focus. While still reflecting, selecting, and deflecting reality, the Rotunda assiduously narrows its take on history to highly specialized minutiae. The romantic history acts as a solitary minor premise in an Aristotelian syllogism. In other words, rather than stand as an enthymeme—that rhetorical syllogism that invites an audience to fill in the missing piece—the romantic history is an Aristotelian maxim or proverb. The isolated detail becomes the conclusion itself, an assertion about right action.21 Housed within the foyer of the seminary, the Rotunda is a passageway for all seminary and graduate students in the university’s Seminary. The lower exhibit is divided between Jones Jr. after whom the building is named and Ministerial Class graduates whose academic progeny frequent that building. Originally and affectionately called “Preacher Boys” by the school’s founder, the Ministerial Class has always been a feature in school memorializing. Every year the Vintage yearbook includes a Ministerial Class portrait, and the Evangelism Museum devotes considerable space to these graduates. The earliest class pictures are simple group shots with individual personalities recognizable and noticeable. But as the Ministerial Class grows, its portraits present the class less as a medley of personalities and more as an individual group focused on a single goal. Some pictures feature the students standing en masse in symbolic shapes: a cross, an open book meant to represent a Bible, a shield, or a crown. They appear ready to march as one with singularity of purpose, the whole working together as greater than the sum of its parts. Amidst these memorials to the ministerial students, the observer can review the history of “Bob Jones University and the Stream of American Evangelism.” To view the “digital slide show,” a visitor stands at four separate kiosks represented as pulpits. Standing among the memories of the school’s protopreachers, observers become messengers. The first kiosk begins by explaining the Greek origins of the word evangelism as “carrying the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a world that does not know him.” A serene male voice reads the narrative while the slide show moves along. Beginning with a reading of Acts 1:822 and showing a painting of Christ’s Ascension, the presentation connects evangelism to the early disciples at Pentecost. The show adroitly skips to North America and the first Great Awakening. That is, the

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connection from the first-century Middle East to eighteenth-century North America is unproblematic and assumed. No justification for the connection between these two vastly different continents, centuries, or articulations of Christianity is offered; the observer must actively connect the two dissimilar events to make the progression sensible. The viewer briefly hears of George Whitefield’s involvement in the first Great Awakening, Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday’s urban revivals, and John R. Rice’s post–World War II Youth for Christ campaigns. The presentation abruptly halts at Billy Graham’s “Ecumenical Evangelism” which “troubled Fundamentalism by including theological liberals” when he claimed “I intend to go anywhere sponsored by anybody to preach the Gospel of Christ.” The narrator comforts the listener by claiming that “this separation” from Billy Graham “was not the end of evangelism.” Thus, these fundamentalists carefully distinguish themselves from the late twentieth-century evangelicalism, or as they call it “Neo-evangelicalism.” Their association is with an older “evangelism” rather than, to them, a diluted “neo-evangelicalism” that sacrificed the message for the sake of a broader appeal. These fundamentalists alone continue to carry the torch of Pentecost that others, in their view, tried to dim. They are nearer to the century-old “evangelism” than to a recent “evangelicalism.” Thus, the visitor must conclude from this singular Aristotelian maxim that these romantic sectarians remain true to God’s original plan. But only the minor premise is ever articulated in the Rotunda. Like an Aristotelian maxim that compactly urges right action by its brief nod to a completed argument,23 these romantic sectarian memories are tightly compressed hybrid syllogisms that merely sound incomplete to the tragic outsider. The second kiosk focuses on the Jones’s urban revivals. Beginning with Bob Jones Sr. as one of the “leading urban evangelists,” the presentation repeats the story that Jones Sr. was brokenhearted over the young people he met in his travels whose “faith was shattered by liberal professors.” His founding of the school itself was not to create professionals as much as it was to create evangelists. His primary evangelistic emphasis was as important as his orthodoxy. While he “[stood] without apology for the old-time religion,” he reminded his “preacher boys” that “it takes evangelistic unction to make orthodoxy function.” His son, Bob Jones Jr., put a “red carpet on the sawdust trail.” To him, film, Shakespearean plays, and sacred art were part of evangelism since the purpose of all the arts was “to glorify God and bring lost



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souls to Christ.” All elements of the university’s education, then, were evangelistic. No matter what the medium, whether a camp meeting or a Merchant of Venice production, the message is always divine. All action is part of their maxim urging evangelism. By the third kiosk, the story of evangelism disperses from the Jones’s focus to those of the administrators leading the Ministerial Class. Former directors of ministers, Monroe Parker, Gilbert Stenholm, and Richard Rupp are remembered in the third kiosk as well as with sculpted busts in the center of the room. The story describes the boom in the Ministerial Class after World War II when countless young men had been moved to join the ministry and to become part of “an army of soul-winners.” Later, Stenholm guided the “preacher boys through the confusion and controversy instigated by Billy Graham.” The slide show says little else about this defining moment in recent fundamentalist history. Graham is simply described as a troublemaker who refused to connect with the original disciples. No other explanation or deliberation seems necessary within their memory. This singular statement alone is enough. The listener must fill in the rest of the narrative and must complete the syllogism. The fourth story in this Rotunda describes the last thirty years of “church planting” around the world. The narrator reminds listeners, now standing in their fourth “pulpit,” that “the evangelistic mission of BJU has not wavered from its founding” and asks personally and pointedly about the listeners’ “standing” with God: “Where do you stand?” Thus, this story of “evangelism” is not advancing but stationary. The Ministerial Class has expanded and the administrative tasks have been delegated, but the purpose is still the same. Even the term “Evangelism” Museum is carefully chosen, connecting these fundamentalists with the early apostles and not with the less-than-separatist twentieth-century articulation of “evangelicalism.” Hanging above the memories of Jones Jr., the preacher boys, and the ministerial administrators is a mural of American evangelists. Up the circular staircase but directly above the Jones’s display is a brief and edited survey of this continent’s preachers: Roger Williams, Gilbert Tennant, Jonathan Edwards, David Brainerd, George Whitefield, Francis Asbury, John Leland, Timothy Dwight, Asahel Nettleton, Luther R. Rice, D. L. Moody, J. Wilbur Chapman, R. A. Torrey, A. I. Gordon, Billy Sunday, W. B. Riley, and Bob Jones Sr. A separate portrait to “hymn writers,” Fanny Crosby, Philip Bliss, and Ira Sankey

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stands apart from the line of preachers. Placed in a sort of timeline, the preachers stand together with Roger Williams’s hand seemingly placed on Gilbert Tennant’s shoulder. In the background is a frontier camp meeting with a menagerie of people standing and listening intently; even Native Americans observe from a distance. The mural also features the circuit-riding preacher, alone with his horse, crossing a stream in his travels. The third scene remembered in the pulpit is of an urban revival with the crowd a mere sea of faces, and the preacher, resembling Bob Jones Sr., animatedly stirring his listeners. Behind the mural, a short description of each evangelist’s life informs the visitor of his “stand” against compromise and collusion. Each honorable life, then, is additional proof within the romantic’s syllogism. While never stating the other elements of the argument, these devout figures stand together as fundamentalists see themselves standing today. Both then and now, beautiful separation has pleased God, and with these beautiful, evangelizing separatists, all may have God’s blessing. This history never completely states that argument but merely reduces it to a single maxim. As the visitor views the mural, the gaze of every preacher is diverted away from the observer’s eye—every gaze except Jones Sr. Piercing through any sense of distance or detachment, Jones’s portrait demands the viewer’s attention. His commanding, narrow focus slices through any apathy or separation from the argument these texts attempt to further. While the rest of the Evangelism Museum tightly focuses on Ministerial Classes, founders, administrators, and singular purposes, Jones’s eyes zero in on the contemporary visitor. His shooting gaze revives the past and makes the deceased revivalist near, accessible, and still admonishing. A key influence on the choices made for the Rotunda mural was David Beale, a university church historian and author of Pursuit of Purity. For the sake of “accuracy” and “truth,” Beale, then, writes this history by crafting the fundamentalist genealogy not from the early twentieth century, but from deeper in the Anglo-Protestant consciousness. He defines fundamentalism as more than merely a literal interpretation of the Bible but “as the lengthened shadow of Moses and the prophets, of Christ and the apostles, of Augustine and Calvin, of the English Separatists and Puritans, of Wesley and Whitefield, of the German Pietists and the English Brethren, of London’s Spurgeon and Princeton’s Warfield—and of all who continue loyal to its principles and genius.” Within Beale’s metaphor of a “lengthened shadow,” his



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romantic view of the past is clear. With antebellum protofundamentalists, the “lengthened shadow” of Hebrew patriarchs and Western Protestant Reformers, the latter must stand alongside the former. Just as eighteenth-century Jonathan Edwards could stand together with twentieth-century Bob Jones in the Rotunda mural, so certain ancient devout are present with particular, more recent devout. One has not gone before, in Beale’s view, but remains together with the more recent. Time is not a linear progressive pattern, but a continuous, ever-present phenomenon. To him, the fundamentalists persist, and any that persist are fundamentalists. Others vary, but fundamentalism remains “true.”24 While he admits that fundamentalism per se began in the naming of the Fundamentals in the 1910s, Beale goes back further to the Niagara-on-the-Lake Bible Conference that produced those fundamentals and even to the1850s prayer meetings—a “third Great Awakening”— which produced the aforementioned Bible Conference. The Niagara conference was the initial sowing of fundamentalist seed. “Most of the essential features of fundamentalism, however, find their roots in Niagara.” In describing this Niagara Conference, Beale creates a laundry list of all the sermons preached at the conference with the preacher’s name, his denomination, his life span, his sermon title, and a very brief excerpt of the sermon’s contents.25 Beale offers little textual discussion of these sermons or even any contextual analysis. He simply presents facts alone as sufficient proof of the participants’ stand. His focus is narrow and confined to specifics alone. The text rarely broadens to discuss the causes or effects of fundamentalism. The sociopolitical events surrounding fundamentalism, the leaders’ motivations, and general themes are absent in this history. Fundamentalism simply is and always has been. The movement seems unencumbered by any outside influences. Beale’s compact focus on minute details blurs any environmental features. Pivotal to Beale’s fundamentalist lineage is his forebears’ take on the future. That is, eschatology—the ecclesiastical doctrine of the future—defines protofundamentalism for Beale. When Beale is analytical, he conflates the past, present, and future. The past and the present are connected because of their seemingly identical views of the future. The antebellum protofundamentalists, as well as early church fathers and seventeenth-century Puritans, are admirable because of their perspective on forthcoming events.

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The fact that the early fundamentalists almost all held to a premillennial view of prophecy26 did not preclude eschatology becoming a divisive issue. Indeed, it was the debate over eschatology that started the Niagara Conference on the road to decline. Premillennialism has had its ups and downs throughout church history. The ante-Nicene fathers (i.e., those prior to the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325) were largely premillennial, the vast majority defending the doctrine of two distinct resurrections (one for the righteous and one for the wicked) as opposed to the single resurrection of amillennialism. However, since the early church believed itself to be in the midst of the Great Tribulation, they naturally assumed that Christ would return for his church after the tribulation, which is the post-tribulational view. By the end of the fourth century, amillennialism had become the standard interpretation, and it remained so until after the Reformation. Though some of the seventeenth-century Puritans espoused premillennialism, it did not come into its own until the nineteenth century. The upheaval of the French Revolution and a new interest in the Jews helped bring about a revival of historic premillennialism in Britain. At the same time dispensationalism was being popularized by the Plymouth Brethren.27 Amidst all the technical details of millennialism, Beale firmly constricts his analysis to the singular issue of eschatology and conflates past, present, and future as one. Future events are not merely forthcoming, but current. The past deliberations are not about obsolete issues, but contemporary matters. Whether early Christians or American Separatists or present-day fundamentalists, all agree that future events are crucial doctrines. Beale concludes by further conflating the past, present, and future as proof of God’s continuous care: “The Fundamentalist. . . . will recognize his vital need of the God who has worked miracles in the days of his fathers, but he will also know to avoid the sins that would limit his usefulness in the Lord’s work.” His is a history of personalities who are reduced to proverbs and who persist in the old doctrines and persevere through troubling hardships. He lists the dominant people and paints them as identical to patriarchs of the faith: “like the English Puritans,” “like Aaron and Hur,” and “like the man from King David’s mighty three.”28 He converges on singular events, ideas, and individuals and portrays his history as continuous. His history is far from epic, but episodic, punctuated by solitary stands amidst the stock conflicts and adversaries. Thus, Beale’s history itself, like the Rotunda presen-



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tation, stands alone—sporadic and focused—in the overall romantic reach for beautiful isolation. The Unframed Photograph in Romantic Memory This detailed and sharply focused romantic photograph history, however, is rarely framed within the social, political, and cultural environment. The romantic’s memory seems independent, even isolated, from past events and, as a result, is more easily connected to contemporary issues. To the tragic outsider yearning for atonement with the past, the romantic offers a charming nostalgia. The tragic’s piety is “painful,” according to Burke, because it “[requires] a set of symbolic expiations (such as martyrdom or intense ambition) to counteract the symbolic offenses involved in purely utilitarian actions.”29 Within the modern notion of nation, time has been re-indexed making the past as something “before” and distant. Tragedy, then, is pained to make that remote and vague event seem near. The tragics’ atonement is necessary due to the distance they have created. Yet the romantic is not similarly goaded with the cultural ideals and is not striving for atonement. The romantic assumes redemption from its outsider status and is reconciled with its past. To the tragic, the romantic’s proximity to the past seems odd and quaint. Thus, in its seemingly intimate connection to the past, the romantic seems attractively nostalgic to the outsider. The tragic painfully yearns for that connection to the faraway past. The romantic’s seeming nostalgia, then, appears to be an answer to the tragic’s piety. What the tragic strains to remember with their cenotaph, the romantic has in hand. The romantic, then, in its tightly focused photographic reviving of the past leaves the picture unframed. Their photographic histories are displayed unfettered with sociopolitical causes and effects. The meticulous detail alone creates a nostalgic appeal—as if they are living in a past they never left. Burke might describe the romantic photographic history within his notion of a “pure document.” He accounts for historians’ attempt to craft a “pure document”—a history free of ideology, persuasion, or perspective—in their reach for their “documentary” ideal: “For the documentary facts are the medium with which the historian works; and insofar as he tries to write ‘pure document,’ he is placing the major stress upon the medium itself. In this sense such historiogra-

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phy would be a featuring of agency. Avoiding the problems of causal ancestry, it would simply record whatever historical events are known to have occurred together.”30 In other words, in attempting to craft a purely accurate history, historians feature the medium or agency of their history. The means of history becomes more essential than the history itself. Proof of accuracy overwhelms the story. The romantic sectarian’s history fits this notion of “pure document.” Like Burke’s documentary ideal, the romantic sectarian’s retelling of the events themselves outshines their causes and effects. The particulars overtake the context; the details outdo the analysis. Any attempt at analysis ruins the nostalgic picture. Yet Burke is less than hopeful that a “pure” history is possible: “For the historian must in some way seek to characterize, summarize, and place the period with which he is concerned. And in his presentation of an historical era, he is guided by more or less clearly formed notions of its essence. . . . Such wider claims of definition must make themselves felt surreptitiously. He must give us essences while disclaiming any such purpose.”31 Specifically, the ideology still ekes through, and the context still unfurls. The romantic’s photograph, while seemingly frameless, is still framed within the separatists’ perspective. The details they choose still cluster into an overall ideology of nostalgia. At Bob Jones University, this quaint nostalgia is most striking in their own institutional history. In its painstaking photographic portrayal, this history seems less a description of past events, and more a current articulation of present policy. After leaving the seventeenth century and the Jerusalem Chamber, a visitor is drawn up into the Archives Room—a museum display of university memorabilia. The Archives are quite dark, thus, compelling the observer to hone in on the memorabilia alone and to ignore its structure. The details, then, become paramount. Half of the Archives presentation is devoted to Bob Jones Sr., an early twentieth-century urban evangelist affectionately called “The Founder,” who instituted the school in 1927. The first display clearly identifies Jones Sr. as an educator by showcasing his honorary doctoral robes in religion and law. The scarlet and purple velvet accenting the robes echoes throughout the room’s décor lending a royal air to the room. The same case houses formal plaques and awards and includes a portrait of Mrs. Jones Sr. From this regal formality, the Archives turns to homespun informality much like a family photo album. Candid pictures of Jones Sr.



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with his childhood nurse, his dog, and his schoolmates along with other mementos—a safety razor, school awards, and fraternity pins—guide the observer to build an endearing familial relationship with the subject. The room memorializes Jones Sr.’s urban evangelistic meetings with the help of newspaper clippings, printed sermons, and newspaper cartoons as well as formal family portraits, wedding pictures, and candid photographs. Included are his desk pen and pencil set, a letter from contemporary evangelist and friend, Billy Sunday, and even a birthday card to “Father” signed by the faculty’s young children. Among those childlike scrawls on that card, visitors can make out several current faculty members’ names. These minutiae seem charming and familial. No contextualization clouds the visitor’s perspective. The displays never mention the Great Depression or the world wars. The history of the family and the school itself are seemingly self-contained and sufficient—even “pure.” Although the Archives’ remembering turns from family photos to building artifacts when recalling the founding of the school in 1927, the memory-making is as detailed as before. A doorknob from the dining hall at that first College Point, Florida campus, an appeal for funds from Jones Sr. to his many converts across the South, and photos of ground-breakings and foundation-pourings are interspersed with photos of young Bob Jones Jr.’s military school days and Jones Sr.’s cuff links. The story of this school’s founding is a story of a family. Remembering the institution is remembering the individuals. The broader stories bow to personalities and idiosyncrasies. Grander themes are less important than finer details. Eventually the family memorial becomes corporate. The memories of the Founder merge into memories of his son, Bob Jones Jr., and grandson, Bob Jones III, and portray the school’s institutional expansion. The years during Jones Jr.’s presidency are remembered for their growth as the school grew into a university and moved to its present location in Greenville, South Carolina. Family portraits, weddings, and a few candid snapshots still pepper these displays, but the behind-the-scenes machinery of this now massive operation directs the remembering. Pictures feature the steel-girded shelves that support the university press warehouse, student-filled study carrels in the university library, and market-driven public relations campaigns to prove that “BJ Cares.” Current administrators, while previously pictured only occasionally, now pervade the exhibit.

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The movement through the school’s generations might seem typical for a tragic progression with the university strengthening from one man’s vision to a corporate empire. Yet these fundamentalist memories are not presented within a linear evolution but as a singular, continuous event. The institution has not moved beyond its humble beginnings but persists in them. The story of the school is not a progression but a perpetual proof of God’s care. A video presentation within the Archives plainly articulates this romantic theme. In the center of the displays, the visitor is invited to sit and view a film production of the family and the founding of the school. While highlighting pictures already on display in the Archives, the voices of “the Founder” and his wife allow the visitor to connect with the original administration. A violin solo and then a string duet play a melancholy “Amazing Grace.” An original recording of Bob Jones Sr. explains his initial motivation for starting the school: he saw “young people losing their faith.” The “foundation” for the school was in College Point, Florida, but after six years, Mrs. Jones Sr. explains, “we were inaccessible in Florida,” and the operation moved to Cleveland, Tennessee. After surveying the school’s exponential growth in Tennessee and permanent move to South Carolina, the film presents Jones Sr.’s insistence that there is “no human explanation for [the school’s success].” Mrs. Jones Sr. reminds the listener that the school is “essentially the same. . . . We can’t change anything. We couldn’t. We wouldn’t be Bob Jones University.” And in her words is found the theme of these archives: God’s consistent success over and above sociological or political machinations. “Change” or progress is undesirable within romantic memory. Persistence of the original ideals is crucial. The past, then, cannot be far, but is near and ongoing. Absent is any historical or social framing of the school’s history. The family/institutional history is autonomous and even uncontaminated by secular scheming. Like Burke’s “pure document,” the medium of history—photographic accuracy—dominates while veiling any ideological framing. The university Archives Room acts as a lengthy visual aid for the school’s most recent official history, Standing Without Apology. Written by Daniel Turner, a university faculty member, Standing may seem merely complimentary, but actually represents a romantic history or a Burkean “pure document.” Like the Archives Room, Turner’s text begins as a family history and blossoms into a corporate remembering. Drawing from the Jones family’s collection, faculty interviews, and the



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university’s official files, Turner compiles a massive encyclopedia of university memories. In a Church History review,32 William Vance Trollinger calls Standing “interesting” but “exceedingly uncritical” and Turner a “loyal insider” with a “lack of perspective” and no “sign of regret.” That “lack of perspective,” however, is exactly what makes Turner’s history an example of romantic nostalgia. Like the Archives Room, Turner includes little contextualization in his history. The text reads like an overly straightforward presentation, a laying out of all the cards with little analysis. Its picture, then, is unframed, but the romantic nostalgia, however, clearly shines through. Turner’s laudatory positioning does not mean, however, that all information is only positive. While Standing Without Apology is clearly an official history, blemishes are plainly revealed. To meet its goal of photographic accuracy, Turner’s camera focuses on beauty marks and warts alike. By “telling all,” Turner’s history features that precision necessary for romantic sectarian histories. Turner baldly presents unfortunate events within the school’s history. He lists faculty members who have disagreed ardently with school policy, who have organized resistant “prayer meetings” to stop school functions, and even one who wrote “maliciously” about the school in H. L. Mencken’s national magazine, the American Mercury.33 Thus, unsavory details abound in Turner’s account, but he deals with them so painstakingly that the history seems simply accurate. Like Burke’s “pure document,” these facts are plainly presented with little contextualization as if to dismiss any sociopolitical or authorial intervention in the events. With their history purely photographic, the romantics preserve their nostalgia and proximity to the past. When Turner cites the school’s original means to instill “good breeding,” the description is more than merely a peek into an old-fashioned past but a presentation of contemporary policy: One major goal of the [Bob Jones] College was to make ladies and gentlemen out of the students; Bob Jones Sr. often preached, “A Christian will always be a lady or a gentleman.” In this connection, the students received lectures on etiquette by Mrs. Jones Sr. or by the dining hall supervisor before meals. The meals were all “family style” to give students a sense of community and belonging. Family-style meals also gave students the opportunity to practice good manners and display good

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breeding under the supervision of the faculty, who served as hosts and hostesses at each table. Students were also required to meet certain dress standards for both morning and afternoon classes, for Sundays, and for social events. They were taught to be punctual and to treat others with Christian consideration. Social functions were numerous and well chaperoned, with as many as six formal banquets, one formal tea, and five dinner parties for the students. At these functions, Dr. Bob’s “boys and girls” were expected to behave with poise and dignity.34

The students at Bob Jones University still receive regular lectures on etiquette. They still must meet required dress standards for morning and afternoon classes and other special events. They still must be prompt and polite. They still must attend formal events. Turner’s description, then, is less a harking back to the past and more a present argument for current procedures. What seems like a portrait of early twentieth-century coeds chatting at the soda fountain in unspoiled letter sweaters and prim ankle-length skirts survives in living Technicolor in this romance. That is, the past is not past, but is near and accessible. The picturesque photograph they present endures unyellowed by time. To redeem the past, the tragic must simply step into the romantic mindset and then what seems so far away can be attainable. The meticulous accuracy, narrow focus, and unframed photograph characterize the resistant romantic’s view of the past. What the tragic cenotaph remembers through ambiguity, the romantic photograph remembers through accuracy. While the tragic speaks metonymically, the romantic speaks authentically. While the tragic’s memorial requires the archetypal similarity to Christ’s tomb, the romantic’s memorial requires an exacting devotion to the divine’s Words. While the tragic feels detached from its past, the romantic feels connected. Both are pious, both search the historical catacombs for solutions to contemporary problems, and both reflect, select, and deflect while crafting their histories. Despite these similarities, their essential purposes and agencies are dramatically different. The romantic sectarian’s painstakingly detailed, sharply focused, and unframed photograph seems nearly blasphemous to the modern tragic nation. The tragic cenotaph must remain empty to be culturally valuable, and when filled with meticulous details, their memorial loses its cultural power. This structurally sound but internally flexible cenotaph seems merely empty to the romantic sectarian. Without that intimate and



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detailed connection to their forebears, their memorial seems meaningless. While the dominant pushes ahead on the timeline of progress, the sectarian refuses to see the line at all. “Memory” and the past to the dominant are not merely a “counter memory” for the sectarian. Rather, the past is continuous and current—a perpetual proof of God’s care, the dominant’s exclusion, and the sectarian’s need for a separated, meaningful memory. Their photographic history, however, remains rather two-dimensional. With only a detailed and narrow focus, the unframed snapshot seems shallow. The sectarian histories, then, are dusty photo albums of unfamiliar people, wearing antiquated clothing and stern expressions. Yet they are treasured for their nostalgia and admired for their connection to a seemingly distant past. In this sense, their two-dimensionality may be exactly what makes them beautifully simple and inevitably irresistible. Their contrary memory, then, preserves the romance. Nevertheless, within Burkean comedy, the tragic’s cenotaph and the romantic’s photograph are inadequate. The comic would find both too pious and too stationary. Both are “fit in unfit fitness.” That is, in the tragic and romantic’s pious devotion to remembering their values, their memories are ineffective or “unfit.” The comic would prefer imprecision and agility over stability. A Burkean comedian would rather “muddle through” than be “over-exact” and “let events shape themselves in part, to make up one’s specific policies as one goes along, in accordance with the unforeseen newnesses that occur in the course of events.”35 How, then, would Burke have us remember? Certainly the marble walls, the larger-than-life statues, and the eternal flames would be inadequate historical comedies. Even the recent attempts by curators to make history more complex—featuring domestic artifacts and inviting and displaying patrons’ responses—are too controlled to be comic. And the sectarian’s photographic devotion to accuracy would equally fail as a Burkean comedy. Burke’s comic memorial must resist any preplanning and defy any exactitude. It must be tenuous and poly-vocal and provoke constant critique and impiety. Perhaps the Burkean comedian would be the mime on the steps of the museum who distracts visitors away from the singular but awe-inspiring tragedy inside its mausoleum walls. Perhaps the comedian would be the

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rabble-rousing tourist who disrespectfully quizzes tour guides about the settled story they tell. Imagining a comic memorial is difficult since examples are so rare. Then again, Burke gives a clue when he describes art as “naturally antinomian.” Art itself accumulates “discordant voices arising out of many systems” that must “undermine any one rigid scheme of living.”36 Thus, art is essentially polyvocal and dissonant and this multiplicity dismantles any presumed piety. So perhaps an ideal comic memorial is an art museum—filled with contrary accents that prevent a culture from becoming too much itself. Perhaps art’s antinomian qualities are strong enough to make even the most romantic sectarians into Burkean comedians.

Chapter 3 the romantic pied piper

Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery A piper who had insisted upon the right to call his own tune became unhappy when everyone began saying to him, “I don’t care what tune you play.” He discovered that he wanted them to care tremendously— and to make them do so, he even tried outrageous tunes. Though insisting upon his professional immunity, he didn’t want to be too . . . immune, since complete tolerance would imply the unimportance of his craft. He simultaneously wanted separation and integration.

z Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form Kenneth Burke imagines his notion of comedic art within the fable of the pied piper. With their homes infested with rats, the tragic citizenry is doomed without the help of the peculiar and musical artist to carefully eradicate the social plague. This piper stands at the borders of the town. But the tragic cares little for the piper’s background; it is purely pragmatic—simply seeking an effective solution. The comic piper will give the dominant the efficient resolution, but he wants them to care deeply for the tunes he offers. He wants to be useful and beautiful. He wants to help, but he also wants to inspire. Burke frames this tension within the comic piper as concurrently seeking “separation and integration.” The artist wants to be impervious to cultural whims while shaping them. Both alien and allied, the comedic piper negotiates these two conflicting identities. Within Burke’s metaphor, however, a third persona can be imagined—the romantic piper. While the comic, in Burke’s theory, stands fully inside the cultural borders, the romantic piper clearly stands beyond the dominant. Both the comedic and the romantic piper, however, must negotiate between separation and integration, both want their audiences to care deeply about their expression, and both seek to

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change the rat-infested tragedy. Thus, both play at the borders between “inside” and “outside” and still submit to the tragic’s whims. Yet while the comedic piper is primarily outrageous (while still wooing the rats), the romantic works harder at being beautiful to the citizenry. While the comedic confronts cultural plagues, the romantic distracts from it. To the comedic, the vermin resides in all citizens’ houses. To the romantic, the vermin may not be the problem at all. The romantic piper plays a beautiful tune, not to entice the rats to their destruction, but to woo the citizens to their salvation. The comedian removes the pests to save the town. The romantic would like to remove the citizens and leave the pests. The comical piper sees tragedy’s problems and solutions within the social structure itself. He can identify the specific problem and remove it, leaving the town and its citizens in place. In the comic scenario, the pests leave and are destroyed; in the romantic narrative, the people leave behind their infested town and enter a new ethic. Both the comedian and the romantic offer a solution to social problems with their art. The former remains inside and worries that the tragic does not care; the latter remains outside and demands that the dominant join him, proving how much they do care. Burke’s foregrounding of the pied piper offers a heuristic for interpreting one of the strangest and most moving texts of these religious sectarians1: the Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery (M&G). Started in 1951 with only twenty-five paintings, the collection now displays over four hundred pieces permanently and is consistently recognized as the finest collection of religious art in the Western Hemisphere. For Bob Jones Jr., a gallery of sacred art was an appropriate melding of the university’s emphasis on religion and the fine arts. He established two criteria for the paintings—only religious themed artifacts and that too from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries.2 That an ultraseparatist and ultraconservative fundamentalist university would acknowledge, value, assemble, and display this superlative collection is so unexpected that scholars usually ignore it. Few know what to do with this obvious incongruity. Historian Mark Dalhouse only mentions the M&G briefly in his history of BJU and that as just one of the many untenable contradictions of these fundamentalists. And yet, as we explore BJU, its commitment to theological and lifestyle separatism, and a constituency that continues to support it, we will find that the school is not a monastery and its supporters can hardly be considered separatist pilgrims. Instead, we will discover that,



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while the school does not allow its students to attend movie theaters, it has produced films that have won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and represented the United States at an international film conference. We will also find a school whose founder once remarked that “every time we hire a Ph.D. we need a week of revival,” yet which boasts an internationally acclaimed art gallery, regularly hosts international opera companies, and whose president once regularly took faculty members to spend summers studying at Stratford-upon-Avon.3 The romantic pied piper is easily found in Bob Jones University’s Museum and Gallery. In their talk to their Others as well as to themselves, these romantic sectarians use the Museum and Gallery to distract their secular outsiders from the social problems around them and to woo them towards a more separatist life. The purpose of this chapter is to unpack the rhetorical clusters in the discourse surrounding the Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery in order to theorize a Burkean hybrid of romantic comedy. This chapter argues, therefore, that in this text these religious sectarians most closely approximate romantic comedians since their collection of art clearly “prevents” them “from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly” themselves.4 Talking to the Others For Burke, art is stirring, unruly, and rhetorical. He defines art as more than just a painting or a novel, but as anything “designed for the express purpose of arousing” or “winning” emotions. Art is at its most beautiful when it induces the strongest emotional commitments.This “eloquence” is art’s purpose and is achieved “by adapting it in every minute” to human desires.5 Thus, art’s moving beauty is at its best when continually bending to the human condition. Yet art is not only poignant, but also essentially defiant. To Burke, art can never be singular. “Art is naturally antinomian,” he contends. “Art’s very accumulation (its discordant voices arising out of many systems) serves to undermine any one rigid scheme of living—and herein lies ‘wickedness’ enough.”6 Art, then, is essentially polyvocal and dissonant with that multiplicity dismantling any presumed piety. As an arousing and antinomian medium, art, then, is ripe with rhetorical possibilities. 7 Burke frames the aesthetic as audiencecentered, continually “new,” and always “true” based on its practicality. That is, art goes beyond mere “expression” or entertainment to

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craft a bond between the artist and the audience “with both parties actively participating. In such an approach, the poet’s ‘self-expression’ or the audience’s ‘appreciation’ will necessarily figure, but the main emphasis will be elsewhere.”8 In creating that “elsewhere” audience–artist bond, art becomes a “translation” and as such is a “compromise.” In the relating between artist and audience, the art transforms both participants, forging new ties and discarding old ones. A cobbled compromise results. Art thus offers new options independent of the original subject.9 The Rosetta Stone, for instance, was crafted for communicating particular information indigenous to the times. Yet for us, we value it as an answer key for translating Egyptian. The original carvers of the Stone spoke not only to their past but also to our present—an audience beyond their original intentions. Burke reasons that “we owe the stone no allegiance. We use it for our own purposes, for a ‘truth’ which did not exist at the time of erection.”10 Thus, to Burke, art has the potential to move, to dismantle, and to invent. More than a mere demonstration or amusement, art is persuasion.11 And through this eloquent, polyvocal, artistic rhetoric, Burke imagines that his comic dream may be fulfilled. Through art, cultures may “return to inconclusiveness.”12 And no text could seem more inconclusive among these religious sectarians than the Museum and Gallery. While the art itself is eloquent and moving, the collecting and displaying of the art within these fundamentalist walls seems somewhat defiant and even impious. The M&G collection seems to embody the antinomian quality that Burke suggests lies at the heart of all artistic endeavor. Surprised journalists, art critics, and business people seem bewildered that the likes of these fundamentalists would honor such beauty. Perpetually, mainstream press stands agape at the contradiction of a provincial, hard-hitting, Protestant fundamentalist institution foregrounding the finest in European, mostly Catholic, and often lusty art. Washington Post art writer Paul Richard seems to chuckle at the paradox: Bob Jones University, in short, is not what you would call an avant-garde institution. Yet Bob Jones was buying Baroque art many years before Baroque came into fashion. Bob Jones University, whose students are instructed to reject the saints and doctrines of the Roman Catholic



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Church, is Protestant, and how. Yet Bob Jones Gallery, and its traveling exhibit, is full of Catholic paintings of the Counter-Reformation. . . . If one did not know better, one might well regard this as a Roman Catholic show. Something strange is going on here. Protestant Fundamentalists, whose wood churches are as sparse as white china doorknobs, whose unpretentious hymns are shoveled out four-square, traditionally oppose public ostentation. Yet these Baroque pictures—with their ecstasies of passion, their flesh and writhing limbs—are some of the most sumptuous in the history of art. One supposes Fundamentalists, at least those who accept “the absolute authority of the Bible,” might pause (as did the Jews) before happily admiring visual works of art.13

The contradiction is almost too tempting to resist for journalists. Often they simply gush at the M&G’s superlative distinctiveness. Better Homes and Gardens calls it “the finest collection of religious art in America.”14 The Italian paintings compose “one of the most remarkable collections of Italian paintings anywhere,” according to the late Sydney Freedberg, chief curator emeritus at the National Gallery of Art. This is no mean collection that merely dabbles in a few finer pieces with bland student paintings filling in the holes. Rather, the M&G features such Italian artists as Batoni, Beinaschi, Botticelli, Carlo Dolci, Giordano, Palma Giovane, Maratta, Nuvolone, Mattia Preti, Reni, Romanelli, Rosa, Sodoma, Strozzi, and Tintoretto. Stephen Pepper describes the M&G as constituting “one of the great teaching collections, comparable to or better than the much more publicised collections at Harvard, Princeton or Yale.” The associate curator of Italian paintings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Keith Christiansen, claims that in America, “Bob Jones has the best Baroque art around.”15 And Richard P. Townsend, the Ruth G. Hardman Curator of European and American Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is “simply amazed” at the breadth of the M&G collection. “These rooms were filled with altar pieces, devotional pictures and every sort of picture imaginable, whether it was for a public altar, a private chapel, a decorative painting for a grand salon of a cardinal or small devotional works on copper. Bob Jones University was rich in all these types. You don’t see that in American collections. You have to go to Europe.”16 Not only is the press stunned at the collection itself, but they are also amazed at the robust presentation these fundamentalists create.

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The curator of the local Greenville County Museum of Art, Martha Severens portrays the M&G as unparalleled. “There’s no other museum that presents that kind of art in that kind of way. . . . The galleries, the music, the décor, the welcoming staff all make it unique.”17 Sibella Giorello in the Richmond Times-Dispatch describes both the M&G’s collection and its bold presentation as unique: The 70-year-old university holds works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Botticelli, van Dyck, Murillo, Tintoretto, and offers one of the finest collections of Baroque painting—Dutch, Spanish, and Italian works dating from 1590 to 1750—anywhere in the world. . . . Beginning with medieval art and moving through the Renaissance into the Baroque, the galleries break almost every rule for art placed in institutional settings. Jewel-tone velvet drapes, wall-to-wall carpeting and chandeliers decorate intimate rooms. It’s an Old Master viewing experience that’s about as far away as you can get from most public galleries without actually owning the paintings and hanging them in your own home.18

While most art museums highlight their artifacts by downplaying the décor, the M&G features opulent, luxurious surroundings. At most museums, Spartan accessories, bland white walls, subdued floors all fade into the background in large rooms. But at the M&G the accessories are as sumptuous and the walls and carpeting colored as vividly as the sacred art it houses in the most intimate rooms. And no other museum in America is as bold with their sacred collections. Perhaps the Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery receives such effortless accolades because its very presence is so counterintuitive. In a local South Carolinian arts newspaper, James Mann, after mentioning some of the tributes given to the M&G, admits that the praise for the separatist school “will doubtless seem like news from another planet to most college-educated citizens of the Upstate, who see Bob Jones University as a conservative, evangelical institution of provincial interest only—not as an intellectually sophisticated cradle of fine arts education whose large collection of European art is well known elsewhere, and everywhere in international museum and art history circles.” He reminds his educated, business-minded readers that civic leaders credit the M&G for encouraging foreign businesses to establish their American headquarters here.19 For those well aware



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of BJU’s cultural reputation in European circles, the M&G’s presence is an “added attraction” for the area. While the press and art scholars highlight the contrary nature of the M&G, few theorize how this untenable contradiction is maintained or what consequences it creates. Burke offers the term “antinomian” to guide any theoretical imagining, and this text is so paradoxical within this sectarian framework as to seem blatantly impious. Obviously, the Baroque art featured in the M&G is deeply emotional and eloquent. And the ownership and presentation itself seems antinomian within the framework of Bob Jones University. Burke’s third feature of art as rhetorical cannot be far behind. That is, the impious but moving collection is a rhetorical text demanding critique. For Burke, art offers humanity “equipment for living,” and from the M&G subtext we can imagine the equipment that these religious sectarians hope to offer their world. Burke frames the separation of art from vocation as an inevitable tendency in capitalism. From leisure or “vacational experiences” humanity learns about the “good life”—“gentle surroundings, adequate physical outlets, the pursuit of knowledge.” This aesthetic was constructed “by people in comfortable situations for people in comfortable situations.”20 Simultaneously, however, the “daily Scramble”—the uglier, seedier “vocational” experiences—interrupted the good life by compelling capitalist acquisition over enjoyment. Capitalism taught us that we deserve the vacational only after we have mastered the vocational. This tension between the “daily Scramble” and the “good life” trickled into the aesthetic by creating a rift between art and life. “It was naturally in the field of the aesthetic (the ‘vacational’) that the opposition to practical (‘vocational’) demands could best be kept alive. Conditions of economic combat necessarily silenced or stunted the noncommercial morality between the hours of nine and five.”21 Being beautiful was defined as distinct from being practical. Focusing on the one meant to sacrifice the other. Despite the capitalistic rending of art from the vocational, Burke finds comedic optimism since art “is produced for purposes of comfort, as part of the consolatio philosophiae. It is undertaken as equipment for living, as a ritualistic way of arming us to confront perplexities and risks. It would protect us.”22 Even in the elitist aesthetic, reserved for the masters of capitalistic vocations, art can console and shelter.

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Burke dismisses the “proletarian attitude” that art must be simply “useful”: that it must explicitly work to destroy social injustice. Instead art “may prepare the mind in a more general fashion” and may create a “desire for justice.” Art, then, gives us political “equipment.”23 That is, art prepares humanity for change. It is meta-politics. So in theorizing from this particular sectarian co-optation of Baroque art, the critic may look for the equipment for living that the M&G provides to its secular audience and to itself. Or, in other words, we can imagine the nature of this romantic piper’s tune. From the above press releases, the character of this pied piper comes to the fore. Repeatedly, observers describe the “European” quality of the M&G, claiming that there is nothing like it on American soil. The breadth of the collection and its bold presentation defies American sensibilities. It is even cast as a “miracle” with a vigorous and energizing character. This romantic piper comes from outside the norm and, like the Burkean comic piper, dazzles the audience with an invigorating presentation. The tune itself seems to startle and charm its audience. For business interests, the M&G takes credit for recent international expansion. For religious interests, the M&G seems to defy, as Paul Richard mentioned, the austerity of Protestantism. Perhaps this conservative Protestant reach for the opulent Baroque devotional life is a correction of what Burke calls “the aridity of Protestantism.”24 The opulent pageant alone can recover and coopt that beauty for ascetic Protestants. Delving deeper into M&G texts offers more answers to the equipment this piper is offering. These fundamentalist pipers craft their tune to be celestial and to woo the secular citizen toward God. When the staff of Bob Jones University M&G presents itself to its secular outsiders, they frame themselves as drawing close to beautiful expressions of the sacred. For them, the inspiration behind the art is divine and embracing the art means to embrace a beautiful divinity. By seeming so near to God, they hope to woo their secular Other to the same commitment. In January 2001 the M&G opened its new visiting exhibition space with their first focus exhibition, John the Baptist and the Baroque Vision. The exhibition focused primarily on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and the artist’s influence on subsequent portraits of



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the Baptist. The M&G gathered other portrayals of the biblical character from the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, and the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, as well as culling from its own vast collection. A full-color catalog accompanied the show and allowed the M&G to shape the exhibition within its own romantic framework. The catalog mostly includes historical research and artistic analyses unfolding the influence of Caravaggio on representations of John the Baptist. But before the history and before the critiques, the catalog pauses to feature “John the Baptist: A Biblical Perspective,” a scriptural exposition on all biblical references to John the Baptist. Stephen B. Jones, then vice president for administration and great-grandson of the founder of the university, writes the essay and offers one stanza in this romantic piper’s tune. For these sectarians, the Bible is a premier authority more credible and more significant than historical texts or artistic interpretations. Starting from the Scriptural Text is assumed, unquestioned, and undefended. Little justification for this beginning is offered or is deemed necessary. For Jones, John the Baptist is a “bridge” between Old and New Testaments. The Baptist links the Jew to the Christian, the old covenant to the new, the archetypal prophet to the innovative preacher. In Jones’s interpretation, John’s position was quintessential and bold, yet his message was unrequited. John is among the last in an era which looked forward to God’s perfect Answer for man’s sin. He preached that the “Good News” was at hand, yet did not live to see the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Christ is saying that everyone who lives in the era following Christ’s death can look back with greater understanding than John had and put their faith in Christ’s finished sacrifice for sin. That was a privilege John foretold as a Witness in the Wilderness—a privilege we can enjoy as those who come behind John, hearing his message, seeing his Christ, and claiming his sacrifice.25

Jones’s evangelistic plea within an art show catalog is natural for these romantics. The deep connection between this art and their calling is unquestioned and unapologetic. As easily as they honor Roman Catholic art, they unite it with their mission. Their piped tune is always an altar call, an invitation tempting the listener toward the sacred.

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Yet the framing of the Baptist as a nonconforming eccentric on the outskirts of society and the testaments is almost too tempting to overlook. John seems to be a sort of piper himself—a prophet wearing odd clothes and eating bizarre food. The appeal of this biblical character for these romantic sectarians seems to be that he reinforces their own oddity within the culture and, as a result, perhaps guarantees their own effectiveness. Jones here points to the fact that the Baptist could not foresee the fulfillment of his prophetic stand and that his passage between the old covenant and the new left him unaware of the innovations to come. The persona of John the Baptist thus fortifies their own separatist identity and comforts them through uncertainty. When Donnalynn Hess, educational director for the M&G, and John Nolan, M&G curator, describe the show, their talk is less focused on Scripture specifically, but is just as romantic. They wed the eccentric character of John the Baptist to his chief Baroque painter, Caravaggio. Both are fervent revolutionaries who are inexplicably attractive. “Like John, Caravaggio was a zealot whose early training was somewhat atypical and whose revolutionary ideas were both lauded and scorned by contemporaries. In addition, his success, like the prophet’s, was born of a passionate vision and sustained by a confident spirit. . . . Ruffians and prostitutes, soldiers and tax collectors, priests and lawgivers were drawn to hear him.” Like the Baptist, the Baroque artist was both controversial and admirable. They were both loved and hated and always inexplicably appealing. The connection between Caravaggio and his biblical subject is plain in his portraits. In his artistic critique of the exhibition, Nolan views Caravaggio’s portrayal of the Baptist as proving his intimate identification with the biblical character since he signed the portrait in his subject’s spilled blood. Why would Caravaggio make such an emphatic and personal identification with John? This is an extraordinary procedure and one that projects heightened personal meaning from the artist. Puglisi has plausibly suggested that Caravaggio used this signature as an expression of penance and atonement for the murder he committed in Rome. Eliot Rowlands also suggests that the artist had a “special empathy with the lone prophet and his call to penance.” Conceivably, Caravaggio also identified himself with the Baptist as a fellow-sufferer under Roman authority since he anticipated capture and payment for his crime. In the last few years of



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his life after fleeing Malta, Caravaggio returned to the theme of John the Baptist possibly more than six times, all, apparently, without commission and solely from personal compulsion.26

According to Nolan as well as other secular art critics, then, Caravaggio sought forgiveness and empathy, as well as political escape in his personal obsession with the portraiture of John. Discerning this connection is common among art critics—both secular and fundamentalist. But romantic sectarians go one step further. For them, the connection between the Baptist and his painter ends there, however, because Caravaggio was too carnal and irreverent to enjoy the divine blessings like the Baptist. “But unlike John, Caravaggio’s vision was moored in the temporal and his confidence anchored in self. Consequently the pursuit of his mission was marred by his own failures, and though he transformed artistic technique, his personal legacy is a haunting testimony of the tragedy that awaits those who refuse to acknowledge the God who endows men with gifts.” Even Caravaggio’s artistic genius with “actual light” was inevitably heartbreaking since he failed to see the “light” that John the Baptist “sought to reveal—the need for and the power of spiritual illumination.”27 The evangelical application is irresistible to these sectarians even in this wholly secular context. Arguing that Caravaggio identifies with the external politics of the Baptist is far from unusual. But linking the saint to their own devotion and disassociating the artist from the saint is unique in this circumstance. The personas of the eccentric piper, the odd prophet, and the peculiar sectarian all mesh within this particular text of the M&G. At times, the unconventional artist joins their conflation but always at arm’s length. The repetitive themes of the intellectual genius, the divine blessings, and the sheer beauty of these renegades are frequent. Whether artist, prophet, or even collector, the M&G repeatedly admires this outsider character. And this persona comes to the forefront in the M&G’s portrayal of the late Bob Jones Jr., the original collector and creator of the gallery and the son of the university’s founder. Outsider interviewers frame him as an innovator—an art-collecting maverick who outsmarted the fickle fashion-conscious set and procured for his household a mind-bogglingly expensive collection. Washington Post arts writer Paul Richard recalls that Baroque paintings were long considered indecent by the elite in America and were out of fashion in the nineteenth century. Because the likes of “the Mel-

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lons and the Morgans, those who built the great American museums, deemed rich Baroque pictures offensive and impure, . . . they bought as if Italian art had failed to advance beyond Raphael’s Madonnas, [and] the collections of Old Masters they so carefully assembled are embarrassingly weak in works of Baroque art.” But Jones Jr. defied convention and seized the opportunity to collect the then passé art just after World War II when prices were “ridiculously low.” And recently, the value of those same paintings has soared. “ ‘Take Mattia Preti,’ said David H. Steel Jr. of the North Carolina Museum, who arranged the [1980] Bob Jones show. ‘Preti now is hot, hot, hot. Bob Jones University bought one in 1953 for a few hundred bucks. We were just offered another, one not half as fine, for $800,000.’ ”28 The secular outsiders describing Jones Jr. consistently highlight his business savvy and his nuanced artistic style. The cosmopolitan sophistication necessary for Jones’s success contradicts any presumptions about old-fashioned southern preachers. British art connoisseur Alex Wengraf highlights this paradox in his eulogy upon Jones Jr.’s death: “The Italian scholar Federico Zeri (with Burton Fredericksen of the Getty) in the course of compiling the index of Italian pictures in the US was one of the first of a small group of international experts to visit the campus and be befriended by the ever enthusiastic Dr. Bob, whose gentleness and wide culture totally belied the stereotype of a provincial southern minister.”29 In this romantic framework, the Baroque artist and the contemporary collector share the eccentric persona with the New Testament prophet. All three were mavericks. All three defied convention. All three were successful. All three dazzled and mystified those around them. Drawing this web of connections among the ancient, the Baroque, and the contemporary is a crucial theme. While secular critics may see the connection between the sacred and its Baroque portrayal, these romantics make the connection to the contemporary. Whereas secular critics collapse the Baroque and the biblical, the romantic sectarians identify themselves with the painters and their subjects. But aside from the analogous personalities portrayed in, portraying, and accumulating this art, to these romantics, the art itself is hortatory. After the initial biblical exposition and the historical background, the exhibition’s catalog turns to artistic analyses. Here John Nolan, M&G curator, draws a seemingly plain connection between the artistic and



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the practical, the secular and the sacred, the Baroque and the biblical, and finds the moral lesson plain to all. Nolan views the links as clear among disparate pasts and subjects, but he also amply uses the opportunity of art criticism to stress art’s hortative function. In describing Vaccaro’s variation on Caravaggio’s Baptist, Nolan finds this artist’s tribute to John’s preaching unusual and imaginative. Also unique is the inventive way the artist chose to emphasize John’s role as a preacher. Although the lamb can be interpreted as the traditional symbol of Christ, it may also be read as a symbol of Christ’s “sheep.” John’s feeding of the sheep supports this second reading, for Christ derived no sustenance from the prophet. It is valid, therefore, to interpret the act as a means of conveying John’s meditation on his coming mission—to preach the coming of the Messiah to the lost sheep of Israel. In fact, the gospel account reinforces the fact that John would indeed be “feeding the sheep” when the Lord came to be baptized of him (indicated by the banderole of John’s reed-cross saying “Ecce Angus Dei”).30

Nolan amply and intimately uses the biblical text to interpret the artistic expression. His analysis even seems like a hybrid of theological clarification and artistic interpretation. The art complements the text, and the text illumines the art. For fundamentalists, their exhaustive knowledge of the Scriptures makes them uniquely skilled in understanding the lesson behind the sacred. To them, their contemporary conservative evangelical positioning is useful even to interpret the Baroque Roman Catholic articulation of this biblical character. The symbolic lamb is pivotal in Nolan’s description of the exhibit. The lamb becomes Nolan’s focus again in this analysis of Tanzio’s study on John the Baptist as the lamb contrasts sharply with Caravaggio’s. The latter’s Baptist is pensive and inward-focused while the former’s Baptist is active and heavenly focused. Tanzio’s points to the lamb at his side. Nolan reasons: “This symbolic lamb looks out at the viewer with an unusual severity, as if the artist intended this symbol of Christ to confront and engage the viewer as the Lord himself might have done.”31 To Nolan, the artist intended his work to preach a sermon. While other art critics may, naturally, find and highlight the hortatory function of this sacred art, few would highlight and even savor the sermonic potential as much as these romantic pipers. They do

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more than merely highlight the lesson in art; they broaden, encourage, and supplement the art’s sermonic character with their own particular biblical interpretation. While talking to their Other, the romantic sectarians’ equipment for living comes to the fore. These fundamentalist pied pipers are clearly outsiders with their collection more Old World than New. That seemingly uncompromising, conservative evangelicals would embrace and honor the finest in Catholic art is strange and moving.32 But the initial contradiction merely grabs their secular Other’s attention and draws them closer to the equipment these romantics are offering. These sectarians frame the art as revealing their close identification with both the Baroque and the biblical characters. In their latest exhibition on Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, the M&G seems to find its own stand within the ancient biblical stories and the Baroque art histories. They accent the peculiar character of both Caravaggio and John perhaps in a reach to validate their own outsiderhood. When displaying and critiquing the art, the Bible and the art become interchangeable—each complementing and interpreting the other. Thus, when talking to their Other, these romantics are offering the equipment to shape the Other’s view of themselves. The peculiarity of the artist Caravaggio and the prophet John parallels their own eccentricity. And the ingenious beauty that results from the earlier recluses is still possible within the contemporary sectarian ethic. Their tune is essentially about themselves. Rather than directly addressing the problems within secular society, these romantic pipers, instead, distract their Other, to woo them into their arms. Talking to Themselves In art, described as those eloquent creations intended to arouse deep emotions, Burke sees an opportunity to identify. Citizens may identify with a hero and “[share] vicariously in the role of leader or spokesman.” They may construct and transform loyalties, rehearse cultural rituals, both don and cast off symbols. The sheer antinomian quality in art allows the most rigid societies to creatively stretch their frameworks and to play with their presumed identities. They can identify with the most alien outsider and include even the most counterintuitive quality. In other words, the tune can speak to the citizens and transform them while removing the undesirable pests.



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Burke describes the new identification art provides as benefiting a culture “purely through preventing a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly itself.”33 By trying on and even owning new identities, even religious sectarians temper and smooth over their rougher edges. Burke sees the “irony, novelty, experimentalism, vacillation, [and] the cult of conflict” that art brings as a means “to make us at home in indecision” and “to humanize the state of doubt.” When we are too “certain too quickly,” Burke reasons, we are simply resorting to “the deceptive allurement of tradition” or relapsing our “certainties” into an ideology. In essence, we are dodging our duties to be creative, active, and problem-solving citizens. “Since the body is dogmatic, a generator of belief, society might well be benefited by the corrective of a disintegrating art, which ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication works corrosively upon those expansionistic certainties preparing the way for our social cataclysms.”34 That is, art is humbling. Whatever a society tends to reify, art can redefine. It chips away at the dogmatic tendencies present in any culture and grinds down recalcitrant thinking that ultimately leads to cultural tragedy. Even the collecting and displaying of art, as in the Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery, can have these cultural benefits since it is a Burkean “innovation.” The M&G highlights something “to which its contemporary public is not accustomed.” And “any ‘transvaluation of values’ is an innovation, though it be a reversion to an earlier value.”35 Whether the innovation is original is irrelevant. If it is an unfamiliar fusion, an amalgamation revisited, then that “new” transvaluation is an innovation ripe with comic potential. Thus, arousing, antinomian art as a rhetoric provides a culture a means to identify outside their frames of acceptance, soften their hierarchies, and innovate their settled assumptions. Art shakes the settled ground upon which a culture may rest and encourages more creative, casuistic, and comedic thinking. It speaks to the piper while wooing the citizen. As repeated by its staff, the ultimate goal for the M&G is evangelistic. From the required M&G tour for every incoming freshman to campus-wide publicity, the M&G crafts its purpose as winning souls. In the campus newspaper, Sarah McCoy stresses the evangelistic opportunities in displaying the art: “We’re not ultimately trying to make money,” she said, “or mainly trying to help people enjoy the gallery. Presenting

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the gospel is the underlying aim of the Museum and Gallery. It’s the real reason we’re doing all that we’re doing.”36 Even the admission is relatively cheap and, thus, accessible: $5 for adults and $3 for children. Bob Jones Jr. defines the collection’s ends as not “to teach theology” but to inspire: “to provide aesthetic enjoyment, historical instruction, and a chance for religious reflection.”37 At the opening of the M&G in 1951, Jones Jr. reasoned that since “nothing is too good for God,” believers should highlight the finest “talent employed in his service” such as is displayed in the collection: We want you to enjoy these pictures as well as be blessed by them. . . . Your appreciation and understanding of art will grow, your life will be enriched, and your culture increased as great masters long gone to dust speak to you of their faith and their dreams. You may not be artists yourselves, but you have eyes to see and hearts to appreciate and souls to respond. It is my prayer that each of you will find here something which will make your lives more richly revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.38

That inspiration would lead, in their view, to conversion. Jones Jr. himself claims that this collection provides “an opportunity for evangelizing.” He reasons that since “nothing good comes from the devil” and since “color and harmony are God’s nature,” “these works lift thoughts heavenward or Godward. . . . We point out that this is a biblical scene and this gives us a chance to get the scriptural message.”39 While the art’s sheer beauty points to the divine, the subject matter leads the conversation to evangelism. Both the message and the medium work to draw the audience to a spiritual decision. Viewing every interaction as a potential conversion is typical within this conservative evangelical framework. These religious sectarians seize every opportunity to turn the conversation toward conversion. But this particular text juggles the usual assumptions about evangelistic outreach. As the M&G’s director Erin Jones describes it, the gospel message they craft must be “subtle.”40 Rather than use simple gospel tracts or frank proselytizing, these sectarians in this scenario are using Baroque Catholic art as their agency. Using Roman Catholic art as a means to conservative evangelical decisions is a prime example of identifying outside their usual frames of acceptance. To use the Burkean vocabulary, they intend to inspire deep emotions toward the divine and move their audiences to identify with “great masters



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long gone to dust.” Yet they construct a loyalty to the deep spiritual commitment the old masters felt while transforming that loyalty away from the Roman Catholic source. They rehearse the cultural rituals of devotion but wrestle it away from the Old World ceremonies. They dismantle what they would call “pagan baggage” and embrace the spiritual piety. This sacred art provides the antinomian means for these fundamentalists to identify even with the unfamiliar outsider. Their tune can transform cultural assumptions. But the song often falls on deaf ears. And the M&G staff know that their audience must admire the tune and the pipers if they are to be heard. Often the community is reticent to listen to the likes of these religious sectarians. Sarah McCoy confesses that “we want to help Greenville see that BJU isn’t the terrible place they may have heard it to be.” Donnalynn Hess admits in the campus newspaper that “some people are unsure of what BJU is as an institution. . . . Many people are not aware of the opportunities that are available at the Museum & Gallery to enjoy cultured beauty. . . . Our gallery is much more respected by people from Europe than by Americans because nobody here knows about it.”41 Ignorance, then, is the cause of their not being heard. If their public only knew of the “cultured beauty” they could attain among these religious sectarians, they would be won. In order to make their audience aware of their presence, these romantics foreground their business acumen and their hard work. Repeating the usual evangelical altar call will only tire their listeners. Instead, these pipers rehearse their ingenuity and financial stewardship and hope that their admirable character will prompt their audience to listen more carefully. The following narrative is repeated often when presenting the M&G to secular outsiders as well as fellow insiders. Within this drama, the M&G, unlike other collections, finds the unseen beauty in the unwanted, the priceless diamond in the rough, and the wealth in their own backyard. During a routine M&G tour with incoming freshmen, a student asks the tour guide how the university can afford such art. Prepared for the question, she offers the stock response: After the Second World War, this art was out of fashion and was inexpensive. But “the Lord gave him [Jones Jr.] the insight” on what he should buy. “[We] could never afford to buy this now.” She points out two particular items that Jones Jr. found in a warehouse—discarded and dusty. Jones bought them,

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brought them to the gallery where they were restored and displayed. He later discovered that these particular items were priceless.42 The specifics of this narrative—which items were found and where and how much they are worth—are incidental. The story itself is frequently reiterated with the specifics changed. At the dedication of the Mack Library in 1980, Jones Jr. told a similar story with different artifacts but analogous themes: You’ll find some interesting rooms here. Anywhere else they would have cost ten to fifteen times what they cost here. We know how to use junk like some antique stores that say “we buy junk” and sell antiques. We get stuff that nobody else wants and fix it up. The [Earle W.] Sargent Board Room is made with wood paneling and wood-carved capitals that we’ve had in storage for 15 years that somebody gave to us. They came from the [George] Blumenthal mansion in New York which was torn down some 25 or 30 years ago. After being in storage the dealer said, “The only place that I know that will ever use this stuff and appreciate it is Bob Jones University. You can have it if you want it.” So we re-worked it. It’s in there. The two large windows there are Tiffany glass from 1900, which we found in a junk store and polished up, washed, and tried to get clean, and put them in.43

The narrative works to get the attention and admiration of secular outsiders while quelling the usual criticisms among fellow romantics. Among the fundamentalist community, the M&G is often disparaged as a financial drain. This story works to inoculate against that criticism while privileging the “diamond in the rough” appeal. Jones has admitted: “We’ve been criticized for [the cost]—I think wrongly. . . . People say we ought to sell them. It’s been a good investment for the university. We get donations from people who come to the gallery. It’s a cultural contribution to the community. A lot of people come from Europe to see it.”44 He frames the paintings as “a better investment than real estate or stocks or bonds.”45 Within the rather rigid fundamentalist framework, evangelism is paramount and is promoted rather straightforwardly. When Jones defends the M&G as an “investment,” its funding for evangelistic efforts becomes indirect and complex. The argument pushes fellow fundamentalists to dabble outside their comfortable frameworks.



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Thus, the narrative works for both fellow sectarians and secular outsiders. Among themselves, the narrative juggles the usual assumption that all financial gain should be siphoned simply and directly to missionary work. No longer merely assuming that donations should go to Bible presses, missionary homes, and street preaching, the religious sectarian can see other more complex, more nuanced, and even more beautiful means of evangelism. For the secular outsider, the story stretches the usual assumptions that sectarians are underprivileged, indolent, or witless. By proving their reputation for industry, the sectarians hope that perhaps their secular outsiders will attend to their other stories. By demonstrating their secular acumen, their spiritual application will be highlighted as well. By repeating this particular chorus, their altar call will be heard. As they identify outside their frames of acceptance, these religious sectarians, then, may soften their own hierarchies. Just as the above narrative forces fellow romantics to rethink their simplistic approach to missions, the M&G obliges religious sectarians to stretch their assumptions about their faith, their devotion, and their world. Bob Jones Jr. attenuates potential insider criticism by framing the M&G as a “library” necessary for studies of history, religion, and culture. As a “library,” then, it must be exhaustive, diverse, and complex. Informing, exposing, and broadening become the goals. The necessary items to include in a library are culturally determined, independent of the sectarians’ ethic. Jones reasons that incorporating Catholic art in a sacred art collection should not be a surprise to anyone who knows art history, and he seems to be unruffled by the criticism. Since “the Catholic Church was the repository of painting, sculpture, music, literature, and nearly every other activity of cultural life,”46 admiring their artistry without accepting their theology is unproblematic. Jones admits that observers “have expressed surprise” that the likes of BJU would highlight “paintings from the Roman Catholic tradition, depicting extra-biblical scenes, saints and their legends.” Jones explains that Western Christianity’s “imagery,” however, “stems from this tradition, making the inclusion of these paintings reasonable.”47 Such is the argument of the original collector for the M&G. The criticism from his fellow fundamentalists leaves him unmoved and unflustered. Yet he is fully aware of the nearly impious character

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of the collection. In creating that sacred artistic library, antinomian strains come to the fore. The contact with the Roman Catholic Other often startles and disturbs these romantic sectarians. To Paul Richard, Jones Jr. admits that the overwhelming Catholic content of the M&G has troubled some fellow sectarians. I had to buy Catholic pictures, despite the falsehoods in them. Sometimes people gripe. One Baptist preacher took offense at the Baptism of Christ depicted in my Salvator Rosa. He said, “Bob, you’re a Baptist. How can you hang a picture that shows the pouring on of water instead of immersion?” I said, “It was painted by a Catholic. And donated by a Presbyterian. What can you expect?”48

Jones tells the anecdote with a giggle in his voice, revealing that he is wholly conscious of and even welcomes this contradictory and contentious quality in the M&G. To the hard-shell Baptist, this particular painting seems so unorthodox as to be heretical. But to Jones, who can be just as hard-shell at times, the depiction offers a vivid reminder that Other Christians see biblical events differently while their faith and their devotion is still admirable and inspiring. Jones relishes the imagination and splendor in the Catholic art. He points up how “the gifted Catholic painters of the CounterReformation, encouraged to oppose Protestant austerities, filled their art with dazzlements, with winged angels, haloes, sunbeams, blood and clouds.” That inspiration to be more lavish and glittering amidst asceticism, Jones argues, “feeds hunger in the hearts of men.”49 The contrary character of the art appeals to him. The opulence can bring humanity toward God, he claims. The Protestants at the time of the Reformation, he argues, “had to have a strong break [with Catholicism],” and “this [art] was all associated with paganism to them. To us it’s just a good picture.”50 Thus, Jones is willing to define the collection as a sort of Burkean Rosetta Stone. As Burke explains, the initial creators of the Stone were oblivious to the later possible use of their creation. They could not fathom that future audience. But Burke privileges the current use since “we owe the stone no allegiance.”51 We can use it liberally for our own purposes independent of its originator’s purpose. Jones views the Baroque art similarly. While the Catholic Counter-Reformation paintings were explicitly designed to win the former devouts back to the



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Catholic fold, these sectarians can admire the commitment the artists had in portraying those stories. While earlier Protestants found it necessary to separate from Catholic luxury, these religious sectarians may recover that beauty for themselves. While to these fundamentalists’ forebears the paintings represented paganism, to the contemporary conservative Protestants the art can remind them of the passion of biblical characters. In acquiring his visual library, in embracing paintings portraying contradictory doctrines, in admiring the opulent devotion of even Catholic artists, in using Baroque art as a sort of Rosetta Stone, Jones Jr. prevents these religious sectarians from becoming too assertively and too hopelessly fundamentalist. He softens the hard shell of his fellow believers. He invites irony and conflict into the culture and, as a result, encourages more creative and active problem-solving among the sectarians. This inclusion, in essence, is humbling. It toys with the literal and square rigidity that may plague their thinking. This art makes these sectarians more aware of the conflicted history of Christianity. It chips away at their certainty. And, as a result, these pipers cannot play their tune without being moved themselves. The M&G insists that these romantic pipers always be beautiful. The rough edges on their hard shell must be smoothed, polished, and even removed if they are to be socially relevant. The M&G also changes the fundamentalist insiders by highlighting that their beauty is rarely simplistic and that they instead must be multifaceted and even contradictory. Embracing the Catholic Baroque art as part of their own Protestant separatism demands that they shed their purely literal thinking and reach for a more culturally informed and even less rigid fundamentalist frame of acceptance. To make their evangelistic goals work, these romantic pipers must not only soften their own hard edges but also innovate their settled assumptions. As has been argued, the M&G disturbs simplistic evangelism, naïve histories, and rigid frames of acceptance among these romantic sectarians. As it changes the piper, however, the tune continues to startle and move the intended listener. That astonishment leads to a Burkean “innovation.” Since it couples together two dissimilar and unexpected “terms”—the finest art with the artless fundamentalist—the M&G creates something “new.” And in the new creation, Burkean comedy is possible.

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The audience to which this hybrid message would appeal is intended to be quite particular. In his official history of Bob Jones University, Daniel Turner frames the M&G as an outreach to the “upand-outers”: “Besides merely having the students know something about these areas [of cultural education], Dr. Jones Jr. believed that the cultural opportunities would give the students a point of reference from which to build a gospel witness to the ‘up-and-outers.’ ” Not only does the M&G appeal to a particular class of outsiders, but it also “attract[s] students of good quality,” Turner admits.52 Thus, the M&G message is designed to attract the more cosmopolitan upper-middle class for conversion and for matriculation. Whether or not the message is effective goes unproven. While such texts please a higher socioeconomic class, the appeal gnaws at the preconceived notions against fundamentalism that it is merely provincial and culturally harmful. Fundamentalism has been characterized as the entrenched ideology of the backward, backwoods Southerners ever since H. L. Mencken. That these religious sectarians could ever attract the “cultured” social classes is a transvaluation in itself. And Jones Jr. is the clearest instantiation of that innovation. He repeats often that “his father had taught him that to be a fundamentalist was no excuse for unpolished shoes.” Wengraf, Jones’s eulogist, remembers that this “polish was his symbol of the urbanity that he carried into all aspects of his life. . . . His mission in life was the propagation of the gospel; his legacy is a monument to our culture. He saw no contradiction between these.”53 Urbane missionaries, polished gospel preaching, cultured fundamentalist—the joining of these assumed contradictions creates something radically new in contemporary culture. This transvaluation stretches the frames of acceptance for both the secular outsider and the romantic separatist. The innovation forces drastically creative thinking. The seemingly dissonant tune makes for a more beautiful cadence. When a ten-year-old raised in fundamentalism visited the M&G, her impetuous and youthful excitement pushed her to rush through the rather formal displays. But when her guide stopped and said—“See? This is my favorite picture. It shows Jesus helping in the carpentry shop with Joseph and Mary. I like how the people are lighted”—the young girl paused and studied the picture. She realized that the painting represented one of the stories she knew so well. She then rushed to the next one and tried to guess which Bible story it pictured. When



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she noticed that the ancient biblical characters were wearing Western seventeenth-century clothing, she observed while shaking her head, “But they didn’t wear clothes like that back then. That’s not right.” The guide explained that the artist was trying to relate the stories to his audience, and that’s what seemed normal to them. The girl was dissatisfied with the answer but hurried over to other paintings to continue her Bible-story treasure hunt. She was gratified that she could identify so many of the subjects. The art was hers, in a sense, and she was proud to understand it. Until Giovanni Lanfranco’s portrait St. Cecilia. St. Cecilia is a popular, extrabiblical Catholic saint for musicians. The young visitor insisted that her guide tell her about this lady. The adult guide, herself a devout fundamentalist, knew very little about the saint’s story, and the ten-year-old was frustrated with this gaping hole in the otherwise informative tour. The questions came rapidly, “Why is she here? What did she do? How come I’ve never heard of her? Why is she playing the organ?” Her companion stammered and shrugged promising a future Internet search for more information. While simply anecdotal, the ten-year-old’s visit to the M&G typifies the usual insider reaction to the Baroque Catholic art. Usually, separatist visitors might rush past such long forgotten expressions of devotion. But upon realizing that the paintings depict what they define as their own stories, the sectarians are gratified that so many gifted devouts in the past dedicated their talent to the divine. Naturally, the somewhat patronizing trope of “accuracy” peppers their critique of the paintings and highlights their commonsensical perspective on their world. Yet when they come upon stories outside their belief system, their comforting position is disturbed. In the M&G, no disclaimers separate the distinctly Catholic stories from the more general Christian ones. The “extra”biblical is displayed alongside the biblical. What they hold dear is spatially connected to what they do not understand. The suture between their own and their Other’s is baldly exposed. Thus, they are confronted with acknowledging their perspective as just a perspective. As the ten-year-old felt during her first visit to the M&G, the insider’s gleeful satisfaction in “owning” these stories from long ago is unhinged when confronted with another faith system. The unsettling notion that their own expressions of faith, like those of the past, are shaped and attenuated by their culture, their time, and their humanity slaps them

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in the face. They must realize that their articulation of their devotion is neither timeless nor artless. It is fully human, but it still is irresistibly beautiful. In their talk with their Other and themselves, the Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery plays a beautiful tune of peculiar separatism. Kenneth Burke describes art as offering us “ways of seeing one’s reflection in the social mirror.”54 For these romantic sectarians, the reflection they hope to show their Other is of a lovely sectarian. The tune they hope to be heard is stunningly celestial. The sheer counterintuitive nature of Protestant fundamentalists foregrounding Catholic fine art surprises secular outsiders, but as this Other draws closer to the peculiar and poignant text, the romantic equipment for living comes into focus. They seem to offer themselves up as a contemporary example of the eccentric genius demonstrated in the art. They want to distract their audience from the rats around them and move them away from their own tragic culture and into the sectarian ethic. Their tune, while attempting to draw their Other closer to themselves, works on the pipers as well. The cobbling together of fundamentalist with Catholic artists is a transvaluation, an innovation that creates something entirely new in its joining. The M&G, in essence, pokes holes in the seemingly hermetically sealed fundamentalist framework. This nuanced hybrid that demands a connection between Catholic devotion and fundamentalist doctrine forces the romantics to think and act like Burkean comedians. To be included in the collection, their Catholic Other is not evil, but mistaken. The romantic frame of acceptance cannot be stiff, but malleable. Their tune corrects not just their Other, but themselves. Ultimately, the Museum and Gallery is romantic separatism at its most beautiful. The inconclusiveness and ambiguity in the M&G forces a creative and compliant attitude within this strain of fundamentalism. This is romantic comedy. Every spring, Bob Jones University produces a Living Gallery in which the sacred art housed in their M&G is brought to life and coupled with original dramatic productions and sacred music. The audience is broad since not only do nearly 20,000 people attend the production on campus each year over Easter week but the South Carolina Education Television also broadcasts a feature presentation of the event. Described as a “rare fusion of arts” that “showcases life-size re-creations of great works of art, using precisely painted people in the pieces,”55 the production literally blends the sacred art of the Old Masters with



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the contemporary believers of fundamentalism. While viewing a seemingly immobile but full-scale representation of Christ’s ascension, for instance, the painting comes to life. The subjects in the art move and interact. The Old Masters’ work is made relevant and real. And the people at the center of this beautiful art are these Protestant fundamentalists. That is, the production, in essence, melds the biblical characters, the Baroque art, and the contemporary sectarians. The secular outsiders cannot see the one without seeing the other. The spiritual devotion of the ancient personas and the passionate beauty of the sacred art seem at one with the peculiarity of the contemporary romantic sectarian. The secular gaze these romantics crave is fixed upon them. Their tune is passionate and vivid and is played in the hopes that the outsider will leave the rats behind. While the aesthetic theme seems to suit the romantic pipers’ tune in this case of the Museum and Gallery, when it enters the civic sphere, the tune seems too naïve. Simple distraction away from real sociopolitical problems only frustrates the pragmatic focus of contemporary politics. But the romantic sectarian insists that leaving the dominant is the only way of solving its troubles.

Chapter 4 Curing the Culture with Homeopathy, Allopathy, and Sympathy The poet is, indeed, a “medicine man.” . . . As “medicine man,” he deals with “poisons” . . . transforming poisons into medicines by attenuation of the dose. The poet, in his pious or tragic role, would immunize us by stylistically infecting us with the disease. As we move toward the impious response, on the other hand, we get an “allopathic” strategy of cure. We get the recourse to “antidote.” The medical analogy may be justified by authority, as it has been employed in similar contexts by both a critic and a poet.

z Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form Little things mean a lot—especially in romance. A suitor’s physical qualities and social acumen may save or squander the Beloved’s affection. The courtier may even frame such niceties as essential to the Other’s welfare. As such, being grimy or clumsy hurts the Other. Being attractive and elegant, however, is comforting and guides the Beloved toward their destiny. For the romantic separatists at Bob Jones University, minutiae are fundamental. In their sectarian ethic, the most mundane becomes grand. As Burke points out in describing Augustine, “all topics of Christian rhetoric deserve treatment in the grand style, since there is nothing in life that does not somehow bear upon God. Thus, though money matters may be trivial from an ordinary point of view, no sum, however small, can be trivial to the true Christian.”1 For the sake of a dying pagan world, devoted separatists—whether medieval or contemporary—judge every nuance as either pleasing or displeasing God, as attracting or repulsing the Other, as potential medicine or poison for a sickly world.

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For instance, upon enrolling, incoming undergraduate students receive a “student handbook,” a text listing the expected conduct for the Bob Jones University family. More than merely ethical guidelines for the classroom, the handbook describes a behavioral code that harks back to early twentieth-century coeducational regulations. Men must wear ties before noon and collared shirts after lunch. They must remove their hats when entering a building. In class, church, or chapel, no denim clothes or athletic shoes may be worn. On campus and off, women must always wear skirts that cover the knee. The handbook even instructs students how to write thank-yous, how to tip appropriately, and how to make courteous introductions. These rules are crafted with the secular Other’s gaze always in mind. For both men and women, from head to toe, from dress to decorum—these separatists rigorously maintain their personal appearance in order to preserve their “testimonies.” With Bob Jones Sr.’s saying emphasized that “for a Christian, life is not divided into the secular and the sacred,” the handbook reminds students that every detail can preserve or spoil their sectarian beauty. The first stop for any visitor on campus is the “Information Desk” in the BJU administration building. One student worker frames his job of greeting visitors as more than mere public relations but as a ministry. “I’ll answer to the Lord for my response to each person who comes across my path,” he said. “It’s important that I not only represent the university well, but represent the Lord well.”2 He acts for not only his employer, but also the divine. From selling meal tickets to delivering FedEx packages, the student views himself as testifying before a lost world. His presentation must be attractive to his Others so that he may lead them to God. Since BJU has no intercollegiate sports teams, the National Educational Debate Association is among the very few interscholastic conferences in which BJU participates. As with most forensicators, the participants cite improved study skills and a sheer adrenaline buzz as benefits. But these sectarian debaters emphasize that their participation is “a great witness.” “Our team would rather be Christ-like than win. But people often think that being a good Christian somehow makes you second-class. The thing I love about intercollegiate debate is that we represent Christ to the unsaved intellectual academia at their level.”3 One faculty debate coach, Jeanine Aumiller, describes the debate team as “[punching] a hole in the stereotype that Christians



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cannot defend and are not rational people.” Keenly aware of their reputation, these separatists center on proving their intellectual prowess in order to win souls. The annual “Washington Center Challenge Day,” a “lead-up” to the Greenville County Special Olympics, is a regular fall event on the BJU campus. The festivities concentrate on children who are often too disabled to participate in the Special Olympics. Complete with rousing band music, helium balloons, burning Olympic torches, cheering crowds, and colorful carnival booths, the day dazzles the children and their families. The former director, Chuck Luttrell, from the BJU physical education faculty, explains the reason for the university’s sponsorship: “to let the community know that it loves and wants to help children.”4 “Love” is their motivation and has prompted these sectarians to make the event so successful that it is nationally recognized as “one of the best developed programs in the country.” Each BJU participant scrupulously guards every facet of the event so as not to mar their expression of love for the community. Always loving, always cunning, always kind, and always proper— these notions shape BJU’s community ethic. From their perspective, their dress, conversation, intellect, and tenderness can build or destroy relationships with their secular Other. And when they view the dominant culture from their separate (and hopefully glimmering) pedestal, these sectarians blame community problems not on politics, biology, or culture but on loneliness. Welcoming the sectarian Other into the separatist lifestyle, then, will ease community troubles. Wooing them will heal them. For a desolate, hurting culture, sympathy is the best medicine. From the president to the student body to the faculty, when these separatists talk to their neighbors, they stress their personal friendship as a balm for an ailing world. While the secular tragically proposes legislation or comically crafts new vocabularies to relieve cultural illnesses, the separatist romantically prescribes friendship. And this romantic ethic inevitably but inadvertently leads the sectarian into a political conservatism. The purpose of this chapter is to map the romantic trajectory of Bob Jones University’s rhetoric within their local community and to theorize their separatist talk as dramatically different from the dominant. While tragedy offers homeopathy and comedy offers allopathy to cure a sickened culture, romance simply offers sympathy. It neither converts upward nor downward, but toward the Beloved.

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This sympathetic outreach is only possible if the romantic can create a desire for separation. They must frame themselves as desirable when they reach out to sympathize. Polishing their shoes, answering the phone, playing a game, and debating a proposition—these seemingly routine trifles are essential medicine to the romantic. Curing with Likes, Dislikes, and Love: Jones’s Medicine for Greenville For Burke, “everything is ‘medicine.’ ” Proverbs, for instance, as well as all literature, can both comfort and punish, encourage and rebuke.5 To Burke, all symbol-using is a reach for the curative. And in that reach, the “medicine” is a potential poison. Whether art, poetry, or political discourse—all talk is a toxin made useful and safe only by creative and strict attenuation and attention to the dose. Therefore, the critic is a traditional “medicine man,” working medical magic to cure a sickened culture. But Burke adds a prescription to his metaphor. As medicine can be either homeopathic or allopathic, so criticism can be either tragic or comic. Homeopathy cures ailments with more of the same symptoms: a fever is cured with heat, a cancer is stopped by another sort of cancer eating away at the first, or a particular tragedy is ameliorated with another tragedy. The tragic critics are too pious to see beyond the immediate symptoms of the cultural disease. They propose to cure by inoculating with small, controlled doses of poverty (such as taxation) or murder (such as capital punishment). These social medics so fetishize the disease that they hopelessly perpetuate more of the same. Their clinical myopia might find some workable solutions, but those solutions, as tragic as the diseases they hope to cure, simply offer recalcitrance. Burke would rather, however, have critics be allopathic in their cures. Allopathy cures with opposites: a fever needs relief from analgesics that oppose a fever’s symptoms, cancer must be removed and replaced with healthy cells, and tragedy needs comedy for its cure. These opposites are “antidotes” or are “given against” the disease. They turn the disease inside out. They counteract, upset, resist. The comedian wants to reverse the culture and find something completely the opposite for its woes.



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Thus, while the tragic homeopath cures with likes, the comic allopath cures with dislikes. When the culture is suffering from poverty, the tragic suggests more poverty for the entire culture while the comic may redefine, remove, or replace poverty. To a hurting culture, the social homeopath brews a salve from the “roots” of the culture and piously conserves the traditions that brought the hurt. On the other hand, the allopath revisits those “roots,” remixing, reinterpreting, and reviewing to remove the culture’s usual cures and replace them with their opposite. Thus, the homeopath and the allopath differ in both the approach to the problem and its solution. What the homeopath clings to, the allopath dismantles. What the homeopath protects, the allopath substitutes. Yet the romantic offers a solution that is neither homeopathic nor allopathic, curing with neither likes nor dislikes. When faced with the cultural diseases of poverty or crime, romance finds a balm in communion. To the separatist, a cultural illness is not material or “physical,” so to speak, but always psychosomatic. All social maladies are problems of the soul. Rather than cure with a home brew or relieve with a detached scientific drug, the romantic identifies with the Other’s suffering, reaching out and embracing the hurting. This identification is not merely the means to softening the culture to a more material solution; rather it is the solution itself. Through sympathetic communion, the separatist imagines, a flawed culture may realize its ideals. To the romantic, both homeopathy and allopathy are poor solutions. Since the Other’s problem is loneliness, empathy is what the secular needs. In January 2001 the Greenville News asked six hundred “community leaders” to choose the top twenty-five most influential people in Greenville, South Carolina.6 Listed fourteenth among the twenty-five business professionals, philanthropists, educators, politicians, and ministers was Bob Jones University president Bob Jones III. In the biographical profile and article that accompanied the nomination, Jones reveals his romantic medicine for a hurting community. In his assessment of the community, he offers sympathy as its salve. Deb Richardson-Moore introduces Jones as different from his father and grandfather.7 “While Bob Jones Sr. and Bob Jones Jr. will be remembered as the men who brought their namesake university to Greenville, it fell to Bob Jones III to bring Greenville to the university. He did it by listening.” Merely opening up to the community at large was this Jones’s community service. Empathetically “listening” was his

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solution. While his paternal predecessors were “more mercurial and combative” “by all accounts,” Jones wants to connect with outsiders. His contribution, then, was not as much a presentation of the separatist school, but a warm invitation welcoming the secular world into the fold. Rather than (literally) cordoning off the school from outsiders, Jones opened its doors and greeted the community: He removed the barbed wire and the hedges that had caused many to remark on the secretive and clandestine nature of the campus. He joined the Chamber of Commerce, healing a rift that dated to the 1940s when the chamber didn’t raise the full $100,000 it promised to move the university from Tennessee. And he decorated the campus with an elaborate Christmas light display that invites the public onto the grounds.

From landscaping to holiday events, Jones’s administrative decisions reach out to identify with the secular Other. More than mere public relations, this identification with outsiders is central to every interaction and an answer, in the separatist ethic, to secular troubles. Yet the romantic’s talk is often misunderstood, its medicine interpreted as malpractice. Although the separatist only has the Beloved’s best interest at heart, the secular Other typically misconstrues the separatist’s advances. But the romantic remains undaunted. Jones professes: “we love Greenville. . . . There are people in Greenville who may not always understand what we’re here for, why we say what we say and do what we do. We understand that. And it’s OK.” No matter what sinister motives the secular Other may attribute to these romantics, their “love” persists, and the caring medicine Jones offers is always available. The remedy may taste bitter, but the caring separatist knows it can soothe. In his reach to identify with the outsider, Jones emphasizes his ordinariness. His placement outside the dominant is not his first choice. He insists that he resisted the ministry as a young man since he is naturally “timid.” Controversy is the last thing anybody in his right mind would seek. . . . But controversy is not unexpected for a Christian whose purpose in life is to live by the Scriptures and make Christ known in a world that is increasingly trying to rid itself of Scriptural governance. You just do what God’s called you to do the best you can and force yourself to do what the role calls for you to do.



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Jones discards individual comfort for the sake of his patient. Dispensing the harsh medicine that the culture needs hurts him more than it hurts the culture. But God, not his own desire for fame, has put him where he is. He is as human as the secular outsider—shy, hesitant, and fearful—but his choice of separation from the world and identification with the divine has propelled this romantic into cultural medicine. His commitment to the divine and the separated life are clear as Richardson-Moore concludes. That is, his peculiarity among his secular peers is obvious despite his human frailty. When faced with any issue, “Jones cannot be understood apart from the Lord he serves.” As he introduces the accompanying article, Jones foregrounds his connection with the divine. If he writes his own viewpoints, they are useless. Instead he hopes to write God’s “words to the city.” “If they’re just my words, they’re immaterial, they’re of no value.” His therapy is not from his own mixing, but directly from the Great Physician. Although peculiar and misunderstood, Jones talks like a loving and sympathetic, albeit timid, friend to his neighbors. The communion that he seeks is clear in the commentary following Richardson-Moore’s biography. All the 2001 community leaders are asked to name “the biggest challenge facing the community in the coming year.”8 Jones’s text stresses his loving prescription for Greenville since he reaches out to offer empathy. Like most leaders, Jones frames the community as facing a crisis point. When confronted with “what kind of community we will become,” he emphasizes that Greenville’s “future will result either from convictioned action or from careless, thoughtless indifference.”9 In essence, Jones prescribes a program of moral exercise for the community. Lazily loafing will ultimately weaken the Other’s ethical muscles and drive them to an early grave. Since every community is moving somewhere, Jones urges “good and caring people” or “concerned citizens” to notice the “shore” toward which they are wandering. “Good and caring people must take stock of where we are today and determine whether our present direction will lead us to a better or worse end. They must then initiate action. This requires stepping out from their comfort zones and refusing to be swept along in the current toward an unwanted shore.” In this framework, Jones’s readers are not elite, but rather ordinary. “The common man of Greenville” alone is responsible for its future and must be willing to “[step] out of the herd to do the unpopular and criticized thing, but the right and honorable

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thing.” The “common man”—not the politician, educator, or Hollywood entertainer—“will actively oppose the intrusion of government into their private lives.” Jones crafts that ordinary citizen as powerful and himself as the champion of every American’s individual liberty. But Jones does not prescribe a specific exercise program. Rather than a specific action, he suggests a position. He challenges citizens to stand firm against the dominant’s usual drift toward an undesirable end. He urges them to be like the separatist: concerned for the morality of their community, sensitive to the consequences of their choices, and tenacious about resisting apathy. Jones, then, asks his audience to admire his separatism and join him. Yet Jones never specifically demands acceptance of his particular beliefs. He urges the readers to simply take a stand as he has done. Standing firm is more important than standing with Jones. His position is simply an example for them to follow. Their remedy is simply to be strong like him. The picture of a community adrift with the rugged individual standing strong against the tide reinforces these separatists’ political conservatism. The freethinking, separated individual stands apart to tempt the wandering citizenry away from danger. Jones is less an objective medic and more a personal example for the outsider. To motivate his audience to follow his lead, Jones must make them want to follow him. He must appear healthy and vigorous. So when he aligns himself with American traditions, Jones seems less intimidating and more sympathetic and his stand less fundamentalist and more American. He seems more admirable than peculiar. Thus, Jones does not protect tradition, but rather wears it as protection. His “traditional” garment flaunts his robust physique. For Jones, the past does not need to be preserved as much as it preserves these separatists, making them beautiful. Jones’s motive for aligning himself with political conservatism is different from the tragic’s. He is not reinforcing tradition for the sake of comfort or even piety as the tragic citizen does. He admits his discomfort and his distrust frequently. His resisting the dominant and questioning its laziness persists in his talk. His motives are fully romantic. For him, tradition is a useful and beautiful covering, not a weakened Other needing protection. His aligning with tradition casts Jones as an old-fashioned beauty. His peskiness, then, becomes more quaint than irritating. He seems more American than alien. Therefore, Jones’s prescription for Greenville is not simply pious reinforcement of the past or creative juggling of the talk. He is not



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merely tragic or comic. Instead, he challenges Greenville to resist the drift their tradition has pushed them toward. He urges them to stand apart—not necessarily in his place, but next to him nonetheless. He compels them to identify with his ordinariness and suggests that an individual can be powerful. Like all romantic discourse, his talk toys with the tension between seeming traditional and radical, admirable and irritating, inside and outside the culture. There is little precise about his medicine. He simply engenders sympathy for himself and offers sympathy for his perceived “common man.” Upon examining the culture, he finds its sickness is simply isolation and its cure companionship. So in both Richardson-Moore’s brief biography and Jones’s article, Jones reaches out to the community. He simply connects. He identifies himself as the reluctant separatist who simply wants to do the right thing. He does not tragically sacrifice himself for the good of the community. He, instead, asks that the community join him in his peculiar separation. If they commune with him, if they empathize with him and accept his empathy, then they will be strong, healthy, assertive citizens. They will fulfill their American ideals of individualism and morality. Sympathy, not homeopathy or allopathy, becomes his balm. Converting Upward, Downward, and Toward: Reaching Out to the Community Theorizing rhetoric as medicine persists throughout Burkean theory. He interprets the therapeutic quality of rhetoric as a sort of secular “conversion” with tragedy converting “upward” and comedy converting “downward.” Tragedy drives the hurting culture to aim for its unattainable ideals. It views events within the usual victimage cycle, names them within the recalcitrant vocabulary, and piously reaches up to repeat the hero’s sacrifice. When faced with the cultural problem of drug abuse, for instance, one means of relief for the tragic mechanism is launching “drug wars,” criminalizing drug use, and incarcerating offenders. The drug-free ideal is unquestioned and untouched, and preserving that ideal through the legal system persists. Comedy, on the other hand, juggles the vocabulary and makes the grand seem mundane. Psychoanalysis is Burke’s example of this curative comedy since it offers “a new perspective” to a patient by dismantling “the system of pieties lying at the root of the patient’s sorrows or

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bewilderments.” Essentially, psychoanalysis can be comic, “an impious rationalization, offering a fresh terminology of motives to replace the patient’s painful terminology of motives.” What the patient sees as personal, uncommon, and permanent, the analyst reinterprets as scientific, typical, and temporary. The comedic analyst gives a new productive vocabulary that transforms overwhelming despair into a solvable problem.10 The comic psychoanalysts, then, in Burke’s terminology, “convert downward.” They craft an “unfit, incongruous” terminology that offers a patient something “brand-new.” Burke imagines that a patient is helped not by naming a disorder, but by misnaming. The notion of perspective by incongruity would suggest that one casts out devils by misnaming them. It is not the naming in itself that does the work, but the conversion downward implicit in such naming. . . . One casts out demons by a vocabulary of conversion, by an incongruous naming, by calling them the very thing in all the world they are not: old coats.11

This rhetorical juggling is therapeutic and stands in direct contrast to the tragic conversion upward. Burke uses Christ’s Sermon on the Mount12 as an example of this comedic misnaming. In this New Testament text, poverty becomes a sign of wealth, hunger is proof of fullness, and present mourning guarantees future joy. “By this translating device, danger-situations were not merely converted downward: they were rephrased precisely as comfort-situations.”13 Therefore, Burke emphasizes the rhetorical form of a solution as comic instead of its ideological or political origins or associations. That is, comedy can be either Republican or Democrat, rightist or leftist, Christian or pagan, as long as its form converts downward. The Burkean comedian might solve drug abuse, for instance, by legalization rather than criminalization. This misnaming of abuse as legal, this conversion downward, may be enough rhetorical medicine to comfort a diseased culture. But romance acts differently within its community. These separatists neither optimistically strive for nor confidently tear down cultural ideals. In their community service, their conversion is neither upward nor downward but toward their alternative. Romance resists the hierarchy that the secular imposes. The secular ideals of prosperity and happiness are unreachable within the current system. Only by leaving the



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system are those ideals accessible. Thus, the romantic converts neither upward nor downward but toward—across the secular hierarchy and into a completely alternative worldview. By separating, reaching those ideals is possible. By resisting, the culture can be cured. Romantic sectarians, therefore, reach neither up nor down, but out and see that “outreach” as the medicine for a hurting culture. When faced with drug abuse, these separatists assume that drug users are lonely, not criminal. The focus is on the personal hurt, rather than the social cause or the political effect. Sincere communion, they believe, will relieve the malady. Like Jones who simply “listens” to and welcomes his neighbors, so the BJU student body builds friendships to solve problems. Thus, within romance, interaction alone is their therapy. They emphasize not hours worked, money raised, or acres cleared, but friendships cultivated with their secular Other. “Quality time” is their focus. Forming relationships, not generating statistics, is their end. In 1986 the BJU student body initiated the Community Relations Council (CRC) with a campus recycling campaign. By 2001 over 1500 volunteers from a student body of 3000 offered over 9000 work-hours for community service projects such as Heritage Creek Cleanup, Special Olympics, and Reedy River Sweep under the CRC’s auspices.14 Their annual blood drive makes BJU the largest blood donor in South Carolina and Georgia.15 For such a small school to surpass larger organizations in their community service is impressive. And BJU students even see this volunteer work as recreational. BJU has a Greek system independent of the public universities’ fraternities and sororities. Joining one of fifty “societies” is required for all undergraduate students, and the school operates its intramural athletic and academic competitions through this social network. Historically, every semester each society plans a recreational outing; one semester’s outing is for members only (called a “stag outing”), and the other is for members and invited guests. Society “stag outings” have turned from white-water rafting, skiing, and hiking trips to community service. Society members deliver flowers to local nursing homes, build daycare additions for local churches, and demolish and gut old buildings for a nearby camp. Students credit these outreaches for improving “unity” and encouraging unselfishness. “[You get] your mind off yourself,” they claim.16

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Any college community service program would most likely attribute similar benefits to its student body. Charitable efforts often bill themselves as improving participants’ character and group camaraderie. But the BJU’s talk about community service has a different tone. In press releases, they rarely boast about the quantity of their community contributions. Finding the actual numbers of their accomplishments is difficult. They do emphasize, however, the community contact they had made, the outsider friendships they had created, and the personal exposure they were allowed. Their work, thus, fosters relationships not only among fellow students, but also, and more importantly, with their secular Others. In the fall of 2000, for instance, the CRC organized a group of students to clean up Brushy Creek at the local Del Norte Eastgate Community Club. While their work prevented flooding for the surrounding homes, the campus newspaper reported few quantitative details. Rather, the Collegian foregrounded the friendships the students cultivated with secular outsiders. The Community Club president commented that “students working with the community like this truly do build bridges that bring people closer together. Their help will be long remembered in this community.”17 The neighborhood contact for the project, Ellen Countryman, observed that “everyone from the community who was working alongside these students commented on more than one occasion on their work ethic and their willingness to do whatever was asked of them.” That the students presented a beautiful picture of generosity and industry proves to them the success of their efforts. The figurative “bridges” they were building were more important and more real to them than any brick-and-mortar bridges they might construct or repair. And to these sectarians, community clean-up projects heal the soul as well as more “spiritual” outreaches since both lead the lonely Other to the divine. On weekends, BJU students pile into school buses and automobiles for their weekly “extensions”—the campus term for local, student-run evangelistic efforts. The term extension itself perpetuates the romantic perception of reaching out to their neighbors. Every Friday evening since 1981, a group of BJU students drives to nearby Clemson University for one particular extension ministry. During this outreach, BJU students hope to approach Clemson students, start a friendly conversation, and “lead one of them to the Lord.” The specific metaphor of “leading” a secular Other toward the divine is



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crucial to these separatists. They are careful to resist attributing any evangelistic success to their own efforts. They merely “lead” Others to Christ; they do not actually perform the conversion themselves. They reach out to the Others, draw them in, guide them toward the divine. In their ethic, the actual conversion is God’s work. While at Clemson for extension, the BJU students relish personal exposure to secular outsiders. During one conversation, they discovered that their Others were “from the University of Tennessee and . . . were doing a project to find out if Americans were as giving as they used to be.” Secular research meets sacred missions, and both were satisfied. The BJU students remember that the UT students “wanted to know if we would give them our socks. They were really surprised when we did and videotaped us sharing the gospel for their class project. Not only did they take that videotape back to UT to share with the class, but after they were through taping, one guy got saved right there.”18 While baffling their potential converts by their peculiar generosity, these separatists were delighted that their message was recorded for a broader audience. They remember that one UT student “got saved.” The passive voice in this phrase is deliberate. The BJU student would refuse to take credit for the Other’s conversion; he simply reached out and guided the Other to the divine where God could perform the conversion. This single contact was enough to justify years of “extension” in their romantic mindset. Whether canvassing public universities or picking up debris, whether “witnessing” door-to-door or donating blood, these romantics want to reach out to their Other whom they interpret as simply lonesome. Communion is the best therapy they can imagine for a sickly culture. Their empathy is successful, in their ethic, as long as it is attractive. When these sectarians are admired, they are validated. Clemson University students know this BJU extension all too well. In the midst of the Campaign 2000 media firestorm, Clemson student, Andrew Trapp, defends Bob Jones University’s extension in the CU’s campus paper.19 He admits that many of his secular peers find the BJU students’ “Are you saved?” questions in the middle of Friday night revelries to be “intrusive and annoying.” Nonetheless, while he disagrees with BJU’s religious doctrine, he still “admires” them. While exasperating, these fundamentalists are commendable since they are sincere and unselfish. To Trapp, there is something beautiful about these pesky fundamentalists.

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Bob Jones University is an institution founded upon conservative Christian ideals. Its purpose has always been to instruct young people in fundamentalist beliefs. Whether or not a person agrees with those fundamentalist beliefs, it is undeniable that the administration at BJU has done everything in its power to try to make its institution embody these beliefs.

Like the military or the monastery, BJU “strive[s] to help its students to have the strongest religious formation possible.” Their commitment is unswerving and effective and, therefore, laudable—even if it is irritating and peculiar. Not only is BJU dedicated to its separatist beliefs, but it is also conscientious in its civic contribution. Trapp reminds his audience that BJU students “truly do contribute to the Greenville community in a positive fashion” with over 40 percent of the BJU student body contributing over 10,000 hours of community service. In Trapp’s opinion, their community service and their earnestness soften their irksome reputation. I have talked with Bob Jones students on several occasions and, although I do not share their religious views, I still find them to be very friendly and God-loving people in general. It is impossible not to admire the sincerity and love of Christ that these people demonstrate in coming to Clemson on Friday nights. . . . The enthusiasm and zeal exhibited here by these students every weekend, as well as their university’s commitment to defending its understanding of the truth, are qualities which every Christian can strive to imitate. For this, Bob Jones University deserves our respect, not our jeers.

Both the BJU students and administration are beautiful examples to Trapp. The administration is merely consistent, the student body is simply altruistic, and their devotion is nothing but admirable. Overall, Trapp sees these romantic separatists as irresistible. These sectarians should not be judged by the media criticism alone, Trapp insists. They must be viewed personally and intimately, as reaching out to what they perceive to be a needy community. That these romantics have won Trapp’s admiration is proof to them of their success. Even an outsider can see their natural beauty. And when that beauty is acknowledged, communion has begun, and in that empathy the secular Other can be healed. Through extensions



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and community service projects, these romantics reach out to heal. Converting toward the divine is the romantic’s sympathetic medicine for a hurting culture. While Jones emphasizes a loving sympathy and an unpopular standing alone, the student talk stresses reaching out and “extending” themselves to a lonely Other. Their unselfishness alone, and not the specifics of their faith or their work, makes them attractive to some secular outsiders. Curing with Courtship: Creating the Desire for Separatism But for their secular patients to swallow their remedy, the romantic must make it palatable. They must demonstrate their own vim and vigor. They must create a desire to be healthy. In creating that desire for communion, the romantic sectarian frames their outreach as courtship. Burke features the metaphor of courtship as a possible paradigm when theorizing persuasion in general. “The hierarchic principal of courtship sets a pattern of communication between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ classes (or kinds).” Since the differences between classes, sensibilities, or even worlds can be interpreted as residing within a temporarily stable hierarchy, encouraging movement between those levels becomes a sort of wooing. This courtship “can be universalized in terms of a climbing from body to soul, from senses through reason to understanding, from worldly to the angelic to God, from woman to beauty in general to transcendent desire for absolute union. Or the communication may be between merely ‘different’ kinds, where the relative grading is not established by general agreement.”20 Without a contrary placement in this hierarchy and without making that distinction clear, the wooing is impossible. As a result, persuasion essentially requires controversy, or, in other words, courtship requires difference. Who is necessarily higher or lower on the hierarchy is vague since often “the superior in one respect becomes the inferior in another, or the superior must court the underlying.” Whether the exact movement seems vertical (as in “climbing” up within a hierarchy) or horizontal (as in reaching out to another group) is immaterial. Separation itself is the key to successful wooing. In sum, identification is compensatory to division.21 And moving within the hierarchy, or wooing, rests on crafting and satiating desire. To Burke, desire is more formal than visceral. Even

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in literature, he views form as psychologically creating and satisfying appetites. “A work has form insofar as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence.” If readers anticipate a sonnet to have fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, finding it will satisfy a psychological but formal need. The only “correct” form, then, to Burke, is one that “gratifies the needs which it creates. The appeal of the form in this sense is obvious: form is the appeal.”22 In other words, when analyzing desire, a critic can look for the form that anticipates it. Making appeals may only be as mysterious as creating and following a predictable form. To be effective, however, the form must be timely and well-timed. For example, to communicate treachery during war times an author may characterize a villain as an enemy spy. This toying with ideological form, Burke warns, is shaky since “shifts in ideology . . . [are] continuous, not only from age to age but from person to person.” The desirability of a form, then, is highly individual. This timeliness must be not only well adapted, but also well performed. That is, to exaggerate desire, an artist should delay its fulfillment. “This satisfaction . . . at times involves a temporary set of frustrations, but in the end these frustrations prove to be simply a more involved kind of satisfaction, and furthermore serve to make the satisfaction of fulfillment more intense.”23 The longer the wait, then, the more rewarding the conclusion. By stirring needs and delaying their satisfaction, a rhetor may make their fulfillment all that more desirable. Therefore, as a paradigm for persuasion, courtship foregrounds difference as essential to success. Once separation between the lover and the beloved is obvious, creating the desire to bridge that difference is crucial. Those desires must be adapted to the cultural context as well as delicately timed to intensify the pleasure in their satisfaction. In terms of sectarian romance, courtship becomes the primary means of persuasion. With desire as a key element in romance, the separatist talk centers on creating and satisfying desire. Separation between the romantic separatist and the secular Other is essential, and accentuating the secular loneliness is paramount. Without the separatist, the secular is forsaken and wan. To restore the cultural health, the romantic separatist must reach out and ease their Other’s sickly soul. Any malady becomes psychosomatic to sectarians, and their “bedside manner” the only salve.



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Every other Thursday throughout the school year, BJU holds a “Bible Study Luncheon.” Complete with uniformed servers, catered entrées, and concert ticket give-aways, the school invites business people from the community for lunch and a short devotional. Seasoned faculty, staff, and administrators speak at these semimonthly events and accentuate the courtship so essential to the separatist’s romance. Creating and satisfying the desire for the separatist lifestyle is the consistent form in these luncheon devotionals. A frequent speaker, Mark Minnick, a local pastor and Bible faculty member, frames the four gospels as “the Heart of the Bible” since every biblical theme “circulates” through them.24 He states that focusing on this center of Scripture can “inspire interest” in the uninitiated. Creating the desire to study the Bible, then, is Minnick’s purpose, and he naturally satisfies that need by informing his audience about the gospels’ text. But such need-creation and satisfaction seems rather mundane and is little more than following conventional public speaking advice from Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.25 His organization, then, does not reveal the peculiar romantic bent. Minnick talks fully like a romantic, however, in his conclusion when he crafts the following desire as universal: “People want Someone to pray to. . . . People want Someone to answer those prayers. . . . People are looking for something after this life.” His framing of this need is, of course, distinctly monotheistic and evangelical. He assumes that prayer and philosophical thoughts about the afterlife are ubiquitous. Yet in the calling out of the desires to pray, to have those prayers answered, and to know their eternal consequence, Minnick heightens the difference between the sectarian and the secular. In his framework, “people want” what Minnick has. They are lacking while he is complete. Minnick merely has access to this “Someone” and this “something” that his Other desires. He is the means to their satisfaction. He wants to reach out and lead them to the balm that can heal their hurt. At a later luncheon, the chief financial officer for the school, Roy Barton, describes “The Case of the Ignorant Professor.”26 He wonders aloud, “Why is it that so many of the world’s intelligent are so ignorant about eternal matters?” Barton splits secular from sacred intelligence. Mastering one usually means, in Barton’s view, bungling the other. Just like many of the educated elite today, Nicodemus from

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John 3 was “woefully negligent about spiritual matters.” This Pharisee was “intellectually curious” about Christ despite the vast differences Barton perceives between them. Nicodemus was an aristocrat; Christ was a populist. Nicodemus was a ruler of the Jews; Christ was only a carpenter. This clear class distinction between Nicodemus and Christ—the educated and the uneducated, the elite and the common, the aristocrat and the worker—is key to stoking Nicodemus’s desire to know more about Christ. As Burke points out the hierarchical difference essential to courtship, so Barton highlights this difference in order to prove Christ’s (and thus the Christian’s) desirability to the secular Other. Bridging the gap between Nicodemus and Christ, then, is the next step in the courtship, and shaping that difference as a lack is necessary. In Barton’s framework, Nicodemus was unhappy with his higher social status. “As with so many people in our churches today,” “wealth” and “knowledge” did not give him what he wanted. His secular status created a deficiency that caused him to seek out a sacred solution. “This burning thirst sent him to meet this rabbi from Nazareth.” The elitist, educated life left this Pharisee only parched and weary. It never satisfied. In Barton’s ethic, secularism alone only creates the desires it can never fulfill. Life without separation only sickens and never heals. So Nicodemus comes to Christ in the middle of the night, and Christ, Barton makes clear, “answers the longing in Nicodemus’s heart.” Barton sees Christ’s confrontation as pinpointing the lack in Nicodemus: “You aren’t satisfied . . . in spite of your searching.” Christ reaches out to satisfy Nicodemus’s longing. Barton’s framing of John 3 is more than a biblical interpretation. He crafts the entire story as an example for contemporary citizens. He turns the story directly to his professional audience: “Is that your experience personally? . . . What Jesus asked of Nicodemus centuries ago, he is asking us.” The biblical story is a metaphor for contemporary separatist wooing. Its form reveals Barton’s romantic framework. Like the contemporary secular Other, Nicodemus was worldly-wise and successful, but terribly lonely and discontent. Both have a “burning thirst.” Both have attained all that the secular world can offer. Both desire spiritual fulfillment. Like the romantic separatist, Christ was ordinary and humble and can cure the Other’s loneliness. Both are peculiar. Both are pure. Both are reaching out. By positioning the separatist as gratifying a secular lack, Barton, like Minnick, is talking like



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a romantic. The secular Other is unhappy and sickly and needs the separatist’s communion for a salve. Empathy and communion alone can heal the secular Other. Like Barton, Jim Berg, the Dean of Students, sees the Bible as a model for contemporary action. He imagines the “Pardons in the Bible” as examples for recent issues of justice and mercy.27 “There’s a lot of misunderstanding of what pardons are all about,” and the contemporary exercise of mercy is “really a travesty of justice.” The solution to the tension between justice and mercy, Berg proposes, is divine. “If we want to get it right, we have to get it from God.” Thus, in his general purpose, Berg creates a distinction between the human and the divine, the irreverent and the holy. But the romance reveals itself more plainly in the thrust of his talk. Berg defines mercy as “rescuing someone from his miserable condition.” Like the Good Samaritan, the merciful perceive hurting people and reach out to liberate them. The separation for Berg is between the merciful and the miserable, the unselfish and the needy, the generous and the pitiful. There are levels of misery and, thus, priorities need to be set within mercy. Berg even describes the “levels” of misery in terms of emergency room patients: the heart attack victim is more “miserable” than the patient with a broken arm, and, thus, the former needs more immediate mercy. Within Berg’s analogy, that heart attack victim is parallel to the secular Outsider. He frames the most miserable condition as being “a soul that is lost and outside of God.” Just as the emergency room medic must soothe a seizing patient, so the separatist must reach out to the “lost” Others drawing them nearer to God. The romantic is content and complete but worried for the lonely Other. For Berg, God’s exercise of justice is always an example to the secular Other who is “watching.” The divine’s actions and the separatist’s reactions are not solitary, but a vivid picture to the secular’s critical eye. “When God executes a judgment it is always to rescue somebody. It’s the most merciful thing He can do. To rescue us personally from our spiritual needs and to rescue society that is watching from their spiritual needs” [italics added]. The Other is “watching” how the separatist heals and is healed. With all eyes on the separatists, they must make themselves robust and strong in order to woo the Other into God’s arms. Even their healthy display can be therapeutic. God’s reaching out to the miserable is a “definite pattern for” the separatist from Berg’s standpoint. As God seeks to bridge the

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gap between the divine and the human, so must separatists extend themselves toward the secular. Berg urges his sectarian audience to “meet the physical affliction of people around us.” He uses the BJU student body as an example for other fundamentalists. Even when they are meeting the physical needs of people, their real ministry is to the secular souls. We have groups of students that go out into this community who help out with literacy campaigns and community relations projects and building projects—all of those acts of mercy, of relieving people of their miserable conditions, is an opportunity for the gospel. That’s why Jesus did those acts of mercy here—for a higher spiritual end. Not for that end in itself, but for something else.

Helping their Others is not the sectarians’ goal. There is “something else,” “a higher spiritual end.” As Berg points up, in the BJU romantic mindset, all community service is a form of courtship. Essentially the BJU community projects are fulfilling the timeliness of Burke’s form. In their reaching out to convert the secular toward the divine, they must appropriately answer immediate material needs. And in satisfying those pressing necessities, these romantics defer what they believe the secular really wants—spiritual communion. Since in the romantic ethic, the outsider desires communion more than physical comfort, the sectarians only tease their Other by meeting those material needs. They are temporarily frustrating, as Burke would say, the secular desire, thus making its satisfaction more intense. The longer the wait to reach the separatist, the more intense will be the fulfillment. While Minnick starkly creates the difference between the secular and the sectarian and Barton demonstrates the separatist desire to bridge that difference, Berg frames all romantic community interaction as within courtship. Well adapted and well performed, the sectarian’s crafting and satiating of desire is central to their talk. Berg’s mercy is a timely reaching out, Barton’s Nicodemus is an affluent but incomplete Other, and Minnick’s “people” can only be satisfied with the separatist’s ways. Minnick accentuates the difference between the romantic and the outsider, Barton bridges that difference, and Berg adapts and delays that much-desired communion.



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Whether with business luncheons, community outreaches, or presidential prescriptions, Bob Jones University views itself as offering a cure to a sickly culture. Their talk accentuates desires that the secular hierarchy creates but cannot satisfy. They extend themselves, reach out, and convert toward the divine. By listening to and welcoming outsiders, they hope to guide Others to stand alone. In the separatist ethic, they sympathize, lead, and satisfy. Sympathy is their cure for a secular Other whose only illness is solitude. Overall, when a culture is diseased, the romantic interprets its sickness as loneliness and offers communion as its balm. That communion depends upon the romantic separatists courting their secular Other and wooing them toward their alternative. Their bedside manner alone is their therapy. In order to make its romantic medicine available, in order to accomplish their converting-to, the romantic must twist the usual secular form. The form may create contemporary desire, but, according to the separatist, it fails to fulfill those desires. Satisfaction can only be found outside the system. Leaving the system, ironically, will make the system’s desires real. Reaching across the hierarchy to rescue the miserable Other, the romantic must accentuate the unsatisfied desires within the secular Other and use themselves as proof that those desires are satisfied in their alternative. Their beauty is their means to satisfy. Romantic separatism, therefore, rests on the system that it resists. To be desirable they must be beautiful, and to be beautiful they must align themselves with the culture. They clothe themselves in the dominant culture so that they seem to be an old-fashioned and therapeutic beauty. This empathetic medicine, however, unwittingly drives them to political conservatism. To aptly satisfy desires, they must adapt or even submit to the dominant culture. To convert toward the divine, they must define community problems as personal (not civic) and solutions, therefore, as private. To create empathy, they must present themselves as wrapped in tradition so that they seem more beautiful than peculiar. As traditional, privatized, and submissive, their romance seems simply conservative and even tragic. But rather than piously conserve the dominant culture, they stand outside it and fashion themselves as part of it. In Fundamentalism and American Culture, George Marsden attributes the overwhelmingly conservative political leanings of twentieth-century fundamentalists to the widespread individualistic values

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of middle-class America that surged following World War I.28 That is, these religious separatists were involuntarily swept toward the right by a political event and have lazily remained there ever since. Analyzing their talk about the community, however, reveals that the fundamentalists’ conservatism is less idle parroting and more active exploiting. For them, conservatism is a tool to lure the Other or a beautiful costume to attract their lonely Beloved’s attention. Making an introduction, delivering a package, filling a helium balloon for a disabled child, and arguing a prima facie case in a policy debate—all these mundane elements are medicinal in the sectarian ethic. That these romantics are solving material cultural problems with immaterial solutions, however, would prompt Burke’s rebuke. To Burke, the separatist sympathy would be merely euphemistic since it distracts from the real social problems and concentrates on the promise of a better life in the next world. But when talking in the midst of a media maelstrom, these romantics seem more than just euphemistic.

Chapter 5 Unfit Fitness

The Comic Corrective to Campaign 2000 Chickens can be taught that only one specific pitch [of a ringing bell] is a food-signal. . . . If one rings the bell next time, not to feed the chickens, but to assemble them for chopping off their heads, they come faithfully running, on the strength of the character which a ringing bell possesses for them. Chickens not so well educated would have acted more wisely. Thus it will be seen that the devices by which we arrived at a correct orientation may be quite the same as those involved in an incorrect one.

z Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change When Bob Jones University moved to Greenville, South Carolina, in 1947, its separatist way of life did not seem too different compared to the established private Southern Baptist liberal arts school across town, Furman University, the public agricultural college up the road, Clemson University, or even the first state-funded school, University of South Carolina. Naturally, BJU had its fundamentalist creed, but many rules among the schools were identical and reflected the stubborn traditional life that dominated the South—a life that seems dangerously foreign to Northern and contemporary sensibilities. For instance, at that time and until the 1960s, all four schools admitted only whites. In fact, until 1964, throughout the South, segregation laws prohibited blacks and whites from attending the same schools. After that, Clemson and USC reluctantly matriculated African–Americans and that only by court order and after student protests. Furman, a private institution, quietly integrated in 1965 and admitted two married black high-school educators into their night school for graduate classes.1 Soon after, Bob Jones University’s continuation of the once typical Southern educational policy came under the scrutiny of the federal 87

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government. Steeped in Southern pride, Scotch-Irish stubbornness, and fundamentalist separatism, the BJU administration bristled under any outsiders’ attempt at change. School president Bob Jones Jr. claimed that he would not “put this institution under the control of the [U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare]” since it was “God’s institution.”2 The school contended that while racial oppression was of “satanic origin,” the racial differences were sacred. Since they defined racial lines as unambiguous and God-ordained, these separatists felt obligated to maintain and never question the divine plan. And the more the federal government wrangled with these sectarians to submit to the new public policy, the more intractable these fundamentalists became. In a sense, they were the ultimate political conservatives—passionately maintaining what the rest of the South wished it could uphold. The defiance against the national (and more Northern) government might have seemed noble to the local audience gazing at these sectarians. By 1970 the Internal Revenue Service announced that any school not admitting blacks would lose their tax-exemption status. The department directed their statement specifically to all private schools in Mississippi as well as Bob Jones University in South Carolina. BJU initiated the usual legal action to preserve their current policies, but by 1975 the Board of Trustees voted to admit all races with the provision that interracial dating and marriage be strictly forbidden, citing the same fear of social “ecumenism.” The separatist submission to federal authority, then, was only a compromise reminiscent of past legal and political “separate but equal” concessions.3 The inclusion of blacks for matriculation while maintaining racial boundaries for more intimate relationships did not satisfy the Internal Revenue Service. In sum, on October 12, 1982, after years of federal court battles, press releases, political offensives and defenses, the Supreme Court heard Bob Jones University v. United States of America. Whereas the government argued that any “charitable” organization must conform to “Federal public policy,” William Ball, BJU’s attorney, argued BJU’s First Amendment rights to religious freedom. Bob Jones University lost that legal battle and their tax-exemption status, refusing to submit to governmental policy. Today it remains one of the few taxable educational institutions in the United States.4 By the late 1990s, the interracial dating prohibition was still established, and the university still enjoyed a sort of financial freedom as



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a full corporation, albeit taxed. In November 1997 Bob Jones Jr., the fundamentalist patriot that led the university to more strident independence from federal authority, died. By May 1999 Bob Jones III, now the only patriarch of the school, asked the Board of Trustees to consider removing the interracial dating prohibition. The board agreed.5 Yet any hopes to remove the rule quietly were dashed by February 2000. On February 2 George W. Bush rallied at BJU, a usual Republican pit stop, on his 2000 presidential campaign in South Carolina, with little media attention.6 Two days later, democratic candidate Bill Bradley severely criticized Bush for his appearance there, though only a few others joined him initially.7 By February 13, after attempting to garner the BJU vote in other forums,8 Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and began his obsessive focus on BJU. He called the university “unAmerican.”9 And the year long political and media firestorm began. After the Bush win in the South Carolina primary on February 19, the media and political fetishizing of Bob Jones University only intensified. McCain now tailored his attacks to fit the upcoming Michigan primary by shifting from accusations of racism to anti-Catholic bigotry. New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli sponsored a (failed) congressional censure of the school which unabashedly lambasted Bob Jones University for its uncivil religious beliefs.10 What amounted to republican bickering outside of South Carolina hurt the politically active BJU “family” deeply. Terry Haskins, speaker pro tem of the South Carolina State House, cochairman of McCain’s South Carolina campaign, and graduate of the university, claimed, “It’s outrageous what’s been done to Bob Jones University. . . . The rules of Bob Jones are very old-fashioned and they’re out of step with normal society. There’s no question about that.”11 Haskins subsequently resigned from McCain’s campaign because of the candidate’s attacks on his alma mater.12 Caught in the thick of the most biting media critique, Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University, felt overwhelming pressure to change university policy. The administration and the board had already been cautiously moving towards eliminating the rule for nearly a year, but the necessity of an immediate response to the national attention was pressing. On March 3, 2000, on Larry King Live, Jones eliminated the interracial dating prohibition that had legally defined the university since the 1970s. The Associated Press reported the next week that

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the rule was only partially lifted: students now needed parental permission to date outside their “race,” the report said.13 But the story was incorrect. As of March 3, 2000, no prohibitions on interracial dating whatsoever exist at Bob Jones University despite continuous media reporting to the contrary.14 The media, political, and separatist responses to the events of Campaign 2000 aptly demonstrate the stark dissimilarity between and the recalcitrant inflexibility within tragedy and romance and the need for a comic correction. Burke warns us that when we choose methods that coincide with our past training, we may, like well-taught chickens, choose the wrong method. “People may be unfitted by being fit in unfit fitness.” And humans may be even more “unfit” than chickens since they are riddled with “the greater complexity of their problems, the vast network of mutually sustained values and judgments.” That social intricacy clouds perceptions and “makes it more difficult for them to perceive the nature of the reorientation required, and to select their means accordingly. They are victims of a trained incapacity, since the very authority of their earlier ways interferes with the adoption of new ones.”15 Dramatistically describing the tragic and the romantic rhetoric in Campaign 2000 foregrounds the unfortunate “unfit fitness” in either frame of reference. This chapter surveys the media transcripts from Campaign 2000 in order to understand the tragic and romantic dramas that persist throughout the discourse. Studying the history of formal and attitudinal prohibitions against interracial marriage is not the focus of this chapter. Nor is primary attention given to the political machinations surrounding the choice of Bob Jones University for a campaign stop or the crafting of the McCain attack, the Republican defense, or the Democratic use of the conflict. The purpose of this chapter is to theorize a comedic response for both the tragic seeking only to kill their Other and the romantic seeking only to woo. Amidst the conflicting discord between tragedy and romance, comedy must step in and break the tension. “Kick the bums out!”: The Tragic Response to Bob Jones University Dramatistically, Burkean tragedy is rather predictable. Teasing out Burke’s tragic cycle from guilt-redemption-hierarchy-victimage reveals



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that humanity views itself as incapable of reaching its ideal perfection. Reaching that perfection is thwarted by the evil scapegoat tainting that ideal. In this drama, the scapegoat primarily acts in order to destroy the citizen’s ideals. The citizen merely becomes part of the scene that is acted upon. And so the tragic citizen’s only defense when faced with this vision of the scapegoat’s evil triumph is to immobilize the scapegoat, to offer itself as a counter-agent hoping for evil’s ruin. Burke suggests that when viewing a contrary drama within your own drama, the contrariness often becomes assimilated into the background as part of the scene. “What A does ‘from within’ as an act, B sees ‘from without’ as an event (that is, a scene).” Yet Burke reminds us that this dissimilarity “is complicated by the fact that A can dialectically consider his own act in terms of B, thus to some extent looking upon it from without; and B can to some extent respond to A’s behavior from within, so that it is not felt merely scenically, as a set of signs, but is vicariously participated in (or ‘incipiently imitated’) as an act.”16 That is, analyzing contrary dramas as simply scenes in its Other’s viewpoint is too hasty. At times an Other’s drama so motivates our own dramas as to be infused into the act. In Campaign 2000, the tragic drama offered is unsurprising. Upon hearing the romantic sectarian’s contrary drama, the dominant quickly assimilates it as a threat. The tragic agent can be broadly interpreted to be all religious separatists or even all of the “Christian Right” and is often specifically articulated as Bob Jones University. To the tragic’s ears, these separatists are forcing the polity to imitate them through legal and political means in order to fulfill what they interpret to be God’s commandments. The scene is the tragic citizenry who is being acted upon rather than acting. The dominant is a potential victim of the separatists’ zealous incivility. In Campaign 2000, Republicans tend to emphasize their candidate’s passivity: he only moves within Republican tradition with little attempt at acting creatively. Democrats usually scapegoat the romantic sectarian: they see the separatist’s contrary drama as a frightful threat to their own drama and, thus, propose only one action—expunging evil. In their cynicism, the media simply debunk: they thoroughly censure the entire culture and never propose any solution. Republicans, Democrats, and media pundits, therefore, are rehearsing an “unfit fitness” that relegates their rhetoric to only tragedy. They can only cry, “Kick the bums out!” when faced with the peculiar sectarian.

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Republican Passivity Republicans attempt to divert attention away from the uncivil separatists but justify their actions by emphasizing passivity in their drama. They must rebuild their constituency, and their creative rationalizations stress again and again the passivity of the candidate who becomes acted upon in the rigors of presidential campaigning. In the Republican debates, George W. Bush tried to put the BJU issue to rest by emphasizing the scenic elements. He was simply one more Republican among many who had gone to BJU before—Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. In this argument, Bush becomes part of the Republican tradition or scene. He “regrets” that he “missed an opportunity” to separate himself from the “antiCatholic bias,” he admits, or that he did not act appropriately or at all in the midst of this tradition. By this time, the issues of race have faded into the background since the minority vote is not pivotal for a Republican primary win. The swing Catholic vote, or the so-called Reagan Democrats, becomes the chief focus.17 Michigan’s Republican governor John Engler similarly emphasizes candidate Bush as part of the political scene: “Ronald Reagan went [to BJU]. The Democratic governor of South Carolina went there. Democrats go appear with Al Sharpton.” Because the Republican tradition since 1980 has been to appear at BJU before the South Carolina primary, the candidate merely follows the custom. The comment emphasizes the passivity of the candidate in planning his schedule as well as disperses particular attacks against him. The purpose of his BJU appearance was not to act uniquely, but passively. He was performing a campaign ritual, a habit, a political motion, not a coherent action. He was simply there “to put his message out, not to go ratify or affirm something that somebody else is saying.”18 On Chris Matthews’s Hardball, Utah’s Republican governor Mike Leavitt similarly justified Bush’s appearance as ambivalent to particulars within the scene but merely moving within his campaign role. He justifies Bush’s ignoring the school’s controversial policies because Bush was there to talk about his own platform. “You go to places like that—to make your point and to persuade people to your ideas not to be persuaded by theirs. . . . He wasn’t there to speak directly to Bob Jones. He was there to speak to 5,000 students who had an interest in his vision for America.”19 Leavitt nuances the audience. To speak



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to school president Bob Jones III would be a distraction but a critical action. To speak to the student body was, on the other hand, an expected political motion. Oklahoma representative J. C. Watts frames George W. Bush as a victim of hypocritical media badgering. He calls the media coverage “beat[ing] up on George Bush for going to Bob Jones University.”20 Several months later, Watts continues to wonder why association automatically assumes guilt. “To say that George Bush speaking at Bob Jones, that that condones the policy of Bob Jones is about like saying that me shopping at a grocery store that sells liquor that I condone liquor. That’s nonsense.”21 Here the candidate is like a submissive consumer who ritualistically follows a capitalistic custom. Bush is merely a part of the scene, mindlessly following the rituals set before him. Pat Robertson similarly sets Bush as a passive part of the tragic scene. Robertson is obviously uncomfortable with the usual coupling of himself with Bob Jones, and thus tries to separate from the controversial, more sectarian institution. On Paula Zahn’s Fox News Network talk show, Pat Robertson portrays himself as a political insider, sympathetic to the strains of presidential campaigning.22 While he visited and spoke at BJU during his 1988 presidential campaign, he claims that he “would have advised [Bush] not to go to Bob Jones. . . . Bob Jones has been known as a rather extreme place. I mean, any of us in the Christian world understand that they are pretty harsh. . . . But when I was there, and I spoke when I was running for president, and they gave me a wonderful reception and [were] very gracious.” He goes on to claim that “it’s just a real big school, and they have a huge alumni organization all over this country. And in that part of South Carolina, they’re very strong.” Although Robertson included BJU in his 1988 campaign tour, he would have steered Bush another direction since even fellow evangelicals see the school as severe. The school is “harsh” to fellow Christians but hospitable to candidates, Robertson implies, since when he was a candidate, BJU was receptive, affable, and very influential in South Carolina politics. Robertson seems to struggle with himself between making BJU appear outside the evangelical mainstream and yet somehow inside the South Carolinian politics. His description of the school is oddly contradictory and may belie the separated attraction that BJU so desperately tries to maintain.

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While he admits the BJU prowess in South Carolina politics, Robertson clearly blames the circumstances of contemporary campaigning for Bush’s appearance there. The campaigning nominee is not an actor in charge of his actions, but a passive victim unable to act independently: I ran for president, as you know, and once you get into that rat race, I mean, it’s so hard to make every decision about every little nuance of what people believe or don’t believe. You’re given a schedule, and you become like an automaton. You’ve got to be at such-and-such a place at 9:00 someplace else at 9:15. You know, it’s just hectic. And—and it’s the job of the campaign managers or the schedulers to figure that stuff out. And if they don’t do it, then, of course, the candidate gets blamed, but at the same time it’s very hard for candidates to overrule their campaign schedulers in the process of a hectic campaign. So I don’t think he ought to be blamed for that.

Bush was the victim of his campaign handlers, like livestock merely passed from 4H to State Fair shows. By placing Bush as a passive part of the scene, Robertson may divert blame from Bush and attention from BJU, and he successfully represents himself as a political insider, empathetic to the rigors of campaigning and distant from the religious separatism of BJU. The chief Republican critic of Bush’s appearance at BJU is, naturally, his opponent, John McCain. His comparison of BJU to other separatists contributes to the fear of victimage at the hands of these religious deviants. In one fell swoop, John McCain equates Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones with Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton. All are “on the extreme ends of the political process, and neither one of them are good . . . for the political process.”23 Both parties have their fanatics in McCain’s view and neither extreme benefits the whole. “Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”24 The “extremes” define the whole in McCain’s talk. All characterize and taint the political process. The rest of the parties can only be passive victims of these acting separatists. Overall, McCain’s arguments amount to little else than a “wouldacoulda-shoulda” attack: if he would have been invited to speak at BJU,



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he could have critiqued the school, and he, then, should have gotten the upper hand. “If I’d have been invited to go to Bob Jones University, sure, I’d have gone! And I’d have told them, ‘Get out of the 16th century and into the 21st century. What you’re doing is racist and cruel!’ Instead—instead, Governor Bush went there and never said a word. I would never, ever do such a thing.”25 McCain’s critique of Bush’s noncritique may seem hopeful since he seems to be urging a moral correction. Yet more than any other’s, McCain’s drama is a complete fantasy. He is only imagining what might have been. His action is tied to a fictional proposition that is too far past to ever happen. As much as any other Republican, McCain is inescapably riddled with the scene, trapped in a dramatistic fantasy over which he has no power. Alan Keyes’s February 14th appearance at BJU amounts to little else. He was strategically poised to speak the day before the South Carolina Republican debates. While Keyes was clearly the moral maverick in the Republican Party, the content of his BJU speech condemning the policies and the religious doctrine at BJU was handed to him on a platter. He clearly knew what was expected of a candidate appearing at BJU at that point, and the overly religious talk that pervades the speech seems simply banal in its timing and context. With his arguments so obviously made for him, his talk seems to be far from creative or active, but simply motion within tragedy. Among all the Republican justifications, only one voice plainly resists succumbing the candidate or the party to mere motion within a scene. Arkansas Representative Asa Hutchinson is a graduate of Bob Jones University along with his brother Arkansas Senator Tim Hutchinson. Representative Hutchinson pointedly called the school’s interracial dating policy “indefensible.” He, naturally, accuses the school’s opponents of misguided action since they are “trying to take political advantage and divide our country and exploit this opportunity.”26 His action-focused criticism is pointed and unusual among his scene-obsessed Republican peers. But for most Republicans, their candidate is merely part of the scene—the long and admirable tradition of other Republicans going before. In their reach to mollify potential but concerned Bush voters, they frame their candidate as submissive to a noble tradition and nearly incapable of acting. Bush was acted upon by the Republican rituals and, perhaps, even tricked by the duplicitous sectarians. Nonetheless, the Republican talk wallows in unfit fitness. The mechanics of

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campaigning and the reputation of authoritative Republicans gone before stifle the Republican response in Campaign 2000. In their honoring of past tradition, what was once a “correct orientation” proves to be only an unfortunately passive, unwise course. Democratic Scapegoating Yet the Democratic talk is equally unfit. They have little to lose in their criticism. Attacking BJU only strengthens their base. And scapegoating these romantic sectarians is as “unfitting” as the Republican passivity trope. Within the contemporary or “pseudoscientific” tragedy, according to Burke, the scapegoat is a dangerous actor who has to be stopped. In our talk, Burke contends, humanity frames the scapegoat as the “representative” or the “vessel” of unwelcome sins, “the sacrificial animal upon whose back the burden of these evils is ritualistically loaded.” In primitive cultures, the scapegoat was “ritualistically delegated” to an animal. But in complex contemporary cultures, “the tendency was to endow the sacrificial animal with social coordinates, so that the goat became replaced by the ‘sacrificial King.’ ”27 But around the scapegoat, human beings congregate. At times, Burke speaks idealistically about the scapegoat: “the delegation of one’s burden to the sacrificial vessel of the scapegoat is a giving, a socialization, albeit the socialization of a loss, a transference of something, deeply within, devoutly a part of one’s own self.”28 Since our rowdy compulsions must be disciplined, Timothy W. Crusius argues, the tragic scapegoat assumes our punishment and offers us “both an imaginative expression of the forbidden and absolution from it.”29 Community necessitates sacrifice. Identification is compensatory to division.30 But Burke would prefer that we were more ritualistic and more traditional in our choice of scapegoats. In an “explicit ritual,” according to Burke, the scapegoat is “formally appointed” and is thought “both to have and not to have the character formally delegated to it” with a touch of disguise or pretentiousness about it.31 There is a sense of duplicity in the ritualistic scapegoat. This sacrifice is inanimate or nonhuman or even inorganic. And its sacrifice is symbolic. Thus, in traditional rituals, the scapegoat is continuously the malleable agent of the community. Members identify against the symbolic scapegoat. They choose and sacrifice. They act.



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The “pseudoscientific scapegoat,” however, plagues complex contemporary societies. Here the scapegoat “is felt purely and simply to have the assigned character.” “The scapegoat is taken to possess intrinsically the qualities we assign to it.” “Indictment, vituperation, and vindictiveness” plague the tragic talk. Formal accusations, bitterness, deep-seated ill will, and striving toward revenge are all symptoms of the contemporary scapegoat mechanism.32 In a “pseudoscientific” tragedy, the scapegoat is not a symbolic sacrifice, but a real, personified evil that threatens to overtake the passive citizenry unless they struggle to expunge the evil. With Republicans desperately struggling to rebuild their constituency by emphasizing the passivity of their scenic candidate, the Democrats fully and “pseudoscientifically” scapegoat the religious sectarians and, thus, underscore the evil of the BJU scapegoat/actor. “Indictment, vituperation, and vindictiveness” persist. What started with Bill Bradley’s appropriate and incisive criticism against Republican conservatism in general,33 mushroomed into a vengeful and acrid accusation of the evil inherent in BJU from all sides of the political and media spectrum. The scapegoating talk reveals a passivity as well with only one “unfit” act possible for the victimized citizenry trapped in the scene: expunge the evil. The discourse surrounding Robert Torricelli’s congressional censure of Bob Jones University is perhaps the clearest articulation of this tragic drama. Torricelli painted the separatists as pure evil—thieves stealing everyone’s Christian faith: “Christianity doesn’t belong to these evangelicals any more than the flag belongs to military militias. . . . This is a faith that belongs to everybody.” Inherent in his statement, of course, is the assumption that all citizens would call themselves “Christian.” As American as Old Glory, Christianity belongs to all citizens, according to Torricelli. One supporter of the resolution even compared BJU to Ayatollah Khomeini.34 In supporting the censure, the Interfaith Alliance condemned BJU’s religious doctrine as “heresy” while itself criticizing BJU’s criticism of alternative faiths.35 Within their drama, the critique of the separatist is legitimate while the separatist’s critique is so unorthodox as to be dangerous. While surveying Torricelli’s failed censure, reporters remembered a similar resolution condemning Louis Farrakhan,36 and once again, separatism itself seems hazardous and uncivil.

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Peter King, prominent McCain supporter, frequently argues that George W. Bush and Bob Jones University and anyone else who is tied to the school are guilty by association. While he admits that “George Bush himself is not a bigot,” going to BJU proved that in crisis, Bush “was willing to shake hands with the devil.”37 Bush is here again seen as passively submitting. While the insider Republicans present Bush as submitting to a noble Republican tradition, King frames him as weakly surrendering to evil incarnate. The evil, in this case, is the wily scapegoat, BJU. Even after BJU removed the interracial dating restriction, some leaders refuse to change their tragic drama. They continue in the usual fear tactics and are “fit in unfit fitness.” Reverend Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, does not believe that “Bob Jones has had a change of heart. I think that perhaps Bob Jones has had a change of mind.” The difference between “heart” and “mind” is lost in this civic context. The policy change is, at the very least, framed as insincere in Butts’s comment, and BJU is still untrustworthy. Maxine Waters, prominent Democratic Representative from California, is “suspicious when a change comes under this kind of pressure. I would not rush too fast to believe that we have reached a new milestone here.”38 Dramatic, albeit tardy, changes in policy are ignored. The scapegoat’s actions may have fallen out of character, but the tragic drama piously persists. The fear that pervaded the tragic rhetoric before BJU removed the rule, predictably and unwisely continues after the change. Talk about BJU quickly degenerates from argumentation into mere hasty generalizations. At times, their separatist religion is attacked and they are called a “fringe group”39 and “extreme.”40 More often, however, their civic position is lambasted. BJU is on the “low road”41 and “not American”42 since they are out of “sync with mainstream America.”43 Appearing at the uiversity is an absolute “deal breaker”44 for those fighting for social justice and an “albatross”45 for George W. Bush. BJU is quickly reduced to a mere symbol: “of the South’s troubled racial politics,”46 “of divisiveness and intolerance in our society,”47 and “of monomaniacal right-wing intolerance.”48 In perhaps the lowest attempt at humor in the news transcripts, Congressman Barney Frank on CNN’s Crossfire joked that the hood BJU gives to its honorary degree holders is “white” with “eye holes.”49 Frank was pretty proud of his quip because he asked Republican mod-



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erator Mary Matalin “You don’t like the white eye holes?” Matalin responded “No, I don’t like that one, but it was a pretty good joke.” Within tragedy the only action a scene-entrenched citizenry can take is to expunge the scapegoat, and Frank’s fantastical jibe is far from harmless or comedic. Suturing the most maniacal symbol in the American consciousness to the character of these religious separatists is purely tragic. The ubiquity of the tragic scapegoating is obvious in a Capitol Hill Hearing of the Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the House Commerce Committee in April 2000. The subcommittee was deliberating over the recent FCC regulations for noncommercial television licenses. The 2000 regulations required that “more than half of the hours of programming aired on a reserved channel must serve an educational, instructional or cultural purpose in the station’s community of license.” While “teaching” about religion was allowed in that requirement, programs “devoted to religious exhortation, proselytizing or statements of personally held religious views and beliefs would not qualify.”50 The committee was discussing the FCC’s potential infringement on broadcaster rights under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. And here the tragic drama places Bob Jones University as the evil actor sublimating the good albeit weak citizenry. Democratic Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey resists lifting the FCC restrictions against religious broadcasting. He worries that BJU will be “buying the only noncommercial educational station in my hometown and telling me that Catholics are a cult, telling me that the pope is the emissary of Satan. . . . Because Bob Jones has the money to buy a station and to come into my hometown and that’s the only station in town and I’m going to have to listen to this message. . . . I just don’t want that, okay.” BJU is the only actor in Markey’s argument. He is merely a passive consumer of the media, only able to succumb to its arguments. He is “going to have to listen to this message [italics added].” BJU is wealthy, crafty, and ominous. This evil will overwhelm Markey’s freedoms unless he, in fading desperation, limits BJU’s freedoms first. Republican Mississippi Representative Chip Pickering tries to divert attention away from Markey’s fears and to the issue at hand. His is a more action-oriented drama. “This has nothing to do with Bob Jones or any other fringe group. This is simply about whether the

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FCC can regulate the content of programming and we say it cannot.” In Pickering’s talk, the subcommittee can act rather than be acted upon. He frames BJU as a “fringe group” but one that is still part of the citizenry. “[Because] we just really don’t like those people,” we cannot “put them over here where their voice isn’t heard, or doesn’t intrude upon us. . . . It is a question of bias and discrimination against the religious voice.” Media Debunking While glimmers of Burkean comedy occasionally shine through this political talk, scapegoating predominates. At times, the scapegoating becomes so thorough as to degenerate into pure “debunking.” While some operating within the tragic drama might simply reframe the scapegoat as a tool for community building, debunkers are too exhaustive in their purging of evil, according to Burke. Burke scholar William H. Rueckert describes H. L. Mencken as the quintessential debunker.51 A typical debunker “discerns an evil. He wants to eradicate this evil. And he wants to do a thorough job of it. Hence, in order to be sure that he is thorough enough, he becomes too thorough.”52 In other words, debunkers legitimately perceive an injustice. But in their zeal to eliminate it, they dismantle more than the evil and its doers. They dismantle the culture itself and leave little in its place. In their purging, the good is thrown out with the evil. Destruction, thus, is the only goal for debunkers. Correction is immaterial. “In order to knock the underpinnings from beneath the arguments of his opponents, he perfects the mode of argument that would, if carried out consistently, also knock the underpinnings from beneath his own argument. But at this important juncture he simply ‘pulls his punch,’ refusing to apply as a test of his own position the arguments by which he has dissolved his opponents’ position.”53 The sheer thrill of being able to logistically dance around the practitioners of injustice is all that matters. And within the debunkers’ absurdist tragedy, the citizenry too is relegated to the scene with little power to act. Only moving is possible since any action would simply be as malevolent as the action it replaced. On the editorial page, debunkers in Campaign 2000 shine. The Denver Post’s Cynthia Tucker debunks all Christian religion as simply hypocritical and false—whether fundamentalist, Catholic, or evangeli-



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cal. BJU’s atypical take on Scripture is simply “false prophecy.” And its theology is merely “warped” like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Roman Catholic Church. “There is a long and ignominious tradition of that [hypocrisy] in Christianity, from the Southern Baptists’ use of the Bible to defend slavery, to the Catholic Church’s failure to vigorously denounce the Holocaust.”54 Washington Post’s Colbert King debunks the entire political process. To him, Bob Jones University has “earned . . . a national reputation for clinging to some of the worst vestiges of the Old South” and is “a long-time lightning rod for racial and religious controversy.” As for the school’s opinion on Catholicism, he complains that BJU has called Catholic doctrines “false” while, of course, implying that BJU’s theology is equally incorrect. But BJU critics are within King’s sight as well. Senator Robert Torricelli has “never met a political shot too cheap to take” and has thus “introduced a Senate ‘tut-tut’ resolution.” He moans, “Have mercy!” at the end of his editorial.55 Neither Tucker nor King offers any solution to the mire of injustice they see before them. Gathering the evidence and finding the implicit evil in all of them is simply enough. Deconstructing and never reconstructing is all they seem to do. They move through the procedures of criticism without actually acting as critics. Republican passivity, Democratic scapegoating, and media debunking all fully reinforce tragedy. The romantic sectarian’s counter drama is perceived as a threat, and the sectarian is acting to destroy the citizens mired in the scene. The only act possible is to destroy the separatist in order to preserve the idyllic perfection of unity and civility. Like the trained chicken, the tragic foolishly clings to its drama to the point of an “unfit fitness.” “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”: The Romantic Response to Tragedy Dramatistically, the romantic scenario vacillates between how the separatists view themselves with the divine and how they view themselves with their unrequited Other. To the divine, they emphasize passivity, with the sectarian merely the submissive agency in God’s active will. Among their Others, however, the drama turns active, and the sectarian becomes the agent to woo the lonely outsider to the divine by being attractive.

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Although their romantic drama may be as singular as the tragic, its distance from the dominant discourse makes it paradoxically both fixed and innovative. Since the romantic views itself as embodying the deteriorating values of the dominant, it scrambles to preserve them but may not know how to negotiate between conflicting ideals. Not knowing what their suitors may desire, romantic sectarians are often caught between old-fashioned beauty and outmoded garishness. They interpret the contrary tragic drama as proof of their Other’s loneliness and hope that by tenuously removing themselves from participating in the tragic drama they can woo their secular Other toward the divine. In essence, they quietly and frequently repeat to their unrequited love that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” in the hopes that their cultural absence will stir their beloved to join them. Their dramas are not quite as mystical or as euphemistic as Burke might assume; rather these romantic separatists’ dual reach for the divine and the human tames any propensity toward tragic talk. Their singular trope of courtship and ingratiating style temper their recalcitrant passivity. Passive versus Active Drama The negotiating between their role with God and their role with their fellow human being is quite evident in the Bob Jones III’s interviews with Larry King. On March 3, 2000, after nearly a month of political and media attention resulting from George W. Bush’s campaign stop at the university, Bob Jones III stepped into the media spotlight on Larry King Live. Jones must have realized that his letting the media attacks roll off his back was no longer an effective strategy, and the live format ensured him that no unkind editing would reduce his arguments to sound bites. In this text Jones’s talk strategically moves between passivity and action all within a romantic frame of reference. The then enforced ban against interracial dating is King’s initial focus. And he allows Jones his due and asks him simply to explain “why they can’t date.” Jones’s response follows: Well, being a Bible-believing institution, Larry, we try to base things on Bible principle. The problem we have today is that our principle is so greatly misunderstood. People think we don’t let them date because we are racist, in other words to be racist you have to treat people differently.



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We don’t. We don’t let them date, because we were trying, as an example, to enforce something, a principle that is much greater than this. We stand against the one-world government, against the coming world of antiChrist, which is a one world [sic] system of blending, of all differences, of blending of national differences, economic differences, church differences, into a big one ecumenical world. The Bible is very clear about this.

Jones boldly admits differences that, he assumes, the secular outsider overlooks. He seems to be baldly facing the racial distinctions that the secular world wants to blur. The diversity that is commonly celebrated in the secular is too loose for the romantic ethic. Rather than “celebrate” diversity, Jones is more comfortable squarely identifying it. He seeks to rigidly define that diversity with precise rules reinforcing those racial differences. While the secular outsider bristles under any identification of difference—religious, racial, or otherwise—these separatists demand recognition of difference. While the former strives to celebrate diversity, the latter attempts to make rules reinforcing it. While the former worries that divergent identities will result in dissimilar treatment, the latter assumes that it does not. The romantic is comfortable drawing clear lines in the sand that the secular would rather gloss over. The romantic drama is still unfolding in Jones’s defense. In his talk, the sectarian acts within the scene of an increasingly monolithic world in order to highlight difference. His resistance to a unified whole is so mysterious and incomprehensible to outsider ears that it may appear deviant and dangerous. Jones continues: Now, we realize that an interracial marriage is not going to bring in the world the anti-Christ by any means, but if we as Christians stand for Christ and not anti-Christ, . . . we are against the one world church. We are against one economy, one political system. We see what the Bible says about this, so we say, [“]OK, if they’re going to blend this world—and interracial marriage is a genetic blending, which is a very definite sort of blending . . . let’s put this policy in here, because we are against the one world church.[”] And, way back, 17 years ago when I was on your program, I was saying on programs all across America, we are not going to the Supreme Court fighting for our rule . . . we are fighting for our right to it. There is a religious freedom issue, that’s all we ever fought for.

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Their separatist notion of diversity must be preserved even down to interpersonal relationships. Their universal fears trickle down into individual choices. The differences between the grand scale and the mundane details are overlooked while differences in race are assumed. But continuing with the perplexing notion of social “ecumenism” will only perpetuate their separation. This identification with the divine and resistance to the anti-divine (i.e., the “anti-Christ”) will be dismissed if Jones leaves his defense there. This divine-focused drama is unintelligible to a secular audience. Jones must turn that belief into a civil right if he is to woo the outsider. He must shift to a more active, more civic drama. When he becomes an “example” of American religious freedom, when he presents himself as the embodiment of First Amendment liberties, he finally can be his most romantic. The religious interpretation is perplexing. So to be heard, he must turn the faith into a civil issue. After the lengthy and somewhat mysterious explanation of the “Bible principle,” Jones contends that the specific interracial dating practice is “insignificant.” “Students never hear it preached. There have been four, five, six generations of students that graduated from there have never heard this preached in our chapel or taught in our school.” That the school would fight all the way to the Supreme Court for a prohibition it would eventually call unimportant is baffling. To his secular audience, perhaps Jones was attempting to characterize the rule as merely an old vestige that merely needed to be removed from dusty rule books. To his insider audience, perhaps the argument is directed at the thousands of BJU graduates and their families who were poring over Jones’s media defense. Jones is priming them for the announcement to come and reminding them that the interracial dating rule is unimportant to the overall fundamentalist identity. Early in the interview, Jones drops the unexpected bomb. “But I can tell you this; we don’t have to have that rule. In fact, as of today, we have dropped the rule.” While outsiders may have been unimpressed, insiders in the fundamentalist community were stunned. The “indefensible” rule was gone. Students listening to the broadcast in the 7000seat auditorium on the BJU campus gasped, cheered, and applauded.56 Jones had stepped outside of the expected behavior for a sectarian. He was willing to stretch—even slightly—the sectarian framework, to massage it as necessary, in order to make his position more attractively stylish to the secular outsider gazing at these sectarians.



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Yet the patriarch could not be seen as caving in to outsider pressure. Living independently of the whims of secular culture is imperative in the separatist ethic. Jones’s defense sets the romantic position as paramount: Here is a great institution, one of the premier academic institutions in America, one of the premier Christian colleges of America. We have a broader testimony. And if all anybody can see is this rule, which we never talk about or preach, which most of our students couldn’t even tell you what it is. It is that unimportant to us. I said to our administration, [“]You know, guys, this thing is of such insignificance to us, it is so significant to the world at large, the media particularly, why should we have this here as an obstacle? It hurts our graduates, we love our graduates greatly, it hurts maybe the church, as well. I don’t want to hurt the church of Jesus Christ.[”] . . . It is ended, and I want it to be very clear why it has ended. Our concern for the cause of Christ, our concern for our graduates, our concern for our testimony, our concern for the school’s broader usefulness is greater to us than a rule that we never talk about and that is meaningless to us. The principle upon which it’s based is very, very important.

The BJU “testimony” is Jones’s concern—the example they portray to the secular world, the beauty they are able to maintain. The rule becomes insignificant when outsiders make it their entire focus. In the interest of a “broader testimony” or the larger image of the fundamentalist Christian, Jones acted to remove the rule. He admits that “all anybody can see is this rule.” The outsider gaze had centered on this one issue that was not indicative of the whole beauty. What was once thought to be a traditional beauty mark had turned into an aberrant cancerous blotch. It was a small detail to the separatist, but a large imperfection to the outsider, and, therefore, Jones removed the distraction. By eliminating the prohibition, Jones hoped to “take this club out of their hand. That’s the only thing I want to do.” He perceived that the media and the politicians were beating on these separatists. Instead of allowing the abuse to continue, instead of sacrificing himself, instead of vengefully beating the outsider in retribution, Jones simply removes their weapon. He acts. In his romantic defense of the policy change, Jones seems “fitting.” He is not merely championing past tradition and wallowing in an unfit fitness. Unlike Burke’s chickens, Jones is not

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responding to the media firestorm as his authoritative past would have him, but he is responding, though cautiously and strategically, in a new, fitting way. Euphemistic Mystics versus Active Romantics Within Burkean dramatism, these romantics might seem to be mere mystics. For the Burkean mystic, the goal to identify with God alone is all-encompassing. This mystic is “engrossed, enrapt, entranced” to the point of transforming the means to the divine into the ends themselves. And “when means become ends, and are sought to the exclusion of all else, then the man for whom they are thus transformed does indeed identify himself with a universal purpose, an over-all unitary design, quite as with mystical communion.”57 Juggling the Burkean grammar, the mystic almost reduces the pentad into a uni-ad—the purpose itself becomes the act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose. Making purpose absolute, to Burke, makes it perfunctory. “Doctrines of absolute purpose lead into doctrines of mechanism, since the perfect regularity of nature (such as a thoroughly mechanical universe would exemplify) could be taken to indicate the ‘design’ of its Creator.”58 Seemingly obvious differences, then, appear divinely sanctioned. Racial distinctions must be God-ordained. While most nonmystics are satisfied with the ambiguities and mysteries of life, the mystics “are content with nothing less than the conviction that they are God, that they have actually been one with God.”59 And their union with the divine (or with the divine’s divisions) is pure identification, pure consubstantiation. The secular world becomes merely the scene to be ignored. This mystical mechanism, then, results in an “unfit fitness,” according to Burke. The mystic is so piously tied to fulfilling the divine’s will that any other noble purpose is overlooked. Only moving with an “unfit fitness” is possible. Acting is impossible. In essence, mystics are so heavenly focused that they are no earthly good. In Burke’s analysis, their otherworldly, transcendental focus makes them useless. Another descriptor for the mystic is “euphemistic.” “Euphemistic is Burke’s euphemism for the church or any frame that is based upon a supernatural scheme that hides or covers up or misnames the real ills of life in society and promises a better life in the next world.”60 This distraction away from the real social problems of life does little to solve those problems. The euphemistic frame distracts

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from and obfuscates material troubles by translating them into otherworldly maladies. But Burke’s descriptors of “mystic” and “euphemistic” do not perfectly correspond to these religious sectarians. Although the sectarians do repeatedly rehearse the divine will as their purpose, their civic interaction defies any solely spiritual ambitions. Although at times they frame public problems as spiritual maladies, they actively suggest political solutions in their rhetoric. Although they interpret culturally imposed distinctions as providential, they are willing to call their earlier assumptions “insignificant” for the sake of their “testimony.” In other words, Burke’s terms aptly describe the devout, separatist side of these sectarians but ignore the attractive wooing that dominates their civic talk. While they singly submit to God’s will, they creatively craft their public image. While they weave a spiritual application from the most political events, they can as easily stretch their faith into a political issue. While their civic action is so deliberate and protracted as to seem dormant, they do act. While they may be passive to the divine, they are active in the body politic. In this first Larry King Live interview, Bob Jones III’s talk demonstrates this romantic tension that challenges Burke’s euphemistic-mystical frame. Jones clings to the divine while brushing off bad policy. He identifies with medieval Protestants while nuancing doctrinal distinctions. King allows Jones to rebuild his reputation after being called anti-Catholic. He asks, “Will you explain your feelings about the Catholic Church? . . . What is the argument of the Bob Jones theory against that?” JONES: Well, it’s really not the Bob Jones theory, Larry. In all, this is what the Reformation was all about a long time ago. You know, this goes back to . . . KING: Luther. JONES: Yes. And before him to Wycliffe in mid-1300s in England. It’s called . . . the morning star of the Reformation. Bob Jones University believes the Bible. If there’s doctrine in any other church contrary to the Bible, we can’t feel good about that. I mean, the way we feel about the Catholic Church or Mormonism or Buddhism or Hinduism or anything else is that, you know, we wish these people knew the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord delivers liberal Protestants, atheists, unsaved people of any faith, delivers them from the bondage of sin to Christ.

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KING: That’s what the Catholics say. JONES: The Catholics say the deliverance is in the grace that is imparted through the transubstantiation that takes place in the offering of the sacraments, the elements of the sacraments . . . KING: Original sin. JONES: . . . takes away—you know, the Catholics are very strong on the infallibility of the pope.

Jones is careful to frame all counter positions—even liberal Protestant positions—as outside the original Protestant ethic. He carefully outlines meticulous specifics about religious doctrine to point up the seemingly stark differences between Catholics and Protestants. Here Jones seems somewhat mystical and euphemistic. Whereas his earlier defense of the interracial rule and its subsequent elimination frame the sectarian as an active participant, this defense of the BJU position on Catholicism changes the active drama he offered earlier. What was first presented as an active sectarian resisting the monolithic, unified “ecumenism” has changed into the traditional and passive Protestant carrying the torch of believers gone before. When King asks Jones for his explanation of his contrary stand on Catholicism, Jones replies that his position is the medieval Reformers’ position. He diverts responsibility to the historical figures before him. He is not creating new doctrine but preserving the old. His description seems “unfit” since it is merely a rehashing of past authorities. Yet Jones is fully aware of his own outsider status within the world. He is not so distracted by transcendental purposes as to ignore his civic position. He is not euphemistic alone. King confronts Jones on his use of the term “cult” to describe the Roman Catholic Church, and Jones admits its loaded implication. KING: Why say that they’re a cult? Why say that that’s some sort of mysterious kind of thing that’s bad? JONES: Well, “cult” has, I admit, a connotation, of something sinister, or . . . KING: It does. JONES: . . . small and underhanded. Cult also means, according to the dictionary—I looked it up this afternoon because I figured you would



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ask this question—it also has the broader meaning of strict adherence to any faith. Now . . . KING: Then you’re a cult. JONES: People—Catholics would say we are. Mormons would say we are. In fact, I was reading a Newsweek article today written in 1996 about the pope’s visit to South America. And he was railing against the Protestants there. And the whole article was about how strong he was. He called them a sect. So I guess what we’re dealing with here is that any group calls anybody else outside of its group sect, cult, whatever, looks with suspicion upon it.

Jones, then, stretches the “cult” accusation. He admits the negative colloquial assumption but defers to the dictionary definition of “strict adherence to any faith.” He acknowledges that based on many peoples’ perspectives and that definition, BJU would be a cult. He even admits that to any devout insider of any religion, all religious outsiders seem “suspicious” and cultic. Amidst all the religious talk in Campaign 2000, only Jones confesses this insider/outsider tension. Perhaps he is so aware of his separatism that acknowledging its distrustful image to outsiders is not difficult. Thus, Jones is not simply mystical or euphemistic. He is not solely heavenly minded. He is aware of his position as a cultural outsider, and he emphasizes civic solutions in his public talk. His romantic framework, therefore, assuages any fully mystical rhetoric. He cannot be completely euphemistic while being romantic. He is, at times, unfit and, at others, quite fitting. The more passive drama arises when King initially asks Jones if the media attention “annoys” him. Jones responds with passivity. “We feel like the Lord owns the university, it’s his school, it’s been there seventy-three years and if he allowed this to happen, then we are content. We are just trying to figure out what the meaning is.” These sectarians describe themselves not only as preservers of the past, but also as submissive tools of God. The school is not theirs, but the divine’s. They do not make the rules; God does. In this context, they do not act, but contemplate the divine act that is done to them. They pensively “figure out” the “meaning” and assume that the divine will take care. They can talk as mystically and as euphemistically as Burke expects them to.

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But this passivity is private and devout. In defending himself, his school, or his creed, Jones turns passive and even euphemistic. But when participating in the civic sphere, these sectarians see themselves as acting. While they are submissive to God, they are assertive within the political spectrum. And negotiating between the two dramas is easily done: Twenty years ago roughly, God brought the university to the national attention. . . . We went to the Supreme Court, we lost our tax exemption—we’re the only taxable college now in America, the only one. OK, we went for the principle of religious freedom, not for our policy, but for the right to hold it. I would die for a Catholic’s right, a Jew’s right to believe what he believes. I would not want anybody to abridge that.

The policy may be sacred, but the right to adhere to it is political. They submit to the former, but they actively fight for the latter. This seeming contradiction between passivity and activity is essential to their separated attraction. They identify with the divine by passively surrendering while identifying with the secular outsider by passionately acting. The tension between submission and assertion continues in Jones’s defense: Maybe God is using this little independent Christian college that takes no federal funds, [with] high academic standards, producing a graduate of character and patriotism, of decency and integrity. Maybe God is using this little school now, again, so America can look and say, [“]Wait a minute. What is happening to these people down there? Why is everybody against them? Why are they being accused of these—why is the Senate even thinking about a resolution to slap them for what they believe? Will my church be next?[”] There’s some questions America needs to be asking itself.

In this concluding moment, Jones fully articulates the romantic sectarian position. The sectarian identifies with the divine by passively submitting. In that surrender, the sectarian might get the outsider’s attention. America might “look” at the sectarian and reconsider its own freedoms and faith. The surrender, then, cannot be tacit; it must be obvious and plain before the secular Other. And it must prove that these sectarians embody the most lovely of the culture’s ideals—here, the First Amendment freedoms.



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BJU students also talk within the romantic framework and present themselves as beautiful examples, active in the civic sphere. The university newspaper reported on the difficulties that the summer brought to students recently branded as prejudiced by the media.61 Rather than wallow in the negative press, these romantics turn the media attention into an “opportunity.” They refuse to sacrifice themselves. They refuse to merely distract their attention to otherworldly concerns. Instead, they act—publicly and assertively. Those active in politics over the summer found themselves “objects of curiosity.” One student remarked, “The question I heard most often from other interns was ‘Is Bob Jones really like what people are saying?’ . . . I hope somebody saw a different message about the school than they were accustomed to.” The message this student offered was to be seen. It was a presentation, a demonstration of unexpected sectarian beauty. An incoming Rhetoric and Public Address student interested in a political career worried that her choice of institution would affect her future. At the Republican National Convention to which she was the youngest delegate, she described, “reporters would come up and talk to me, and of course the natural question was ‘Where are you going to school?’. . . Honestly, I was afraid of the effects it might have on my career. But I knew I was coming to a Christian college no matter what. Basically, the media could do that to any Christian college—it’s not just Bob Jones.” This student diverted the media criticism from merely attacking BJU to attacking all “Christians,” or all evangelical separatists. She knew she was “on display” before reporters and fellow delegates. She admitted that her response would affect her school and her future political interaction. She responded publicly without euphemistically sticking her head in the sand. Thus, since the romantic simultaneously reaches for the divine and the human, Burke’s mystical-euphemistic category does not fit. Their dramatistic purpose does not consume their talk to the point of devouring all other pentadic elements. Their focus is not entirely heavenly. Instead, they are so devoted to wooing their secular Other that the euphemistic mystic acquiesces to a loving courtship. The contradictory and simultaneous reach for the divine and the human demands that the romantic sectarian will not always respond with “unfit fitness.” While Burke somewhat admires the euphemistic frame even though it opposes his comic prescription, he has little patience for the sectarian impulse. Sectarians are merely reacting to rigid frames

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of acceptance, in Burke’s view, and need the flexible comic frames to loosen and defuse their separatist tendencies. To Burke, sectarians feel “driven into a corner” and duck out of the frame to create a new “colony.” The splintering among separatists will perpetuate new groups since, Burke reasons, their frame is purely rigid.62 Once stuck in the corner, sectarians create a new strategy—separation. But their leaving is never pure separation, or pure euphemism, for they remain in full sight of the dominant they just left. They are not only concerned with identifying with the divine. If they were, they would completely remove themselves from any interaction with the dominant. Instead, romantic sectarians want to woo their Other toward the divine. This “courtship” is only possible if there is a clear and distinct estrangement between the sectarian and the dominant. There must be dissimilarity in order to move toward a particular similarity. So highlighting up difference is essential to accomplishing that ultimate romantic identification. Division, for them, is compensatory to identification.63 And for the romantic sectarians, courtship is not just one option among many; it is the only way to prove their value. The difference between the class of the dominant and the class of the sectarian must be initially made clear. Who is superior and who is inferior in this drama is difficult to determine. Burke reminds us that “the hierarchic principle of courtship sets a pattern of communication between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ classes (or kinds). . . . Or the communication may be merely between ‘different’ kinds, where the relative grading is not established by general agreement.” And even if the courtship roles are clear, often “the superior in one respect becomes the inferior in another, or the superior must court the underling.”64 Yet the difference cannot be too stark or a romantic union may never be possible. Scapegoating, then, is out of the question for the romantic. Even those most defiant of Others must be framed as only lonely without the romantic sectarian. Wooing them must always be possible. So instead of expunging evil, the romantic charms the evildoer. No scapegoats exist in their most recent and most romantic talk. While the late Bob Jones Jr.’s past accusations of evil against contrary faiths is undoubtedly harsh scapegoating,65 no such tragic talk exists in Jones III’s contemporary Campaign 2000 discourse.66 Within Jones’s King interviews, the most contrary Others are undoubtedly the media, the left, and John McCain. The media are “incorrect” with their



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“skewed values” but not evil.67 Their political opposites on the left are “raucous and radical” and unreflexively biased but not criminal.68 And even though John McCain had “ridiculous” and “politically warped” expectations of George W. Bush, he was nothing more than foolish.69 The romantic must maintain its charm, and scapegoating their Other would destroy that charm’s effectiveness. The romantic’s hope for a future identification keeps scapegoating in check. This romantic trope of “love” pervades these sectarians’ presentation to their secular Other yet sounds odd within the civic discourse. In describing Alan Keyes’s visit to BJU, Jones tells Larry King about his affection for the public figure: “I got up afterwards, and I told him I appreciated his frankness. And when I got through, he came to the platform and hugged me. And I hugged him. He was treated royally.” When asked about anti-Catholic themes in BJU’s public discourse, Jones replies “The truth is, Larry, we don’t hate Catholics. We love Catholics. We love the souls of everybody. We want to see everybody come to Christ.” In his talk, Jones fervently argues that accentuating the doctrinal difference between the fundamentalist and the Catholic is not hateful. Once again, as a separatist, Jones wants to intensify difference while secular outsiders seek to muddle it. That difference is essential to their romantic courtship. Unless dissimilarity is perceived, no wooing or eventual identification is necessary. So these sectarians insist that they “love” all people—even those starkly different from them—because they hope to unite with those people in the faith. “We want to see everybody come to Christ,” Jones stresses. Their affection for their Others does not rely upon their conversion but upon the hope of their conversion. Since that courtly hope is always possible, no potential mate could be ignored. Every outsider is a prospective companion. Thus, any accusation of hatred is a misunderstanding in Jones’s view. To Jones, anyone who criticizes BJU as hating Catholics is uninformed: “Nobody that has ever accused us of hating Catholics . . . knows us.” Consistently he emphasizes that personal, gracious contact and fundamentalist doctrine are not mutually exclusive. These seeming opposites are what he sutures together. And through personal relationships—hugging and appreciating, separating and knowing—their beauty may be seen. Other spokespersons also emphasize the courtship trope. The university’s community relations coordinator, Jonathan Pait, insisted

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on CNN World News Today that “We love America and we love one another. That’s the message that isn’t being heard.”70 And in an interview with the Daily News,71 another member of the BJU Community Relations office complained about the political controversy. “We’ve poured our heart out. No matter what we say or how we say it, it gets twisted.” In spite of the loving talk that they have tried to demonstrate, they are not heard. When they “pour their hearts out,” the media and the political system cannot help but misunderstand. Outmoded Garishness Turns to Timely Beauty Perhaps this courtship talk was not particularly stylish. According to Burke, style is a set of rules for “doing the right thing.” Style is simply ingratiation—“an attempt to gain favor by the hypnotic or suggestive process of ‘saying the right thing.’ ” “The ways by which the mannered speaker would ingratiate himself with mannered listeners, or the plain-spoken one with blunt listeners, may thus become style gone wrong when the two groups cross.”72 That is, sometimes style outside of its intended audience is grossly unstylish. Some acts cannot fit among the cultural prescriptions. And at times identifying with the divine or wooing the outsider may seem inelegant. Talk of doctrine may be too tedious in political discussions. Talk of “love” may ironically be off-putting as well. But for the romantic sectarian, ingratiation is the principal means of acting in the public sphere, and finding a more stylish rhetoric is essential. So on the same day that Bob Jones III was to appear on Larry King Live, Bob Jones University published a full-page advertisement called “A Letter to the Nation from Bob Jones University” in the business section of USA Today.73 On its website this “Letter” accompanied another text labeled “The Truth About Bob Jones University.”74 The “Letter” and the “Truth” are generally similar in content, but the “Truth” is assertive and bold, almost brazen, in its tone. The reach for the divine and the purpose of their romantic talk is clear: “The Christian, scriptural mandate is to present Christ to the world and plead with all men everywhere to look to the Lamb of God, repent of their sins, and trust Him as their sin substitute and His righteousness to give them standing in the sight of God which they cannot have any other way.” This clear nod to the Great Commission suits the conservative evangelical ethic and seems fitting within the BJU Website.

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But to its now purely secular and national audience of business professionals in USA Today, such a reach for the divine or earlier “love” tropes may be unstylish. In courtship, both participants may restrain from boldly declaring their intentions initially. The “Letter” must be more subtly romantic and show the beauty of the sectarian life. The “right thing” to say must be more political than homiletical. The letter in its entirety follows: Dear Fellow Americans, For the past few weeks, reports in print and broadcast media in connection with the Republican presidential primary have characterized Bob Jones University as a bigoted institution. This characterization has been false and injurious to the school. Please allow me to give you additional information so that you can form your own image of our students, faculty, staff and graduates. WE’VE BEEN THRUST INTO THE CURRENT POLITICAL DEBATE QUITE IRRATIONALLY. In the interest of helping to educate the university’s 5,000 students and to assist them in practicing good citizenship, we allow political candidates to come to our campus to speak on a regular basis. We have welcomed officeholders and conservative candidates from the Republican party virtually since the school was founded more than 73 years ago. Gov. George W. Bush and Dr. Alan Keyes were two recent speakers in this continuing program. This practice is followed in most of the nation’s institutions of higher learning. Bob Jones University is, first and foremost, a traditional Bible-believing Christian place. We believe in the absolute authority of the Bible, which clearly reveals that our God is the creator of heaven and earth and of all therein. Since its founding in 1927, the university, with 34,000 graduates who are spread throughout the world, has not moved away from its historic biblical roots. Bob Jones University’s academic credentials are heralded and respected. Our graduates are in demand throughout the business, educational and professional worlds. They occupy high positions in state and federal government, both elected and appointed. BJU students want discipline because they know it is essential to success in all areas of life. They want to be challenged academically. They also want to graduate as people of better character, as better Christians, and as more productive citizens. Millions of Americans were unfamiliar with the university until a national media spotlight was turned on it. Through this media coverage, most of it incorrect, you have been given the opportunity to find out more about Bob Jones University.

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RELIGIOUS FREEDOM SHOULD BE PRECIOUS TO ALL AMERICANS. Bob Jones University’s beliefs are not the issue at hand, however. Our right to be Bible-believing is the issue. This is religious freedom in a nutshell. Religious freedom was the quest that brought the Pilgrims to these shores in the first place. Religious freedom is, indeed, the bedrock reason for our nation’s existence. The framers of our Constitution believed this. The First Amendment to the Constitution states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . Recently U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli from New Jersey attacked this freedom when he announced sponsorship of a U.S. Senate resolution to censure Bob Jones University for its religious beliefs. This attack ought to offend and frighten every freedom-loving person. What other religious belief will find itself in the gunsight of the U.S. Senate next? Will it be: Islam’s doctrines with regard to women? The Qur’an states: “Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other” (Sura 4:34). Roman Catholicism’s doctrine that the Pope is infallible? “The First Vatican Council has defined as ‘a divinely revealed dogma’ that ‘the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra . . . is possessed of infallibility . . . that such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable . . .’ ” (Kevin Knight, On-line Catholic Encyclopedia, www.newadvent.org/cathen/07790a.htm). The belief in Judaism restricting the marriage choices of their adherents? “According to post-Sinaitic Jewish law, a marriage can be contracted only between two Jews, so an intermarriage is not recognized” (www.faqs.org/faqs/ judaism/FAQ/05-Worship/). Would you desire to see them persecuted by the Senate, by Presidential candidates, or by the media because their beliefs are not yours and may even offend you? We wouldn’t! RACIALLY BIGOTED? YOU DECIDE. We are not racists in any shape, form or fashion. We do not hold one race over another. Our admissions policy is open and students of differing races come from 50 states and 40 foreign countries. Our 1998 recipient of the coveted Alumni Appreciation Award happened to be an AfricanAmerican. We didn’t give the award based on filling a quota. We gave him the award because he exemplifies an outstanding Christian life. He represents Christian living we want current and future graduates, regardless of race, to emulate. We invite minorities to speak at our daily chapels and annual Bible Conference, participate as guest artists in our fine arts performances and lecture students in classes. We work hard at promoting racial harmony in our local community. Approximately 40 percent of the individuals in our student body are volunteering time weekly in a



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wide variety of activities, including: working with children from broken or abusive homes, teaching literacy, cleaning up litter, repairing homes of the downtrodden, ministering to prisoners, serving in churches, helping those with special mental or physical disabilities and visiting the elderly in area nursing homes. The volunteer efforts cross all racial lines and go into all segments of the community. WE DO NOT HATE CATHOLICS, AS CHARGED. Our faculty, staff and students do not hate Roman Catholics — we love them in Christ. There is a wide gulf between Catholic and Baptist/ Protestant beliefs. Nevertheless, we respect the freedom of all Roman Catholics to have their beliefs, just as we do individuals in other faiths. THE CORE ISSUE IS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. The university does not expect everyone to agree with it or like it. The cross of Jesus Christ is a dividing line for some. We don’t quake or blush with embarrassment over the term “religious conservatives.” More importantly, we are not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith” (Romans, Chapter 1, Verses 16 and 17). Thoughtful American citizens, Christian or otherwise, should see that religious freedom is the core issue in this entire matter. To speak in defense of Bob Jones University does not align anyone with our beliefs, but with the cherished principle of religious freedom guaranteed by our Constitution.

The romantic frame of reference dominates this text. Their identification with the divine is more subtle than in their web declaration. When speaking within this forum of nationally focused business professionals, an explanation of a particular fundamentalist doctrine will be lost and blatant courtship talk will be distasteful. Jones simply says that the school “believe[s] in the absolute authority of the Bible, which clearly reveals that our God is the creator of heaven and earth and of all therein.” And their doctrinal identification in this forum is complete. Difference is still significant in this text, but Jones relegates racial difference to the petty machinations of secular life. In the romantic framework here, separatist living outshines racial differences. Awards are given, speakers are invited, and charity is offered—with race, they claim, never considered.75 Here, racial distinctions seem to be the talk of secular outsiders. But religious difference in doctrine is significant.

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Even with striking denominational differences, the people are “loved” and “respected” with their freedoms sacred. Differences in policy and doctrine must be made clear, but differences in people are unseen. The earlier distinctions that Jones described as necessary to prevent social “ecumenism” are not present in this text. Perhaps in his conversation with King, Jones was describing an earlier, unstylish defense that now needed to be tweaked to be more ingratiating to contemporary Others. Within this “Letter,” identifying with the secular by embodying their core ideals becomes essential. These sectarians craft themselves as glimmering with the beauty of Americanism. Understanding the school cannot come from inspecting its rules, but from admiring its product who are the quintessential Americans. Their graduates are “sermons in shoes” for the faith. As Jones describes, they occupy positions in the highest echelons of the business, political, and educational realms. They are disciplined people with “better character” and who are “more productive citizens” than those who graduate from secular educational institutions. They demonstrate what BJU really is. They literally embody what such sectarian living is all about. Any institution that makes such a beautiful product, the text implies, must be admired. These beautiful people deserve the appreciative gaze of the secular outsider. And these people are unselfishly personifying religious freedom for all Americans. “The core issue” of the Campaign 2000 controversy is the separatist’s “right to be Bible-believing” not their particular beliefs. If religious freedom is the “bedrock” of the American identity, then those personifying religious freedom are equally essential. BJU’s pursuit of religious freedom parallels the pilgrims’ “quest” that founded our country. If a senator can censure the peculiar religious beliefs of a fundamentalist institution like BJU, any other atypical belief system could be under attack. From the faithful Muslim to the devout Roman Catholic to the Orthodox Jew—all believing Americans may be at risk, and Bob Jones University is ready to take on the fight for all of them. And defending BJU is not an espousal of its beliefs, but an affirmation of America’s precious freedoms. BJU is not sacrificing itself for the sake of the greater good, but presenting itself as an embodiment of the cultural ideals. They are not the surrendering, dying hero, but the beautiful, quintessentially American lover who can complete the lonely outsider. Their drama is not typically tragic, but contrarily romantic.



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When the most timely, the romantic is the most beautiful. When they embody the finest cultural ideals, their corporeal text seems irresistible. At times, however, their articulation of the beautiful is “unfit.” They seem unstylish and grossly pretentious. Then, the romantic turns inward and passive. They seem to retreat to the divine and worry that their beauty is fading. At these pensive moments, the romantic seems most euphemistic—withdrawing from the civic sphere and overwhelmed by the scene in their romantic drama. “Heads I win, tales you lose!”: The Comic Corrective to Tragedy and Romance Since tragedy is mired in passivity and scapegoating and romance, at times, falls back into a similar “unfit” scenic dependence, Burkean comedy must offer a corrective. The comic drama is fully active. Tragedy fetishizes the expunging of the scapegoat to the point of suppressing the hope of any other action. Romance embodies the cultural values to the point of stifling well-timed action. Burke does not merely include, redeem, or welcome the scapegoat, but instead corrects. The evil is translated into foolishness, and the viciousness into mistakenness. Burke offers the proverb “Heads I win, tails you lose” as the dominant strategy in comedy that makes every situation a win-win situation. So that “if things turn out one way, your system accounts for them—and if they turned out the opposite way, your system also accounts for them.”76 The comedian makes every attempt to push the culture away from the precipice of victimage. The comic drama is one of action—juggling the cultural books in order to correct by making fun within a supple frame of reference. For Rueckert, Burke was always a comedian and for Burke, criticism was always comic. The comic tropes are “widen,” “broaden,” and “amplify.” In essence, Burke wants the critic to “see double” and “around corners.” And in so doing, the critic admits that human existence is far from simple or stagnant, but complex and moving. And in that “seeing double,” perhaps we can cobble together a new vocabulary that provides “humility without humiliation.”77 Burke sees the comic approach as always ironic. Like in a drama in which the characters interpret an act as negative while the audience’s contrary frame of reference may see the act as positive, this “dramatic irony” is possible in human relations as well.78 True irony is humble

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and grounded in a “fundamental kinship with the enemy, as one needs him, is indebted to him, is not merely outside him as an observer but contains him within, being consubstantial with him.”79 Consequently, Burke’s notion of rhetorical irony could temper the scapegoating in a tragic drama. Burke would not have society sanguinely eliminate the process of scapegoating altogether, since scapegoating can build a community. Instead he would have us adopt a more traditional scapegoating ritual. Rather than kill people, Burke would prefer we destroy a symbol. Rather than singularly assign an evil character to humans, Burke would want us to make the vice muddled and imprecise. Rather than seek revenge against our Others, Burke would have us cleanse ourselves. Rather than simply and tragically move, Burke would have us creatively act. So Burke’s comic irony would have us find a primitive scapegoat, rather than a pseudo scientific one, to sacrifice—something inorganic, symbolic, or nonhuman. Rather than sacrifice BJU, for instance, Burke might suggest expunging the interracial prohibition itself as a representative of the social ills. And in this rhetorical work, the need for a pseudoscientific scapegoat is tempered. By gathering around the rule’s removal, a cobbled identification—even with romantic sectarians—is possible. The “good life” can be reached. Burke’s irony may provide us with other alternatives to the tragic reactions within Campaign 2000. Interpreting BJU as an enemy outside the civic sphere can be overturned to find the “fundamental kinship” with these sectarians. The division that seems so obvious is inverted to be an identification that is so necessary to “the good life.” Thus, looking at the tragic rhetoric ironically, describing BJU as evil incarnate would widen into describing it as the recalcitrant strain in all human organizations. Farrakhan and Sharpton as well as Robertson, Falwell, and Jones are no longer threats, but perhaps reminders of the stark diversity possible in a democracy or bulwarks preserving everyone’s freedom to radically disagree. The Republicans’ drama of passivity would broaden to a drama of activity with their candidate not merely following the planned course but radically crafting it anew. Reducing BJU to a representation of all social ills—“the South’s troubled racial politics,”80 “divisiveness and intolerance in our society,”81 and “monomaniacal right-wing intolerance”82—would amplify into a problem for all human beings caught in a foolish situation that drives



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mistaken behavior. Critique is still possible in comedy, but correction is the solution rather than annihilation. With perspective by incongruity, Burke urges the comic critic to refuse to cut squarely along grain lines. Instead the critic must cut along the bias to create new, supple classifications that can give under pressure. That is, rather than succumb to the usual classifications, Burke wonders what new thing might result if we make new categories. “Classifications are heuristic by reason of the fact that, to the processes of abstraction and analogy, they dictate new groupings, hence new discoveries.”83 Rather than insist that the sectarians abandon their romance, the comic critic could suggest new arguments within the ethic itself. And in correcting the romantic sectarian, Burke could suggest perspective by incongruity. By urging the romantics to step down from their pedestal and shake off their singular focus on traditional beauty, perhaps a new charm could result. Jones attempted this stretch when he spoke out against the Confederate flag on the South Carolina State Capitol—the first minister in the state to publicly criticize the practice.84 Jones was attempting to cut across the grain, to stretch the romantic frame, to respond in a way no one expected, to align himself within a new category. This was a glimmer of romantic comedy in Campaign 2000. But other perspectives by incongruity are possible. The fear of appearing to cave in to outsider pressure caused the overly protracted wait in eliminating the interracial dating rule. Oddly enough, the wait was so long and the public sentiment was so voracious that BJU was nearly forced to act within the full gaze of the media and politicians. Had these religious sectarians acted sooner perhaps their beauty would never have been tarnished. If BJU had bucked the Southern tradition in the 1960s and had integrated prior to the state-funded universities, they would have been still peculiar (or separate) among their peers and their beauty would have endured. Within the contemporary context, their romantic choice to endure could be replaced with a more comic choice to readily admit their past foolishness. In their focus on First Amendment liberty, these romantics align themselves with the most conservative doctrines of American liberalism. A Burkean comedian might ask them to find an incongruous perspective and consider supporting other American ideals such as democratic equality. When accused of bigotry, instead of pedantically

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explaining their doctrinal differences or demonstrating themselves as the embodiment of freedom for all Americans, they could argue that politically and legally all faiths are equal. Their “Letter to the Nation” hints at this argument but never fully articulates it. The accent on liberty over equality so dominates their talk that a contrary stress might cut on the political bias and might allow more comic, more supple, and more incongruous perspectives. The romantic framework triggers “love” talk that only frustrates the romantic’s effectiveness in the civic sphere. “Love” tropes may also reinforce a dysfunctional reaction within the public sphere. Romantics become hurt when their love is not reciprocated, and they, thus, are prone to withdraw from civic interaction. During the media firestorm, one BJU faculty member said while furrowing his brow, “Why do they do this? Why are they so cruel? I just don’t understand.” The regret and the frustration in his voice can lead to a civic passivity. When the beloved belittles, often the lover turns away, disappointed, wounded, and silent. Political action is impossible within this sort of passivity. Looking at the dysfunctional talk through Burke’s perspective by incongruity might urge the romantic to adopt the more civil notion of “friendship” or “respect” over “love” in their public discourse. “Friend” would seem less threatening to their secular Other and would encourage a critical laughter at differences that might otherwise hurt a purely romantic focus. Yet comedy could be at home within this romantic ethic. That is, a romantic comedy hybrid can be imagined for these sectarians as they talk in the public sphere. Standing outside the dominant can allow a rhetorical freedom for these sectarians. They can use their tenuous position to be creatively and comically beautiful. They may support moves toward social justice by framing it as divine design. They can cut across the grain in fashioning their beautiful garment of American ideals. They can resist romantic passivity and act politically. At times they can resist an unfit fitness and act creatively and beautifully. When surveying the talk in Campaign 2000, the contrary tragic and the romantic frames of reference become clear with both crying out for comic relief. Comedy can correct the tragic’s passivity and scapegoating and the romantic’s reluctance and timidity. What the tragic defines as an evil enemy, the comic would define as a mistaken adversary. What the romantic sees as a lonely and potential mate, the comic might redefine as a different but equal friend.



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Even though the clamor over Bob Jones University in Campaign 2000 died down by the fall, little tragic jibes kept popping up in the media. In October 2000 Gentlemen’s Quarterly published a fall fashion spread under the guise that it took the seemingly candid shots on a faux BJU campus with two typical students—an interracial heterosexual couple. With an actual BJU pennant, license plate, and T-shirt carefully placed throughout the spread, the editors stretch at humor by juxtaposing the ostensibly outdated rules at BJU with the expected behavior of typical contemporary college students. Flirting in the classroom, kissing at a ball game, and fondling in a coed dormitory are all shown with authentic rules from a 1975 BJU student handbook. When president-elect George W. Bush selected John Ashcroft for his attorney general, politicians and pundits naturally scrutinized the choice, and Ashcroft’s Bob Jones University honorary degree was too irresistible for a story-hungry press. Most of the media fetishizing of BJU was simply reminiscent of earlier talk—painfully and similarly tragic. Bob Jones III appeared once again on Larry King Live with a much coveted video recording of Ashcroft’s acceptance speech. Jones’s talk is as romantic as ever, defending the separatist way of life as beautiful and charming.85 By early spring 2001, BJU hits the news again when Trevor Loflin, a homeless teenager from California, receives a perfect SAT score. Eager for human interest, the media jumps on the story of this downand-out boy making good in spite of his hardships. But media jaws must have collectively dropped when Loflin announced where he wanted to go to college—Bob Jones University. On “The O’Reilly Factor,” Loflin explains that BJU is “in accord with my religious beliefs for one thing. And for another thing, well, it’s got a very strict moral code. And I believe in that. And also, it’s very good academically. It’s got one of the best academics of any Christian college anywhere.”86 By May, George W. Bush had appointed Arkansas Representative Asa Hutchinson, vocal BJU graduate, as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. News outlets reported of Hutchinson’s fundamentalist education with little comment.87 On May 1, 2001, the producers of the CBS drama Judging Amy were eager for the sweeps month attention and added a new stereotypically conservative character to contrast with Tyne Daly’s left-leaning Maxine. Played by heartthrob Mitch Longley, the character is disabled (as is the actor himself) and needs help in setting up his office. While attempting to hang his

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portrait of George W. Bush, Longley’s character asks Maxine for her help. She is appalled at the picture and bursts out, “What do you think this is? Bob Jones University?”88 Later in that sweeps month, NBC’s desperate grab for the game show advertising dollar, The Weakest Link, asked one of its contestants, “What university did George W. Bush visit in 2000 that was the subject of much controversy?” The contestant, a university professor, passed on the question.89 The tragedy continues and so does need for comic correction. Bob Jones University, more a household name after Campaign 2000 than ever before, is still the tragic scapegoat for some or a curious place to mock for others. It has become a background for fashion spreads, a jibe in prime-time dramas, and a trivia question for struggling network game shows. For the romantics, however, their drama reached its unexpected happy ending in October 2000. One of the university’s favorite sons, Terry Haskins, Speaker pro tem of the South Carolina State House, died prematurely at age forty-five of melanoma. Haskins, a Republican, was greatly respected on both sides of the aisle. He led the legislative fight in eliminating video poker in the state and in removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. His funeral was held on Friday, October 27, 2000, at Bob Jones University in the Rodeheaver Auditorium.90 Bob Jones III spoke along with Haskins’s former pastor Bob Sheldon, South Carolina’s former Governor David Beasley, and Haskins’s best friend David Gustafson. The entire political machine of South Carolina poured into the university building—both Democrats and Republicans, both local and state officials—to honor this graduate of the politically controversial school. In the last row of the building, Republican presidential candidate, John McCain noisily slipped in during the service. Haskins had been his personal friend for years and the cochairman of his South Carolina campaign until McCain lambasted his alma mater. The funeral concluded, and the family began the recessional right past McCain’s seat. After the family, Bob Jones III followed. He stopped and warmly greeted the senator. “Senator McCain, it’s so nice to see you here. I know that Gloria [Haskins, the widow,] appreciates it. I’m glad you could come.” McCain was as gracious in response. The next Sunday in the campus morning church service, Jones delivered the sermon.91 Before beginning, he mentioned the Haskins funeral and his meeting Senator McCain afterward. At the graveside,



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he recalled that the two had talked at length. McCain had requested that they meet in Jones’s office just to talk. Jones reminded the audience that McCain suffers from the same cancer that killed Haskins and implied that McCain was concerned for his own future. An audible and collective sigh echoed through the building. To these separatists, their most bitter beloved had softened toward them. While the proposed meeting has never taken place, the promise of a meeting—the hope of a closer identification—was enough for these romantic sectarians. Had they scapegoated the potential mate that was scapegoating them, their romantic conclusion would have been impossible. In their separated romance, however, even the harshest enemy could be redeemed. Their peculiar beauty, while inopportune and sullen at times, often resists tragedy and reaches toward comedy.

Conclusion

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

z Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form Well into the throes of the twentieth century, Kenneth Burke crafted a vocabulary to talk ourselves out of the ultimate disease of cooperation—war. Framing tragedy as persisting through every human endeavor and comedy as its periodic relief, Burke started a provocative conversation and invited critics to participate. This book joins that parlor discussion. It takes Burke’s notions of tragedy and comedy very seriously, imagines their practical possibilities, and then offers an additional term, foreshadowed but unimagined in Burke, in the vocabulary of romance. This conversation has also joined political theory and religious scholarship. From the Federalist Papers to contemporary political theory, liberal democracy has always looked askance at religious zealotry. Political theory and religious histories provide few new vocabularies to 127

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theorize the religious separatists as part of the public sphere. Crafting this new vocabulary is essential since restricting our vision of public discourse by excluding sectarians would hinder democracy’s goals. Limiting one voice, no matter how pesky, opens the possibility to contain other defiant views. As critical scholars, we must craft ways to stretch our frames of acceptance to include even the peskiest voices. And Kenneth Burke’s notions of tragedy and comedy productively offer a metanarrative for understanding this impulse to expunge the undesirable and for creating a critical alternative. Burke’s notions of tragedy and comedy persist throughout his writing. While tragedy reaches for a beautiful ideal, Burke’s alternative comedy would poke fun at the ideal. While tragedy feels guilty for falling short of perfection, comedy juggles the cultural books so that a loss is translated into a win. While tragedy blames a scapegoat for cultural sin, comedy finds that sin in every human being. The Other in tragedy is irreconcilably evil, but in comedy the Other is simply mistaken. Chantal Mouffe would add that the Other should be transformed from an enemy to an adversary. While Burke opens the door for theorists to include the sectarian in their discourse, his tragedy and comedy dichotomy fails to adequately describe the religious sectarian. They seem to stand outside his vocabulary, acting neither tragically nor comically. Unlike tragedy, they are not goaded by the cultural ideals but embody them. They do not tragically offer themselves up as a sacrifice for the culture’s purification, but they use themselves as an example for the culture to follow. Thus, a third frame of acceptance can be theorized—romance. When the sectarian is “cornered,” as Burke described, the sectarian separates from the dominant culture and that separation forces an entirely new rhetoric. The separatist leaves but never very far so as to guarantee the full attention of the dominant. The sectarian neither tragically purifies nor comically corrects the Other. Instead the sectarian unequivocally and unalterably woos. What the tragic kills and the comic critiques, the suitor charms. The evil enemy, which the comic transforms into a mistaken adversary, becomes a lonely Beloved in the romantic’s sight. What goads the tragic and tickles the comic, the romantic personifies. Romantic sectarians identify not through victimage or criticism but through wooing—that irresistible beauty that joins the Other to the sectarian ethic far outside the dominant frame.



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And in their remembering, collecting, helping, and defending, Bob Jones University fully talks within a romantic motive. By separating, they have removed themselves from the dominant’s piety toward tragedy and have lost some opportunities for an impious comedy. Mapping who is their Other, the beloved, or the audience for their talk reveals the incipient tragedy. In their remembering, they are most likely talking to potential students or their parents. In their art collection, they woo the cultured, educated, religiously sensitive art-lover. In their community service, they work to win whoever is present. In their most political talk, they try to win those fellow citizens most at risk of losing their own religious freedoms. Perhaps their beloved is best understood by who it is not. They have, in essence, given up on the left-leaning urban elite who seem too self-sufficient to be loved. They ignore the Democratic Other as too unsympathetic to listen. Most telling, however, is that they rarely talk to their less separated evangelical brothers and sisters. Totally ignoring the evangelical’s presence in any of their discourse implies a sort of romantic competition. To continue playing with this metaphor, perhaps the evangelical community seems too promiscuous to these chaste romantics. Like the heroine in Edwin Long’s “Vashti Refuses the King’s Summons,” the romantic shuts out the pleading servants and the bragging king to keep her own self pure. More metaphoric teasing might also provide a resolution to this tragic tension in romance. A mother of a teenage daughter often insists that if she just “be herself,” the boys will flock to her side. Being comfortable in her own skin, showing a sincere friendship, just enjoying herself—the therapeutic culture gives lots of ways of resolving adolescent romantic angst. Rather than fetishizing their Other, appreciating themselves first and then seeking platonic friendships might ameliorate the drive toward romantic tragedy. Much has changed at Bob Jones University since Campaign 2000. After years of resisting the external validation of accreditation, BJU is now accredited through the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. A new president and a new administration are at the helm. At times, these romantics still sound like their pre-Campaign-2000 selves. After President George W. Bush’s second election, the still university president Bob Jones III wrote a forthright and unembellished letter of congratulations.1 He assumed a spiritual connection with the

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president. He identified with him as the same substance. “Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly. . . . Nonetheless, we could not be more thankful that God has given you four more years to serve Him in the White House, never taking off your Christian faith and laying it aside as a man takes off a jacket, but living, speaking, and making decisions as one who knows the Bible to be eternally true.” Talking as if both are “insiders,” Jones hopes to make his loyalty and admiration as loud and as plain as any of the others. When it seems safe to join the chorus, the romantic might tiptoe out into plain view. Yet assertive political involvement for these sectarians has been scarce since 2000. Their public discourse has turned more strategic and even more internal. The new administration offers a more comedic metaphor for the next generation. Stephen Jones, great-grandson of the founder, is the first BJU president without the “Robert Reynolds” moniker. He has been described as “more attuned” to the Millennial generation in the student body.2 Far from the exciting extroverted evangelists before him, “he’s more anti-hellfire and brimstone,” reporters quip.3 Jones expresses a gracious “reaching-out” reminiscent of pre-Campaign 2000 romance. “[Jesus] reached beyond the pure believers of his day,” he reminds a reporter. To him, the campus is a nurturing “greenhouse,” a family that grows Christians stronger. And within that attractive strategy of outreach, within that comedic cultivation of a greenhouse, Bob Jones University can find a robust rhetoric. A greenhouse is a temporary place. Its purpose is to start the seed, feed it, nurture it lovingly, and eventually harden off that plant and send it out into the world to bloom and flourish. Greenhouses grow plants that are not only beautiful, but also strong. They not only produce good fruit, but also weather the storm. Not just for show and not just for the fight, the products of a greenhouse will thrive and nurture many future generations. As gardeners in a greenhouse, these romantics can be better comedians. Ideologically they must keep their romance intact. But within that cultivating ethic, they can sing more like the romantically comic tune so predominant in their Museum and Gallery. These sectarians are already well-versed in liminal living. They know how to be beautiful. As gardeners, however, they are neither the sole actors nor the pragmatic agencies nor passive scenic elements. Rather, they join the



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divine in the ongoing work of growing grace with those around them. Some plant, some water, but God gives the increase after all.4 In 1999 Bob Jones University opened the Gustafson Fine Arts Center, a building addition and renovation that dramatically expanded and improved the facilities for the School of Fine Arts. For all performance majors in music, art, and speech, the building reinforces their studies’ place as the crown jewel in fundamentalism. For these romantics, the fine arts are clearly the most beautiful way to woo their Beloved into divine arms. In every service, outreach, revival, or event that the school hosts some fine arts influence can be found. Making the message beautiful is essential to making it heard. Every person that enters this fine arts complex is reminded of the sectarians’ romantic reach for attraction. The foyer is tall and dramatically austere except for an opulent stained glass picture opposite the entryway. Towering above the picture is a reminder from Philippians 4:8: “Whatsoever things are lovely, . . . think on these things.” For insiders the text urges them to comically and confidently assert their sectarian beauty. For outsiders the text chides them to alternatively see their cultural ideals in the sectarians surrounding them. And for the social critic, the text provides a productive means to craft some comic relief.

Notes

Preface Epigraph: James Madison, The Federalist No. 10 (Atlanta: Emory Law School) http://www.law.emory.edu/cms/site/index.php?id=3142. 1 Mark Taylor Dalhouse, An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 2 Jan Schakowsky, Schakowsky Cosponsors Crowley Resolution Condemning Discriminatory Practices Prevalent at Bob Jones University, House of Representatives, 29 February 2000, http://www.house.gov/schakowsky/press2000/pr2_29_00bobjones.html.

Chapter 1 Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 3–24. 2 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 22. 3 Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 4–5. 4 Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, 265. 5 Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 195. 6 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 73, 43. 7 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 22. 8 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 43. 9 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 102, 41–42 (italics original). 10 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 171. 11 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 166–67, 171, 260; Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 6. 12 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (Phronesis) (London: Verso, 1992), 4. 13 Chantal Mouffe, “Democracy, Power, and the ‘Political,’” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 254. 14 Mouffe, Return of the Political, 6. 15 Mouffe, Return of the Political, 2–3. 16 Mouffe, Return of the Political, 20–21. 17 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 229, 33. 1

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Mouffe, “Democracy,” 247. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 25. 20 Mouffe, Return of the Political, 57. 21 Mouffe, Return of the Political, 4. 22 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 102–3, 100, 138–39, 321. 25 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 208, 37, 177, 217. 24 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 208. 25 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 260. 26 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 5, 55, 57. 27 Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 105. 18 19

Chapter Two Epigraph: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 9. 1 Jennifer Wilson, “Heritage Day Honors Late Chancellor,” Collegian, 28 October 1999. 2 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36. 3 Before the modern notion of nation, language was considered untouchable and sacred. Anderson argues that “the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized” (19). That is, before nations were imagined, Latin, as one example, was honored as divine. This “particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth.” Only with this notion of a specific language as sacred could Christianity, and other religions such as Islam, manage its “great transcontinental modalities,” as Anderson calls them (36). Thus, when Latin was no longer privileged, the vernacular came to the foreground. The common tongue contained fracturing and divisive qualities. The vernacular is accessible and open to even unskilled conversants. With artificial linguistic constraints removed, diversified and common discourse could fill the void. 4 Before the modern notion of nation, society was structured as highly hierarchical and top-down. Monarchy meant rule by “persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation. Human loyalties were necessarily hierarchical and centripetal because the ruler, like the sacred script, was a mode of access to being and inherent in it” (36). Sacred rule and the sacred tongue directed all attention to a singular, detached entity. Thus, when the monarchy, like Latin, was no longer preferred, the common citizen was drawn into the social structure. No longer could the provinces be less important than the capital or the “suburbs” less than the urban centers, so to speak. With the boundaries of the nation clearly drawn, citizenship was clearly and more democratically defined. 5 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12. 6 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36. 7 See Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History (Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen, 1974).



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8 Daniel Turner, Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University Press, 1997), 140, 142, 257. 9 Martha Beaver, “BJU Library Adds Jerusalem Room,” Greenville News, 6 September 1980. 10 Bob Jones Jr., “Dedication of Mack Library,” speech. (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University Audio Services, 6 September 1980), sound cassette. 11 Bob Jones III, “Dedication of Mack Library” (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University Audio Services, 6 September 1980), sound cassette. 12 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 35–36. 13 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 36. 14 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 36. 15 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 36. 16 Burke, Permanence and Change, 173. 17 Burke, Permanence and Change, 107. 18 Burke, Permanence and Change, 74–75. 19 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 59. 20 Kenneth Burke, “Semantic and Poetic Meaning,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), 144. 21 George A. Kennedy, Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 182. 22 Acts 1:8. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. 23 Kennedy, Aristotle on Rhetoric, 182. 24 David O. Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville, S.C.: Unusual Publications, 1986), 3, 4. 25 Beale, Pursuit of Purity, 29, 55–58. 26 Like most evangelical fundamentalists, Bob Jones University has predominantly embraced a dispensationalist premillennialist eschatology. The most popular expression of this perspective comes from one of the school’s graduates, Tim Lahaye, and his best-selling series about the end times, Left Behind. BlueLetterBible.org offers a straightforward explanation of the four eschatologies: dispensational premillennialism, historic premillennialism, postmillennialism, and amillennialism: Dispensational premillennialists hold that Christ will come before a seven-year period of intense tribulation to take His church (living and dead) into heaven. After this period of fulfillment of divine wrath, He shall then return to rule from a holy city (i.e., the New Jerusalem) over the earthly nations for one thousand years. After these thousand years, Satan, who was bound up during Christ’s earthly reign, will be loosed to deceive the nations, gather an army of the deceived, and take up to battle against the Lord. This battle will end in both the judgment of the wicked and Satan and the entrance into the eternal state of glory by the righteous. This view is called pre-millenialism because it places the return of Christ

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before the millennium and it is called dispensational because it is founded in the doctrines of dispensationalism. Historical pre-millennialists place the return of Christ just before the millennium and just after a time of great apostasy and tribulation. After the millennium, Satan will be loosed and Gog and Magog will rise against the kingdom of God; this will be immediately followed by the final judgment. The post-millennialist believes that the millennium is an era (not a literal thousand years) during which Christ will reign over the earth, not from an [sic] literal and earthly throne, but through the gradual increase of the Gospel and its power to change lives. After this gradual Christianization of the world, Christ will return and immediately usher the church into their eternal state after judging the wicked. This is called postmillennialism because, by its view, Christ will return after the millennium. The amillennialist believes that the Kingdom of God was inaugurated at Christ's resurrection (hence the term ‘inaugurated millennialism’) at which point he gained victory over both Satan and the Curse. Christ is even now reigning (hence the term ‘nunc-millennialism’ — nunc means ‘now’) at the right hand of the Father over His church. After this present age has ended, Christ will return and immediately usher the church into their eternal state after judging the wicked. (“Four Views on the Millennium” [Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.: BlueLetterBible.org], http://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/mill.html). 27 Beale, Pursuit of Purity, 28. 28 Beale, Pursuit of Purity, 353, 354, 355, 357. 29 Burke, Permanence and Change, 74. 30 Burke, Grammar of Motives, 282. 31 Burke, Grammar of Motives, 282. 32 William Vance Trollinger, “Review of Standing without Apology,” Church History 67 (1998): 429–31. 33 Turner, Standing Without Apology, 70–74, 179–88, 64, 73. 34 Turner, Standing Without Apology, 81. 35 Burke, Permanence and Change, 10, 108. 36 Burke, Counter-Statement, viii.

Chapter Three Epigraph: Kenneth Burke, “The Calling of the Tune,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 221. 1 Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 2 Turner, Standing Without Apology, 196, 194. 3 Mark Taylor Dalhouse, An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 6. 4 Burke, Counter-Statement, 105. 5 Burke, Counter-Statement, 123, 58, 41. 6 Burke, Counter-Statement, viii.



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7 Burke, Counter-Statement, 73. Kenneth Burke, “The Nature of Art under Capitalism,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 321. 8 Kenneth Burke, “Reading While You Run,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 329. 9 Burke, Counter-Statement, 54. 10 Kenneth Burke, “War, Response, and Contradiction,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 237. 11 Burke, “The Nature of Art,” 321. 12 Burke, Counter-Statement, 91. 13 Paul Richard, “Baroque from the Bible Belt: The Extraordinary Collection of Bob Jones University,” Washington Post, 26 August 1984, K5 (italics added). 14 “Atlanta & the Old South,” Better Homes and Gardens, April 1967. 15 Quoted in Paul Richard, “Baroque from the Bible Belt.” 16 Frederick Kaimann, “Bob Jones U. Shows Off Religious Art Treasures,” The Birmingham News, 16 July 1995, 1F+. 17 Jenny Munro, “Renaissance Woman: Museum Director unveils Greenville’s Hidden Treasure,” Greenville News, 16 July 1995, 1F. 18 Sibella Giorello, “Entertainment Adorned: A Treasury of Religious Art at Bob Jones University,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 22 December 1996, J1+. 19 James Mann, “Going Global: The Bob Jones University Art Museum,” The Arts (n.d.). 20 Kenneth Burke, “The Philosophy of Literary Form,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 60–61. 21 Burke, “War, Response, and Contradiction,” 248–49. 22 Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 61. 23 Burke, Counter-Statement, 189–90. 24 Burke, Counter-Statement, 20. 25 Stephen B. Jones, “John the Baptist: A Biblical Perspective,” in John the Baptist and the Baroque Vision, 9, 19. 26 John Nolan, “The Image of One: An Iconographic History—Caravaggio’s Youthful John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” in John the Baptist and the Baroque Vision, 47–48. 27 John Nolan and Donnalynn Hess, “The Voice of One: A Biographical Perspective—The Enigmatic Lives of John the Baptist and Caravaggio,” in John the Baptist and the Baroque Vision, 21, 24. 28 Richard, “Baroque,” K1. 29 Wengraf, “Fundamentalist Teacher.” 30 Nolan, “The Image of One,” 58. 31 Nolan, “The Image of One,” 56. 32 Black, Rhetorical Criticism, 83. 33 Burke, Counter-Statement, 105. 34 Burke, Counter-Statement, 105. 35 Burke, Counter-Statement, 110. 36 Nathan Casebolt, “Museum and Gallery Seeks Community Involvement,” Collegian, 30 September 1999.

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Turner, Standing Without Apology, 196. “Dedication of Bob Jones University Art Gallery,” The State Magazine, 13 April

1952. 39 Greg Garrison, “Fundamentalist Bob Jones Jr. Says Criticized Paintings Offer Opportunity to Teach, Evangelize,” Birmingham News, n.d. 40 Melina Kingry, “Gallery Program Reaches Community,” Collegian, 4 March 1999. 41 Casebolt, “Museum.” 42 Elizabeth Weibe, “Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery Tour,” guided tour. (Greenville, S.C., 13 October 2000). 43 Bob Jones Jr., “Dedication of the Mack Library.” 44 Garrison, “Fundamentalist Bob Jones Jr.” 45 Turner, Standing Without Apology, 196. 46 Turner, Standing Without Apology, 408. 47 Kaimann, “Bob Jones U. Shows Off Religious Art Treasures.” 48 Richard, “Baroque from the Bible Belt,” K5. 49 Richard, “Baroque from the Bible Belt,” K6. 50 Garrison, “Fundamentalist Bob Jones Jr.” 51 Burke, “War, Response, and Contradiction,” 237. 52 Turner, Standing Without Apology, 189. 53 Wengraf, “Fundamentalist Teacher.” 54 Burke, “War, Response, and Contradiction,” 227. 55 Lyndsey Haught, “Art Comes to Life in Living Gallery,” Collegian, 9 April 2001.

Chapter Four Epigraph: Burke, “The Philosophy of Literary Form,” 64–65. 1 Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 75. 2 Susannah Barba, “Info Desk Workers Serve People, Answer Questions,” Collegian, 26 April 2001. 3 Anita Feliciano, “Competition Respects Debate Team,” Collegian, 23 November 2000. 4 Rachel Copley, “Challenge Day Gives Students Burden For Kids With Special Needs,” Collegian, 1 October 1998. 5 Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 293. 6 “Top 25 Leaders 2001,” Greenville News, 14 January 2001, B1. 7 Deb Richardson-Moore, “Bob Jones III Has Brought Greenville To School He Leads,” Greenville News, 14 January 2001, B1. 8 “Top 25 Leaders 2001.” 9 Bob Jones, “Character of Community Comes From Individuals,” Greenville News, 14 January 2001, B1. 10 Burke, Permanence and Change, 125. 11 Burke, Permanence and Change, 128, 133.



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Matthew 5–7. Burke, Permanence and Change, 155. 14 Community Relations Council, “Yearly Summary,” written annual report (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University, 5 May 2001). 15 Lyndsey Haught, “CRC: The Community Looks at BJU,” Collegian, 14 September 2000. 16 Susannah Barba, “Outings Become Ministries,” Collegian, 15 February 2001. 17 Lyndsey Haught, “CRC: The Community Looks at BJU,” Collegian, 14 September 2000. 18 Anita Feliciano, “Reaching College Peers with Gospel: The Clemson University Extension,” Collegian, 28 October 1999. 19 Andrew Trapp, “Bob Jones University Deserves Our Respect,” The Tiger, 7 April 2000. 20 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 231–32. 21 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 232, 22. 22 Burke, Counter-Statement, 124, 138. 23 Burke, Counter-Statement, 146, 147, 31. 24 Mark Minnick, “The Heart of the Bible,” sermon (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University, 7 September 2000). 25 Alan Monroe’s Motivated Sequence has been the default standard for organizational guidelines (esp. in persuasive speaking) in public speaking textbooks and courses throughout the twentieth century. The five steps of this organizational pattern are as follows: “(1) your attention was caught; (2) you were made to feel a definite need; (3) you were shown a way to satisfy this need; (3) you were made to visualize the application of this proposal to you personally; and (5) a definite suggestion was made that you act.” Alan H. Monroe, Principles and Types of Speech (New York: Scott, Foreman, 1935), 189. 26 Roy Barton, “The Case of the Ignorant Professor,” sermon (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University, 16 November 2000). 27 James Berg, “Pardons in the Bible,” sermon (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University, 15 March 2001). 28 George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of TwentiethCentury Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 85–93. 12 13

Chapter Five Epigraph: Burke, Permanence and Change, 6–7. 1 Alfred Sandlin Reid, Furman University: Toward a New Identity, 1925–1975 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976), 199. 2 Turner, Standing Without Apology, 224. 3 Celeste Condit and John Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 101–46. 4 Turner, Standing Without Apology, 231–49. 5 “What Role Should Religion Play in Politics?” CNN Larry King Live, 10 August 2000, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/. 6 The extent of the media coverage is demonstrated in the banal reporting of the event. Elizabeth Arnold, for instance, simply reported to National Public Radio’s

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Morning Edition that after Bush’s defeat in New Hampshire, he “turned hard right yesterday, heading to one of the most conservative venues in the state, the gigantic auditorium of Bob Jones University.” In the same story, McCain’s strategists predictably called the Bush strategy “old school.” Elizabeth Arnold, “Morning Edition,” NPR, 3 February 2000, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/. 7 James Dao, “Bradley Blasts Bush for Talk at Bob Jones U,” New York Times, 4 February 2000, A25. 8 On February 6, 2000, McCain appeared at Hampton Park Baptist Church in Greenville. Hampton Park’s membership is overwhelmingly filled with BJU students, faculty members, board members, administrators, and graduates. Very few members have nothing to do with the school (Sarah Kaminski, Personal Interview [8 February 2000]). 9 “Former Senator John McCain, Republican Presidential Candidate, Discusses the Race for the Presidency,” Face the Nation, 13 February 2000, http://web.lexisnexis.com/universe/. 10 The failed congressional censure read as follows: 106th CONGRESS—2D Session S. RES. IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES Mr. TORRICELLI submitted the following resolution, Condemning the discriminatory practices prevalent at Bob Jones University. Whereas the Senate strongly rejects the practices of racism, segregation and intolerance based on religious beliefs; Whereas the administration of Bob Jones University enforces a segregationist policy by prohibiting the free association of interracial couples on the Bob Jones University campus; Whereas officials of Bob Jones University routinely disparage those of other religious faiths with intolerant and derogatory remarks; Whereas officials of Bob Jones University have likened the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church to a “possessed demon,” and branded Catholicism as a “satanic system and religion of the anti-Christ”; and Whereas senior officials of Bob Jones University have made openly racist remarks on many occasions regarding African Americans and Asian Americans: Now, therefore, be it 1 Resolved, That the Senate— 2 (1) condemns practices, such as those prevalent 3 at Bob Jones University, that seek to discriminate 4 against and divide Americans on the basis of race, 5 ethnicity, and religion; and 6 (2) strongly denounces individuals who seek to 7 subvert the American ideals of inclusion, equality, 8 and social justice (“The Interfaith Alliance Supports Senate Resolution Condemning Bob Jones University,” Interfaith Alliance, 24 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/). 11 “Has Bob Jones University Been Misrepresented by Politicians and Pundits?” CNN the World Today, 2 March 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 12 James Hammond, “Longtime Greenville Legislator Terry Haskins Dead at 45,” Greenville News, 24 October 2000.



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13 “Race Dating Plan Needs Parents OK,” AP Online, 7 March 2000, http:// web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 14 John Daulton, “Question,” e-mail message to Camille Lewis, 28 May 2001. 15 Burke, Permanence and Change, 10, 23. 16 Burke, Grammar of Motives, 283. 17 “Republicans Square Off in California Debate,” CNN Larry King Live, 2 March 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 18 “Governor John Engler, Republican of Michigan, Discusses the Bush Campaign and Speculates on Results of the Coming Primary,” Face the Nation, 20 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 19 “Political Ads, Bush’s Visit to Bob Jones University and Who Has the Better Chance in the Presidential Race,” Hardball with Chris Matthews, 24 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 20 “Interview With J.C. Watts,” Fox Hannity & Colmes, 2 March 2000, http:// web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 21 “Can George W. Bush Attract African-Americans and Other Minorities?” CNN Crossfire, 10 July 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 22 “Interview with Pat Robertson,” Fox The Edge with Paula Zahn, 24 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 23 “Senator John McCain Discusses Politics and Answers Questions from College Students,” Hardball with Chris Matthews, 4 March 2000, http://web.lexisnexis.com/universe/. 24 “The McLaughlin Group,” The McLaughlin Group, 4 February 2000, http:// web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 25 “Interview with Pat Robertson.” 26 Lizette Alvarez, “Democrats in Congress Introduce Resolution Attacking Bob Jones U Intolerant,” New York Times, 29 February 2000. 27 Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 39–40. 28 Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 45. 29 Timothy W. Crusius, Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1999), 205. 30 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 22. 31 Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 45. 32 Burke, “Philosophy of Literary Form,” 45–46, 39–40. 33 Bradley said about Bob Jones University: “We had to fight to deny tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University unless it changed that policy. And yet the Republican candidate for president yesterday goes to Bob Jones University to make a speech about what conservatism is in this county. Well, ladies and gentleman, that is what conservatism is, Bob Jones University, and it should be rejected” (Dao). 34 “Bob Jones University Drops Interracial Dating Ban,” Christianity Today, 10 March 2000. 35 “The Interfaith Alliance.” 36 Alvarez, “Democrats in Congress.” 37 “John Faso, Bush Supporter, and Representative Peter King, McCain Supporter, Discuss the Presidential Campaign,” Tim Russert, 4 February 2000, http:// web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/.

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38 “Race Relations Getting a Lot of Attention this Weekend,” CBS Evening News, 4 March 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 39 “Hearing of the Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the House Commerce Committee,” Capitol Hill Hearing, 13 April 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 40 Bob Franken, “Reporter’s Notebook: What Does the Road Ahead Hold for Bush,” CNN Saturday Morning News, 13 January 2001, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/ universe/. 41 “New York Congressman Peter King Discusses Why He Now Supports John McCain instead of George W. Bush,” Hardball with Chris Matthews, 21 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 42 “Former Senator John McCain” on Face the Nation. 43 “Will Ashcroft Pass Senate Scrutiny to Become Attorney General?” Fox News Sunday, 14 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 44 “Controversial Edge: The John Ashcroft Appointment,” Fox the Edge with Paula Zahn, 2 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 45 “GOP Candidates Debate in California Before Super Tuesday,” Fox the Edge with Paula Zahn, 2 March 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 46 Stephen Barr, “McCain: No Visit to Bob Jones University; Race Policies Decried As ‘Not American,’” Washington Post, 14 February 2000, A04. 47 “Will Ashcroft Pass,” Fox News Sunday. 48 Daniel Kraus, “Makin’ out at Bob Jones U,” Salon.com, 2 March 2000, http:// archive.salon.com/books/it/2000/03/22/bobjones/index.html. 49 “The Bush Cabinet,” CNN Crossfire, 26 May 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/ universe/. 50 “Hearing of the Telecommunications,” Capitol Hill Hearing. 51 William H. Rueckert, Encounters with Kenneth Burke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1994), 125. 52 Kenneth Burke, “The Virtues and Limitations of Debunking,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 171. 53 Burke, “Virtues and Limitations,” 171. 54 Cynthia Tucker, “Bigotry is Bob Jones’ Bible,” Denver Post, 17 February 2000, B11. 55 Colbert I. King, “Bush Caters to the Bigotry of Bob Jones,” Washington Post, 28 February 2000, A15. 56 Ben Szobody, “BJU supports Dr. Bob’s appearance on Larry King Live,” Collegian, 16 March 2000. 57 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 331–32. 58 Burke, Grammar of Motives, 289. 59 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 298. 60 Rueckert, Encounters with Kenneth Burke, 118–19. 61 Susannah Barba, “Negative Press Provides Witnessing Opportunities,” Collegian, 14 September 2000. 62 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 321.



NOTES TO P. 112

143

63 The separatist, then, reverses Burke’s “identification is compensatory to division” (Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 22). While Burke frames identification as compensating for any pesky division that might result, the separatist reverses that hierarchy, seeing division from the secular as filling in the lack in identification. 64 Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 231–32. 65 The late Bob Jones Jr. was the most recent and most vocal critic of the Roman Catholic doctrine and leadership. Critics in Campaign 2000 most often quote Jones Jr.’s words in their anti-Catholic accusations against BJU. Usually quoted is Jones Jr.’s 1982 statement. At that time in particular, he was galled that his personal friend, Ian Paisley—an ardent Irish Protestant, strident opponent of Catholicism, and long-time member of the British House of Commons—was denied entrance to the United States by the State Department for the annual BJU Bible Conference. Jones Jr. claimed that the State Department was “staffed almost completely by Roman Catholics” who were vengeful against Paisley and were, thus, denying Americans their religious freedom (Paul Richard, “Baroque from the Bible Belt: The Extraordinary Collection of Bob Jones University,” Washington Post, 26 August 1984, K1). In a campus chapel message, Jones Jr. condemned Alexander Haig, Reagan’s then secretary of state. And, perhaps coincidentally, before the year was out, Haig was fired from Reagan’s staff (Steve Kaminski, interview by author, 3 May 2001). In this context, Chancellor Jones spewed his most biting criticisms of the Catholic church. A revival in Iowa’s Saylorville Baptist Church is indicative of Jones Jr.’s tragic talk: “I believe some of the leaders of the World Council of Churches and the Pope are in conscious service to the Antichrist. . . . All the popes are demon-possessed. . . . [Pope John Paul II is] the greatest danger we face today. He is doing more to spread Antichrist Communism than anyone around. The papacy is the religion of Antichrist and is a satanic system” (From the National Catholic Reporter, April 9, 1982 as quoted in George W. Bush, “Cheney to Say: Bush will Bring People Together,” Presidential Campaign Press Materials, 2000, 1–23). Clearly, in anger and in unfortunate Burkean tragedy, Jones Jr. is scapegoating the leadership of Catholicism. He is careful not to condemn Catholic believers whom he might call deceived, but the biting criticism against their leadership and doctrine clearly sets Catholicism as irrevocably vicious. 66 That Jones III resists scapegoating in the civic sphere while his father welcomes it, is clear. Reporters often conclude that Jones III is less “mercurial” than his father, implying that the romantic rhetoric is simply a function of personality or nature (Deb Richardson-Moore, “Bob Jones III Has Brought Greenville To School He Leads,” Greenville News, 14 January 2001). Jones III, however, has spent much more of his presidency in the public eye. While Jones Jr. was an internationally recognized thespian, art collector, and preacher, he rarely spoke in a civic forum, and his press releases were usually quoted from insider sermons and released to the outsider press. With Jones III’s presidency, however, the University found itself much more often in public view. Jones III has been a frequent guest on network and syndicated talk shows since the 1970s. And, it may be concluded, that constant gaze honed the romantic discourse to become more beautifully romantic than combatively tragic (Turner, Standing Without Apology, 125–35, 213–22).

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67 “Dr. Bob Jones III Discusses the Controversy Swirling Around Bob Jones University,” CNN Larry King Live, 3 March 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 68 “What Did John Ashcroft Say at Bob Jones University?” CNN Larry King Live, 12 January 2001, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 69 “What Role Should Religion Play in Politics?” 70 “Has Bob Jones University Been Misrepresented by Politicians and Pundits?” CNN the World Today, 2 March 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 71 Owen Mortiz, “Bob Jones U, Bible Belt Citadel,” Daily News, 25 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 72 Burke, Permanence and Change, 50. 73 Bob Jones, “A Letter to the Nation From Bob Jones University,” Bob Jones University, 3 March 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/20000511173508/www.bju.edu/ response.htm. 74 “The Truth about Bob Jones University,” Bob Jones University, 18 March 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/20000606160855/www.bju.edu/fresponse.html. 75 The race narrative that these romantics offer is clearly naïve. With racism defined as treating one race differently from another, they ingenuously obscure their own privileging of whiteness. 76 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 260. 77 Rueckert, Encounters with Kenneth Burke, 112–13, 119, 125. 78 Kenneth Burke, “Reading While You Run,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 323. 79 Burke, Grammar of Motives, 514. 80 Stephen Barr, “McCain: No Visit to Bob Jones University; Race Policies Decried As ‘Not American,’” Washington Post, 14 February 2000, A04. 81 “Will Ashcroft Pass Senate Scrutiny to Become Attorney General?” Fox News Sunday, 14 February 2000, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 82 Daniel Kraus, “Makin’ out at Bob Jones U,” Salon.com, 2 March 2000, http:// archive.salon.com/books/it/2000/03/22/bobjones/index.html. 83 Burke, Permanence and Change, 102, 103. 84 “What Did John Ashcroft Say?” 85 “What Did John Ashcroft Say?” 86 “Back of the Book: Teen Overcomes Poverty, Gets Perfect Score on SAT,” The O’Reilly Factor, 3 May 2001, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 87 Kelli Arena, “Sources: Arkansas Congressman to Head DEA,” CNN.com, 8 May 2001, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/. 88 “Between the Wanting and the Getting,” Judging Amy (TV drama, 1 May 2001), http://www.tv.com/judging-amy/between-the-wanting-and-the-getting/episode/37801/ summary.html?tag=ep_list;title;18. 89 “The Weakest Link,” executive producers Phil Gurin and Stuart Krasnow. NBC, 16 May 2001. 90 “Funeral of Terrry Haskins” (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University, 27 October 2000). 91 Bob Jones, “Sermon,” Bob Jones University morning worship service (Greenville, S.C., 29 October 2000).



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Conclusion Epigraph: Burke, “The Philosophy of Literary Form,” 110–11. 1 Bob Jones, Letter to President Bush upon his Re-Election, 3 November 2004, http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/11/14/143038/90. 2 Jim Davenport, “Bob Jones Changes Leadership,” Associated Press, 6 May 2005. 3 Jennifer Berry Hawes, “This is His Father’s World,” Post and Courier. 10 July 2005. 4 I Corinthians 3: 7-9

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INDEX

agonism, 4–6, 8, 11 allopathy, 10, 65–69, 75 Anderson, Benedict, 13–16, 18, 21–22 Ashcroft, John, 123 Augustine, 28, 65 Aumiller, Jeanine, 66 Barton, Roy, 81–84 Beale, David, 19, 28–30 Beasley, David, 124 Berg, Jim, 83–84 Bob Jones University Archives Room, 14–15, 17, 22, 24, 32, 34–35 Bible Study luncheon, 81 Bob Jones University v. United States of America, 87–89 Community Relations Council, 75–76 Evangelism Museum, 14–15, 17, 22, 24–25, 27–28 Jerusalem Chamber, 14, 17, 19–23, 32 The Living Gallery, 62 Mack Library, 17, 19, 50 ministerial class, 15, 25, 27, 28 see also Museum and Gallery

Burke, Kenneth action, 91–93, 95, 98–102, 119, 122 Attitudes toward History, 21 division, 1–2, 6–9, 79, 96, 106, 112, 120 “equipment for living,” 45–46, 52, 62 frame of acceptance, 3, 6–9, 23, 59, 62, 128 frame of rejection, 9 “good life,” the, 45, 120 hero, 2–3, 8, 11, 14, 21–22, 52, 73, 118 humor, 3, 6, 8, 98, 123 identification, 1–2, 6–9, 79, 96, 106, 112, 120 motion, 92–93, 95 pentad, 3–4, 106, 111 Permanence and Change, 87 Philosophy of Literary Form, The, 39, 65, 127 Rhetoric of Motives, The, 7 Bush, George H. W., 92 Bush, George W., 89, 92–93, 98, 102, 113, 115, 123, 124, 129 Butts, Calvin, 98

159

160

INDEX

Campaign 2000, 90–125 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 46–49, 51–52 Chantal Mouffe, 4–8 Clemson University, 76–78, 87 comedy, 3–4, 37–38, 59, 62–63, 68–69, 73–79, 119–22, 129 courtship, 8, 79–82, 84 Crossfire, 98 Crusius, Timothy W., 96 Dalhouse, Mark, 40 democracy, 5–9, 120, 127–28 democratic party, 96–100, 124, 129 Dole, Bob, 92 Edwards, Jonathan, 27, 29 Engler, John, 92 eschatology, 29–30 Falwell, Jerry, 94, 120 Federalist Papers, 127 First Amendment, 88, 99, 104, 110, 116, 121 Frank, Barney, 98 Furman University, 87 Graham, Billy, 26–27 Gustafson, David, 124 Haskins, Gloria, 124 Haskins, Terry, 89, 124–25 Hess, Donnalynn, 48, 55 homeopathy, 10, 65–69, 73 Hutchinson, Asa, 95, 123 Hutchinson, Tim, 95 Internal Revenue Service, 88

Jones, Bob III, 20, 33, 69, 89, 93, 102, 107, 112, 114, 123–24, 129n143 Jones, Bob Jr., 13, 17, 20, 25–27, 33, 40, 49–50, 54–60, 69, 88–89, 112n143 Jones, Bob Sr., 26–28, 32–35, 66, 69 Jones, Erin, 54 Jones, Mary Gaston, 32, 34–35 Jones, Stephen, 47, 130 Judging Amy, 123 Keyes, Alan, 95, 113, 115 King, Colbert, 101 King, Larry, 102, 113 Larry King Live, 89, 102, 107, 114, 123 Leavitt, Mike, 92–93 Loflin, Trevor, 123 Long, Edwin, 129 Madison, James, 7 Markey, Edward, 99 Marsden, George, 85 Matalin, Mary, 99 Matthews, Chris, 92 McCain, John, 89–90, 94–95, 98, 112–13, 124–25n140 McCoy, Sarah, 53, 55 memory, 13–38 Mencken, H. L., 35, 60, 100 Minnick, Mark, 81–82, 84 Moody, Dwight L., 26, 27 Moose, William, 13 Museum and Gallery, 40–64 National Educational Debate Association, 66



INDEX

Niagara-on-the-Lake Bible Conference, 29 Nolan, John, 48–49, 51 O’Reilly Factor, The, 123 Pait, Jonathan, 113 Parker, Monroe, 27 Pickering, Chip, 99–100 Plymouth Brethren, 30 premillennialism, 30n135 Puritans, 19, 28–30 Reagan, Ronald, 92n143 republican party, 89, 92–96 Rice, John R., 26–27 Robertson, Pat, 93–94, 120 Rueckert, William H., 100, 119 Rupp, Richard, 27 scapegoat, 8, 11, 91, 97–101, 112–13, 119–20, 122, 124–25, 128n143

161

Sharpton, Al, 92, 104, 120 Sheldon, Bob, 124 Stenholm, Gilbert, 27 Sunday, Billy, 26–27, 33 Torricelli, Robert, 89, 97, 101, 116n140 tragedy, 1–5, 21–24, 39–41, 68–69, 73–74, 85, 90–101 Tucker, Cynthia, 100–101 Turner, Daniel, 34–36, 60 University of South Carolina, 87 USA Today, 114–15 Waters, Maxine, 98 Watts, J. C., 93 Weakest Link, The, 124 Whitefield, George, 26–28 Zahn, Paula, 93