Taking the Bob Out of Bob Jones U.

"If the secular academy wants to look down their noses at us, okay," Pait says, "but our students can stand toe-to-toe with anybody."

The difference between Bob Jones and secular schools, Pait says, is that at BJU every teacher is a fundamentalist Christian and every subject is taught from a "Christian worldview."

"In secular schools, they say, 'Let's use science to discover the unknown truth,' " Pait says. "We say, 'We know the truth -- how does this glorify the truth, who is God?' "

Family Business

Bob Jones preached his first sermons to the rear ends of mules as he plowed his daddy's Alabama peanut farm.

Jones was born in 1883, and born again 11 years later, saved at a revival meeting. Soon he was preaching. At 14, he preached so powerfully a Methodist group voted to ordain him on the spot.

By the 1920s, Bob Jones was one of America's biggest evangelists, second only to Billy Sunday. Jones denounced the evils of the age: liquor, jazz, "picture shows," flappers, makeup, big cities packed with "degenerate, unassimilated foreigners," and Al Smith, the New York Catholic who ran for president in 1928. Jones believed the Catholic church was particularly evil because it set up a hierarchy, including the "Antichrist" pope, between God and man.

"The things that made America great," Bob Jones said, "are the very things Al Smith's religion opposes."

In the '20s, America's Protestant denominations split in what David Beale, a BJU professor and religious historian, calls "a vicious battle between fundamentalists and modernists" over evolution, which modernists accepted but fundamentalists rejected because it conflicted with the biblical story of creation. The modernists won, Beale says, retaining control of most mainline religious institutions, and fundamentalists left to create their own.

Bob Jones created Bob Jones College, outside Panama City, Fla. It was devoted to strict separation from religious liberals -- and from fundamentalists who associated with liberals. On opening day in 1927, 85 students watched as the faculty marched up to publicly sign a creed that renounced "all atheistic, agnostic, pagan . . . adulterations of the gospel."

On the verge of bankruptcy in 1933, the college moved to Cleveland, Tenn. By 1947, it had outgrown its campus and moved to Greenville, S.C.

Meanwhile, in 1911, Bob Jones begat Bob Jones Jr., "perhaps the most colorful member of the Jones family," wrote Mark Taylor Dalhouse in his 1996 book on BJU, "An Island in the Lake of Fire."

As a child traveling on his father's evangelistic crusades, Bob Jones Jr. would hang bedsheets up like theater curtains in hotel rooms and perform plays of his own creation. As a student at his father's college, he founded a campus Shakespeare company and played Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice," a role he reprised throughout his life.