IN WALKING DISTANCE OF BOB JONES

The unholy union of politics and media has bestowed Bob Jones University with 15 minutes of national infamy – its first dose since the mid-70s, when it lost federal funding over the same issue that besmirches it today: racial inequity.

Between then and now, we residents of Greenville have been living out an uncertain destiny. Secreted away from media glitz, we have been vacillating ambivalently between pretensions of New South renaissance (wedged halfway between Atlanta and Charlotte) and intolerant, redneck backward-ism most visibly symbolized by the time-warp university on Wade Hampton Boulevard.

Greenville’s paradoxes are startling:

Max Heller, an Austrian-born Holocaust survivor, became by all estimations the single most popular and progressive mayor in Greenville’s history, while hundreds of Bob Jones faculty, students, and alumni belligerently picketed outside a civic prayer breakfast, denouncing him as “the Antichrist.”

Designer-clad up-and-comers dine and shop at trendy spots along Main Street to the gabble of Bob Jones kids waving Bibles and street-preaching damnation at 120 decibels.
A city council candidate recently visited my office to woo my support. The very first line of her brochure trumpeted her as a Bob Jones graduate, but she followed it instantly with a verbal caveat that she was not one of “those types” of Bob Jones alumnae. (She won.)

Abundant paradoxes . . .

I may not be constantly aware of Bob Jones’s presence and influence, but I am never fully disengaged from the oxymoronic ironies – the only rabbi who lives in walking distance of Bob Jones, presiding over the only synagogue in walking distance of Bob Jones, residing in a lovely upscale home surrounded by senior administrators and faculty of Bob Jones. Many a morning, I join my ministerial cohorts of more liberal inclination to sip coffee and plot interfaith initiatives and racial reconciliation strategies at the IHOP directly across the boulevard from Bob Jones’s main gate.

Not long ago, Bob Jones University, through an amalgam of veneration and fear, profoundly influenced if not outright controlled Greenville’s civic agenda. Its presence is still acutely felt, but astute observers will freely tell you that its influence is waning. In part, this is due to Greenville’s tentative entry into the New South and the emerging international stature (BMW, Michelin, Fuji) of its business community.

In larger measure, though, the discrediting of Bob Jones stems from its increasing perception as a comic-relief caricature, so radical and vociferous in its intolerance and hyper-fundamentalism that its pronouncements are whimsical background noise, not serious, community-shaping dicta. Even certain local fundamentalists will acknowledge, albeit quietly for now, that Bob Jones is an embarrassment to their cause: their overt racism (mysteriously based on a tortured reading of the Tower of Babel epic), their rabid paranoid hatred of Catholicism, their denunciation of fundamentalist icons Drs. Falwell and Robertson (presumably because of their dialogues with, or tolerance for, Catholics), their hero’s welcome for Northern Ireland’s most vicious anti-Catholic, Rev. Ian Paisley, and so on.

Let it be known that, one-on-one, Bob Jones students and faculty are kind, friendly, respectful, well deported, even toward this unsaved, hell-bound rabbi. They are faultlessly good neighbors and abundantly kind people – real-life versions of Ned Flanders and family, the religiously obsessed but unctuously nice neighbors of the cartoon Simpsons. They will, however, pull no punches when asked for their doctrinal stance on the broad array of people and causes they deem unsaved. For this honesty, I guess we should be grateful.

It tickles me to see so much national media hoo-hah right outside my front door in this otherwise forgettable hamlet that I call home. Governor Bush’s appearance at Bob Jones rightfully calls to question the alliances that should, and should not, be forged for the sake of political ascendancy. More importantly, though, it fleetingly focuses our attention on the veneer of legitimacy that religion-gone-wacky still tries to confer on racism, intolerance, and a long list of paranoid delusions and hatreds masquerading as “love.”

As the only rabbi who lives in walking distance of Bob Jones, I dwell in the midst of paradox: I see an institution whose pronouncements have become more silly and irrelevant than threatening. But, I also see, much more warily, 5,000+ young people from the American heartland tooling up Wade Hampton Boulevard, having consciously chosen to be immersed in such folly in the name of higher education and God’s Holy Writ.

Give Greenville another 20 years and check us out again. And thanks for dropping by.