Bob Jones, Sr.

Bob Jones, Sr. (born October 30, 1883, Skipperville, Alabama, U.S.—died January 16, 1968, Greenville, South Carolina) was a prominent American evangelist and the founder of Bob Jones University (BJU), a conservative Christian liberal arts university in South Carolina. Jones was known for his unwavering commitment to Christian fundamentalism and for his strong stance against liberal and modernist theology and ecumenism.

Early life

Jones was the 11th of 12 children born to William Alexander and Georgia (née Creel) Jones. His father fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and was left injured from a wound he received at the Battle of Chickamauga Creek. Shortly after Jones was born, the family moved near Dothan, Alabama, where they made a living by growing cotton, peanuts, and vegetables on their farm and instilled in him the value of hard work.

Raised in a Christian home, Jones became a Methodist at a nearby country church at age 11, and a love of preaching soon consumed him. At age 12 he presided over a weeklong revival meeting at his church. Both his parents died when he was a teenager, and by 16 Jones was working as a circuit preacher in southeast Alabama.

In 1905 Jones married Bernice Sheffield, who tragically died of tuberculosis 10 months later. He later met Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, a convert at one of his revival meetings, and the two were married in 1908. The couple continued to travel extensively as Jones preached, and their only son, Robert (Bob) Reynolds Jones, Jr., was born in 1911.

Preaching career and beliefs

Jones’s notoriety as an evangelist grew as he got older; by his 30th birthday, he had preached in 25 states, and he often gave radio interviews while on his tours. His meetings and conferences commonly made front-page news in the towns hosting them, and he could draw crowds of thousands.

A staunch fundamentalist, Jones was known for his fiery and direct preaching style that emphasized the authority of the Bible and the need for personal salvation. He advocated a strict moral code and frequently railed against the liquor trade, sometimes inspiring towns to shut down all alcohol sales. Like other preachers of his tradition, he taught that Roman Catholicism was a counterfeit of true Christianity and referred to the pope as the Antichrist.

Jones was supported by the Ku Klux Klan, and he agreed with some of the Klan’s positions, though he denounced the practice of lynching. He was concerned about the spiritual welfare of African Americans and preached in Black churches but maintained racial segregation at his meetings and was opposed to integration and miscegenation. In 1960, during an Easter morning radio broadcast titled “Is Segregation Scriptural?” Jones argued that segregation was divinely instituted and that challenges to the racial status quo were satanic in nature:

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God never meant for America to be a melting pot to rub out the line between the nations. That was not God’s purpose for this nation. When someone goes to overthrowing His established order and goes around preaching pious sermons about it, that makes me sick—for a man to stand up and preach pious sermons in this country and talk about rubbing out the line between the races—I say it makes me sick.

The broadcast would become a pamphlet sold in the Bob Jones University bookstore.

Bob Jones College

Jones’s decision to establish a college was inspired largely by the growing fundamentalist-modernist controversy, in which conservative and more-liberal Christians increasingly disagreed about how or whether to reconcile Christianity with modern science and historical criticism. Specifically, Jones was troubled by the increasing acceptance of evolutionary theory among academics, which he held as incompatible with a literal interpretation of scripture. Like other fundamentalist leaders, including his friend William Jennings Bryan, Jones feared that students who were taught to accept Charles Darwin’s views would ultimately lose their Christian faith. Jones was also troubled by the growing scholarly consensus about the authorship of the Bible—for instance, the view that Moses himself did not write the Torah. He wanted to establish a school in the South that would serve as a bastion of his conservative views.

The board of his planned college was established in 1925, shortly before the controversial Scopes Trial brought the teaching of evolution into the public sphere. By then, Jones’s income from preaching was larger than that of any other evangelist in the United States except Billy Sunday, and he used his own money to help establish the college. The board settled on Panama City, Florida, and the school opened in September 1927 under the name Bob Jones College. Though Jones had a Methodist background, the school was officially nondenominational. The charter said the school’s purpose included “combatting all atheistic, agnostic, pagan, and so-called scientific adulterations of the gospel” and instructing young people in “the essentials of culture and in the arts and sciences.” Early on, Jones established daily chapel services. African American students were not permitted to enroll.

The school struggled to survive during the Great Depression and moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1933, partly because the leaders decided its location in Florida was too remote. In 1947 the school moved again—this time to Greenville, South Carolina, after a campaign by the city’s chamber of commerce to woo the college—and changed its name to Bob Jones University.

Jones and Billy Graham

In 1936 Jones sat down with a young Billy Graham, who was then a struggling student at Bob Jones College seeking to transfer to another school, and reportedly warned him, “Billy, if you leave and throw your life away at a little country Bible school, the chances are you’ll never be heard of.” Despite the injunction, Graham transferred to Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College of Florida) and would go on to become one of the most famous American evangelists of the 20th century. Graham apparently remained friends with the Jones family, and in 1948 BJU conferred an honorary degree on the acclaimed evangelist. Two years later Graham held a successful rally on the school’s campus.

However, tensions between Jones and Graham soon formed over the latter’s decision to adopt a more inclusive approach to evangelism in the 1950s. Jones and other fundamentalists disagreed with Graham’s ecumenism with mainline Protestant denominations and, at times, with Roman Catholic organizations and felt that this compromise betrayed core principles of the faith. (Notably, Graham also began to racially integrate his rallies and crusades in 1950, while BJU did not admit African American students until 1971.) As Graham became the de facto leader of the emerging neo-evangelicalism movement, the disagreement between Jones and Graham grew to symbolize a broader split in American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. BJU eventually ordered students to boycott Billy Graham’s crusades.

Death

Following several years of declining health, Jones resigned as university board chair in 1964. He died quietly at the clinic on campus and was buried in front of the school’s auditorium. His son, Bob Jones, Jr., served as university president (1947–71) and was succeeded by Bob Jones III (1971–2005) and Stephen Jones (2005–2014). Steve Pettit (2014–23) was the university’s first president outside of the Jones family.