An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement

An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement. By Mark Taylor Dalhouse. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996. viii, 211 pp. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8203-1815-9. In An Island in the Lake of Fire Mark Taylor Dalhouse seeks to discover what made Bob Jones University (BJU) different from other fundamentalist institutions. He concludes that biblical separation was the key ingredient that made BJU unique from other fundamentalist schools.

The founder of the university, Alabama native Bob Jones, Sr., served as an itinerant evangelist for the Methodist Church before he became an educator. When conservative/fundamentalist theology came under attack during the 1920s, Jones founded a college in which Darwinism and theological liberalism were anathema. With the help and advice of Alabama governor Bibb Graves, along with the financial support of some Birmingham businessmen, the college opened its doors in 1927 in Panama City, Florida (it eventually moved to Greenville, South Carolina, in 1947). During the 1940s and 1950s, in an effort to distance themselves from Billy Graham (of whom they apparently were envious) and the National Association of Evangelicals (which they could not dominate), Bob Jones, Sr., and his son, Bob Jones, Jr., added the doctrine of separation to the list of requirements one had to follow to wear the fundamentalist label. All who refused to separate themselves from religious liberals, moderates, or neoevangelicals (which Graham and the NAE declined to do) were, according to the Joneses, no longer true fundamentalists. The Joneses eventually came to see themselves as appointed by God to serve as the thought police and gatekeepers for fundamentalism.

Dalhouse has written the first scholarly history of Bob Jones University and has produced a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on religious fundamentalism in America. Anyone interested in the subject would do well to read this fine account.

ROBERT VEJNAR, Saint

Leo College

Copyright University of Alabama Press Apr 1998
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