Thread by @PMatzko

A student fashion show inspired by Paradise Lost brought down the mandolin-strumming president of a college that once billed itself as “the World’s Most Unusual University.” 🧵

I'm both a historian of 20th c America and a graduate of Bob Jones University, so I'm gonna unpack that truly bizarre sentence for you.

The imbroglio began with a student fashion show in December 2021. For his capstone project, fashion design student Matthew Foxx put together a runway show that explored the story of the gospel as embodied through renaissance-inspired clothing.

For example, a crown-of-thorns haloed model strode the cat walk wearing a coat stained blood red, a visual representation of a crucified Christ who, in Foxx’s words, “covered our sins…completely and fully like a wrap coat covers the body completely and fully.”

Now, that's actually quite impressive, albeit very niche. It certainly stands out; it's not like anyone at Parsons or FIT is doing stuff like this.

Props to Foxx, who apparently does custom work FYI:

linkedin.com/in/matthew-fox…

BUT...BJU is a fundamentalist school, and many in the network of pastors it pulls students from weren't happy, calling the show “blasphemous,” “gross,” “too feminine,” and “what happens when Christians ‘model’ their college programs after those of sodomites.”

Well then.

BJU Prez Steve Pettit bowed and scraped and put out a statement condemning the show as “clearly sacrilegious and blasphemous," but that didn't assuage the hardliners who acted like it was barely one step removed from BJU painting its iron fence the colors of the pride flag.

So the hardliners controlling the university board tried to oust Pettit—who was guilty of the heinous crime of being very slightly less conservative than the board—and send him back to his prior career as an itinerant evangelist who traveled with a Christian bluegrass band.

You read that right; Pettit is a mandolin-head? -leer? -Ian?

It's even tamer version of one of those Irish Re-Revival pop supergroups, like a "Christian Celtic Thunder."

After six months of back and forth, Pettit signed a letter of resignation this month.

BUT an ad hoc alumni group organized on Facebook kicked off a wider backlash to the board's maneuvering, forcing the core hardliners to resign as well.

So if you're interested in wrangling this particularly bitey nest of squirrels in exchange for a high risk of reputational damage and a low presidential salary of $150,000 (!), now's the time to get that application in the mail. ;-)

Those are the facts of the matter, but they're insuffiencient for understanding this moment. It has deeper structural and historical roots, seeds sown nearly a century ago at the founding of Bob Jones College that are now bearing strange fruit at a post-Bob Jones University.

If you stop and think about it, it’s less surprising that a fundamentalist college would put a stop to a fashion show than that such a place hosted a student fashion show in the first place.

If, say, you saw Franklin Graham on the cover of Vogue, you'd do a double take, right?

BJU is weird by design. In 1927, Bob Jones Sr. was determined to establish a liberal arts college, not just another bible training institute. Chapel and bible classes were mandatory, but all students would also take literature, history, drama, art, and have free music lessons.

This was a product of founder Bob Jones Sr.’s upbringing in rural poverty on the wiregrass frontier of Alabama. When he attended what is now Birmingham-Southern College, he glimpsed how college education could open a door to middle class status and social respectability.

Bob Jones College/University would give a sacralized spin to Victorian social norms and a culture of bourgeois aspirationalism. It was an era obsessed with self-improvement — urban clerks attending mass educational lectures, door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen peddling Knowledge.

Certainly, while I was there, the highest aspiration of a Bob Jones University student was to be considered a “renaissance man" who combined religious ardor w/ scholastic aptitude, physical fitness, & artistic / dramatic finesse.

This led to odd juxtapositions. Frats were banned, but all students joined literary societies. Most popular music was prohibited, but all students attended annual operas & concerts. You couldn't go to the movie theater, but attendance at Shakespearean plays was mandatory.

Jones Sr. replicated his own Victorian experience of college at BJU, which was then mostly frozen in amber until the 21st century. Sunday afternoon vespers—think of choirs in gowns with grand musical accompaniment—were a weekly event. Societies sponsored annual formals.

Students were encouraged to take dates to all functions. There was a literal dating parlor—we called it the “land of couches”—where students could get not-too-cozy under the eye of spinster chaperones.

It’s straight out of a novel about finishing schools or inter-war colleges!

Take a second and imagine trying to mandate that every student at my other alma mater, Pennsylvania State University, get dressed up in formal attire, attend a three hour Verdi opera, and do it sober. The mind boggles!

But placing cultural education on the same plane as religious education was controversial in fundamentalist circles. Eg., while opera has a staid, stuffy reputation today, in the early 20th century it still retained some of its older reputation for worldliness & sensuality.

Thus Wheaton College's arch-conservative president in the 1930s, J. Oliver Buswell, told parents of prospective students that the fact that Bob Jones College put on plays and operas was evidence that the Joneses were leading young people “into a worldly life of sin.” Well then.

BJU walked an uneasy middle ground when it came to cultural engagement. Artifacts of low & popular culture (from jazz to Hollywood) were mostly scorned while high culture, at least that of the late Victorian era, was considered a necessary pursuit for the man or woman of God.

During the mid-20th c, a new branch was spliced onto the older Victorian trunk: a counter-counter-cultural backlash. “Jesus People” weren't welcome at BJU, which formalized strict rules like daily “hair checks," no women in pants, no contemporary christian music, and so on.

Sometimes that meant going to ludicrous lengths, like when the campus chief of police applied for a machine gun permit in order to deter anti-Vietnam war protestors. But even the silly rules weren't meant as a buffer against the intrusion of dangerous, worldly values & outsiders.

As a student, you could get whiplash, one moment listening to sermonizing about the incipient dangers of worldliness—the sinful spirit of κόσμος lying in wait—and then seeing, emblazoned over a classroom chalk board, a popular saying of Bob Jones Sr.:

“There is no difference between the secular and the sacred; all ground is holy ground, every bush a burning bush.”

All truth is God’s truth…except if it comes unshaven, unshorn, or with a little too much funk.

Yet the personal charisma and extensive connections the Bob Jones maintained within a broad network of fundamentalist churches gave the school (some) leeway when it came to (mildly) pushing the envelop for a (limited) fundamentalist cultural engagement.

But the Joneses haven't been in charge of BJU for a decade, and the fashion show hit right along the fissure of that unresolved tension b/t Victorian aspiration and anti-counter cultural paranoia.

Think about it this way. Finding the story of the gospel through renaissance era fashion would have been second nature for this guy, Bob Jones Jr. in costume as Shylock in the Merchant of Venice.

But in an era when Fox News has a bigger pulpit than any church, a man in fancy dress no longer reads as the image of an urbane, renaissance man-of-letters that the Jones family once cultivated. Rather, for conservatives today, it's easy to pull out a "queer panic" script.

For more about how a high/low cultural distinction rooted in late Victorian social norms & expressed via bourgeois aspirationalism, then partially overwritten w/ conservative anxieties in the '60s, could lead to a fundy fashion show & panicked backlash:

matzko.substack.com/p/not-bob-jone…