S2E09: On Leaving BJU and Klandamentalism — with Dr. Camille Lewis

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[00:00:07] And I said, Grant, I'm going right now to move out of my office.

[00:00:10] I don't want to do it when people are around.

[00:00:12] And so I took all night and I didn't live dark.

[00:00:16] And I moved out of my office, which is so weird.

[00:00:19] And I just left.

[00:00:20] And as soon as the sun came up, I was driving down White Hampton, stopped and got an Egg

[00:00:25] McMuffin, and it was done. sitting down and having a conversation with. And I know that when I've heard you discuss topics we'll probably get into today, I've been like, Oh, when Nate says I messaged her, I'm like, you don't have to run that by me. You know, I'm thrilled. So, so all of you who are waiting to hear who we're talking to today. Our guest today is Dr. Camille Lewis, who teaches at Furman University, though you're currently on sabbatical right now.

[00:02:41] It is my alma mater. I graduated there in 2007, which was also the year

[00:02:45] that you and your husband left the university faculty.

[00:02:50] So let's rewind.

[00:02:52] Let's backtrack and tell us your origin story.

[00:02:58] How did you end up in the orbit of a place

[00:03:00] like Bob Jones University?

[00:03:02] I think our conversation is going

[00:03:03] to also expand out into the broader world in the church, it was community Baptist, that's a big old BJU church, it was a GARB church. And yeah. What is GARB church? A general association of regular Baptist, so it's kind of a northern Midwest conservative, I think Cedarville is still their flagship school. The church I grew up in was GARBC until about the year

[00:04:23] that my family started attending there.

[00:04:26] They split off from the GARBC

[00:04:27] because the GARBC got too liberal. from first grade through 12th grade. And even though we moved around, I was always in some kind of a Christian day school. I feel like up to this point, your story, what you have just shared in Nate's just totally tracked. Like the grounding with parents that really love him, that converted into fundamentalism, even though they had a conversion story before. And like, it's fundamentalism and him growing up

[00:05:40] kind of coincided and then the growing up

[00:05:43] in private Christian schools, straight through 12.

[00:05:46] Yeah, you guys, all right, so.

[00:05:48] Right, and right. I would not have had the major trauma that I had. Everything started to get pretty terrible once we were in grad school, once we were married. I'm gonna back this up a little bit, just because before we started rolling, I mentioned that I know you only got 11 demerit points

[00:07:00] when you were at Bob Jones,

[00:07:02] which was kind of a big deal.

[00:07:04] So people who don't know,

[00:07:05] Bob Jones gives demerits for being bad

[00:07:07] and for doing anything basically. There is we know of somebody who has you beat. Oh, really? Yes. So Lance Weldy throughout his four years I don't believe he ever got a single demerit. Oh I need to go talk to him. Well, see if you got under 10 it was expunged. That's right So that's right, you know, I would have here and there some but they all got expunged

[00:08:22] So the only it's on my records 11

[00:09:25] Yeah, I have opinions and thoughts. Now you're educated. Now you're a teacher, a woman. So I taught there as a grad student, which is part time. But part time at BJU is full

[00:09:31] time in every other planet, in every other university. So I taught three, three hour

[00:09:36] classes for four semesters and that paid for my was in grad school, I had a miscarriage.

[00:11:04] And my second pregnancy came while I was writing my dissertation

[00:12:20] and my daughter, I had never felt more useless when my milk came in

[00:12:22] and she wasn't there. I child so I can't forget you. So God is a mother, is a nursing mother. And I was like, I couldn't forget Isaac.

[00:13:41] I couldn't.

[00:13:42] I chemically could not forget him.

[00:13:43] And I thought God loves me like I love Isaac. as a manager, then there's a transaction. You don't see God as a parent, as a loving parent. It just blows their mind. As a mother on top of, I mean, it's going to be a parent. It's got to be a dad, an authoritarian cold, cracked down on you, bear at the rods, spoil at the child, blah, blah, blah. Not, yes, not a breastfeeding mother that is ever present practically.

[00:15:06] Right.

[00:15:07] Oh, of them. And I was giving them away. And I gave one to him. And his dad did not like that. Oh, I mean, and call fundamentalism is like, you should always be striving to measure up, that should be your life goal. How can you tell

[00:16:21] someone to take it easy on that kind of a thing?

[00:16:24] Yeah, well, how dare you? And so feel that the end was coming. By the way, he treated me it was bad. Just just mansplaining, you know, condescending, all of those things. I couldn't do anything right. At that point. Typical for leaving high control groups where they just kind of pile on all the sins. So they're

[00:17:43] they're upset that you're not okay with spanking, you're

[00:17:46] telling kids they don't need to try and strive to constantly be you and Grant have an egalitarian marriage, what do you have to say about that?" And I said, yeah. And again, I was here holding this child, this little infant and this stinky duck. I'm like, yeah, wow, that you can't... And he just kind of stammered. He didn't really say anything. And eventually it came up that he arranged for a meeting with my authority, which was my chairman,

[00:20:05] the time about when because the male you know in speech classes you had a lot of preacher boys and we would talk about I don't know how it would come up I guess we talked about

[00:20:10] feminism and I said you know there are things that women have more expertise on than men.

[00:20:17] No that's impossible.

[00:20:18] I said men know everything about everything.

[00:20:20] If there's a decision to be made I would say this about breastfeeding.

[00:20:24] My husband's not gonna be making that decision.

[00:20:27] But he just he knows by osmosis. to live in the gray. In church, we were told that life after leaving would be a bitter wasteland of unfulfilling hedonism. But we've discovered quite the opposite. There's actually a vibrant community of people on the other side of faith who are finding and co-creating space for hope and healing.

[00:21:40] Come along as we explore the all too often uncharted

[00:21:43] expanse of evangelicalism, evolving faith,

[00:21:47] and the life of the book. And I have another book ready, which was called Adventures in Tandem Nursing. So that there's not a rivalry from mom's attention, it was to nurse both a toddler and an infant.

[00:23:02] Well, I just posted a link to the book on Amazon.

[00:23:06] And the cover of the book is a little cartoon mommy It's so amazing how they'll blame women for anything a man thinks, like thinks, literally thinks in his own head because a woman's problem. It's dehumanizing of everybody involved. It's dehumanizing of women because it makes women objects.

[00:24:22] And it's dehumanizing of men because it by a talented artist, however done in the style. Yeah, essentially to mimic what like maybe a seven year old or a 10 year old might draw. It's it is not in any way. But here's the thing though.

[00:25:40] And I'm not while I am inclined to disbelieve. Well, it's just so interesting the number of conservative men who end up on Ashley Madison. It's interesting how disproportionately represented the people who rail against porn are in the

[00:27:01] most...

[00:27:02] Right.

[00:27:03] It's not even about the porn.

[00:27:04] It becomes about infidelity. in all of that, it fits. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I find that. Sorry, go ahead, Gail. No, you go ahead, Nate. I was just going to say, I found myself in similar environments, even after evangelicalism, working for, or sorry, even after fundamentalism,

[00:28:20] working for an evangelical church.

[00:28:23] And one of the news items that ends up of such a thing inside evangelism inside fundamentalism even more I mean inside fundamentalism I'm thinking like.

[00:30:42] She's my space and social media. She needs social media, but whatever, you know, their blogs to make sure nothing's going

[00:30:47] on.

[00:30:48] That was her job.

[00:30:49] She was a detective.

[00:30:50] She's what she called herself.

[00:30:52] That's something I feel like that might be a distinctive.

[00:30:54] Like when I try it like between evangelicalism and fundamentalism, there's a long comment.

[00:30:58] But like some little distinctives for me is the level at which they monitor you inside

[00:31:02] a fundamentalist culture and the where like. Which doesn't make any sense. That's Synthiology. That's not a thing. We're weird. And it's your belief in God. It's not what that means.

[00:32:22] So I said to Grant, I said, I for a second? They're talking about something. I asked if I can see it and I went to the last page because I knew that's where the punch would be. And there it was. If you... Gotcha. Yeah. Your statement while orthodox, your statement is orthodox. If you cannot, however, if you cannot keep your position, if you cannot hold your position

[00:33:41] and keep from, that was it, communicating it the satisfaction of a clear break or a clear reason, because then you can, you have power, you have some agency, if you can argue that. That's so strange. Like they looked, they thought they were gonna get you, obviously, with writing out your statement on sin theology, like now we're gonna show her she doesn't believe in sin

[00:35:00] the proper way.

[00:35:01] And then they read through it all and they cannot find anything in there that bothers

[00:35:05] them.

[00:35:06] Right.

[00:35:07] So they've come up with some weird, like it's just... to try and get rid of you both and wanting to make sure you guys would be taking care of you. And so we went to the Burger King because they had a play place there and the kids could play and we just sat there and stared and talked, can we do this? This is possible. And that was a Wednesday and we said, yep, we can do it. We decided, I think it was a Wednesday, it might have

[00:36:20] been a Tuesday. And that night kids were in bed and night. And yes, I don't wanna take away from how absolutely bizarre that is. But I also think it's important to note, like so I read this book by Jocelyn Zikterman

[00:37:40] a little while back called I Fired God,

[00:37:42] which is basically her documenting the life

[00:37:45] that she lived inside the IFB

[00:37:47] and then her escape talked about that. Now that I think about it,

[00:39:00] I'd have to go back and reread it.

[00:39:02] But yeah, you're right.

[00:39:04] It's not bizarre.

[00:39:06] And I mean, if you've listened to Leah Remini you know, they changed the contract on you when they added that line, others at the university, away from the university. That's adding to your contract. You were right to leave. That was in August, but by October, he had changed his tune. And he wrote us this very long, very long email with lots of Bible verses about how we were wrong.

[00:41:23] one of the churches that I liked to go to because it wasn't Mount Minnick.

[00:41:31] Yeah. The I kind of wonder too,

[00:41:35] about the possibility of money, maybe,

[00:41:40] some money exchanging hands, potentially being removed from the, the approved list of churches that students could attend and attendance at a

[00:41:44] church of Bob Jones students was, was big. It was a big deal. He doesn't, we don't mean that. But if, if she's not good enough to teach Sunday school either, so we're out. And, uh, I drove all the way, the, the, I had just gotten the curriculum for the four year old Sunday school class. I drove all the way to Simpsonville to give it back to the lady sobbing the whole way.

[00:43:00] I mean, I remember I'm going to start crying again because we thought it

[00:43:04] shouldn't have been that way, And it takes, it takes time. I don't know that it's ever completely healed, but you come to an acceptance of it. Right. And I think, I guess I'm bringing that up because if into this show. We're so grateful that you've decided to spend your time with us. Seriously, Dan, Gail, Kathleen, Nate, Scott, and the rest of us here at the

[00:45:42] Dauntless Media Collective couldn't produce content like the show you're listening to and clicking on the link in the top banner. See you there. Yeah, there's a lot of loss that comes with leaving an environment. I don't wanna pivot too much because I think it's good to sit in our thoughts about grief, but I'll let people take that as they will with their scenario. But I'm wondering, I wanna focus on something about your story that I guess for me.

[00:47:00] Yeah, so if you do need to take a moment, press pause.

[00:47:03] Okay, yes. And then come back.

[00:47:04] That's right, there we go.

[00:47:05] So now here we are.

[00:47:06] Here.

[00:47:08] On an upbeat note, the same way. I mean, that man is fearless. And he, if somebody is coming after me, he is a total watchdog about it. And it's a wonderful feeling. It's a wonderful feeling. So that when, you know, if it's Darren Lawson, if it's

[00:48:24] Did men try and tell him to put his wife in order?

[00:48:26] Did he get those?

[00:48:27] Oh my god, So that's nice. I relate to your husband. That's a lot of my personality as well. The mama bear, sort of like protective of my people. Yeah. Wow. And like how beautiful is that? I mean, I'm just thinking when you lose everything around you, your community, you know, you guys left together. You guys have that Bob Jones experience

[00:49:41] you can talk about together.

[00:49:42] Remember that?

[00:49:43] Yeah, yeah.

[00:49:44] We went through that together.

[00:49:46] Even to the point now, I don't really know the person or if they're like, yeah, it just gets like, what, what do you do when you're there early? I tell my colleagues at Furman, I say this often, look, y'all,

[00:51:00] because if I do something like that, and I said you can take

[00:51:03] the girl out of fundamentalism, but I'm sorry, you can't always

[00:51:07] take the fundamentalism out of fundamentalism. And it's really the birthplace of clan-to-mentalism because the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and fundamentalism were one too. I mean, just that alone, that he would be the name of one of their dorms, it says quite a bit. Then there's the Billy Graham slash Bob Jones stuff, which I mean, you have some insight probably on that.

[00:53:42] What happened was on Good Friday in 1960,

[00:53:45] so that would have been April 13th, Our eight, 1986 is the first year we had to sign that we read it. Hmm. No, we got the, um, it's as apologetics for why segregation is good, right? Pretty much. Yeah. Mm hmm. It's pretty awful too. It's really awful. We got, we got to watch the, um, uh, the, uh,

[00:55:00] triple sticks going on Larry King live.

[00:55:02] You watched that in like orientation or something?

[00:55:04] Yeah. And we, I forgot what university it was that was doing a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

[00:56:22] after he passed away.

[00:56:23] We brought it up on a previous podcast.

[00:56:25] And Tim LaHaye wrote an angry letter

[00:57:23] presidency second in line to the presidency. Like the previous administration, Mike Pence was first in line.

[00:57:28] Yeah, that was my initial thought. Bless him. Oh goodness.

[00:57:34] Yeah.

[00:57:35] I think for people who don't have, if you didn't grow up in the US, because that's me

[00:57:40] in Canada, and I think anyone listening outside of the US, I think the was April A. Joy. He does a lot of great talks. You know, that painting of the rapture, that really schlocky painting, that was in my dentist office. I can't remember. I think it was in when we were in Tulsa. And I remember, I mean, looking back, that's just weird that that was in the dentist office. That is super what does that mean and how does it connect to racism well that's a nice way to convince and this is me i'd love to hear your thoughts but mine are like that's a way to convince evangelicals that it's not about racism by pretending uniting different groups is the problem because it's going to bring about this one world government which is going to be the

[01:00:22] anti-christ and the end of the world and you'd like. It I wonder if Raymond St. John would have failed him. That's a fun story. Oh, I'll say something controversial, but oh, to be a white man. Yeah, for me. Like, what qualifications do you need

[01:03:01] to start an institute of higher education?

[01:03:05] Yeah, my I'm remembering. And she worked with the state GOP for a while. And then somebody got? Of course they are. I mean, so that just makes perfect sense, right? Right. So there's that bit of news and in sacks They I was one of the people that wrote sacks There were lots of us who wrote the accrediting body and they said they looked into it and said everything was fine

[01:05:41] But I I honestly don't know how much

[01:06:43] And I can mask some of the details in such a way.

[01:06:47] And I keep it, I keep everything. So that's also a problem.

[01:06:48] But what happened is that a year ago, this week,

[01:06:54] Steve Pettit let it be known

[01:06:57] that he may not get his contract renewed.

[01:06:59] So Steve Pettit was the president of the university

[01:07:02] this time last year?

[01:07:04] For many years, right?

[01:07:05] For a few years?

[01:07:06] Or how long was he, or 14?

[01:07:07] 14 or 15, yeah. quote. And I remember, I mean, he was still not in the picture when I was there. But I do remember the Steve Pettit evangelistic team. And I remember him being very endearing to students and younger generations, as opposed to somebody like Bob Jones III.

[01:08:20] Bob Jones III, right.

[01:08:22] Do you guys think that that was a move? I think this is a good answer. Okay. I didn't even realize Pensacola was still around. I know Clearwater shut down.

[01:09:44] Did it? Oh, Clearwater. Yes, it did, I guess, final project had a wrap coat on display that was, you know, and look, fashion shows are art displays. They are not- They're not clothing. Right. This isn't what you're gonna buy at the mall to wear on a day-to-day basis.

[01:11:01] This is an art piece that a student is showing

[01:11:04] and they're showcasing, I guess, the life of Christ

[01:11:08] through this piece.

[01:11:08] Was it a Paul Ruppitz? Is that fair? You think that was the... You know what? I would say it... That's definitely how they read it. That's how they read it. And I would look at it and I would say it doesn't fit within any particular gender confines. Right, right. It was like a friend, an old...

[01:12:23] Louis the 14th kind of thing.

[01:12:25] Yeah.

[01:12:26] Right, right, exactly. Not a waistcoat, but longer. trying to parse something out. Was it because there was an art piece about Jesus on it? But like the living gallery that they put on every year is in a similar vein. Was it because the coat gave a more traditionally quote unquote feminine style? But even that is arguable because again,

[01:13:41] like you were mentioning, you know, Renaissance, yeah,

[01:13:45] Renaissance or Victorian apparel,

[01:13:47] it fits within the male. has to be wrong. But now it's shifted to, you know, and then fundamentalist course, they're still going to go off about gay people. But I feel like in the mainstream, you know, conservative, conservative world, it's fear around trans people. And it's fear around non binary. It's this idea that, yeah, that you are not exactly in one or the other camp. And that's so scary. And it's just it's always dominating media

[01:15:01] topics and like headlines and discrimination stuff. And I'm

[01:15:04] like,

[01:15:05] book bands are behind I mean, it is. And I think so there's all of this that happened and it turned into this fuel. And we have a few episodes back if you go back a little bit, you'll see we have an episode

[01:16:25] I think titled All You Need to Know About Bobtooth University where we talk to our friend that from the finance people. Their finances, if you look at what, I believe it was the Washington Post laid out for how you judge if a school is financially stable, they don't pass muster because they're not getting enough, they're discounting tuition so much to get people to come that it's not sustainable.

[01:17:42] Yeah.

[01:17:43] They lose out on- if you wanted excellence in those areas. Rhetoric, intellectualism, the arts. That's where you went if you were a fundamentalist and you wanted those things. If you wanted to double down on your fundamentalism, you had Pensacola and you had Heilz Anderson, you had Maranatha, you had maybe Northland even. But the intellectual and the artistic, the talented, they went to Bob Jones.

[01:19:02] The School of Art and Fine Arts is gutted. It's completely gutted. college. Yeah. So I think, sorry, I just want to, no, no, no, you're fine. I just, I guess the position that I think Bob Jones is sort of like stuck in right now is trying to, trying to regain the student population and they, they can't seem to figure out how to do that. But that seems to be the thing that they're looking at because they're at the end of the

[01:20:22] day, they're a university. If they don not just even funding like, okay, you know, it's much more expensive to go to Bob Jones than my community college, but also I don't know how much stories are getting out there about people being kicked out of Bob Jones and what even what the degree is worth outside of the fundamentalist world. I don't know if students are starting to realize that paper isn't worth anything. And if you, if they decide they want to make an example out of you and in that culture,

[01:21:43] they need to do that with a certain amount of kids to keep everyone in line. sympathetic to the plight of the Bob Jones castaways, which aren't necessarily great schools in and of themselves either. No, they're not. And just thinking like how much a student might be more aware of this than in the past, which is that idea that they can get kicked out. Those stories might be coming out. I think they are getting repeated and discussed like in podcasts like this.

[01:23:00] I think it how I do think it helps. But then when you have very low enrollment and every student counts, like my head I'm like, do they start changing things up? Do they still kick out as many kids? Do they have to relax the rules? They now do fines. They do fines now. Steve Pettit instituted that. Wow. Okay. That's interesting. You can buy your way.

[01:24:20] No, but I mean like that's just-

[01:24:21] What happens to the lower income students?

[01:24:23] I know.

[01:24:24] Well, it shows they're about making money now,

[01:24:26] more than controlling even, I cut it down, it was 150,000 words, now it's 82,000, so yay me. So I've got a lot of extra stuff too. But, so I'm just being patient now. And I, when I hear something, I'll shout it from the rooftops. When a contract is signed, I will let you. Quick question related to your book and one more teaser I want to throw out there.

[01:25:42] Was there anything you stumbled across as you were doing research for your book that you find really interesting or noteworthy or? is his older sister, four months, four and a half pounds older, ex an and he could not have been born from the same woman. That's all we know. Now he had a sister die right around that time too. So I'm wondering if he's actually his an eight, she was 18. And, you know Mary Gaston's mom. And when Mary Gaston was five, her dad was Eugene Stolenwerk. And for a few reasons. One, the fundamentalist influence on the larger American project is pretty heavy. And it's frightening.

[01:29:41] It's very heavy. It's like we can't really ignore, yes.

[01:29:45] And I think we can hold two things at the same time. the students that end up suffering because of this, the former students, the castaways, even alumni like myself, who thought we made it out unscathed. And then years later are looking back and saying, oh my God, I've got these gaping wounds that I never, never... What did that girl, what did that girl?

[01:31:02] So I think if you care about people

[01:31:06] and you care about the human toll,

[01:32:03] stop the clan to mentalists that are in our public space.

[01:32:04] So that's my hope.

[01:32:09] And, and I think that's the beautiful part of learning history and why history is so threatening and is being kept out of schools currently is because when you learn about

[01:32:12] history, then you can prevent things from repeating themselves.

[01:32:15] You can, when you see the rhetoric today looks so much like something from back then,

[01:32:19] you're like, how, how will we repeat house history repeating?

[01:32:22] And it's cause it's not being taught.

[01:32:23] Like, so your, your work is a contribution in that regard.

[01:32:26] So we can learn from history and say, I hope so.

[01:33:22] and the bulletins that they used to have in church that BJU published, what in the world?

[01:33:24] It's my little riff on that.

[01:33:27] The oldest and the latest about Bob Jones University.

[01:33:31] Nice.

[01:33:32] Well, thank you again for coming and hanging out.

[01:33:34] Thank you.

[01:33:35] This is fun.

[01:33:37] Thanks for listening to another episode

[01:33:39] of the Full Mutuality Podcast.

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