I grew up a Fundamentalist of Fundamentalists. I was born at Barge Memorial Hospital on the campus of Bob Jones University, grew up under the preaching and teaching of men like Mark Minnick, and lived in a world shaped by BJU. The University was never merely a school I attended. It formed nearly everything about me.

I was saved at eight, baptized at ten, and called to preach at about sixteen. From childhood, I was taught that the Word of God stands in judgment over us, not the other way around. Scripture was not something we were free to bend toward our preferences, our politics, or the assumptions of the surrounding culture. We were supposed to study grammar, context, history, theology, and the whole counsel of God, and then submit ourselves to whatever the text required. That conviction became part of my identity, and it remains part of me.

To this day, I love the Bible because I believe it is the infallible Word of God. Whatever else I may now say about Bob Jones University, I cannot tell the truth about my relationship with BJU without acknowledging that the University helped give me that love for Scripture. That is part of what makes everything else so difficult.

BJU’s vocabulary still comes naturally to me, and its habits of argument remain recognizable even when I disagree with its conclusions. I know what its preachers mean when they speak about biblical authority, separation, compromise, revival, ministry, Christian education, and fidelity to the faith. I know the instincts behind those words because they became my instincts too. And I know people associated with that tradition whom I continue to love and admire—teachers, pastors, friends, and family members whose seriousness about Scripture changed me permanently for the better.

Yet it was that very commitment to Scripture that eventually led me into a painful confrontation with the culture that taught it to me. In the fall of 2019, I was assigned a seminary paper on race relations. I did not approach the subject looking for evidence against conservative Christianity, and I certainly was not looking for reasons to become disillusioned with Bob Jones University. I was trying to work through the biblical material carefully, beginning with Old Testament exegesis and moving toward contemporary application.

Eventually, if I was going to apply Scripture honestly, I had to look at the racial history of my own tradition. I still remember standing in the old Fundamentalism File, going through news clippings about the 1983 Supreme Court case, Bob Jones University v. United States. I remember my shock at the rhetoric I encountered—the anger, arrogance, and vitriol coming from the University during that controversy. And I remember coming across a statement to the effect that, “It doesn’t matter what we believe so long as we have the right to believe it.”

That sentence stopped me because, according to the Constitution, the claim makes a certain kind of sense. In a pluralistic society, the government should not determine which religious beliefs its citizens are permitted to hold. The right to believe something cannot depend upon whether that belief is true. But according to the Word of God, it matters very much what we believe. It matters whether our beliefs are true. It matters whether they are righteous. It matters whether they reflect the character of Christ. It matters how we treat our neighbors, how we use our influence, and how we present our beliefs to the watching world.

I found myself confronting a terrible irony. The institution that had taught me that Scripture must stand in judgment over culture appeared, at a crucial moment in its own history, to have done the opposite. It had taken deeply held cultural assumptions about race and defended them even when those assumptions should have been brought under the judgment of Scripture.

The problem, as I came to see it, was deeper than simply getting a difficult passage wrong. Everyone misinterprets Scripture at times. What disturbed me was the possibility that cultural commitments had become so deeply embedded that they were being defended as biblical, rather than being subjected to the Bible. BJU had taught me never to do that, and now the principles I had learned at BJU were forcing me to judge BJU.

That realization sent me into something of a spiral because these were my people. My people had defended racial segregation. My people had participated in and perpetuated racial bigotry. My people had sometimes spoken with an anger and self-righteousness that horrified me. The history I was reading was not ancient history either. This was not some distant medieval church whose sins I could condemn from the safety of centuries. This was the world of my parents and grandparents. In some cases, the people involved were still alive.

I remember the thought hitting me with almost physical force: My people were on the side of evil. My people had been on the side of segregation, racial discrimination, and the preservation of a racial hierarchy that I could not reconcile with the Scripture they had taught me to obey.

And yet even saying that created another problem, because these were still my people. The people I actually knew did not fit neatly into the historical categories I was reading about. My friends, my family, my church, my professors, my community—I had experienced real love among them. I knew people who had cared for me, prayed for me, taught me, sacrificed for me, and pointed me toward Christ. I knew people I loved and respected then, and whom I still love and respect now. Somehow all of that existed alongside this, and I could not get my head around it.

For a time, I think I wanted the story to become simple. If BJU had been wrong in such a serious way, perhaps I could simply reject BJU. I could draw a clean line between myself and the institution, condemn what needed condemning, and move on. But identities do not come apart so cleanly.

I remain committed to the historic Christian faith, to the apostolic and Nicene confession, and even to the doctrinal creed of Bob Jones University. I still believe many of the truths I was taught there. I still love many of the people who taught them to me. But I have never recovered the uncomplicated relationship I once had with the institution or with the broader fundamentalist culture surrounding it.

Over the years that followed, I began to realize how much of my identity had become wrapped up not merely in Christ, but in the particular world in which I had learned to follow him. I was a BJU person, a preacher, a PhD student, a fundamentalist. I had a calling, a theological tradition, an academic path, and a community that told me where I belonged. One by one, those identities began to crack.

Looking back, I believe God was doing something in me that I could not understand at the time. He was stripping away identities that had become too important so that my identity could be rooted more deeply in Christ himself. But after God separated me from so much of what I had used to define myself, another question remained: would I accept that BJU was still part of my story?

I remember wrestling with God over that question:

Will you accept the fact that I brought you up at BJU?

“God, no. I don’t want BJU to be part of me.”

Well, it is part of you. And I put you there.

“No, God. They’re evil.”

Not all of them. And you’re not answering my question.

“God, it’s embarrassing to be connected with them at all.”

Will you accept my plan for you?

“Why? Why must it be this way?”

I will not answer that right now. You must trust me and accept this.

I do not know exactly when I finally did, and I still do not know how to resolve all the tension between the evil I have discovered and the good I have known.

Perhaps there is no neat resolution. And I don’t expect one. But I do know that God has granted me peace and joy. For that I am grateful.