Bob Jones University

Bob Jones University was founded in 1927 by evangelist Bob Jones Sr. in Florida, later relocating to Greenville, South Carolina. The university operated as an explicitly fundamentalist Christian institution with strict rules governing student behavior, dress, and associations. For most of its history it also maintained explicitly racial policies: it did not admit Black students until 1971, and after admitting them continued to prohibit interracial dating and marriage, a policy it grounded in a biblical interpretation that God had intentionally separated the races. The university's conflict with the IRS became the central legal and political drama of the Religious Right's founding decade. Following the Green v. Connally ruling in 1971, the IRS notified Bob Jones University that its tax-exempt status was at risk. The university's exemption was formally revoked in 1976. Rather than change its policies, BJU fought in court — a fight that ultimately reached the Supreme Court in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983), where it lost 8-1. The significance of BJU to the history of the Religious Right is not that it was uniquely influential as an institution, but that its defiance made it the focal point of a broader conflict between conservative evangelicals and the federal government. The IRS's move against BJU — and against the broader network of segregation academies — was experienced by many white evangelicals as an attack on religious liberty. Weyrich, Falwell, and other organizers used this framing deliberately to mobilize a constituency that could not be mobilized around the explicit defense of racial segregation. The university's racial policies persisted long after the legal battle ended. Bob Jones III, who led the institution from 1971 to 2005, maintained the interracial dating ban until March 2000, when he announced its removal in an interview on CNN's 'Larry King Live' — acknowledging that the ban 'had become a source of shame' and had 'no rational basis.' The timing coincided with political pressure following George W. Bush's controversial visit to the campus during the 2000 Republican primary, which drew widespread criticism. BJU's history — from explicit segregation to IRS battle to Supreme Court loss to belated policy reversal — traces the arc of the racial politics that underlaid the Religious Right's founding and that the movement spent decades attempting to obscure.

Documented themes

• Christian Nationalism
• Anti-Democratic
• Political Strategy
• Race & Civil Rights

Connections from Bob Jones University

• influenced → Bob Jones v. United States (1983) — Bob Jones University's decision to refuse compliance with IRS non-discrimination requirements and fight in court was the direct cause of the landmark Supreme Court case that bears its name. After the IRS revoked BJU's tax exemption in 1976, the university pursued litigation through the federal courts, arguing that the IRS lacked authority to deny exemptions on non-discrimination grounds and that doing so violated the university's First Amendment rights to religious exercise. The case was consolidated with a similar challenge from Goldsboro Christian Schools. The resulting Supreme Court decision, Bob Jones University v. United States (1983), definitively resolved the legal question — ruling 8-1 that the IRS had full authority to deny exemptions to racially discriminatory institutions — and set a precedent that has governed tax-exempt status and public policy requirements for nonprofit institutions ever since.
• responded to → Green v. Connally (IRS Ruling) (1971) — Bob Jones University responded to the Green v. Connally ruling and subsequent IRS enforcement actions not by changing its racially discriminatory policies but by mounting a decade-long legal challenge. When the IRS notified BJU in 1971 that its tax-exempt status was at risk unless it demonstrated non-discriminatory policies, the university refused. It began admitting Black students in 1971 — but only to married students, as part of an effort to retain exemption while preserving its prohibition on interracial relationships. The IRS ultimately found this insufficient and revoked BJU's exemption in 1976. The university continued operating without the exemption while pursuing litigation, fighting the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The entire trajectory — notification, partial compliance, revocation, litigation — was shaped by BJU's initial decision to respond to the Green v. Connally standard by fighting rather than complying.

Connections to Bob Jones University

• Anti-Democratic Values: Before 1940 influenced (1954) — Bob Jones University's decades-long defiance of federal oversight was not mere institutional stubbornness. It rested on a theological foundation that had been developed over a century in Southern evangelical churches: that God-ordained authority structures — family, church, denomination — took precedence over federal power, and that federal intrusion into those structures was not merely unconstitutional but spiritually illegitimate. This framework had been used to resist Reconstruction, oppose anti-lynching legislation, and reject New Deal programs. Its application to federal desegregation orders was a continuation, not an innovation.
• Bob Jones Jr. founded (1947) — Bob Jones Jr. served as president and later chancellor of Bob Jones University, having succeeded his father. Under his leadership the university made its most consequential institutional decisions: refusing to admit Black students until 1971, maintaining the interracial dating ban after integration, and choosing to fight — rather than comply with — IRS enforcement of its non-discrimination requirements. Jones Jr.'s combativeness and his willingness to litigate to the Supreme Court made BJU the institutional symbol that Religious Right organizers, particularly Paul Weyrich, used to frame the movement's foundational grievance as religious liberty rather than racial discrimination.
• Race & White Evangelicalism: Before 1940 influenced (1940) — Bob Jones University's racial segregation policies were not aberrations — they were the direct continuation of a theological tradition that had defended racial hierarchy since the antebellum church. The pre-1940 Lost Cause project, which rewrote Southern evangelical identity around white Christian civilization, was the ideological foundation on which BJU's policies were built and defended.

Sources

• Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right — Randall Balmer (2021), pp. 31-105
• The Real Origins of the Religious Right — Randall Balmer (2014), pp. Politico Magazine, May 27, 2014
• White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America — Anthea Butler (2021), pp. 75-90