First, I have to say that there were no Satanic symbols whatsoever used at BJU Press.
Second, I must add that I believe that there is a Satan, an Adversary.
Having said that, I add that Fundamentalism elevates Satan far beyond his estate. Yet Fundamentalism also trivializes Satan, as it trivializes a lot of things. According to them, he’s in cartoons; he’s in pop music; he’s on cereal boxes; he’s encoded into subliminal messages on TV. But Billy Sunday “will gum him ‘til I die!”
If you go out trick or treating on Hallowe’en, you’re in dreadful danger because in some way that you never even imagined in your Buzz Lightyear costume, you are participating in the worship of Satan by going door to door to get micro-sized candy bars. That’s a widespread Fundamentalist take on every child’s favorite night of the year. They are never clear on exactly how this costumed collection process of candy empowers Satan or how his influence is then transfered to human beings, unless dental caries is demonic.
And somehow, trick-or-treating-slash-worshiping-Satan unwittingly infects you spiritually. Never mind that Christ has died for you; that Christ defeated Satan; that Christ demonstrated to us several times over that He has complete power over Satan and death. Never mind that He imparted that exact same power to His disciples. In the Fundamentalist theory of evil, Satanic cooties somehow stick to you if you get snagged in watching Scooby Doo or going trick-or-treating or hanging up a Christmas stocking. Again, they are never clear on how that works out. It’s the cooties theory of evil.
In the 1980′s, which was when I worked at BJU Press, Satanic Panic was all over the country. Granted, Scoobie Doo and other cartoons had gotten more dark than was healthy. They’d also gotten more butch than was healthy. But the idea that Satanism was infested into the media, all media, brought the Fundamentalist whackadoodles to the doorstep of Bob Jones University.
First of all, we had that art gallery, which a lot of our less educated, predominantly Fundamentalist Baptist brethren suspected because it was full of what several of them called “Catholic art.” And BJU’s art gallery, at least back then, was dominated by a monstrosity-sized altar with all the fixin’s, which included engraved wall pieces and railings and a jumbo-sized, medieval sarcophagus.
Now, no self-respecting Independent Baptist expects to walk into an art gallery and see what he or she would take to be a replica of the entire front of a Roman Catholic Church, and a dark, spooky one at that, with an enormous coffin thing in the middle of it. Add another shocker, the spooky chapel and sarcophagus were at least partially visible from any room you entered in the last third of the walk-through of the art gallery. It really was creepy. You’d think you’d left that scene behind, and you’re in a totally different room looking at other stuff, and the you realize that the wall of the room you’re in is the back wall of the sarcophagus room, and you can see the sarcophagus through slats in the wall.
As an undergraduate, I had worked on Security. Normally women did not patrol front campus (at least not back then), but when I worked on campus over the summers, I was assigned to patrol the art gallery just at dusk.
Security patrol entered the art gallery through the back, entering on a basement level where there was a massive workroom. Our number one rule for patrolling here was not to touch anything. Nobody touched anything. The work room was as creepy as the rest of the art gallery in the dark. We were instructed to walk from entry point to the rear of the room, check all corners, check the floors under the table for debris accidentally left behind, and then climb the stairs to go up to the art gallery proper, stopping to check the rafters on both sides (where items were stored) for any animals or signs of animal droppings. The entire inspection was supposed to be completed in under five minutes.
It was completed, by everybody, in under 20 seconds: Spin your flashlight around as you race to the steps, flash it on either side of you as you clear the rafters on your way up, and then get out of there.
The patrol officer would enter the art gallery proper from the basement steps via a wall panel (ie, a secret panel). It’s hard to recall enough of the art gallery to say which room it was, but it was a smaller room, all lined in wood paneling that came up to about chin height, and it had a recessed shelf, as far as I recall, that ran along at least two of its walls. The shelf may have run along all four walls. Once you got through the door/secret panel, you had about 30 seconds to switch off the alarm, which was in the room, hidden behind something–I don’t remember what. Right near the alarm was a little silver devil. People used to insist that it would move when they weren’t looking.
Following the disarm of the alarm, the patrol officer would then do a complete circuit of the art gallery, and we had instructions on different places that we had to check, places not accessible to the public. We had to check every closet, which was always scary in the dark. I had it easy. I was the only girl on Security in the summer, and I knew that there was always going to be another Security guard sent out to scare me. There always was. It was one of the reasons that I disappointed my colleagues by never seeming to be afraid in the Art Gallery after dark: I knew I was never alone. It was more like playing Hide ‘N Seek. (By the way, I was always scared in the basement.)
What frightens me now is that one of the men on Security back then, Brian, was a rapist. I didn’t know it at the time, but now I know of two, possibly three women that he raped. And he raped at least one of them back then, although as I understand it, he pressured her into silence. One of his victims contacted me recently out of sympathy, assuming he had done the same thing to me, but he never did. I only ever saw his light side, his happy face. Just a month or two after I graduated, I learned that he beat his wife and infant son, and that was corroborated by a witness who also had worked on Security. It shocked me down to my heels, but I believed the report of the witnesses, who were all people of integrity. His young wife, thank God, divorced him back then and escaped him.
So there was a monster in the Art Gallery that summer, at that point still undetected. Those are the evil beings I worry about.
Anyway, the Art Gallery had a few demons/devils present in the art work, and that was enough for our more unbalanced brethren to suspect the University of being part, even if an unwitting part, of this great network of Satanic symbols and Satanic rituals.
When I first came to work at BJU Press, we were under fire by a percentage of our customers every time we produced a story that featured talking animals. And talking animals, to the more Devil-loco members of our clientele, was Satanic.
We also did a story in the Fourth Grade Reader called “Janwahr’s Bridge,” in which a sea serpent with a great silver horn rises up out of a river. That provoked a hailstorm of protest. Didn’t we know that dragons are symbols of Satan?
I was the factotum on the Reading 4 text book, just learning the ropes to prepare for Reading 5 when I would become the production assistant. I had no role at that time in answering the complaints that we received. And I wouldn’t have said anything professional at that point anyway. I loved CS Lewis, George MacDonald, and JRR Tolkien, and the fact that we were giving credibility to people who would have stripped down our fiction to dull and drab moralistic tales irritated me.
As I mentioned, I had worked on BJU Security previously for several years, and I had covered the last World Congress of Fundamentalism for FAITH for the Family just a year or so earlier. I was starting to see what a collection of nincompoopery, stinginess, miserific outlook, and constant outrage formed a big part of the bedrock of Fundamentalism. BJU Press was a wonderful, loving place to work back then. But we were always in touch with the cranks and kooks.
But, at least in terms of BJU Press’s editorial choices, I really had nothing to fear. BJU Press’s Elementary Authors were educated women who loved children’s literature and were expert in it. I learned more from them about both children’s literature and writing than I had learned in school.
We always had a book or two circulating around the room, and it was expected that we would take 30 or so minutes out to read such books when they landed on our desks. Our own clientele, the more educated and well grounded segment of our audience, recommended great books for children to us, which we would check out from the library and bring in, and we also brought in our own treasures that we wanted to share.
One of my favorites, brought in by one of my colleagues who worked on the Spelling text books, was Black and Blue Magic. That book has magic sparkling the entire way through it. She had been a Christian school teacher and had read it to her children without any problem.
There was no way we were going to include it in our curriculum, but as my boss Jan said, we should all be up to date on these things.
And I must add, there is a dark side to children’s literature that doesn’t have anything to do with demons. There are writers who want to pull children too quickly into dark adulthood. I would never expose fourth, fifth, or sixth graders to Paula Foxe’s The Slave Dancer, and I would never have a child under the age of 14 read anything by Robert Cormier without guidance. These are far too dark. I would never recommend a Judy Blume book to any child. But in my opinion, if a child really wanted to read Blume, I would hold them off for as long as possible before giving in.
Not that I’m overprotective. I think that the Great Gilly Hopkins and The Master Puppeteer are great for readers who are ready for them in middle school. Sounder remains a great and tragic book, and Old Yeller was the book that awakened me to the concept of “noble tragedy” when I was 12 or 13.
All of the people with whom I worked at the Press were concerned about what is called the Hurried Child Syndrome. They believed that children need a lot of free range roaming and playing and less stress. Books were meant to be enjoyed. Even the most conservative of my colleagues would have frowned on the dry and moralistic tales that A Beka was churning out back then. We wanted fun short stories for the Reading books and fun, exciting novels.
Anyway, whenever we received a litter of letters (for this was before email) protesting occult symbols in our stories, our department head would crank out reply after reply to assure our readers that we were not worshiping Satan, and that the stories were defensible in a Christian book. I don’t know if this has changed over time or not, but back then we never sent form letters. If we got five letters that said just about the same thing, we sent out five individual replies.
We had other issues with the fanatical side of Fundamentalism. We had some people who objected to all use of fiction. “Just read the Bible for stories,” they would say, as though the purpose of the Bible is to be a storybook. The purpose of the Bible is to reveal the nature and person of God. It is not a storybook, and it is not to be reduced to being a storybook, even though stories for children can be extracted from it. But fiction is for storytelling. And as Christ used fiction and storytelling abundantly in His discourses, we are free to use fiction.
As I became more confident at my work, I also became more displeased with Fundamentalist nonsense. It’s not just that these people were mistaken about what to read, it’s that they were seriously in error at the root of understanding what reading is for, what God has given us in giving us language. But back then I didn’t know enough to know what exactly the error was.
But I did know who to ask, and that will be in Part Two, Lord willing, scheduled for next time.
Books For Former Fundamentalists
The semi-fictional journals of Grace Jovian, her account of her senior year at Greater Independent Baptist College (Hyles-Anderson) and her first year starting out on her own, determined to be her own woman, making her own decisions. Plenty of adventures that many readers will recognize!
Thoroughly enjoyed the history of Fundie kookdom as seen firsthand. Praise God for opening our eyes. May He work powerfully in your health issues.