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Bob Jones University
Thousands of people watched in the campus chapel, and countless more tuned in to a live Web feed earlier this month as Bob Jones University President Steve Pettit addressed the school's handling of sexual assault reports.
Like many of those with ties to BJU, a private school in Greenville, South Carolina, nicknamed the "fortress of faith," Julia had been waiting decades for this moment.
After watching the video for just a few minutes, she vomited.
"I couldn't stop throwing up," said Julia (not her real name), who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity so as not to be linked to her alleged rapist. "It shocked me. There was nothing in me that prepared me for the response that came."
Three months before Pettit's speech, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), an independent Christian organization, released the results of a nearly two-year investigation, detailing how the school — over four decades — heaped shame on rape victims, urged them not to go to the police and even counseled them to repent for their own abuse.
BJU leaders commissioned the report voluntarily after a scandal about one of the school's trustees allegedly making a teen rape victim confess her "sin" before his church’s congregation.
The probe was unprecedented in the world of higher education and sharply divided the wider school community, which stretches to churches around the country and ministries around the world. BJU's response was considered less of a test for colleges on the issue of sexual violence and more of a test for American Christianity's most conservative wing.
In its response, the school doubled down on the biblical counseling that many victims found so devastating. Two sexual assault victims on the task force that drafted the report's recommendations later wrote an open letter to Bob Jones, saying their "hope was shattered by BJU's official response."
According to a current student, many faculty members are extremely upset — although they can't express it publicly for fear of losing their jobs.
There were a few firm reforms. Incoming students and faculty members now receive an hour of abuse awareness training, and all BJU employees are designated as mandatory reporters of child abuse.
The school says there will be further changes, including a review of its student culture, which many graduates say is so oppressively rule-focused that you are afraid to admit a problem at all for fear of being seen as a failed Christian.
Many sexual assault victims pinpoint Bob Jones' philosophy of biblical counseling as the greatest source of harm. In BJU’s brand of pastoral care, all mental issues — such as ADHD, depression and trauma — are considered spiritual fights with God. The result: Abuse victims whose issues weren't resolved through prayer or religious study were told they were sinning and needed to repent.
Julia said she never told her counselor, Jim Berg, then the dean of students, about the abuse she experienced as a child years before she arrived on campus. Instead, she sought help for an eating disorder. She says he labeled her struggle "a lifestyle of sin," and she graduated thinking “God has spit me out," she said. When a BJU ministry student raped her several months later, she believed he was "the tool that God used to punish me."
Sarah, a recent graduate and abuse victim, who also asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said her Bob Jones counselor told her, "You know that the nightmares are your own fault, because you're choosing to replay pornographic thoughts in your mind."
“I would say that the impact of the two years of counseling I had with her is that I felt like I had been raped all over again," Sarah said.
Katie Landry
former BJU student
GRACE urged Bob Jones to strike these teachings from sermons and curricula, bar certain individuals from counseling and outsource the counseling of abuse victims to licensed trauma professionals. None of the counselors at Bob Jones are licensed.
But BJU hasn’t done any of that.
"God's inerrant and authoritative word is completely sufficient to address any problem believers face in their spiritual life," Pettit stated in his address. "We are and will continue to be totally committed to a philosophy of biblical counseling at BJU."
"I feel Bob Jones has gone decades backwards, not forwards," Sarah said. "They are reinforcing the very policies and counseling standards that caused the damage."
The university did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
But BJU Vice President Marshall Franklin has been in regular touch with several sexual abuse victims who attended the school. Julia said he explained to her that BJU couldn't budge on issues of doctrine and that it had a fundamentalist constituency to serve.
BJU's hard-line spiritual approach to counseling has become increasingly controversial in the university's ranks.
"I literally shook. I was so upset by the things he was teaching," said one recent BJU graduate about her counseling class. She said she has a family member who struggles with psychological issues and asked to remain anonymous because she's still in good standing with the university.
"The secular is bad at seeing everything as a medical issue and not a moral issue," she continued. "But just because the world is wrong doesn't mean we can go to the opposite extreme and call it right."
While Pettit's pronouncements seemed unmovable, the school's more detailed response, posted on its website, offered an inch.
"We recognize there currently may be limits to our ability to deal with certain aspects of trauma present in some cases of sexual abuse/assault," it reads, adding that students have the option of pursuing help off campus.
For Katie Landry, it's an unconvincing concession. She dropped out of BJU in 2004 after she says Berg told her to "find the sin in your life that caused your rape."
"Look at me and tell me I'm not to blame," she said of Pettit's speech. "Tell me it wasn't sin in my life. Tell me that and tell me you understand that, and tell me you're sorry for that."
In an example of how the investigation has divided the wider fundamentalist community, Landry's mother, father, sister and brother-in-law left the Ohio church they attended for 17 years, after the pastor allegedly refused to even read the GRACE report.
A campus culture that GRACE described as "showcase Christianity," coupled with militaristic discipline, has been a suffocating one for many Bob Jones students, especially those grappling with the aftershocks of abuse.
"People ask you questions, like, 'You seem exceptionally sad.' 'Why are you sleeping so much?' 'You cry out in the middle of the night because you're having nightmares, what's wrong with you?'" said one former BJU student who was a faculty member for more than a decade in the 1980s and '90s and asked not to be identified because she has family and friends associated with BJU. "Girls got turned in because somebody noticed a symptom of trauma, and then, of course, they got routed up to Mr. Berg."
Lydia, who asked to be identified by only her first name, was raped as a freshman over the 2008 winter break at Bob Jones. She sought help and was directed Berg, who sent her to meet with a dorm counselor, a BJU graduate student. The counselor told "America Tonight" that there was no confidentiality; she was told to keep the higher-ups in the loop. Within a couple months, Lydia was expelled in the middle of the night with no explanation.
She believes she had become an irritation to the school administration.
"It should have been expected that I would feel stressed out and trapped and alone and emotional about it," Lydia told "America Tonight" in 2013. "And they sent me back to the place with the person who attacked me, to be alone all day."
Steve Pettit
president, BJU
"A part of our culture placed too much emphasis on policies and not enough emphasis on people," said Pettit in his address. "I believe in my heart that we have always loved our students, but we have not always disciplined with love."
This culture has been changing slowly for a decade, propelled by the Internet, which exposed students to ideas outside the fundamentalist worldview. The campus handbook is still anchored in the 1950s, with an emphasis on obedience, alongside rules about handholding (banned if you're unmarried) and music (no rock, jazz or hip-hop beats). But at a recent talent show, students performed the soft rock song "Ocean (Where Feet May Fail)" by the Christian band Hillsong United, and it was extremely well received.
A rat-out culture used to be encouraged on campus, but now snitches are a minority, according to a current student. In the last few years, student movements like Do Right BJU have sprung up, advocating for change and openness.
And on a campus where individuals have long been hesitant to speak up, a student petition declaring their empathy for victims of abuse garnered 392 signatures in the lead-up to Bob Jones' response.
In a powerful sign of the changing times, the administration embraced the petition, with Pettit praising it on the chapel stage.
Overall, though, the university president's language was carefully hedged, clearly geared to the Bob Jones loyalists who have felt scorched by the GRACE report and the national attention it has received.
"I wanted substance, and I felt like I walked away with mist," said Ryan Ferguson, a popular Greenville pastor and former BJU student. "What would have happened if someone had sat down and said, 'Case No. 5074, we wronged you. Case no. 5045, we wronged you.' What would have happened in our town? To the faith community?"
But he said he was impressed that when he reached out to Pettit's office, the president agreed to meet him in person.
According to some of the victims who poured their heartache into the GRACE investigation, however, the school’s response felt like just another insult. And this time they felt they had exhausted all recourse. Many used the word "hopeless."
"I feel like we were pawns in a game I don't understand," Julia said.
Former students at ‘the fortress of faith’ who reported sexual abuse say they were told they had sinned
The ‘fortress of faith’ caused extensive harm to sexual abuse victims, according to a two-year independent investigation
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