#BJUisNOTsafe

[wutbju]

By their fruit ye shall know them....

Adam Morgan, BJU Class of 2011, is proving that he is NOT safe. Consorting with Matt Gaetz of all people? Really??

You can say no, Adam.

Far-right conservative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Congressman, is coming to Greenville to help campaign against his colleague William Timmons.   Gaetz will join South Carolina state representative and Fourth Congressional District Candidate Adam Morgan to keynote a campaign rally on April 23 at the Greenville Marriott.   “I’m looking forward to welcoming Congressman Gaetz to South Carolina,” said Morgan in a press release. “Matt is a strong leader in Congress and I’m thankful to have his support, as well as several other conservative members of Congress, who are committed to consistently fighting for conservative ideals and winning.”  Doors will open at 6 p.m. for the rally beginning at 6:30. Tickets required for entrance can be found here.  “Congress needs more America First warriors willing to fight the establishment, the uniparty and the special interests,” said Congressman Gaetz. “Adam Morgan is that warrior who will join me to fight the DC swamp to take back our country and restore our conservative values. I enthusiastically endorse his candidacy for South Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District and am excited to have him fighting with me soon for the country we love.”  Morgan, an extreme conservative who chairs the SC Freedom Caucus, recently garnered national attention on the social media app X, formerly known as Twitter, when he posted a video of him on the South Carolina House Floor claiming that dark money groups were behind the pressure for him to vote for an economic development.  “My constituents told me to vote no on the $1.3 billion VW project ($400 million of which is taxpayer cash). But the swamp wants me to ignore those ‘back home,’” Morgan posted to X, which received 1.3 million views.  Gaetz responded to Morgan’s post, saying “Inject this into my veins.” Gaetz has also openly spoken about Timmons on X, saying “We need better Republicans than this.”   Still, earlier this year, Timmons garnered former President Donald Trump’s endorsement for a second time.  "Congressman William Timmons is a terrific advocate for the people of South Carolina's 4th Congressional District," Trump said in a press release. A captain in the Air National Guard, he fights hard to secure our border, strengthen our military, support our veterans, grow the economy, defend our Second Amendment, and hold Joe Biden and the Radical Left Accountable. An original member of my South Carolina Leadership Team, Congressman William Timmons has my complete and total endorsement."  The primary is June 11 and early voting begins Tuesday, May 28. Whoever secures the primary will face off against Democrat Kathryn Harvey. 

#Bob Jones University #Adam Morgan #Patch the Pirate #Matt Gaetz #BJUisNOTSafe #SC GOP

[bojopalooza]

#MakeTheAdminGreatAgain

#Bob Jones University #BJUisNOTSafe #Admin #Raze

[wutbju]

CW: careless talk about postpartum depression

I've been avoiding this introductory story from Dr. Dionne because it's so horrifying. I'll just quote the whole thing.

Karen is a 30 year old woman who grew up in our church and has parents who were missionaries in Venezuela when she grew up. She has three children and one is less than two months old. She and her husband have been married for 10 years, and she professed Christ when she was a girl, and her husband also grew up in our church, and he just got a job as a police officer, and he's working the graveyard shift. And after her second baby, she suffered with postpartum depression. Now her baby's crying every night, and her husband has gone during the night, and he has to sleep during the day, and she's not getting enough. She is having angry outbursts, and she's very unhappy, so she went to her doctor and was given antidepressants for postpartum depression, and she hoped it would help. But she only took it for three days and seemed to get worse, so she stopped taking the medicine. Her doctor told her if she could not tolerate the medication, she would need to get counseling. And she doubted if it would work for her. She felt like she had known God her whole life, and she doubted that God loved her which is very common when people are depressed.

Picture the scene. This mother has no sleep and a newborn. She has the flood of postpartum hormones -- a wallop for everyone -- but this is in the depression territory. Her husband is absent.

Her medical doctor (at least according to the story) is basically doing nothing. She's not taking the meds -- probably because she's been told at their church that meds are wrong.

But Dionne goes on. Guess what the BJU-trained counselor suggests. Yup -- MEMORY VERSES! But lo and behold, what does she discover??!??!?

So my wife Kelly started meeting with her, and she met with her every week and she started off by having her memorize scripture. And as Kelly was getting to know her, she learned about some sin Karen had committed with her husband when they before they got married. And they had never asked her, repented of this to each other or repented before God.

"Some sin."

Dionne never says it, but he's attributing allll the problems to that "sin." It's probably sexual relations with her now-husband before they were married. At least, that's the way Dionne sets it up.

He goes on:

And this was a very important time when her husband came to counseling with her, and they apologized to each other and they confessed to God their sin. From this, she learned that she actually had to seek forgiveness from some other people in her life. She would have lots of anger, and as they spent more time counseling, it became clear that she had some wrong expectations about her life. What was the problem? Well, she wanted life to be comfortable and easy, and it wasn't. As she was being counseled, Kelly taught her how important her thoughts are, the thoughts she deserved an easy and a fun life. And to be had to be replaced with right expectations about. So whenever anything went wrong in her life, she would doubt God and become angry with him. She learned that God was using the hard things for her good, showing her her desperate need for him. Anybody learning that right now suffering is so good for me.

Everybody stop.

Is anyone taking care of the baby during the day so that Dad and Mom can sleep? Is anyone taking care of this family? Is anyone talking to the Dad and explaining, "You need a different shift." Is anyone offering the Dad a different job?

These are real things that can be done that are not "memorizing verses" or plumbing the depths of a 20-something's life.

Where are the older moms who can come in to help? The grandmas? The aunts?

Medication is important too. But hello!!?? You don't need a license to be a decent human being.

Dionne never actually says what happened to the family and specifically the mom. He just tells the story in such a way that you think it's all tidy after they confessed to "sin."

#Bob Jones University #CORE2024 #BJUBC24 #Bible Conference #Seminary Conference #Jim Berg #BJUisNOTSafe #Dan Dionne #Stuart Scott #Brian Hand #COVID

[wutbju]

Nouthetic counseling, now more commonly known as Biblical counseling, has taken root across the country since Adams created it in 1970. In 2002, the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed the principles of the method, which is now taught at the denomination’s most prominent seminaries. It has garnered intense criticism over the decades for its renunciation of evidence-based counseling and what detractors say is an overly confrontational approach. The word “nouthetic’ derives from the Greek word “noutheteo,” which means to confront or admonish. It’s the same method highlighted in the Bob Jones University GRACE Report, a 2014 evaluation of the conservative Christian school’s response to sexual abuse. The report found counselors at BJU in Greenville for years consistently focused on the supposed culpability and sin of survivors of sexual abuse, and de-emphasized the responsibility of perpetrators.

BJU is not safe.

#Bob Jones University #GRACE Report #Nouthetic Counseling #Abuse #Legacy #BJUisNOTSafe #Jay Adams #Donn Arms

[wutbju]

Remember that Dr. Dionne started with the fact that he's not talking to career biblical counselors per se. They may just be "friends" of their "counselee."

So that's what makes this next part a little jaw-dropping (36:04). He mentions medications -- not "cholesterol medication or blood pressure medication." He wants to make that clear (48:00):

It's really not your job to tell them to stop taking medication. That's probably because you're not a doctor. You don't know how to wean them off the medication, and you're their counselor, and you're helping them with their heart issues so you can ask them if they've tried counseling, and then you just get to work on what's going on in their heart. You don't have to tell them to go off medication. You can counsel somebody when they're on medication.

Okay. Fair enough. But wait.

Don't judge your counselee if they're on medication.... Don't make them feel like they have an inferior faith if they're on medication and don't tell them that it's a sin to be on medication. Now, that's often the message that people get when they're on medication in the church.... Ask what was going on at the time they started, meds and what they were hoping the meds would do. ... Ask why their doctor to prescribe their medication and were there other medicines that they've tried? Ask about side effects of the medication. Ask how well the medication has worked for them and ask if you can go with them to their next doctor's visit. You can ask if you can have permission to speak with their doctor. You'll need a signed release, but then just get to work talking about their heart issues. That's what you can do.

Don't judge. Don't tell them to go off the medications. But do ask them a whole host of questions that's outside your unlicensed expertise.

But also go with them to the medical doctor? What's the result of that conversation?

#Bob Jones University #CORE2024 #BJUBC24 #Bible Conference #Seminary Conference #Jim Berg #BJUisNOTSafe #Dan Dionne #Stuart Scott #Brian Hand #COVID

[wutbju]

He finally spits it out (40:37):

So we talked about medical disease and we talked about medical disorders. And you're wondering what about the science of psychiatry? And I want to remind you that psychiatrists went to medical school like I did. And they want to help their patients with their suffering, their emotional suffering and pain. And they've been trained to look for pathology as well. So you might ask, how does the psychiatrist look for pathology and what test can a psychiatrist run on the patient? And that's really where the DSM-5 comes in and those long lists of criteria. That's what they use. So because psychiatrists use lists to find disorders, it seems to me like squishy science.

And so they want to be scientific. They want to help. But it's tricky because it's harder for them to find pathology. So list of criteria make it seem more scientific. But was there really anything very quantifiable on that list that I read to you earlier about depression? It's very subjective.

And just like Mazak, he insists:

There's no blood test for depression. You can't even get a blood test that will tell you your serotonin levels. DSM-5 does not have a blood test for depression. You can't do a blood test. You can't do a biopsy. All you can do is say we see a list of criteria that this disorder meets. But you can't really do a biopsy or a blood test for it.

That's really his gold standard -- a blood test or a biopsy. That's "objective." That's concrete.

You know why that seems to be the standard for you, Dr. Dionne?

BECAUSE YOU'RE OUTSIDE YOUR LANE!

Sure other disciplines seem different from yours. They use different methods. They use different manuals. That's why we have different disciplines.

#Bob Jones University #CORE2024 #BJUBC24 #Bible Conference #Seminary Conference #Jim Berg #BJUisNOTSafe #Dan Dionne #Stuart Scott #Brian Hand #COVID

[wutbju]

Of course, this medical doctor who graduated in 1987 thinks life made more sense in the 1950s.

Now, in 1952, there was another classic which was published, which was the first diagnostic and statistical manual and we would now call that DSM-1.

He goes on:

And there have been several revisions over the years, so now we're up to the DSM-5, and it really started out with the intention to be scientific. But I'd say it's become a little more political and cultural as the years have gone by. So we're up to DSM-5 now, which is published in 2013 and in the health world and this is kind of their Bible that they use to talk about psychiatry.

Dude.

It's not your discipline. You're a medical doctor, not a psychologist. You have no degree in psychology whatsoever. Something outside your discipline but that's 75 years old might be your right down your alley.

I might understand music better from 1952 too!

And I might ignorantly call updated things outside my expertise "political and cultural."

Stay in your lane, Dude.

#Bob Jones University #CORE2024 #BJUBC24 #Bible Conference #Seminary Conference #Jim Berg #BJUisNOTSafe #Dan Dionne #Stuart Scott #Brian Hand #COVID

[wutbju]

I started with the ridiculous because Dr. Dionne's actual lecture gets dark and frightening really fast.

But his entire talk can be understood in how he imagines his listener.

In rhetoric, we talk about the "first persona" -- that's the speaker, their ethos. Their credibility.

You remember how we reviewed it: The effective speaker is a person whose character, knowledge, and judgment command respect.

But then there's the "second persona." That's the way the speaker creates, curates, or directs his audience to be a particular kind of person. For instance, a 1st grade teacher says to her class, "Friends, lets go outside now." In calling them "friends," she directing to act friendly. If she said, "okay stupids...."

Well, you know how that would go. But the rhetor is creating the second persona; he's directing how they should be in the world.

And Dr. Dionne is pretty bald about it.

To him, his audience is ... well, look (3:25):

So oftentimes when I talk, I'll talk about you all as biblical counselors and really, uhm, you might be a biblical counselor, or you might be a friend, or you might be a loved one. But really, this is for you as you are talking to people about depression, the other thing that is great is that Dr. Hand's first message was very helpful for just describing what it feels like to be depressed. What a person's heart does, and … how deep the suffering can be. So I always like to ask, is anybody … have you ever known somebody that suffered with depression? Yes. So we almost all know somebody. And so this is going to be hopefully helpful for you as you think about how to be helpful to them.

The people in front of him are not actually depressed nor have they ever been depressed. It's the people "out there" who are depressed (we rhetoricians actually call that category the "third persona."). The people he's talking to are the ones who don't get depressed. They've got all the answers.

Dionne is consistent too (27:31):

We can talk about that. So here's the thing. When you're counseling people that are depressed, it can be very frustrating and discouraging. And so you, as the counselor, need to have a long term view of the process in order to keep from getting off track…. So I always tell people if you get a counselee that's depressed, this is not going to be a quick fix. It might take them a year, it might take them longer to really see change in their lives. And so that can get discouraging for you as a counselor because you might give them some really good homework. And for a couple weeks, it seems like it's working and then all of a sudden they're back in the dumps again.

He's empathizing with the untrained, unlicensed counselor who "feels discouraged" that their "homework" isn't working.

That's not how educated experts talk, Doctor. That's how MLM huns talk.

#Bob Jones University #CORE2024 #BJUBC24 #Bible Conference #Seminary Conference #Jim Berg #BJUisNOTSafe #Dan Dionne #Stuart Scott #Brian Hand #COVID

[wutbju]

So Bob Jones University stretches out Bible Conference (sorta) into two parts -- one part for all the people and the other for the people going into "ministry."

And ... this year's CoRE Conference needs one big trigger warning. It's not good. None of it.

Officially its theme is "The Return of Hope."

Brian Hand (yes, ol' Richard Hand's son) was early in the week. You can see his PPT slides here, if you like. Frankly, they are enough to get the gist of his talk.

It's simply a thesaurus search of "depression."

He's trying to define the term, and he finally comes down to:

So let me offer a definition today so that we can be on the same page, and you're you're welcome to disagree with the definition to add or subtract elements, because I know even within our own faculty we have individuals who have a narrower definition of depression than I do. They're going to, they're going to add some elements that kind of shorten it -- Elements that involve things like despair, which make depression automatically sin, and I would agree if depression includes despair always, then we have to deal with the sin issue. My definition is a little bit different, so let's let's we'll use that as a basis for our discussion that follow.

Whatever "despair" is -- the BJU Bible faculty agree -- it's a sin.

He is trying to say that you can be completely, thoroughly, all-consumingly sad and it's not a sin. That's ultimately what he wants to communicate, I think.

But he's not clear at all because he's dancing around whatever "despair" is. And he never, ever defines despair. Never.

But it's sin.

What happens rhetorically when you define a generic category with all the terms that fit under that category, but you leave one aspect -- the sinful aspect -- completely undefined?

Look at all the synonyms for "kill." If we talk about all of them except "murder," what happens?

It seems to me (as a Ph.D. in rhetoric, mind you) that it's emboldening that one slice of a term. When it's undefined -- even though we're giving the pretense of defining all the things -- we make that one aspect even more powerful.

This talk isn't helpful. It clarifies nothing. But then ....

It gets so much worse.

#Bob Jones University #CORE2024 #BJUBC24 #Bible Conference #Seminary Conference #Jim Berg #BJUisNOTSafe #Dan Dionne #Stuart Scott #Brian Hand #COVID

[wutbju]

This case against BJU (2023CP2301096) is ongoing. According to the court records, mediation is scheduled February 26, 2024.

Essentially, in the BJU campus day care an August 2021 excursion on the Bye-Bye Buggy scraped a child's hand. So all the employees were on notice that that vehicle and that doorway were dangerous.

The next Wednesday the same thing happened, except this time the same child lost a finger. The itty-bitty had to have his finger surgically re-attached!

The family is seeking damages. And they should!

BJU is not safe.

#Bob Jones University #Pennington Child Development Center #Personal Injury #BJU Educational Group #BJUisNOTSafe

[wutbju]

When listening to Episode #8 of the Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult podcast, I was struck by the account of the survivor of sexual assault after the GRACE Report.

Apparently Deneen Lawson has a habit of saying to female BJU students that, if they have no place to go after expulsion:

There's always a homeless shelter.

Do you want your daughter to experience that? If not, then don't send her to Bob Jones University!

#Bob Jones University #BJUisNOTSafe #Andrew PLedger #Deneen Lawson #Dean of Women #Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult #GRACE Report #2020-21

[wutbju]

When Andrew Pledger and I were talking on his podcast, Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult, he mentioned a sermon he heard from a BJU ministerial student that told his nursing home resident audience that Satan lived in them.

I was kind of shocked that this heresy is still getting repeated at BJU.

I found that statement in Jim Berg's heretical Changed into His Image. The exact statement on page 36 is:

There can be little doubt that God sees our independent spirit--the very thing that the world considers a virtue--as the root problem of man. Our heart says, 'I will make life work my own way!' It raises a clenched fist toward the heavens and asserts, 'I will do it my way!' . . . Here then is the defiance of our flesh. . . . This fleshly nature is perpetually at war with God. It will not be subject. It will not be ruled. It is no wonder, then, that when we begin to submit to the Spirit of God as He works in our lives that our flesh rises up and resists that work of God. We possess within us a clone of Satan's own nature, and it violently opposes God

That's anti-Scriptural. Look for it. It's not there. It's actually a variation on the Bulgarian heresy, a kind of Manichean yin-yang.

It's anti-Gospel.

I first discovered this in 2005 and posted this on my old Xanga blog. Jim Berg heard about it, and he was not pleased. So we met at the Atlanta Bread Company in Cherrydale. I told him this statement was not Scriptural. He claimed it was just "literary flourish." He pretended to write down what I was saying. He ignored it all, of course.

When I brought this up again with Stephen Jones and Gary Weier in July 2007, Stephen said something like, "Oh, I never really paid attention when I was reading that. I just ignored it." Lonnie Polson told me the same thing.

Nobody pays attention, you see. Nobody. That's how heresy gets repeated over and over and over so that even Andrew Pledger -- some 17 years after the fact -- is traumatized by the same heresy from a ministerial student.

I compiled all the heresies from Jim Berg in a post in 2008, and I summarized it all as follows:

The redeemed are inhabited both by Satan's clone and God's Spirit, and these bitter enemies are at war inside us. "The world" joins the battle and attacks us with a sort of biochemical warfare where even casual and unprotected contact puts us at risk. Spiritual "surgical gloves" are necessary to protect our spiritual lives. Adding to the crisis, even in childhood the flesh/sin is a cancer eating away at our souls so that we need spiritual chemotherapy very early if God will use us at all. And if all goes well--if the clone gets resisted, the gloves are regularly used, and the chemotherapy works--ideally, we'll become God's submissive pet.

That is not at all what the Bible teaches. That is not the Good News!

What does the Bible actually say? See Romans 8. Paul says that the battle was over at the cross, and we're just cleaning up the damage now. We're through and through God's children, not His pets! He doesn't withhold His love waiting for us to act like we should. No father would! He loves us first just because He's chosen to.

THAT is Good News. BJU preaches the opposite.

#Bob Jones University #Jim Berg #Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult #Andrew Pledger #BJUisNOTsafe #Heresy #Good News #Changed into His Image

[wutbju]

Two of us in Andrew Pledger's podcast, in describing the surveillance culture at Bob Jones University and Liberty University, reference Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as interpreted through Michel Foucault.

I used to teach this concept when I was at BJU. I doubt anyone is teaching this now. I still teach it in my current position. It's a standard way of understanding culture.

Here's what Foucault says in Discipline and Punish (201-02):

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

Essentially, BJU surveils to the point that you never know when you are being scrutinized, and so you end up disciplining yourself.

It's a "perfect" system, yes? Except it will kill you. For more of an explanation, see this Purdue professor's post.

#Bob Jones University #Surviving BJU #Andrew Pledger #Podcast #BJUisNOTSafe #Jeremy Bentham #Panopticon #Michel Foucault

[wutbju]

Late Thursday and early Friday (9/15/2023) morning, BJU Class of 1992 graduate Matthew Edward Healey, DMD, had fired shots in the parking lot of the Trophy Club in Greenville. Police arrived, "encountered" Healey, and at least one gunshot hit Healey. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. There's coverage everywhere. It even made the national news.

Healey's list of "encounters" with the law is pretty long. Drug charges, weapons charges:

When this archivist worked at BJU, most of us went to Bill Brown for dental care. Healey, however, offered a lower price to BJU employees, so I know a lot of folks went to him. But because of all those pending criminal cases, his dentistry license was suspended in January, 2023.

What a mess. But more Proof of the Product of Bob Jones University.

#BOb Jones University #Matthew Edward Healey #PRoofistheProduct #Proof is the Product #BJUisNOTSafe #Dentist #Class of 1988

[wutbju]

BJU Class of 1984 and Pastor Scott Randolph delivers a loyalist's perspective on the 300-page GRACE Report:

the Grace Report proved that not one minor was abused by any BJU employee or teacher. It is forever challenging to see the Grace Report pointed too in ignorance. The counselees were no longer minors but fully adults. There were no "cover ups". Adults have the full opportunity to call law enforcement according to their own choice. You can hate fundamentalism for not approving of your current thoughts, choices, etc. but how foolish to misuse the Grace Report which proves the opposite of so many assumptions.

#bob jones university #Scott Randolph #Class of 1984 #GRACEReport #BJUisNOTSafe

[wutbju]

Listening to Andrew Pledger's Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult is impressing all of us Gen X alumni.

Nothing has changed.

BJU is the same abusive place that it's always been. Hearing from these young folks who just graduated that BJU is still hurting people is overwhelming.

Rich Merritt shared this 2005 video with WutBJU. His statement that gets me is:

I had to put up a façade, and it just wore me out.

BJU is still acting in the same ignoble, hurtful way.

BJU is NOT safe.

#BOb Jones University #Rich Merritt #2005 #Andrew PLedger #Surviving BJU: A Christian Cult #BJUisNOTSafe