Welcome and Guest Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Can you imagine being forced to resign from your church based university for being unwilling to let them hit your children? Hi, everyone. Welcome to Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is August 5th, 2025. I'm here with Margi. Hey, Margi.

Margi Dehlin [00:00:16] Hi.

John Dehlin [00:00:17] And we are interviewing Camille Lewis. Hey, Camille.

Camille Lewis [00:00:21] Hi.

John Dehlin [00:00:22] And Camille is so fascinating. She is currently an assistant professor in communication studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. But she was raised a independent Fundamental Baptist and eventually she ended up attending and working for the Bob Jones University, which I would say if you think BYU is intense, Bob Jones University might even. Bob Jones University might even be more intense than Liberty University. Is that.

Camille Lewis [00:00:53] Oh yeah. See?

Margi Dehlin [00:00:54] Oh yeah.

John Dehlin [00:00:54] Right. Oh yeah. And yeah. So it's. This is going to be a two part Mormon stories. It's following in our tradition of interviewing people who were raised in other high demand religions or cults. In this case we're focusing on again, independent Fundamental Baptists, but it's gonna be about the history of Independent Fundamental Baptists, Evangelicals, Bob Jones University. And we're not gonna be comprehensive, but we're gonna give you a flavor for that faith tradition. That's gonna be kind of part one of this interview. And then part two is gonna be Camille's upbringing in that tradition and what it was like to be raised as an independent Fundamental Baptist.

John Dehlin [00:01:39] And then part three is gonna be. And this will be two parts. So we'll divide those up within the two parts. The third part of the interview is gonna be her awakening to deciding that the church wasn't true or wasn't for her, which also coincided with the church wanting permission to literally hit her children. I'm not making that up. We're not exaggerating. And, and then maybe if there's a fourth part, it's gonna be after she splits with this tradition. Kind of classic Mormon stories. Rebuilding her life after being in a high demand religion slash cult. That's what we're in for today. From what I am expecting, Camille, what did I get right or wrong?

Camille Lewis [00:02:24] You got it.

John Dehlin [00:02:24] You got it all. Is this okay?

Camille Lewis [00:02:25] Yeah, yeah, that's good. Nice summary.

John Dehlin [00:02:28] And then if you wanted to give kind of your own introduction, tell us how you would introduce yourself.

Camille Lewis [00:02:33] I casually. I call myself a speech teacher, but I teach public speaking, argumentation, rhetorical criticism, and I study how religious separatists talk their way into the public sphere.

John Dehlin [00:02:51] Yeah. So you're an academic?

Camille Lewis [00:02:53] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:02:54] And do you publish books or articles and all that stuff too?

Camille Lewis [00:02:57] Yes. Just in May, my fourth book came out.

John Dehlin [00:03:00] Clandimentalism Wait, is that about the Ku Klux Klan?

Camille Lewis [00:03:04] Yes, and Bob Jones, the founder of Bob Jones University's membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

John Dehlin [00:03:10] Okay. Wow.

Camille Lewis [00:03:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:03:11] So. Okay, so, yeah, when you and I were exchanging beforehand, you kind of like Sandra Tanner. Is that right?

Camille Lewis [00:03:19] I want to be like Sandra Tanner. Let me put it that way. Life goals, you know, that's a life goal.

John Dehlin [00:03:25] But to kind of interpret that you are. Maybe you are hoping to be to your tradition what Sandra Tanner has been to Mormonism. And just so, people, Sandra's done a lot of things. What does that mean to you?

Camille Lewis [00:03:38] That to me means documenting the true past, telling the truth about our past and not being manipulated into backing down is what that means to me.

John Dehlin [00:03:53] And so educating people.

Camille Lewis [00:03:56] Oh, yeah. Making history, you know, and providing proof, because I think it's therapeutic.

John Dehlin [00:04:03] Yeah. Beautiful. All right, Mark, you ready for this?

Margi Dehlin [00:04:06] I am so ready.

Origins of Independent Fundamentalist Baptism

John Dehlin [00:04:07] Okay, so, Camille, we thought it'd be great to begin with some context. So we did this for viewers and listeners. Old school Mormon stories. We did Orthodox Jews with Tova Mirvis. We did Scientology. We did Jehovah's Witnesses several times. But we always like to begin giving the background of the religious tradition so that then we can place Camille's life within the context of the tradition. I know very little about Bob Jones University, and I know even less about what it means to be an independent fundamental Baptist.

John Dehlin [00:04:40] I grew up in a Baptist town, but it was like First Baptist and Second Baptist. And all I know about Bob Jones University is like, in the political realm, it's viewed as, like, one of the most extreme. And I think when Matt Harris talked about second class saints, Bob Jones University came up because in terms of the civil rights movement, maybe Bob Jones University represented the most racist of all Christian universities. Or fact.

Camille Lewis [00:05:10] Right. Absolute fact.

John Dehlin [00:05:11] So that's pretty much all I know.

Camille Lewis [00:05:12] And that's all true. I mean, if you're gonna go with the broadest strokes, you have three major world religions that are monotheistic. You have the Jewish tradition, Christian tradition, and Islam tradition. And within the Christian tradition, you have Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants, the Catholic and the. And the Orthodox have a big tent. And they could, in a sense, they contain their diversity within their big tent. But Protestants like to splinter off, so the diversity is all sliced and diced. So within Protestantism, you have mainline liberal Protestants.

John Dehlin [00:06:00] Is that Lutheran? Presbyterian? Methodist?

Camille Lewis [00:06:03] Yes. Right, yes.

John Dehlin [00:06:05] Episcopalian, yes, all those.

Camille Lewis [00:06:07] And then you have Evangelical, which is kind of the middle sorta it. Broad strokes. And then the fundamentalists. And I would probably put Pentecostals with the fundamentalists, although we would, you know, just. We're getting set. Splintering effect.

Margi Dehlin [00:06:24] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:06:25] So the traditional way of defining. The way academics define evangelicals is that. This is from David Bebbington, who's in at Baylor University now, and there's a lot of debate about this. But the traditional way is to say that they center four things. Conversion. So. So there's a datable, distinct, discrete event of conversion that you write it in the front of your Bible. That is, if you. If you have your conversion date written in the front of your Bible, you're probably an evangelical.

Camille Lewis [00:07:00] I do. You center the Bible so everybody has their own copy that they carry. That's tradition. You send her the cross. So there's a lot of talk about Christ's sacrifice and the shedding of. And then activism, which is.

Camille Lewis [00:07:16] Oh, goodness. It could be even evangelism. It could be a personal piety of reading the Bible. So those are the four things that distinguish an evangelical. Fundamentalists do all that. But George Marsden says fundamentalists are angry about something. So the cranks, the stinkers, the pugnacious folks go into fundamentalism, which is my tradition.

John Dehlin [00:07:46] Is it fair to say it's among the most far right or conservative theologically? Religiously?

Camille Lewis [00:07:52] Yes. They pride themselves on that. Although when you get into the weeds, sometimes you're like, wait a minute, that's not orthodox, but that's getting into the weeds.

John Dehlin [00:08:00] Okay. Okay. And the thing that comes to mind is that documentary Shiny Happy People that I saw.

Camille Lewis [00:08:06] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:08:07] Are they cousins? So tell us if there's a ecosystem within Christian fundamentalism where different main sex situate and where, you know, independent Fundamental Baptists situate that context for.

Camille Lewis [00:08:25] I haven't seen the second season of Shiny Happy People yet, but the first season was a throwback. That.

John Dehlin [00:08:33] Which tradition is that?

Camille Lewis [00:08:34] That is the. The Just General Baptist, Independent Fundamental Baptist.

John Dehlin [00:08:39] Oh, so that is.

Camille Lewis [00:08:40] Yeah, that is it. Bill Gothard was taught often. I mean, I went to a Bill Gothard conference in high school, so. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:08:47] Wait, you saw Bill Gothard speak?

Camille Lewis [00:08:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:08:50] Okay, so tell our. Those who haven't seen Shiny Happy People. Well, what is the history of independent fundamental baptism then? And the size?

Camille Lewis [00:08:59] Probably when I would say that it came out of the nineteen teens, right between. Right around World War I, after the Social Gospel movement, the men got kind of perturbed, and they said, the women have had control long enough. We need to take back their control. And they asserted a more aggressive standard of living and of.

John Dehlin [00:09:31] Of kind of gender.

Camille Lewis [00:09:32] Gender roles. Yeah. Put Women, you know, women are silent and men are taking control. That was in the 1910s. It was called the Men in the Religious Forward Movement.

John Dehlin [00:09:42] And

Camille Lewis [00:09:45] we, We. I say we fundamentalists blossomed out of that. And at that point, evangelicals and fundamentalists were kind of intimately tied. And then around World War II, we split. Split.

John Dehlin [00:09:58] So are there. Are there like people viewed as leaders or prophets or heroes or sect leaders of that?

Camille Lewis [00:10:06] Yeah, it would be Billy Sunday. I don't know if you've ever heard of Billy Sunday. Bob Jones would be one of them. Revivalists. So those would be the revivalists, I think. Oh, they might. They would talk about Cirrus, Schofield and. Oh, boy, those are the big ones. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:10:26] And so immediately I'm thinking two things. One, I'm thinking 1830s, burned over district, upstate New York.

Camille Lewis [00:10:33] Yes, yes.

John Dehlin [00:10:34] I wonder how similar what Joseph Smith would have experienced in the 1820s, how similar that would be to what was emerging in the 1920s.

Camille Lewis [00:10:43] Based on what I know about the Second Great Awakening, which was the ether. The meal you. In which Joseph Smith grew up. It's very similar. Okay, so a lot of those folks in western New York were part of the great. The.

Margi Dehlin [00:11:01] The.

Camille Lewis [00:11:01] The Second Great Awakening. And they might have branched off into Millerism. Have you all heard about Millerism?

John Dehlin [00:11:08] A little bit.

Camille Lewis [00:11:08] Yeah. Tell her that's. Millerism was part of western New York. And, and they. William Miller had his followers stand on a hill waiting for Jesus to return. 1832, I think. Then, of course, he didn't come. So they did it in the 33. I think they did it three times. That became dispensationalism, which is connected to fundamentalism.

Bob Jones Sr. and the Founding of Bob Jones University

John Dehlin [00:11:32] Okay, so maybe. Should we do Bob Jones now? Okay, let's do Bob Jones.

Camille Lewis [00:11:37] So Bob Jones as a person was born in 1883 in Alabama. And he was part of the political movement of populism at the time. And he flunked out of college and became an evangelist and made a lot of money. And he did. I think he did want. I mean, Billy Sunday is a. Is a much more successful revivalist who came out of. He's, I think, 15 years older. And he aspired to being as prolific and as popular as he did. So when his evangelistic career was waning, he started a School in 1927 in the Panhandle of Florida.

John Dehlin [00:12:31] Bob Jones.

Camille Lewis [00:12:31] Bob did. Okay, Jones. I call him Bob on purpose. No, it's good because. Yeah, we were taught to call him Dr. Bob. Yeah, well, it was an honorary doctorate and that irritates me so I just call him Bob.

John Dehlin [00:12:44] So that's a way to demystify what people maybe inappropriately hold as sacred.

Camille Lewis [00:12:49] Right. And he has. He graduated from high school. That's his highest earned degree. His grades were terrible.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:57] So he.

Camille Lewis [00:12:57] I just have to say that.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:58] Let the record show.

Camille Lewis [00:12:59] Yes, yes. So he started school in 1927. I think he started it in large part because his son was. Had graduated from middle school and was a troublemaker. And I think he was worried that he would ruin his own, his own reputation. So he wanted to control his son, Bob Jr. So he started it there. It ran into bankruptcy problems, moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, and then where it is now, Lee University. And then in 1947, it moved to where it is now, Greenville, South Carolina.

John Dehlin [00:13:38] Wait, is my friend Chris Thomas in Cleveland? Did we just establish that? My friend Chris Thomas, the Pentecostal guy who is my friend and loves Mormon stories, he's in the place where Bob Jones moved his university to at one point.

Camille Lewis [00:13:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:13:50] Oh, wow. Yeah, that's cool.

Camille Lewis [00:13:52] He's there. That's why I've been research. Yeah, hi, Chris. Why I've done some research there at the pretty little house across street from the university.

John Dehlin [00:14:00] So, okay, then after Cleveland, Tennessee, Bob Jones, Greenville, 1947.

Camille Lewis [00:14:05] Then it became Bob Jones University. It was Bob Jones College up till then. Then it became Bob Jones University in what year? 47.

John Dehlin [00:14:12] 47. Right after World War II.

Margi Dehlin [00:14:14] Right.

Camille Lewis [00:14:14] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:14:15] Okay. So now was he, was he also leading a corporate church?

Camille Lewis [00:14:21] That's a great question.

John Dehlin [00:14:22] Was he trying to, was it a mega church? Was he trying to franchise his religion? Like what's the business play? What's the corporate play?

Camille Lewis [00:14:31] What's the power among those things you just said? I would call it a franchise because he didn't. He, he didn't. He claimed to be non denominational, but it was very clearly. He was a Methodist, but it very clearly picked up steam with the ethic of Baptists because Baptists tend to be more independent than Methodists. So, so it. Most BJU grads are Baptist in some variety because it's in a very independent mindset.

John Dehlin [00:15:01] But it's different than First Baptists or

Camille Lewis [00:15:04] those are Southern Baptists, if they got. If usually every first is a Southern Baptist church, usually. So Southern Baptists are a little more Big Tent, little more, little more Jimmy Carter. Like not as pugnacious as BJU folks.

John Dehlin [00:15:22] Okay, so do they not like each other like traditional Baptists?

Camille Lewis [00:15:25] And up until about, oh, what was it, 2015, they did not like each other. Okay. They're.

John Dehlin [00:15:33] Because the, the Enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:36] They're now.

John Dehlin [00:15:37] They're now like religious freedom stuff. That's why Mormons are making friends with the evangelicals.

Camille Lewis [00:15:41] That. That, that perfect.

John Dehlin [00:15:42] Yeah. Okay. So can you give us a flavor for Bob Jones style religion?

Camille Lewis [00:15:49] It would be.

John Dehlin [00:15:57] Like a kid growing up.

Camille Lewis [00:15:58] Kid growing up would the. We would memorize scripture. So a fundamentalist would memorize scripture a lot. Might even have a competition where they're testing their memory skills. They would have to dress a certain way.

John Dehlin [00:16:11] Meaning what?

Camille Lewis [00:16:14] Girls in my age would have to wear skirts that generally covered your knees, generally covered your shoulders. Boys would have to wear pants. Shorts were not usually allowed, so they'd have to wear pants. Even little kindergartners would have to wear belts. Little boys, I just. That just drives me crazy. So there would be very strict rules about dress and about behavior and about. You don't want to ruin your testimony. You Morgan folks talked about, what is the word? Bear your testimony. But for fundamentalists, it's maintaining testimony, and you don't want to ruin it by, you know, having scuffed shoes that would. That might.

Margi Dehlin [00:17:04] You could ruin your testimony by having. It would defile the shoes, would defile your.

Camille Lewis [00:17:10] I was. I remember those lessons.

John Dehlin [00:17:13] Hmm.

Camille Lewis [00:17:14] So that. I mean, that's a lot of. That's a burden to. To wear, to bear, I should say.

IFB Theology and Core Beliefs

John Dehlin [00:17:20] Let's talk theology for a second.

Margi Dehlin [00:17:21] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:17:21] So, I mean, obviously God and Jesus, but let's go one level deeper.

Camille Lewis [00:17:25] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:17:25] Ordinances, beliefs, afterlife, heaven, sin. What sin, you know?

Camille Lewis [00:17:30] Yeah. So they do believe in an afterlife. They believe in heaven and hell? Very much so. They believe in. In. In some ways, they would look at the Nicene Creed, they would look at that and say, oh, yes, of course we believe that. But they go one step further, of course, so that they believe in a rapture. Christ will return at a particular moment and rapture up his saints, and then the rest of the world will fall into a tribulation, a tribulation period of seven years while the saints are raptured. That. And because we'll be gone, meaning we, the saints, will be gone. Then the world will go to hell.

John Dehlin [00:18:13] Will it be like fire and brimstone and.

Camille Lewis [00:18:15] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:18:15] Maggots.

Camille Lewis [00:18:17] Yes. In the second half, it will be that. I can't believe I'm remembering all this stuff.

Margi Dehlin [00:18:21] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:18:22] Oh, my word.

John Dehlin [00:18:22] Right?

Camille Lewis [00:18:23] I mean, we had charts of all this stuff, you know, up outside the Sunday school office. I remember. But it. I haven't talked about that in a long time. But it's very apocalyptic in Those stories that you hear frequently, they believe in immers. Immersion baptism by immersion. It's crado baptism. So it's. It's the baptism for believers. So you have to decide to be baptized. Not pedo baptism, where it's a child or a baby or a child. That's very strict. They are very offended by pedo baptism.

John Dehlin [00:19:02] Around average. What age do people get baptized in?

Camille Lewis [00:19:05] You know, that's. I was six when I got baptized. And I don't know if that was ordinary or not, but usually by the time you reach high school, you usually have been baptized.

John Dehlin [00:19:19] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:19:22] And this.

Margi Dehlin [00:19:23] The.

Camille Lewis [00:19:23] They do. They practice the Lord's Supper.

John Dehlin [00:19:25] Which means what?

Camille Lewis [00:19:26] Which means they do communion, which. A little cracker, a little grape juice, usually once a month to remember Christ's death is how they'll say it. But what's interesting is that at Bob Jones, because even though they're not a church, they have historically, they will require employees and students to attend church on campus so that they have not had those ordinances that they claim to find sacred. They haven't had them in years. They haven't had communion in years because they've been at campus church. That's a bunch of insider information. The way I'm talking is insider. I apologize.

John Dehlin [00:20:16] Is there a literal Satan?

Camille Lewis [00:20:18] Oh, yes, literal Satan.

John Dehlin [00:20:19] What does he do?

Camille Lewis [00:20:20] He torments and causes harm for believers.

John Dehlin [00:20:25] Does he have minions?

Camille Lewis [00:20:26] Yes, there are demons.

John Dehlin [00:20:27] And what are they all doing?

Camille Lewis [00:20:28] They're all torturing us. Maybe they're inspiring local former graduates and former employees to harass bju,

Margi Dehlin [00:20:38] as the case may be.

Camille Lewis [00:20:40] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:20:40] She breaks the fourth. She breaks the fourth wall.

Camille Lewis [00:20:45] I remember a sermon because I'm a. I'm a rhetorical critic. I sometimes listen to the sermons. I find that empowering. And I remember a sermon by the beloved Steve Pettit, who was a president at Bob Jones recently, and he was talking about a local graduate who speaks out and criticizes Bob Jones University, who is demon controlled. So.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:07] Got it.

John Dehlin [00:21:08] Okay. So literal demons.

Camille Lewis [00:21:09] Me. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:11] What did Jesus do? Like, you know, to. What was special about Jesus.

Camille Lewis [00:21:16] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:16] Jesus.

Camille Lewis [00:21:17] They do believe that Jesus. If you. If you press them, they will say, Jesus was both God and man. He was 100% God. 100% man. See how I can toss this out? But they get offended if you talk about his humanity too much. So they really like to emphasize that Jesus was better. He was more God than he was human. They get a little uncomfortable with that.

John Dehlin [00:21:41] Like, okay, I want to be respectful. Did you just say 100% God? And 100% man.

Camille Lewis [00:21:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:47] That makes zero sense. Like, just mathematically. Right.

Camille Lewis [00:21:50] Isn't that weird?

John Dehlin [00:21:52] It can't be 200% something. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:53] Right.

John Dehlin [00:21:54] Have percentages. No. I'm not trying to be rude.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:57] No.

Camille Lewis [00:21:57] But fair point. But it's weird that that just came out of me. It's weird when.

John Dehlin [00:22:01] When I do, they literally say that. Are you exaggerating? They say 100% God.

Camille Lewis [00:22:05] And I got that in Bible doctrines.

John Dehlin [00:22:07] But don't talk too much about them being a man.

Camille Lewis [00:22:08] Like, okay, I've got that out of Bible doctrines, I'm sure.

Margi Dehlin [00:22:12] Ways. But God's ways are not man's ways.

John Dehlin [00:22:14] My brain's already overloaded.

Margi Dehlin [00:22:16] Could work in God's way.

John Dehlin [00:22:17] No, no, no, don't apologize. Like, that's.

Camille Lewis [00:22:19] Gosh, I can't believe how. How.

John Dehlin [00:22:21] Well, it's muscle memory. It's muscle memory.

Camille Lewis [00:22:23] Yeah, it is. And what's also weird is when I'm on campus because I'm not allowed. Maybe I'm jumping ahead. I'm banned from campus. But when I am on campus, I go into this weird smile, this fundamentalist smile mode. Female fawning mode. That freaks me out a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:22:42] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:22:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:22:44] Okay. So Jesus is full God and full human. And then what did he do with his godliness?

Camille Lewis [00:22:50] He To.

John Dehlin [00:22:52] To help us. How did he help us?

Camille Lewis [00:22:55] They will say that Christ's sacrifice. Because I learned this, you know, in fundamentalism, Christ's sacrifice was for our sins. And because he lived a perfect life, his sacrifice was for our sins. However, they. They seem to get a little bit out of control, a little bit strange about the fact that his righteousness is substitutes for ours.

John Dehlin [00:23:28] They.

Camille Lewis [00:23:28] I'm. Substitutionary atonement is the. Is the phrase that Protestants use. But they kind of. They kind of ignore that and say, no, you need to live up to the. To his. You need to. You need to keep working. You need to keep doing and doing and doing so you can be as righteous as Jesus. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:23:45] Okay, I want to follow up on that, but let me just. Let me tell you the Mormon narrative. It's sort of like we all sin. We do bad things. There needed to be someone to atone for all our sins. So Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane, and in the Garden of Gethsemane, he prayed and in that moment took on all the pain and suffering and guilt for all the sins that have ever been committed for all of humankind. You're looking surprised at that point.

Camille Lewis [00:24:12] Well, I.

John Dehlin [00:24:12] So that's a divergence.

Camille Lewis [00:24:14] Not at the garden Of Gethsemane. I hadn't. That's interesting.

John Dehlin [00:24:18] Okay, well, I'm just. Yeah, that's. Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:24:19] That's not where we would. I was checking off the boxes until you hit that.

John Dehlin [00:24:23] So that's not you. It's not happening in the garden for you?

Camille Lewis [00:24:25] No.

John Dehlin [00:24:25] So for us, it happens in the garden. He takes on all the sins. He bleeds from every pore.

Camille Lewis [00:24:30] Right.

John Dehlin [00:24:30] And that's where he atoned for our sins. Oh, okay. And then later, he was taken to the cross and was killed, resurrected after three days, and that's when he overcame death. So he overcame sin in the garden of Gethsemane and death on the cross.

Camille Lewis [00:24:45] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:24:46] And that's. And then he sits up on the throne next to God.

Camille Lewis [00:24:50] Right.

John Dehlin [00:24:50] And he'll be our judge, you know, and he'll usher in the second Coming.

Camille Lewis [00:24:54] Right, okay. Yeah. From the resurrection forward, I'm checking. But the cross is where we would put that big moment.

John Dehlin [00:25:02] So he did both on the cross. Did he take on sins?

Camille Lewis [00:25:05] Yes, that's the way I was taught. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And. And that's interesting, and I would probably, as a current evangelical, agree with that. But they. The, the, the. That on the cross, Jesus took on our sins.

John Dehlin [00:25:19] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:25:19] And conquered death. It's just kind of all due to

John Dehlin [00:25:21] both of them on the cross. Yeah, we just give him an extra.

Camille Lewis [00:25:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:24] You know. Yes, an extra scene.

Margi Dehlin [00:25:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:26] In the movie there. We give Jesus one extra scene.

Camille Lewis [00:25:29] Here we go. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:25:30] Okay. So. And perfect. He was perfect.

Margi Dehlin [00:25:34] Yeah, he was.

Camille Lewis [00:25:34] He lived a perfect life.

John Dehlin [00:25:35] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:25:35] Yeah, Both, both. I mean, evangelicals say that, and fundamentalists say that.

John Dehlin [00:25:40] Okay. Okay.

Sin, Sexuality, and Gender Roles in IFB

Margi Dehlin [00:25:42] So what was the approach to sin then? And becoming. And if you can become clean or forgiven, you.

Camille Lewis [00:25:49] You work really hard at. You are. You are a sinner. But if you're. There's. And this is where they get a little fuzzy. They get a little. Not orthodox. A little o. Not orthodox because they say you. You can overcome sin. And if you're. If you're really a Christian, you can overcome sin. So if you're not overcoming whatever that sin is, I mean, I mean, it's a pretty wide bucket. I mean, being. I got scolded for being tired. I was complaining. I was tired. And, and I said that on my blog back. This is back in 06 when blogs were a big deal. And my dean said, you got to take that down because, you know, you're complaining and that's. You're not being perfect. Okay. So. So they can get pretty. Pretty particular about those sins. It's not just, you know, arson, stealing. It's the evening complaining about being human.

Margi Dehlin [00:26:54] Do you have to confess in any way? They're a repentance process.

Camille Lewis [00:26:58] There's no process.

Margi Dehlin [00:26:59] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:27:00] That's overt. That, you know, corporately overt. But they'll. They'll think of things that you can do to atone. Go to counseling, you know, not with

John Dehlin [00:27:12] a licensed mental health therapist.

Camille Lewis [00:27:14] Never.

John Dehlin [00:27:14] Okay.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:15] Right.

Camille Lewis [00:27:15] It's with a. It's with a. Per Another person that's just a few years older than you are in the dorm system of. I'm thinking of Bob Jones University, specifically.

John Dehlin [00:27:25] Okay. What are. If there were a hierarchy of sins that are openly and repeatedly discussed, what's kind of the hierarchy?

Camille Lewis [00:27:35] So being gay is the worst.

John Dehlin [00:27:37] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:27:38] I mean.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:39] Oh, gosh, no.

Camille Lewis [00:27:40] It's not even thinking about any of the other LGBTQ folks, but just. They would just say being gay. And they.

John Dehlin [00:27:47] They didn't start with murder, I noticed.

Camille Lewis [00:27:49] No. Oh, no, no, no. Then disobeying authority is pretty high up there.

John Dehlin [00:27:56] We share that.

Camille Lewis [00:27:57] Yeah. And then any kind of. Any kind of what they would call deviants. Deviants, Porn, rock and roll. Isn't that funny?

Margi Dehlin [00:28:10] So now deviance needs to be in quotation.

Camille Lewis [00:28:15] Going to movies. Yeah. Rock music, sometimes watching TV that you shouldn't be watching. It's all those kinds of things.

Margi Dehlin [00:28:26] Well, what's murder in relationship to deviants? Would you say it's murder higher than deviants?

Camille Lewis [00:28:33] I mean, they would probably. If you poked them, they would say, of course. Of course.

Margi Dehlin [00:28:36] But that's bad about.

Camille Lewis [00:28:38] Yeah, but. But that's not. It's just. They're not. They don't consider that.

John Dehlin [00:28:41] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:28:42] They don't harp on it.

John Dehlin [00:28:43] So. One thing I'm stunned you didn't mention is masturbation.

Camille Lewis [00:28:47] That's interesting. I didn't mention that.

John Dehlin [00:28:49] Is that even discussed or referred to?

Margi Dehlin [00:28:51] Is that under deviance?

Camille Lewis [00:28:52] I think it might be under deviance. I. They still operate, at least when I was a student and in their employee, they still operate under the assumption that women are not sexual creatures. So maybe the men heard that and the women didn't. That is possible.

John Dehlin [00:29:15] I mean, that tracks with Mormonism in the sense that masturbation is generally viewed as a. As a young men's problem.

Camille Lewis [00:29:22] Yes, yes, yes, yes.

John Dehlin [00:29:23] And it's pretty much not ever discussed or acknowledged with women.

Camille Lewis [00:29:26] Right. So when they give you the rules for living there at Bob Jones University, they give really, the rules to the women, and we are expected to bear that and keep the men in line.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:38] Yeah, that's Similar.

Camille Lewis [00:29:39] Yeah. Okay.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:40] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:29:41] So women are the policemen of virtue for. For men.

Camille Lewis [00:29:45] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:29:46] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:29:47] Yes. So we get it says it's that weird cult of domesticity thing. We get the power, but then we have to. That's it. That we. We have to disappear at the same time.

John Dehlin [00:29:58] Okay. Okay.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:59] The power you never wanted.

Camille Lewis [00:30:01] I didn't ask for that.

John Dehlin [00:30:04] So what about authority? Mormons believe that like John the Baptist and Peter, James and John laid their hands on Joseph Smith's head and gave him authority to baptize and to give the gift of the Holy Ghost and that our church has the keys from God as the one true church. Kind of like the Catholics claim to be the one true. Is authority part of your theology?

Camille Lewis [00:30:25] It is, but it's not authority. It's not granted in that way. That's interesting because that's more theological or mystical authority. This is more political authority. Almost. Whoever's above you, your employer, your. Your. The father, the parent, the male parent, the pastor, they have authority. But it's not that lineage like you just described. That makes sense.

John Dehlin [00:31:01] Yeah. It's just by virtue of their role.

Camille Lewis [00:31:03] Just. Right. It seems to me that fundamentalists, and they're not going to like it if I say this, but it's true. Funnel everything into a metaphor of an employer. That everything's transactional. Everything is, you know, the. That God is your kind of your boss, your manager. That makes sense to them.

John Dehlin [00:31:25] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:31:26] Not parent. You know, not that. Not that metaphor. It's an employer metaphor.

John Dehlin [00:31:34] What are the guidelines around gender roles and family and children and all that and working women, working or not working. And patriarchy and how patriarchy. Goal is the tradition.

Camille Lewis [00:31:48] Funny, because I. My husband and I. I've have. I've. He's wonderful. And we've had a very happy marriage for 35 years. Congrats and thank you. And we have always described ourselves as egalitarian. We just always have. And that really offended people. I mean, I.

Camille Lewis [00:32:11] I remember being on a. On a. Had my. Was holding my son. I was on a sidewalk and a piano faculty member came up to me. He. I was going to the van to change my son's diaper. He had a stinky diaper. It was easier to do it in the van.

Camille Lewis [00:32:27] And we were on campus. He came up to me and he said so. And so students said that you and your husband have an egalitarian marriage. What are you talking about? That is wrong. And I was like, I'm.

Camille Lewis [00:32:41] I have a stinky diaper right here. I am going to take care of My son, before I take care of your question, he was so upset that he brought me into my. What he perceived as my authority, which was my chair of my department. And he and the piano faculty member and my husband and I all sat down to discuss something that was none of those people's business.

Camille Lewis [00:33:02] So I would say that, yes, they believe that the man is the head. The man makes the final decisions, and that egalitarianism is a. In. In marriage is an offense. They believe it in a way that at least Grant and I did not perceive as necessary. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [00:33:22] Yeah. The word that our church has evolved to. The wording that our church has evolved to is that the husband presides and provides.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:30] Oh.

Camille Lewis [00:33:31] Oh, okay. See that.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:34] Mm.

Camille Lewis [00:33:34] The. The.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:36] It's. They. We.

Camille Lewis [00:33:37] The fundamentalists say the man is the head of the home. The man is the head.

John Dehlin [00:33:41] That's what we used to say.

Camille Lewis [00:33:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:33:42] But then we tried to nuance the language a little bit, so we settled

Margi Dehlin [00:33:46] on a little softening.

Camille Lewis [00:33:47] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:33:48] So we've settled on the husband presides and provides and the mom nurtures the children. That's. That's literally. We have songs.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:57] Is that proclamation of a family. Isn't that some of the terms used

John Dehlin [00:34:01] in our church issued a proclamation on the family and these words come from the brother.

Camille Lewis [00:34:05] Was that me? I do. You know.

John Dehlin [00:34:06] Oh, I'll look it up, but I want to say like 95. But I. Okay, I'll look it up because I wonder.

Camille Lewis [00:34:11] I do wonder if in the. This is. I'm getting in the weeds here. But I wonder if we have a. We evangel. Conservative evangelical fundamentalists have adopted some of the language that we have about headship from you all. I wonder that.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] Or vice versa.

Margi Dehlin [00:34:29] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:34:29] I wonder if there's a lot of cross pollination going on.

John Dehlin [00:34:32] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:34:33] But I have. I have No. I only know that because of my ERA research and I am curious, but that's a distraction maybe.

John Dehlin [00:34:46] Okay. The proclamation on the family. Yeah. 95. Yeah. 95.

Camille Lewis [00:34:51] Okay.

Margi Dehlin [00:34:52] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:34:52] Okay. So. So they.

John Dehlin [00:34:57] September 95.

Camille Lewis [00:34:58] They don't think of it was. It's funny because at least in the BJU orbit and in. In the Bob Jones University literally requires women wives to work. So you. You had to work.

Margi Dehlin [00:35:15] Ah. You had.

Camille Lewis [00:35:16] Which is unusual. You don't expect that. But still, men are the head. And I think it was. They would. They would. Oh, they would designate the man the head by taking a salary that they deemed legitimate and necessary for work, for living. Give two thirds of that to the man and a third of that to the woman. That's how they communicated the authority. I don't know that they still do that, but they did that when I was first employed there.

Margi Dehlin [00:35:55] So are you encouraged then to, you know, seek employment, to have a career at Bob Jones?

Camille Lewis [00:36:03] You could have that as your ministry. So they'll. What they'll do is they'll say it's a ministry at one time, they'll say it's a business at another. So. So you can consider BJU a ministry.

Margi Dehlin [00:36:13] If so, they encourage you to have a job.

Camille Lewis [00:36:18] But it is at Bob Jones.

Margi Dehlin [00:36:20] Yes. It's not necessarily, you know, be a doctor.

Camille Lewis [00:36:23] No, no, no.

Margi Dehlin [00:36:24] Got it.

Camille Lewis [00:36:25] No, no, no, no.

John Dehlin [00:36:27] Just for fun. I'll read.

Camille Lewis [00:36:28] Okay. Yeah, I'd love to hear.

John Dehlin [00:36:29] By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Okay, that sentence, the first part. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. Yeah. So that's.

Camille Lewis [00:36:52] But the moms protect, too. See, that's what always.

John Dehlin [00:36:56] No, come on. Yeah, of course.

Margi Dehlin [00:36:59] We could so go into the prayer, couldn't we?

John Dehlin [00:37:02] But, I mean, this is sounding familiar.

Camille Lewis [00:37:04] Yeah, I mean, they would. They would say that, but they just say it as men of the head. And so there has. They repeat, I remember this too. There always has to be a final decision to be made and the man is the one to make the decision.

John Dehlin [00:37:20] Yeah, period.

Camille Lewis [00:37:21] Which is the preside idea. But of course, that doesn't make. That doesn't make any sense in practicality, I don't think.

John Dehlin [00:37:28] Yeah, yeah, well.

Camille Lewis [00:37:29] And I used to frustrate that with my students too.

Margi Dehlin [00:37:31] Just.

Camille Lewis [00:37:31] Okay, be a stinker.

IFB Politics, Race, and the Religious Right

John Dehlin [00:37:32] But anyway, so before we jump into your personal story, let me just think. Oh, so politically, what can you tell us about some of the major. Because I think Bob Jones has a interwoven connectivity to US Politics.

Camille Lewis [00:37:50] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:37:51] So can you talk a bit about the history of Bob Jones University and US Politics?

Camille Lewis [00:37:54] Okay, so Bob Sr. Was always political. He was. And that's one of the things that has been kind of cloaked. When he would preach in the 20s and 30s and 40s, it was always a political speech. So we've. We, as I say, as a BJU person, have always been involved in politics and it's always been the retrograde. I mean, they would kindly call it conservative, but it's more of a. The extreme right wing. Always. Even when they were politically. Even they were Democrats. It was because, you know, there was a switch in the party. Even Then they were always on the

John Dehlin [00:38:43] far right end, because for a long time in the south, they were mad that Lincoln started the Republican Party and got rid of slavery. So for a long, long time, let's just say racist Southerners were Democrats. Were Democrats, Absolutely.

Camille Lewis [00:38:58] Bob. Bob was a Democrat right up until the Dixiecratic revolution, you know, with. With Strom Thurmond.

John Dehlin [00:39:06] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:39:07] Getting into the weeds.

John Dehlin [00:39:07] No, that's. No, that's okay. That's not weeds. That's stuff I love.

Camille Lewis [00:39:10] Okay, good.

John Dehlin [00:39:10] So by the time Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president in the mid-1960s, he's dealing with Southern. You know, the civil rights movement comes up, and he's a Democrat vice president and then president. He's trying to get the votes to pass the Civil Rights act of 1964. You're nodding.

Camille Lewis [00:39:32] I love it.

John Dehlin [00:39:33] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:39:33] Yeah, I love it. Yeah, That's. That's. That's. And they were mad about that.

John Dehlin [00:39:36] And he had to get the. He had. As a Texan, he could speak Southern, but to get it passed, he needed to get his own people on board.

Camille Lewis [00:39:46] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:39:46] Or it would have never passed.

Camille Lewis [00:39:47] Right, exactly. And so. So you had. Now, they were not for Johnson. They had bailed with Kennedy. Yeah, they had bailed with Kennedy. They were upset about. About. I mean, they. The. The.

John Dehlin [00:40:04] He was a Northern, you know, Yankee liberal.

Camille Lewis [00:40:07] Right, right, right, right, right, right. Oh, my. A Catholic.

John Dehlin [00:40:09] Yeah. And a Catholic.

Camille Lewis [00:40:11] That's the worst thing. They were. Bob had protested Al Smith in the. In the 1920s. He bolted the Democratic Party in 1928 because they had nominated a Catholic.

John Dehlin [00:40:22] Yeah. So. So I guess it's fair to say that independent fundamentalist Baptists hate Catholics. Fair.

Camille Lewis [00:40:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:40:29] Historically.

Camille Lewis [00:40:30] Historically. I'm sorry.

John Dehlin [00:40:31] And probably Mormons, too. And probably Mormons, too. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:40:33] I've got. I've had some of those sermons I've read, too.

Margi Dehlin [00:40:35] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:40:37] So who do they hate? Yeah, who does.

Margi Dehlin [00:40:38] Who do.

John Dehlin [00:40:39] Historically, who do independent Fundamental Baptists hate?

Margi Dehlin [00:40:46] Yes.

Camille Lewis [00:40:46] Catholics, Mormons, Muslims. That's more recent. Of course. I'm gonna say they hate women.

John Dehlin [00:40:54] Yeah. I was gonna ask Jews. I was gonna do.

Camille Lewis [00:40:57] Oh, see, they're funny about Jews. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:41:00] It goes back Old Testament.

Camille Lewis [00:41:01] Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, God said, I will bless them that bless you and curse them that curse you. And so we repeat that and think, oh, no, we gotta be nice to them. I had a. When I was employed at Bob Jones, there was a Jewish journalist from the Boston Globe who was doing a book. I can't remember her name, but the book was called God on the Quad. And they had assigned me to be her contact. And at the end of the day, she came and she. She sat in my chair in my office and said, I am so tired of being evangelized too. This is exhausting. And I remember saying, yeah, they want to win you because winning a Jewish person is a bigger feather in their cap. So there's a weird relationship with the Jews. Okay, so to recap, Democrats, they hate Democrats.

John Dehlin [00:41:48] Okay. So Mormons, Catholics, sometimes Jews, yes.

Camille Lewis [00:41:54] Democrats, Democrats, Muslims, the gays, they hate

John Dehlin [00:41:58] the gays, they hate gay people. Democrats, women and women.

Camille Lewis [00:42:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:42:07] Is that a pretty good story of who they hate?

Camille Lewis [00:42:09] Yeah, Everybody who's not them.

John Dehlin [00:42:11] And is that unfair? Is that unfair? Like, would like. Of course, no one's ever going to. No one is in a cult thinks they're in a cult. No one who's a bigot thinks they're a bigot. Right. No one who's an alcoholic thinks they're alcoholic. But like, to what extent? If you're trying it as objectively as possible, is that fair or is that unfair? That sort of. And we're talking over the past 80 years, not 20.

Camille Lewis [00:42:35] Yeah, right, right, right, right, right. If they would say. And I've heard them say this on news broadcasts, no, we don't hate the Catholics. We love the Catholics. We just hate the Catholic Church or we hate the, you know, we just want to win them to Christ. They might say something like that. So there's a sense of they're just not us and they need to be evangelized.

John Dehlin [00:42:59] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:42:59] One over is the phrase they'll use.

Margi Dehlin [00:43:01] One over.

John Dehlin [00:43:03] I mean, Joseph Smith called the Catholic Church the great and abominable church. I don't know if you know that the horror actually used the words the whore of all the earth.

Camille Lewis [00:43:11] Of all the earth. That's interesting.

John Dehlin [00:43:13] Back in 1830.

Camille Lewis [00:43:14] Well, sure, because I've heard those kinds of sermons. Those kind of. It would be horror of Babylon.

John Dehlin [00:43:18] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:43:18] Would be the phrase that. That Bob Jones iii, the grandson of the founder, would say from the pulpit. Oh, And Bob Jones Jr. Said that all the time.

John Dehlin [00:43:27] Oh, okay.

Camille Lewis [00:43:29] Gosh, there's a lot of anti Catholic.

John Dehlin [00:43:31] So I'll just all. I'll mention some political things that come to mind and you tell me where Bob Jones came down or his descendants. Okay, so let's say the civil rights movement.

Camille Lewis [00:43:42] Oh, bad.

John Dehlin [00:43:43] Why?

Camille Lewis [00:43:44] Because it is upsetting the natural order, the natural racial hierarchy.

John Dehlin [00:43:49] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:43:50] Authority. It's upsetting.

John Dehlin [00:43:51] What about integration?

Camille Lewis [00:43:53] Bad.

John Dehlin [00:43:54] Why bad?

Camille Lewis [00:43:55] Because it's upsetting the natural order.

John Dehlin [00:43:57] What's the natural order?

Camille Lewis [00:43:58] The natural order. Is that there's a hierarchy that God has established and we need to keep it, we need to maintain it. And whites are the authority in government and the church.

John Dehlin [00:44:08] Okay, so white supremacy, Ku Klux Klan. What about that?

Camille Lewis [00:44:13] They would overtly say that they're not white supremacists. They would overtly say that Bob Jones was not a Klansman. But I have found proof. That's what my latest book is about. That says he was a Klansman.

John Dehlin [00:44:25] What's the book?

Camille Lewis [00:44:26] Clandimentalism. Bob Jones at the intersection of Race, Religion and white Supremacy.

John Dehlin [00:44:31] So the original Bob Jones was a clansman, like, literally wore a sheet on over his head? Kind of, yeah. And that was a revelation to your people.

Camille Lewis [00:44:39] Oh, my.

John Dehlin [00:44:39] They didn't know that.

Camille Lewis [00:44:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:41] Wow. So you're like Michael Quinn, digging up history that your people don't somehow forgot

Camille Lewis [00:44:47] and have had and have actively denied

John Dehlin [00:44:49] and whitewashed and hidden. Is that fair?

Camille Lewis [00:44:53] Yes, absolutely fair.

John Dehlin [00:44:54] Okay, so total Klansman, anti civil rights.

Camille Lewis [00:44:57] Anti civil rights, anti. I mean, in the 20s, he was anti women's suffrage.

John Dehlin [00:45:03] So he's against the women getting the vote, literally. Bob Jones was on record of opposing women voting.

Camille Lewis [00:45:09] Yes. In the twenties. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:11] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:45:12] In the teens. Nineteen teens.

John Dehlin [00:45:13] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:45:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:15] And then the Equal Rights Amendment in the 70s.

Camille Lewis [00:45:18] Oh, no.

John Dehlin [00:45:19] What was his.

Camille Lewis [00:45:20] Well, it would have been Bob Jones III's wife who wrote a document that is in the anthology that I recently published with my friend against the Equal Rights Amendment. And what she did is Bennett Jones was her name. What she did really is just take Phyllis Schlafly's arguments against the ERA and translate them into a fundamentalist nomenclature is what she did.

John Dehlin [00:45:42] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:45:43] I mean, it's almost literally word for word in there.

John Dehlin [00:45:46] So they opposed.

Camille Lewis [00:45:47] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:48] They probably teamed up with the Mormons to oppose the era.

Camille Lewis [00:45:50] I think that's a very adequate. I mean, apt conclusion.

John Dehlin [00:45:55] Probably.

Camille Lewis [00:45:56] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:56] Probable.

Camille Lewis [00:45:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:57] Okay, really quickly. What about science, geology, evolution, age of the earth?

Camille Lewis [00:46:05] Sure, sure, sure. They are. Are currently.

John Dehlin [00:46:08] No, historically. Let's start historically.

Camille Lewis [00:46:10] Historically, white supremacists. Oh, yeah. We believed in the flood that absolutely have. Global flood. Absolutely happened. Historically.

John Dehlin [00:46:21] Literal Adam and Eve.

Camille Lewis [00:46:23] Literal Adam and Eve.

John Dehlin [00:46:24] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:46:25] Bob Jones Jr. Was said to be a gap theorist, which was pretty typical for that for his age. For white supremacists in that age, which says that between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, I think it is, there's a gap of time where there were a whole world existed. That's how we got the earth looking like it was aged. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:46:50] So not a 6,000 year old Earth no. Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:46:52] No. But I was taught overtly six day literal creation. And now that is part of their

John Dehlin [00:47:02] pivots.

Camille Lewis [00:47:03] They believe they are 100 literal. The creationists. They are with Ken Ham and the answers in Genesis crowd. They are intimately related with him.

John Dehlin [00:47:15] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:47:15] I don't know if that. If you know that term. He's the guy who's got the ark in. In Kentucky, of course. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:21] So little Noah's ark, global flood. Even though geologists would say there's no. Not enough water that you couldn't keep all the animals in the boat and all that.

Camille Lewis [00:47:31] And mirror. That's just mysteries.

John Dehlin [00:47:37] What's the attitude towards scientists and intellectuals and scholars historically in the tradition they.

Camille Lewis [00:47:47] Bob Sr. Was very much trying to capitalize on the power that academics had while he would insult them. So he would, would. What was the phrase he called academic freedom. A secular God. So he would say we do not have academic freedom here at Bob Jones College, Bob Jones University. So he. He wanted the power that they gave, but he also insulted them regularly.

John Dehlin [00:48:20] He wanted the respect of a university.

Camille Lewis [00:48:23] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:48:24] While demeaning some of the core like tenure. Tenure track.

Camille Lewis [00:48:29] Oh, we didn't have that.

John Dehlin [00:48:30] Neither did byu.

Camille Lewis [00:48:31] Oh, really? How did you.

John Dehlin [00:48:32] BYU still doesn't. Yeah. They have just continuing status.

Camille Lewis [00:48:36] Oh, I didn't. That's what Bob Jones does. I didn't know that.

John Dehlin [00:48:38] Oh, no, no, no. I think so. I was listening to a recent episode of Radio west with Doug Fabrizio and he was interviewing Taylor Petrie, a Mormon scholar. And Taylor said something I'd never thought of before, which is probably obvious to Mormon scholars, which is that Mormon church leaders in the 20th century were heavily influenced by evangelicals, which I never knew before. So I'll give you an example. You talked about in the 1920s, men wanting to take power back. Did you know that Mormon women used to be able to do what's called the washings and anointings ceremony?

Camille Lewis [00:49:13] I heard you say that. The patriarchal. Not patriarchal, but the blessings or something.

John Dehlin [00:49:17] Yeah. Like it was called the washings and anointings. They could heal the sick by the laying on of hands up through the 1920s. And then at some point Mormon church leaders, I think probably tuning in to that movement. You're talking about. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:49:31] Men in the religious forward movement. I bet you're right.

John Dehlin [00:49:33] Men are. If women get too much power, men are going to be lazy and they're not going to do their roles and step up to fill their duties. And so that the famous article is called A gift Given, a Gift taken away. Nowadays, Mormons don't know that women used to heal by the laying on of hands. They don't even know it's. But it had to have been taken away.

Camille Lewis [00:49:51] That's interesting.

John Dehlin [00:49:52] And it was taken away. I think around the same time Bob Jones movement emerges totally logical. So, again, I don't know this for sure, but I'm trying to put this stuff together in my mind. But what I do know is that Joseph Fielding Smith, who was a prophet of ours, who we view now as a fundamentalist, lowercase F, Mormon leader, according to Taylor Petrie, was really plugged into the emerging evangelical movements of the 1900s. So all that modesty garbage.

Camille Lewis [00:50:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:22] How you dress. Virtue policing, like patriarchy. You know, roles, gender roles. You know, Adam and Eve. Literal Adam and Eve, Garden. Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark. Mormonism. Mormonism from like 1950s to the 1980s.

Camille Lewis [00:50:46] I buy it.

John Dehlin [00:50:47] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:50:47] There was Cross bound. Yeah, you're right. I got to read that. That's very interesting.

John Dehlin [00:50:51] Yeah. So anyway, so I think they're. And I think what we'd find is we probably use the same lawyers over the past 50 years, probably use the same accountants, probably use the same PR people, because we're doing the same types of things. Like no tenure at a university.

Camille Lewis [00:51:11] I didn't know that.

John Dehlin [00:51:11] Oh, yeah. I had thought.

Camille Lewis [00:51:13] Because byu. I thought it was so big. Of course they have it.

John Dehlin [00:51:16] No, no, there's no tenure at byu. In fact, when Margi and I were at byu, there were professors that were denied continuing status. Right. Because they were teaching that you could pray to Mother in Heaven that there was a mother in heaven and the church didn't want them talking about that, so.

Camille Lewis [00:51:32] Wow. I didn't realize all that. I mean, I didn't. I just. The tenure thing, that's striking.

Campus Rules, Book Banning, and Honor Codes

Margi Dehlin [00:51:39] I was curious about this idea of book banning. Would that be something that you like? Were there attitudes about things like Harry Potter or To Kill a Mockingbird Bird or. So protective about information or material from.

Camille Lewis [00:51:56] There is absolutely a move, a trend to. Whatever's popular is bad. Whatever.

Margi Dehlin [00:52:03] Whatever.

John Dehlin [00:52:04] Beatles.

Camille Lewis [00:52:05] Beatles. Oh, yeah. Beetles are bad.

John Dehlin [00:52:08] Woodstock. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:52:09] Oh, that's bad.

John Dehlin [00:52:10] Yeah, yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:52:11] And Harry Potter was bad. What else was bad? Oh, Cabbage Patch Kids were bad. Remember those? Those were bad. Whatever. Whatever's popular is bad. I've heard. I've heard sermons about Teletubbies.

John Dehlin [00:52:26] Were Teletubbies.

Camille Lewis [00:52:27] Oh, Teletubbies were bad.

John Dehlin [00:52:28] Was Barney bad? Barney.

Camille Lewis [00:52:29] Barney was bad.

John Dehlin [00:52:30] Purple elephant. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:52:33] Yeah. Sesame Street's bad.

John Dehlin [00:52:35] Is it? How's Sesame Street?

Camille Lewis [00:52:36] Well, it's urban.

John Dehlin [00:52:37] Oh, okay. So urban's bad.

Camille Lewis [00:52:41] Urban's bad.

John Dehlin [00:52:41] Why is urban bad?

Camille Lewis [00:52:43] Because it's not. That hierarchy of the racial hierarchy is not protected.

Margi Dehlin [00:52:48] Interesting.

John Dehlin [00:52:48] Urban means multiracial.

Camille Lewis [00:52:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:51] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:52:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:52] Okay. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:52:54] Bless them.

John Dehlin [00:52:54] Okay.

Margi Dehlin [00:52:55] All right. Thanks for that.

Camille Lewis [00:52:56] I mean, the, the, the. The. The. What was it? There was some musical group that the. The campus radio station was. Was protesting because it was rock and roll, but it was such a. Oh, it's so tame. Yeah. In the 50s they were protesting.

Margi Dehlin [00:53:12] So that's why you listed rock and roll music and deviants under the category of deviants.

Camille Lewis [00:53:17] Right. Because it was. It was. There's a. An organization within the Bob Jones orbit called Majesty Music. And one of the people in that group has said that it leads. That rock music leads to sexual assault.

Margi Dehlin [00:53:40] Oh, wow.

Camille Lewis [00:53:41] Right. I mean, that's pretty.

Margi Dehlin [00:53:42] Sexual assault.

Camille Lewis [00:53:43] That's pretty dramatic.

John Dehlin [00:53:45] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:53:46] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:53:46] Okay. Okay. I think I'm getting a good picture now of. And then any controversies Bob Jones University was involved with Supreme Court decisions like you know, that are worth mentioning.

Camille Lewis [00:54:01] Oh, sure. So in the,

John Dehlin [00:54:04] like, I'm thinking irs, tax.

Camille Lewis [00:54:07] Yes, it was that. Exactly. So when. After Brown v. Board in 1954, where

John Dehlin [00:54:12] what was decided when. Integration.

Camille Lewis [00:54:14] Integration. When the schools were to be integrated, that separate and equal, separate but equal was no longer valid. South Carolina in general was pretty upset about that. And they worked in. In behind the scenes ways to keep things sep. Segregated and in. Let's see, after the Civil Rights act in 1964, they could no longer keep that divide. And so BJU came up with this argument that it was their religious belief that the races need to be separate. And so that not only could races not marry, races could not date because dating just leads to marriage. So that they couldn't even date. And so they defined race in such a strange way so that there were three races. Naturally, it was easily done. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:55:19] Tell me which. Which are the three?

Camille Lewis [00:55:20] So it was black, white and Asian.

John Dehlin [00:55:23] Okay.

Camille Lewis [00:55:23] It was very simple. And what they would do is they would define.

John Dehlin [00:55:27] That explains everything. Right?

Camille Lewis [00:55:28] There we go. And the white. They would define the white race as big as they possibly could. Which is odd, I think, because you

John Dehlin [00:55:40] want to be able to win votes. Right?

Camille Lewis [00:55:42] Okay, sure, sure, sure. And so they. Now the. The Supreme Court case was in 1983. I was not a student then at Bob Jones. I was a high schooler. My brother was a student. And he remembers when Bob came up to the.

Camille Lewis [00:55:58] Bob third came up to the platform to announce that because Bob Jones held to their religious belief that the races had to be separate. They lost their tax exemption status. So they would be a taxed school. They were proud of this fact that they would be taxed, that they stood up for, for religious freedom. And they, they said something like.

Camille Lewis [00:56:26] And they thought we would back down and allow races to integrate so we could keep our tax exemption status. But no, we are going to keep this separate. So at that, at that point I, I attended Bob Jones in 1986, the fall of 1986. Throughout they would be very.

Camille Lewis [00:56:47] It was strange. It was strange. You had. If you had two white parents, you were, you were white. If you had two black parents, you were black. If you had two Asian parents, you were Asian. But if there was any controversy in that, any difference, then you had to go in front of a committee to be judged by the way you looked to see if you were a particular race.

Margi Dehlin [00:57:15] Wow.

Camille Lewis [00:57:16] I have.

John Dehlin [00:57:17] That was a thing at the university.

Camille Lewis [00:57:19] Wow, that's bad.

Margi Dehlin [00:57:21] Wow.

Camille Lewis [00:57:22] That was at least from. I mean when I was there. So from 86 to 2001. At least that it might have been before, I don't know. So that I have a set of friends that were full brothers and sisters. You know, a brother and a sister, full same parents. The man was judged white and his sister, his full blooded sister was judged Asian. I have another friend whose heritage is a mixed racial heritage and she was. They looked, she. This is the way she told me. She described it. They looked me over and she said it that way, which is. Makes me sweat and decided that I looked Polynesian so I could be white. Right. It's just weird.

John Dehlin [00:58:09] And that would then determine whether you could go to go to the university?

Camille Lewis [00:58:12] No, you could date.

John Dehlin [00:58:14] Oh. Who you could do.

Camille Lewis [00:58:15] You could date and see. What do you call a date? I mean that even gets complicated, you know. What's a date?

John Dehlin [00:58:20] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [00:58:20] Is it walking down the sidewalk? Is it, you know, something more formal. So that happened in from 80. The Supreme Court case was in 83. Then in 2001 they got some pressure, they got some oversight and meaning the John McCain had criticized them openly in campaign 2000. Excuse me, not 2001. In 2000. And they decided that they were going to lift the rule and all. Everybody could date who they wanted. That's what they said publicly, privately. However, you had to get written permission from your parents if you wanted to date outside your race again, whatever that means.

John Dehlin [00:59:04] I can't believe this is happening in

Camille Lewis [00:59:06] the 90s and right.

John Dehlin [00:59:07] 2000s and I didn't know about it. Like that's mind blowing.

Camille Lewis [00:59:12] It's bad.

John Dehlin [00:59:12] This is like jaw dropping.

Camille Lewis [00:59:13] It is, it is. And I know. I think in 2014, when they got a non Jones president, it truly, I believe it was truly lifted. So. But it took that.

John Dehlin [00:59:26] Wow.

Camille Lewis [00:59:27] It took not having a Jones in the top office to get it done.

John Dehlin [00:59:32] Okay, really quickly. Alcohol.

Camille Lewis [00:59:34] Oh, no. You don't know. You don't drink alcohol.

John Dehlin [00:59:36] Smoking?

Camille Lewis [00:59:36] No.

John Dehlin [00:59:37] Okay. Dancing?

Camille Lewis [00:59:39] No, the joke is premarital sex might lead to dancing. So that's bad. So no.

John Dehlin [00:59:47] Okay. What about, what about dating? Kissing, Petting?

Camille Lewis [00:59:51] You're not. Okay, you. If you're a student at Bob Jones University, you're not supposed to touch a member of the opposite sex. You would have special activities where you could hold hands. It just sounds in public. In public. Yeah, but you were like holding hands while you're dancing. No, no, no, no. Playing a game or something. It was ridiculous, childish things. So. No, no.

John Dehlin [01:00:23] So would people get married having never kissed?

Camille Lewis [01:00:26] I think some did, but most of us had.

John Dehlin [01:00:29] Just do that off the books.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:30] Off.

Camille Lewis [01:00:31] Off campus, on the down low. On the summer you visited each other. This is how we did it. Oh, so you get to know each other as, as more like a human being.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:40] And you're off because you're off campus. And those rules. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:43] What do they do about, like policing student behavior after hours?

Camille Lewis [01:00:48] Oh, well, you have to be in, you had to be in your room.

John Dehlin [01:00:52] So curfews.

Camille Lewis [01:00:52] Curfews, yeah. 10:30.

John Dehlin [01:00:54] Just for freshmen or everyone, Everybody. Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:00:56] And you had to be in bed at 11. In the dorms, you had to be, I mean, lights out in bed.

John Dehlin [01:01:02] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:01:05] So that's how they. You weren't off, you weren't out and about at all after dark. You weren't supposed to be walking with a person of the opposite sex.

John Dehlin [01:01:15] And then if you got caught having sex or smoking weed or being gay. Expelled from the university. Yeah. Okay. And did they have an honor code office that would.

Camille Lewis [01:01:27] They did. They had a discipline committee, if you will. That's what they call it. But. And they would evaluate it, but they'd have a demerit system, which is so childish. And at 150 demerits, you were expelled.

John Dehlin [01:01:42] And what types of things. What are.

Camille Lewis [01:01:43] So if you didn't, if you forgot to clean, do your room job, which there were set room jobs. If you didn't do your room job one morning, you got a one demerit. If you were late to class, you got 10 demerits. If you skipped class, you got 25 demerits. If you, I, I, my whole. My whole four years, I got 11 demerits.

John Dehlin [01:02:07] So you were. That was good, right?

Camille Lewis [01:02:10] That was good. Yeah, I was great. I got.

John Dehlin [01:02:12] But those demerits add up. And if you get 150 at the

Camille Lewis [01:02:15] 150 every semester, I mean, you get a. You get a clean slate at semester. So if you get.

John Dehlin [01:02:21] Okay, this is crazy.

Camille Lewis [01:02:23] Yeah. If you get.

Margi Dehlin [01:02:24] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:02:24] Was it 50? It was 75, I think it was. If you had 75 demerits, you were restricted to campus. If you got a hundred demerits, you had to. You could not talk to someone of the opposite sex. And they'd post a list so you could see where you were. And then at 150, you. You worked.

John Dehlin [01:02:47] So your demerit count was a public information If.

Camille Lewis [01:02:50] If you were campused or. Or socialed was the word.

John Dehlin [01:02:54] This is wild.

Margi Dehlin [01:02:55] That is so. Wait, what. What is inherent in this is someone is watching your room job.

Camille Lewis [01:03:03] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:03] Someone is. You're being surveyed like you're under surveillance.

John Dehlin [01:03:07] And are students taught to rat out?

Camille Lewis [01:03:10] Oh, absolutely. There's ratting out.

John Dehlin [01:03:12] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:03:12] That's how you get, if you will, brownie points. You don't. I mean, they're not unlike demerits. There's not literal brownie points, but you get.

John Dehlin [01:03:19] You gain favor.

Camille Lewis [01:03:20] Yeah. Yeah. You get street cred, fundamentalist street cred for ratting people out.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:25] This feels like you would have to be so hyper vigilant. Right.

Camille Lewis [01:03:28] And it creates an anxiety that you're still you. You. You know, it takes. It takes years to. If ever to get over. Based on my fellow alumni, we kind of, you know, laugh with each other. Like, walking on the grass was 10 demerits.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:43] Really?

Camille Lewis [01:03:43] Yeah. So. So we still don't walk on the grass.

John Dehlin [01:03:46] I mean, you know, but probably wearing a skirt that's too short.

Camille Lewis [01:03:50] Oh, yeah, that wasn't. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:52] What about facial hair for men? No.

Camille Lewis [01:03:54] Now, when I was a student. No facial hair.

John Dehlin [01:03:56] Yeah. We had no beards.

Camille Lewis [01:03:57] Yeah. No, I think I just read that on Ex Mormon. Yeah. Yeah. No facial hair off for the men. And weirdly, in some ways, the men had more. I. Maybe. And I don't know if I was thinking about this, the men had more restrictions, I think, than the women, but it might have been that I internalized the women's restrictions so much that it just seemed normal.

John Dehlin [01:04:17] What about multiple ear piercings? So, like, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, you know, or 2.

Camille Lewis [01:04:24] I think you could have 2. If you're a female, you could have 2.

John Dehlin [01:04:27] So not 3?

Camille Lewis [01:04:28] Not 3.

John Dehlin [01:04:29] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:04:29] If I remember correctly, but for the men, you know, hair off the ears, sideburns had to be at the ear. And hair off the collar.

John Dehlin [01:04:39] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:04:39] Off the eyebrow. Yeah. And so I thought as a girl, it really just depend on how your head was made for a man.

John Dehlin [01:04:50] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:04:50] Because like my husband has a neck that, you know, his hair always checks. It doesn't matter what's. It's just the way his hair line works. But he, he never got, he never got caught. And they would check you as you, the men, they would check the men for hair as they were walking into chapel. Because there was daily chapel that you had to go to.

John Dehlin [01:05:08] Daily.

Camille Lewis [01:05:09] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:09] At, at the university.

Camille Lewis [01:05:11] Yeah. Oh, yeah. And the faculty were required to go too. And they would have the secretary in the in departments checking to make sure nobody was in their office

Margi Dehlin [01:05:24] trying to skip out.

Camille Lewis [01:05:25] Yeah. That's why we put the couch in the. In. Away from the window so that my office mate and I could take naps.

John Dehlin [01:05:32] That's wild, isn't it?

Camille Lewis [01:05:34] Isn't it wild? We would. When my husband and I were young marrieds, we lived in campus housing. It was an apartment. We were not going to go to all those things that we had to go to. So we had. We would turn the TV in such a way so that the light wouldn't show out the window. And you know, do you have.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:53] I know we're not in your story, but I'm just curious, like, do you. Was it a lot to hold all those rules? Like, do you kind of remember arriving and being like, oh my. Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:06:02] Oh, gosh, yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:03] I can only imagine.

Camille Lewis [01:06:05] Absolutely. And I couldn't keep up.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:08] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:06:08] I just couldn't.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:09] I'm not sad.

Camille Lewis [01:06:09] And I see you give up, you know.

John Dehlin [01:06:11] You did keep up though.

Camille Lewis [01:06:12] I did. Well, obviously for four years. But you know, as I get to be a grown woman, I'm like, oh, good grief.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:19] Right.

Camille Lewis [01:06:20] I'm covered. Knock it off.

John Dehlin [01:06:23] Tank tops.

Camille Lewis [01:06:23] Oh, no shoulders. No shoulder. You want to talk about porn shoulders? Yeah, you have to. You have to have a cap sleeve

John Dehlin [01:06:30] at least and short length shorts.

Camille Lewis [01:06:32] Length shorts. If I were to go walking like on campus when I was married, you know, a grown woman, I had to have make sure my knees were covered even when I was just walking on campus.

John Dehlin [01:06:44] So below the knees.

Camille Lewis [01:06:45] Yeah, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:47] Which is basically a Capri, let's be real.

Camille Lewis [01:06:49] Absolutely. A Capri. Absolutely. I got in trouble so much with walking, with what I was wearing. Walking. I was like, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:06:56] What about coffee or tea?

Camille Lewis [01:06:59] Oh, we can do coffee and tea. In fact, that's kind of almost you know, a sacrament. I mean, it's a lot of coffee that's consumed.

Treatment of LGBTQ People and Social Restrictions

John Dehlin [01:07:06] Okay. And so. Coca Cola.

Camille Lewis [01:07:08] Oh, yeah, that's fine. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:09] No drugs. Marijuana?

Camille Lewis [01:07:10] No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

John Dehlin [01:07:13] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:07:13] Not supposed to.

John Dehlin [01:07:14] And then what did. How did they treat gay people? If someone came out as gay but wanted to not be gay, they would say, is there conversion therapy? Was there. Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:07:24] I was. I know friends that went through that. Yeah. They would call it masculine classes. Oh. Or manly classes. And, I mean, he told us.

John Dehlin [01:07:34] Masculinity.

Camille Lewis [01:07:35] Yeah, masculinity classes. And so they would say, well, you can. You can. They would say you can be attracted to same sex. You know, they use that term, same sex attraction, but that's what we call it. And they might have gotten it from you all.

John Dehlin [01:07:53] Yeah, yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:07:55] That would be gay.

John Dehlin [01:07:56] You have same sex attraction as long

Camille Lewis [01:07:58] as you don't act on it, which I think you are.

John Dehlin [01:08:00] It's totally.

Camille Lewis [01:08:00] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:01] So I swear we have the same consultants. I swear we do. There's some consulting firm that consults all these conservatives.

Camille Lewis [01:08:09] But it. And I don't. Again, I don't know about how it works with. With, you know, at BYU or in Mormons in general, but they say you're not a problem as long as you don't act on it.

Margi Dehlin [01:08:19] Right?

Camille Lewis [01:08:20] That. That's right. I mean, you are scrutinized. And. And there are folks who have talked about this at length. My friends have published a book about it, bj, you and Me, where they talk about their stories being LGBTQ in the BJU world.

John Dehlin [01:08:39] So our movies. R rated movies.

Camille Lewis [01:08:41] Oh, pg. You couldn't watch.

John Dehlin [01:08:44] Really?

Camille Lewis [01:08:44] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:08:45] You had G. Only G. What about TV shows?

Camille Lewis [01:08:48] Well, they would say you're not supposed to watch it. Again, whatever's popular, you're not supposed to watch it.

John Dehlin [01:08:53] So Friends.

Camille Lewis [01:08:54] Oh, that was. Friends was bad. Seinfeld was bad. I mean, we watched it, you know, I mean, my husband and I, we watched it. We're not gonna. I mean, you know.

John Dehlin [01:09:04] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:09:05] Was that. Was that. Would you say you were deviating from the norm to watch it, or do you feel like many people likely watched it?

Camille Lewis [01:09:14] I think many people watched it and didn't talk about it.

Margi Dehlin [01:09:16] Okay. You just kind of learn to put some things undercover.

Camille Lewis [01:09:20] Right?

Margi Dehlin [01:09:20] Got it.

Camille Lewis [01:09:20] Yeah. The. I had a student in my faculty evaluation course. Evaluation. You know, the end of the semester, it was a student. One student in the class. So I know who wrote it. Who? The way the questions were worded. They would ask people to make moral judgments of the teacher. It wasn't about teaching. It was about your character. And I was.

Margi Dehlin [01:09:48] Had my.

Camille Lewis [01:09:49] Completed my PhD. I was done. She had only. She was in her master's program and she wrote. She watches too much tv. She needs to read more. I was like, honey, I read enough. I have my PhD done. But that's the, you know, she felt free to judge my character because of that.

John Dehlin [01:10:11] Yeah, interesting.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:13] And it seems like that's a big part of the culture, are these. These moments of people assessing you whether or not they have information or not.

Camille Lewis [01:10:22] Right, right, right.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:23] Huh.

Camille Lewis [01:10:24] I had had a surgical procedure. It was on. You know, how you do, you have it on a Thursday and then. So you could recover over the weekend. And it was a Monday, and I was in the faculty lounge, and I still. I shouldn't have gone back to work, but I. I was there and I bent over. I bent down to get something in the faculty lounge, and the same student was mocking me for not, you know, bending over in a ladylike fashion. And I'm like, honey, I just had surgery. You need to knock it off. But it was that constant scrutinizing. And it wasn't like I was doing it in this wide open space either. As if that would matter.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:59] But, yeah, policing which.

John Dehlin [01:11:03] So I'll just name some names. So Billy Graham. What?

Camille Lewis [01:11:06] Oh, bad.

John Dehlin [01:11:07] Why. Why is Billy Graham bad? I know this will come up later in the story.

Camille Lewis [01:11:10] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:10] But he.

Camille Lewis [01:11:11] He was. He did attend Bob Jones College for a semester, I believe it was. And he's too liberal, essentially. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:11:19] Jimmy Schwager.

Camille Lewis [01:11:20] Oh, bad.

John Dehlin [01:11:21] Jim and Tammy Fay Baker. Why are these people bad?

Camille Lewis [01:11:24] Because they're too liberal, whatever that means.

John Dehlin [01:11:26] Jerry Falwell bad. Really?

Camille Lewis [01:11:29] Yeah. Because they. Falwell and. And Bob Jones and John Rice, another Baptist, were all together. Sorry, we're all together. Until 1971. They were on the same board of Sword of the Lord, which is a publication. In 1971, Jerry Falwell created what would become Liberty. And I think Bob got jealous. Bob third. Bob junior Got jealous. So it was just jealousy, really.

John Dehlin [01:11:58] So they were. Those are all kind of same swimming pool.

Camille Lewis [01:12:01] Yes, yes, yes. I mean, Billy Graham was in the same swimming pool. Jay Fault was in the same swimming pool. But some personal grudge came about.

John Dehlin [01:12:12] Okay, okay, last question before we jump into your story. Like in Mormonism, all the local congregations all over the world.

Camille Lewis [01:12:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:22] Are feeding into BYU and byu. The board of directors of BYU are the heads of the church. So it's a very, you know, similar. Well, that's what I was going to ask so you, when someone grows up as an independent Fundamental Baptist like Bob Jones III isn't their prophet, isn't their pastor. I don't even know if whatever church they would attend is part of the corporate structure of whatever Bob Jones University is. In other words, what's the relationship between churches and Bob Jones and the university?

Camille Lewis [01:13:01] That's such a great question. So here's what I know in 1933 that I know that this happened. Bob Jones senior created this fellowship. That's what he called it. So it's not a denomination, it's a fellowship. And I've seen the, the documents of this.

Camille Lewis [01:13:22] So that he promised to ordain a Bible Bible major ministerial student through their organization. So he, they would become an ordained pastor. He would. Or the BJU would pay their first year salary, whatever that was, and then that church, he would, they would plant them in a church somewhere, pay their salary, and then that pastor was obligated for the rest of his life to have a Baptist theology, you know, so they couldn't sprinkle. He would have.

Camille Lewis [01:14:01] He must send students to bju. I can't remember the. Oh, couldn't. It couldn't become Calvinistic, which is a buzzword in that world. And if they ever were, they deviated from that agreement, they would owe back that first year salary with compound. With interest compounded yearly.

Margi Dehlin [01:14:23] Wow. Wow.

Camille Lewis [01:14:26] So that's how they maintain that connection. And Bob Jr. And Bob 3rd, I would go with Bob 3rd every now and then would go to churches and check on those agreements to make sure, you know, are they, don't they not playing Christian rock? Are they, you know, not preaching Calvinism? Are they sending kids to bju? So that's how that was maintained.

John Dehlin [01:14:51] Okay. So again the enforcement, the means of enforcement was the visits.

Camille Lewis [01:14:59] The, the Jones family would visit those

John Dehlin [01:15:02] churches and they would again, they would punish people how.

Camille Lewis [01:15:05] Or they claimed, I don't think when I've had lawyer friends look at the agreement and they can't enforce that, but they would claim that they would sue them for the first year's salary that they gave that pastor compounded in compound interest. Compound annually. So they would just, they, what would ended up happening is the pastors would just fold that church so they could do whatever they, you know, they could

Margi Dehlin [01:15:33] do a bunch of money.

Camille Lewis [01:15:34] Yeah. Or just fold it because if it was folded it was fine.

Margi Dehlin [01:15:37] They wouldn't. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:15:38] See, they could start a new church with the same money, even with the same congregation and be more free.

Margi Dehlin [01:15:44] Ah, did you see that happen? Oh yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:15:47] Oh yeah. That happens a lot. Those, those fundamentalist churches, those BJU planted churches don't ever last long. I mean, last long, like 20 years probably is the. Is. Is the max. Unless there's some strange thing.

John Dehlin [01:16:00] So Bob Jones University would plant churches, give money, and then enforce certain standards. And then in theory, those churches would send.

Camille Lewis [01:16:11] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:16:11] Students back to Bob Jones University to perpetuate.

Camille Lewis [01:16:15] And they would check the. The. They would call pastors and check on. On students and on graduates. There was a lot of checking on people.

Margi Dehlin [01:16:25] Okay, how large is Bob Jones University?

John Dehlin [01:16:28] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:16:29] Right now?

John Dehlin [01:16:31] And it's heyday.

Camille Lewis [01:16:31] Let's say it's heyday.

Margi Dehlin [01:16:33] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:16:33] They claim to have as many as 8,000 students.

John Dehlin [01:16:37] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:16:37] And that is probably they lie a lot. Probably they're from kindergarten through graduate school. Probably just the university was about 5,000.

Margi Dehlin [01:16:46] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:16:46] Are they homeschoolers?

Camille Lewis [01:16:47] Some of them are. They have a homeschool program, but they do have a. In, you know, a brick and mortar academy, elementary school and middle school and high school.

John Dehlin [01:16:57] And the shiny happy people. People. What are they called again?

Camille Lewis [01:17:00] The Gothard folks.

John Dehlin [01:17:01] Would they have gone to Bob Jones

Camille Lewis [01:17:03] University maybe for the university? If they wanted to go to a university? Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:06] Okay. If they wanted to go.

Camille Lewis [01:17:07] Yeah. Because Gothard and Bob Third. There was a promise made in the 90s that Bill Gothard made to Bob Third. Bob Gradual bragged about it, that Gothard would send his homeschool graduates to the university. And so that was going to raise our salaries. That's what we were told. I don't know if that ever happened, but that was the. The brag.

John Dehlin [01:17:36] Okay, so never as big as Liberty University.

Camille Lewis [01:17:38] Never.

John Dehlin [01:17:38] Oh, no.

Camille Lewis [01:17:39] Liberty's massive. Massive. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:43] Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's huge.

Camille Lewis [01:17:44] Yeah, Huge.

John Dehlin [01:17:47] Okay. And what states. Those who would be likely to attend Bob University.

Camille Lewis [01:17:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:54] What are the top states? They would usually drop.

Camille Lewis [01:17:56] Historically it's been Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana. Illinois is pretty big. That was probably because I'm from Michigan, so that was probably when I was there. Now it's. It's South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia.

John Dehlin [01:18:13] It's usually now it's.

Margi Dehlin [01:18:15] Now it's.

Camille Lewis [01:18:15] It's much more contained South.

John Dehlin [01:18:18] Now it's South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia.

Camille Lewis [01:18:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:21] Before it was Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Camille Lewis [01:18:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:25] What happened in terms of population shifts? Because I don't think of those Midwest states or Eastern states as heavily evangelical.

Camille Lewis [01:18:33] The fundamentalist folks had a stronghold in those states. I would probably, because of my historical fixation, I would probably trace that back to the Ku Klux Klan's influence in the 1920s because that's where the Klan was big, too. So conservatism, whatever that meant, found its expression at Bob Jones and. And it resonated with those folks. But now it's just because of expense. People stay local.

John Dehlin [01:19:03] Yeah, yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:19:05] Which is probably the right thing to do.

John Dehlin [01:19:07] Okay. Okay. Let's shift to your story.

Camille Lewis [01:19:10] Okay. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:19:11] Thank you for providing that content. Is that all right, Margi? I'm fascinated.

Camille Lewis [01:19:16] Okay, good.

John Dehlin [01:19:16] Like, I love that.

Camille Lewis [01:19:17] Okay, good.

John Dehlin [01:19:18] I love that.

Margi Dehlin [01:19:18] Okay, good.

John Dehlin [01:19:19] And 20 minutes. Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:19:20] Okay.

Camille's Childhood in the IFB World

John Dehlin [01:19:20] All right. So what. Where does your Independent Fundamental Baptist story begin?

Camille Lewis [01:19:27] All right. So my. My dad loved to tell this story, so I'm going to channel him a little bit. My dad was raised Jehovah's Witness.

John Dehlin [01:19:38] Oh.

Camille Lewis [01:19:38] My mom was raised Catholic.

John Dehlin [01:19:40] What?

Camille Lewis [01:19:40] Isn't that funny? Dad would probably. Well, I was. The historian in me would say that there was this huge push among Eastern Europeans, among the Russellites, which was early jws. I don't know why, but it was. So three of my grandparents were Russellites, and Dad kept into that tradition. And mom and dad married and they had my brother. And they're like, we should go to church.

John Dehlin [01:20:11] What state?

Camille Lewis [01:20:12] This was in Indiana at this point.

John Dehlin [01:20:15] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:20:15] And they said, because they were. Everybody was born in Detroit except me. So they were in Indiana then. And, you know, we should go to church. Well, let's compromise Protestants, a good compromise. So they just kind of picked one.

Camille Lewis [01:20:27] And at the same. It was a Presbyterian one. And at the same time, my brother was invited to what is amounts to kind of an Evangelical Scouts program. It's called a Moana. And so Steve start. My brother started attending, and he was really enjoying it. And it focuses on all those. The typical Boy Scout things, like, you know, building a fire, tying knots, that kind of thing. But also Bible memory. And you could get a patch or an award if you attended church regularly.

Camille Lewis [01:21:00] Mom and dad didn't think that they should let him go by himself. So they switched off back and forth. And the pastor of that church in South Bend was very accommodating of my dad's argumentative streak. Again, dad was jw and he liked to argue, he liked to discuss.

Camille Lewis [01:21:24] So the pastor was good about indulging that. And they. Before I around, at my birth, they were converted to Baptist in Southern Indiana. So in a sense, I was always in the Baptist church. Yeah, it was a. Technically, it was a garb church, which is General association of Regular Baptists, which meant regular Baptists are opposed to particular Baptists. Particular Baptists are the Calvinistic Baptists. They believe in Limited atonement.

Camille Lewis [01:22:00] But regular Baptists believe in a general atonement so that everybody could be saved, not necessarily just the elect. Whatever. So my. One of my earliest memories, I've many. I remember, for some reason, the song He's Got the Whole World in His Hands was popular.

Margi Dehlin [01:22:25] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:22:26] At this point, it must have been on tv. I heard it a lot. I watched a lot of tv. I. I liked the predictability of it.

John Dehlin [01:22:33] I think it's kind of a hippie song. Yeah. You know?

Camille Lewis [01:22:36] Yeah. Maybe that was it. I don't know. He's got the whole world in his hands and of course, I asked my mom what it meant, because I like to know. And she said, it means that God's taking care of us. He's got us. He's. He's. He's with us. And I like that. And I like that. I understood it, and I like the sentiment. And I was in church. I was about 6. I was in the evening service. And good fundamentalists go to church three times a week.

John Dehlin [01:22:59] Whoa.

Camille Lewis [01:23:00] Yeah. Morning, evening, Sunday morning. Sunday evening. And Wednesday, Sunday morning. The kids are usually off in a children's church program. So they're not in the big church,

John Dehlin [01:23:11] by the way, Mormons used to do that.

Camille Lewis [01:23:13] Oh, really?

John Dehlin [01:23:14] Up until, like, the late 70s, early 80s.

Camille Lewis [01:23:17] Why'd you change?

John Dehlin [01:23:18] I mean, I think we assimilated more than y' all did.

Camille Lewis [01:23:21] Oh.

John Dehlin [01:23:21] But I think there are more parallels than anybody understands.

Camille Lewis [01:23:24] I think so, too. I'm. I didn't know that.

John Dehlin [01:23:26] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. When I was little, there was church two to three times on a Sunday.

Camille Lewis [01:23:31] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:23:32] Or twice on Sunday and then once during the week.

Margi Dehlin [01:23:34] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:23:34] All right.

Margi Dehlin [01:23:35] I have a memory of that, too.

Camille Lewis [01:23:36] Interesting. That's really interesting. So. But in the evening service, I was with my parents, and usually, you know, parents try to give children quiet things to do. My dad would make origami sailboats out of gum wrappers. That's one of my early memories. But the pastor started preaching about the song He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. And I was like, oh, my word. I understand that. You know, you're little. You don't really get about what's going on in church at all. But I got that. I knew that song. I liked that song. So I tuned in, and he said, we shouldn't sing that song. That's a bad song. Because God does not have the world in his hands. Because if God has the world in his hands, he's got sin in his hands. And he's a holy God. And I was Crestfallen. I was like, oh, my goodness. I really.

John Dehlin [01:24:29] The point of the song is like, we're all. We're all part of the human family.

Camille Lewis [01:24:33] Right.

John Dehlin [01:24:33] He's got you and me and brother and the plants. You and me and sister.

Camille Lewis [01:24:37] Yeah. The son.

John Dehlin [01:24:38] Yeah. Yeah. But also, there's probably racial overtones.

Camille Lewis [01:24:44] There you go.

John Dehlin [01:24:45] In terms of, like, he loves the black people, he loves the Asian people, he loves women, he loves gay people. He's got the whole world in his hands.

Camille Lewis [01:24:53] Bingo.

John Dehlin [01:24:54] I'm not trying to put that on you.

Camille Lewis [01:24:55] No, but you're right, but they will. Fundamentalists will take a typical or orthodox idea of God's sovereignty and slice it and dice it to me. Nope, not. That doesn't happen. They will ruin that for the sake of their pugnacious politics.

John Dehlin [01:25:15] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:25:16] I was so mad. I was. As a child, I was crestfallen because I really liked that song. And it wasn't until I was in my 40s that I realized, oh, no, Pastor, you were wrong. You were wrong. So that was an early confrontation of fundamentalism versus what I had learned from my parents. My parents were that my mom died right before the pandemic. My dad died in 2016.

Camille Lewis [01:25:46] And I still have trouble using past tense. That's just I. That's just who I am. I always live in the 1920s or something. But they were just. If I were. If there were one word to describe them, it would be empathetic. They were just kind, gentle people. And so their love and protection of my brother and me was like the solid foundation for me. And so when I would come to learn that mom and dad were right, you know, that the. The love and the kindness to show to other people is the way to go. But that was the solid foundation there somewhere. I went to public school in kindergarten, and my brother had then graduated eighth grade.

Camille Lewis [01:26:40] We were in the same school, same public school. It was kindergarten through eighth grade. Steve graduated. And this was right when fundamentalists were starting to do this trend of Christian day schools as a way of separating from the world.

Camille Lewis [01:27:02] We could also say it might be segregating from certain races, but that wasn't the vocabulary in South Bend. They didn't use that overtly. It. I think it was under the surface. But the term segregation academy would be something they'd use in the South. Didn't use that in Indiana. So we went to a Christian day school. I did for one grade, first grade, and Steve did, too.

Camille Lewis [01:27:24] And that's when I remember the scrutiny, the dress code scrutiny, beginning. I. I only remember it once they would check our skirts to make sure they were the proper length. So there I was, a little six year old kneeling on the ground and there's a lady next to me with a ruler checking to make sure it was so many inches from the ground. And that was the first scrutiny, I remember of my body, which is. It's a weird. It's a weird thing to do that for a little, little, little itty bitty baby, really. 6. We moved.

John Dehlin [01:28:09] It kind of sexualizes kids. It does. Yeah, yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:28:11] And the knees, I mean, come on.

John Dehlin [01:28:13] Yeah, yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:28:17] We moved to. My dad was a mechanical engineer, so we, we moved a lot. And from South Bend we went to Tulsa and we went to a Christian day school in Tulsa. That was more. It felt to me to be a little looser in my memory. I don't remember the scrutiny as much.

Camille Lewis [01:28:39] And in. When I was 10, in 1978, my brother graduated from that Christian school. He went to Bob Jones. And we all moved, I say, back to Detroit. I had never lived in Detroit, but my. All my aunts and uncles had been born there, my cousins. I was the only person in my generation who hadn't been born in Detroit. So we moved back there. So. But in, in we went. We went to Detroit.

Camille Lewis [01:29:05] I got in a Christian school that was. I say now there were literal Nazis in that church. I mean, the German Bund or did exist in Detroit and a lot of them were funneled into that school. School and church.

John Dehlin [01:29:24] So you went to school and church with literal.

Camille Lewis [01:29:27] Yeah, with. With grandchildren and children of German Bund

John Dehlin [01:29:32] folks who are white supremacists, I'm assuming.

Camille Lewis [01:29:34] Yeah. And more.

John Dehlin [01:29:36] Okay, wait, what's more than a white.

Camille Lewis [01:29:39] Well, Aryan.

John Dehlin [01:29:40] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:29:41] Supremacist.

John Dehlin [01:29:42] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:29:42] So like, I mean, I'm. They would not like Polox. I'm Polish, so. So they wouldn't. I'm not considered of the right race.

John Dehlin [01:29:52] So your parents, you describe them as so loving. Why are they raising you in such. Right.

Camille Lewis [01:29:58] I think now that's a great question. That's a great question. I think they didn't.

John Dehlin [01:30:04] Do you think your home was kind of racist?

Camille Lewis [01:30:06] I think it was typically white privileged.

John Dehlin [01:30:10] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:30:11] I think. And, and there was an obliviousness that we didn't have to confront race because we were white. That's a great point though, because that's something that I continue to wrestle with. My dad would say if he were telling. If he were here and he were telling his conversion story, he would say, now my parents always said, Henry, you can be any kind of Christian you want. Just don't be a Baptist. And then that cued the laughter because that's what we became. And it was a way of saying grandma and grandpa didn't quite understand what Baptists were all about.

Camille Lewis [01:30:48] I now realize that my grandparents, because you know, English was not their first language, they were doing their best to explain, avoid those Protestants that are white supremacists too. Because J. Frank Norris was like seven miles from my grandparents house. He was a terrible segregationist, Texas segregationist who pastored in Detroit too. They were trying to warn us. It just took me in my research to realize what they were trying to warn us about.

Camille Lewis [01:31:19] So I think my parents might have internalized the white privilege to the point that we really didn't need to confront was being American. It wasn't being white supremacist because my. I remember my parents being very accepting, very accepting of black folks and Hispanic folks and Asian folks.

Margi Dehlin [01:31:50] So growing up in your childhood, do you have memories at all of your parents differentiating from things you were being taught?

Camille Lewis [01:32:00] Yeah. Oh yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:32:00] And the fact that they're so loving.

Camille Lewis [01:32:02] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:32:03] And it seems like some of what you're being taught feels so.

Camille Lewis [01:32:07] Dad would, dad would. Because I would have. In, in the Detroit school there would be anti union sentiment, anti Social Security sentiment, which is weird. Pro Nixon sentiment. I remember the, the, the my government teacher saying Nixon was the best president we ever had. And I thought that doesn't sound right. So I went home and asked dad, Dad. I won't say his name but because people know him so and so said that Nixon was the best president we ever had. And I was like what? He lied and he explained because I did. Did remember Watergate. But he went on to explain more about how he was not a good president. So, so there was always this difference. I think that makes sense.

Margi Dehlin [01:33:02] Do you feel like at all during those years that you absorbed the idea of feeling a bit differently as being okay. Yes. Your parents.

Camille Lewis [01:33:12] Yes, yes. That's there, that's that place. We are part of that place. So we're going to, you know like the, the rules about dressing. We don't, you know, we don't have a problem with women wearing pants, but they do so for their sake will accommodate. That was repeated off so literally.

Margi Dehlin [01:33:32] Very similar in some ways to Mormonism. You're having like a self that you is presented in the external world. Your church kind of self. Yes. Where you accommodate maybe aspects because you're like oh this is important here. But then maybe some different views, different standards in home. Is that correct?

Camille Lewis [01:33:55] Absolutely. And so that kind of carries over into the way my husband and I feel about each other. You know, the egalitarian marriage. That's what we're going to do. We don't need you to approve it or to like it or to even know about it.

Margi Dehlin [01:34:07] Got it. That makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:34:08] I mean, what I'm noticing, I'm thinking about the difference between how I was Mormon and how Margi was Mormon.

Camille Lewis [01:34:13] Oh, okay.

John Dehlin [01:34:13] Margi's parents were converts to the church.

Camille Lewis [01:34:16] Oh, that'll make.

John Dehlin [01:34:17] I was a sixth generation.

Camille Lewis [01:34:18] Okay. Wow.

John Dehlin [01:34:19] So I was way more born bought into the theology and doctrine.

Camille Lewis [01:34:23] Okay. That makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:34:24] Culture. Whereas Margi was more do Mormonism. I think Margi was more comfortable doing Mormonism her way.

Camille Lewis [01:34:31] That makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:34:32] And as I'm hearing about how you were at Bob Jones University, yes, you tried to conform to the rules, but internally I don't sense the same degree of indoctrination that I would associate with like a multi generational orthodox Mormon.

Camille Lewis [01:34:49] Right. And that might have been because my parents were also converts like you described. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:34:53] Because I was trying to make sense of like there was some dissonance you always seem to carry. Like when you said you and your husband would. Would skip the daily church service and watch tv, like that's. You don't do that. So I mean, I could.

Camille Lewis [01:35:06] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:35:07] Now that I know your parents were converts to the movement, it makes sense why you felt comfortable differentiating.

Camille Lewis [01:35:14] Yes. And they did not. Like my, my dad did not or mom attend Bob Jones. That's a lot of people are, you know, second, third generation Bob Jones graduates, dad went to University of Michigan. That was outside of this.

Margi Dehlin [01:35:27] I think a key point to that too, the convert thing is also how orthodox the parents are to belief. And it also just kind of sounds like too, your. Your parents had some room and space for their own opinions that might have been different or. And so did my parents. As opposed to like we're fully in alignment with the teachings. I think. I know convert families that actually really buckled down because they were convert and they were like, wow, we can't rely on all the generations giving us clout in the church, so we have to be extra. So I think there's some variability with the convert thing and how it plays out and some of that can be kind of. Yeah, I just wanted to bring that up.

Camille Lewis [01:36:11] That makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:36:12] And I'm trying to relate this to my own story because obviously my parents were Mormons pre1978, which means they were Mormons when the church still had a priesthood and temple ban for black people.

Camille Lewis [01:36:23] Oh, okay.

John Dehlin [01:36:24] And they also would have been Mormons when the era was going on.

Margi Dehlin [01:36:27] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:36:28] And so I've asked my parents, like, with my modern sensibilities, how could you have been a member of the church of a racist church? You know what I mean?

Camille Lewis [01:36:38] Right.

John Dehlin [01:36:39] And they're like, oh, we loved Martin Luther King, and we thought that we wanted good things for black people. So somehow in the 60s and 70s, they thought of themselves as being okay with black people progressing, and yet they were members of a structurally racist church, but they didn't see a contradiction there.

Camille Lewis [01:36:59] I think that's. That is one way of explaining it. I think my parents might have been a little bit further because of the empathy that they wanted. They. They did feel for their black neighbors. We got harassed in South Bend to my maiden name's Kaminsky, and. And we got some vandalism and some harassment for being Polish in that neighborhood. And so I wonder, too, if that might have created a sensitivity and also a cloistering. I'm not sure.

Margi Dehlin [01:37:39] Yeah, I mean, that's a.

Camille Lewis [01:37:41] You don't get. You don't get harassed in Detroit with a ski at your end of her name. But you did in South Bend, huh?

Margi Dehlin [01:37:47] Yeah, I can see that.

Camille Lewis [01:37:48] Yeah.

Racism and Extremism in Her Community

John Dehlin [01:37:49] Okay, so you mentioned. Okay, so you talked about moving and, you know, there being members of the German Bund. I don't even know if people know what that word means. But you're saying it's a kind of

Camille Lewis [01:38:03] white supremacist group, but an Aryan supremacist group, but a volunteer organization. Not a.

John Dehlin [01:38:09] Okay.

Margi Dehlin [01:38:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:10] And then you talk about things being different. You list like, four things in your outline.

Camille Lewis [01:38:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:14] I'll prompt you if you want.

Camille Lewis [01:38:16] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:38:16] You have my fifth grade teacher and the Christmas program.

Camille Lewis [01:38:18] Oh, she bless. Okay. So we moved in November. So I went in the middle of school year. And the previous. The way we did things in the previous school was that if there was a problem, the parent would write a note and the student would hand the note to the teacher.

Camille Lewis [01:38:41] We were in the middle of a Christmas rehearsal for the Christmas program. We were singing Silent Night in German. I didn't know it in German. And so I said to mom, we didn't know. We didn't know that it was.

Camille Lewis [01:39:01] I didn't know the German. And so mom wrote a note to the teacher and her. The teacher's response was, well, can't she talk for herself? Which is an edgy, ugly thing to say. But it also communicated to me that I was.

Camille Lewis [01:39:22] I was Stupid to her, you know. And she continued. I. Her mother was my piano teacher too. And she also was pretty mean. They were mean people. I have since talked to people who knew them in college too and had the, those Bob Jones and they said the same thing. They were. They were a. A harsh group. Everything about that school was harsh. And I learned to just disappear.

John Dehlin [01:39:54] So the second story you have is 8th grade teacher and your socks.

Camille Lewis [01:39:59] It was. You remember how preppy we were in the 80s? Okay, so I had these socks. Yeah, they were argyle socks.

John Dehlin [01:40:05] See, I get it. I get it. I get you.

Camille Lewis [01:40:07] Thanks. And my 8th grade math teacher,

Margi Dehlin [01:40:14] and

Camille Lewis [01:40:14] this is another lesson that I learned to disappear, said at the beginning of

Margi Dehlin [01:40:19] class

Camille Lewis [01:40:21] when she saw my socks, she said, how far down 8 mile did you have to chase an N word to get those socks?

John Dehlin [01:40:29] Oh, that was in a church or

Camille Lewis [01:40:35] school context in front of the class. 8th grade math.

John Dehlin [01:40:39] So you chase down an N person to get the socks to find argyle socks.

Camille Lewis [01:40:44] Yeah. And it was. The class gasped. And I just sat there with my mouth hanging on because she said the N word and that you're not. You don't do that.

John Dehlin [01:40:53] But if the class gasped means they didn't. That means that wasn't on brand for the church at the time.

Camille Lewis [01:41:00] Right? Well, it was a bad word. You don't say that word.

John Dehlin [01:41:03] But then how do we associate that with, with the church?

Camille Lewis [01:41:05] I have no idea.

John Dehlin [01:41:07] Old school church maybe.

Camille Lewis [01:41:08] So, okay, I have no idea. And I was. I, I don't. I don't know what I, I just said.

Margi Dehlin [01:41:14] I.

Camille Lewis [01:41:15] All I remember was my mouth hanging open. Of course I told my mother and of course she scolded the teacher because that's not. You don't say that. That is not legit. But that was normal. At least for this BJU trained math teacher. This was an acceptable thing to say. Again, I learned from that. To disappear. That's. That was my persistent lesson in, in all of this. Just disappear, hide, sorry. Don't make waves. Which is a typical, the, the fundamentalist way for women. It is. Sorry.

Margi Dehlin [01:41:58] And this is. So this is really coming out. This is eighth grade. Eighth grade.

Camille Lewis [01:42:02] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:42:04] I see.

Camille Lewis [01:42:05] And again, it was. It was not that, you know, my, I was covered. You know, everything was, was in, in the school dress code, rules.

Margi Dehlin [01:42:15] Right. You followed all the rules.

Camille Lewis [01:42:17] All the rules.

Margi Dehlin [01:42:18] But you weren't safe.

Camille Lewis [01:42:20] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:42:21] In that scenario you were called out.

Camille Lewis [01:42:22] Yes, exactly.

Margi Dehlin [01:42:24] Humiliated.

Camille Lewis [01:42:25] That's it. And it's such a silly little story. You think about it.

John Dehlin [01:42:29] I don't know what's moving to you about that.

Camille Lewis [01:42:32] I think it's the. Disappear. I'm sorry.

John Dehlin [01:42:34] Don't apologize, please.

Camille Lewis [01:42:36] It's the, it's the fact that that is the way to be safe for a woman to be safe in fundamentalism is to disappear. That's the strategy. And it, it has taken me this, with the recent book I published. There's a chapter in there about Bob Jones attitudes towards his first wife. And he needed her to disappear. He didn't. He hated her. He hated women. He hated women who act is the way I summed it up. And that was the lesson in that eighth grade sock story.

Margi Dehlin [01:43:14] I'm so sorry.

Camille Lewis [01:43:15] Thank you. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:43:17] And that, and that is something that those grooves, they are deep.

Camille Lewis [01:43:22] Deep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very deep. So that, so that creates a learned helplessness that you, you know, you just don't speak up.

John Dehlin [01:43:38] I'm so sorry.

Camille Lewis [01:43:38] Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

John Dehlin [01:43:42] You listed the 12th grade government teacher and your future husband.

Camille Lewis [01:43:46] He. Yeah, this is the same teacher who loved Nixon, FYI. And he. I don't know what his deal was with me, but he told me Sometime in my 12th grade year, whoever you marry, Camille, is going to be henpecked. And that's a dumb thing. It's a dumb thing to say to any young girl. And it's also incorrect. And I remember, I mean, that created a little bit of a, of an identity. What, what do you think he was

Margi Dehlin [01:44:24] trying to say to you?

Camille Lewis [01:44:26] That I was strong willed, That I was strong, That I didn't disappear? I think that I wasn't compliant. I didn't. There was a boy in the class whose name was similar to mine. So we were always next to each other in alphabetical order. And so we always got matched up. We were always next to each other and we always got matched up. And that boy was. If I were to be nice, I would probably say he had some personality disorders. And because we were always matched up, he always wanted to compete with me and I was not the kind to. And I'm still not to flatter a boy to play dumb. And I think that is what my government teacher was trying to get at. That you're not being soft.

Margi Dehlin [01:45:32] Right.

Camille Lewis [01:45:33] And, and, and making him feel smarter and better. And I'm like, I'm not doing that.

Margi Dehlin [01:45:39] That's right.

Camille Lewis [01:45:40] I'm not doing that. That's silly. I, I am who I am. And, and my husband likes smart and that I don't flatter him.

Margi Dehlin [01:45:57] Yeah.

Faith, Doubts, and Homophobia in High School

John Dehlin [01:45:58] Let's talk a bit about your spiritual life and your beliefs in high school. So were you. Did you identify as Christian?

Camille Lewis [01:46:06] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:46:07] Did you love the. I'll, I'll ask a bunch of questions and then like, okay, so like, did you obey all the rules? Did you rebel? Did you, did you like to dress the way the church wanted? Did you push the lines with dating? Did you go to the movies or watch the TV that you shouldn't have? Were you fully identified or just like. It was more like a, A thing you did, but it really wasn't your identity? You know what I mean?

Camille Lewis [01:46:32] Yeah, I was a pretty good kid. I didn't necessarily rebel in any, in any way. And that might have been my neurodiversity, maybe that played into that. I'm not sure. But I, I mean, I wore what I wanted. I thought I did outside of school.

John Dehlin [01:46:52] So. Tank tops or shoulders?

Camille Lewis [01:46:54] Yeah. Oh yeah.

John Dehlin [01:46:54] Mini skirts or whatever.

Camille Lewis [01:46:57] Shorts. Yeah, I probably didn't wear mini skirts in the 80s.

John Dehlin [01:47:00] So you weren't doing Bob Jones University stand?

Camille Lewis [01:47:03] Not in high school.

John Dehlin [01:47:03] In high school, no. You're at a public high school?

Camille Lewis [01:47:05] No, Christian day school.

John Dehlin [01:47:06] Okay, Christian.

Camille Lewis [01:47:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:47:07] So that lasted through 12th grade?

Camille Lewis [01:47:09] Yes, yes, yes, yes. So.

John Dehlin [01:47:11] But they didn't enforce Bob Jones University type dressing standards.

Camille Lewis [01:47:15] At school, I was to have my knees covered, but at outside of school they didn't care.

John Dehlin [01:47:19] Okay, okay.

Camille Lewis [01:47:20] Now outside of school, Bob Jones cared, but outside of my Christian day school.

John Dehlin [01:47:24] But your parents didn't care.

Camille Lewis [01:47:25] I didn't care.

John Dehlin [01:47:26] Okay, so you didn't really have an orthodox upbringing outside of school.

Camille Lewis [01:47:31] Right, right, right, right. Not in a. Not in a. I mean, orthodox in religion, meaning. I, you know, we, but we, we could have ended affirm all the orthodox things, you know, Jesus is God, I'm a sinner. Jesus died for us, all those things. We believe the Bible.

Margi Dehlin [01:47:48] And you went to church.

Camille Lewis [01:47:49] Oh, we went to church the three times a week.

Margi Dehlin [01:47:51] Yeah, Sunday.

Camille Lewis [01:47:52] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:47:52] One straight.

John Dehlin [01:47:53] I should say orthoprax.

Margi Dehlin [01:47:54] That's right. Yes.

Camille Lewis [01:47:55] Fair enough, fair enough. I mean, now I didn't go to movies, okay? We rented movies back then, remember? And we would rent anything. My parents didn't care. They didn't care at all. I mean, and we'd watch them together. My, my parents like to create big discussions between, you know, in the family so we would, you know, watch all kinds of things. I didn't drink. I didn't really rebel. I didn't do drugs. I didn't. I mean, I listened to rock and roll. I love Whitney Houston. That was my favorite.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:31] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:48:32] So that was a rebellion from the fundamentalism, but not from My parents.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:38] Did you have any hobbies? Were you, like, encouraged to have, like, interests?

Camille Lewis [01:48:42] Yeah, I. I really liked sewing. I really. I was really. I made my winter coat. I would make suits. I just liked to sew. That was a big thing. And. And we lived in. In our suburb, you could walk to the public library, so that was a fun thing. I. All through high school, I would just walk there, especially in the summer because they had air conditioning and.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:08] Yeah. I have a question about school.

Camille Lewis [01:49:10] Okay.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:11] So it sounds like in many ways, school was, like, super structured.

Camille Lewis [01:49:16] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:16] And you have a lot of kind of church things coming in. Modesty and the uniform and all of that. But, like, how did you. How did you feel at school? And did you enjoy the learning part?

Camille Lewis [01:49:31] I did enjoy the learning part. I felt. I really did. I like those classes that were a little harder. Our math program at that school was very good, and I enjoyed it and did very well with it. That was one of the things that the government teacher was trying to tell me to. Because I was better at math than this boy. And I. It bothered him. The boy. And it. I was like, I don't care. This is what I'm good at. You. You do you. I do me kind of thing. And I like school.

Margi Dehlin [01:50:05] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:50:06] Yeah. I like. Again, the math, the history, English. That was fun.

Margi Dehlin [01:50:11] Yeah. Yep. I'm hearing a thinking brain.

Camille Lewis [01:50:15] Oh, yeah, I do. Like.

Margi Dehlin [01:50:16] Yeah. Huh.

Camille Lewis [01:50:17] Yeah. And my parents. I mean, that was. You know, we would have these rousing conversations.

Margi Dehlin [01:50:22] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:50:23] At dinner time. And we still do. My brother and I. Yeah. Yeah. My dear nieces and our spouses sometimes just leave. My brother and I will continue going on and on with conversations.

John Dehlin [01:50:38] So then what about doubts about the truthfulness of your religious tradition in high school? School.

Camille Lewis [01:50:44] I didn't. Oh, wow, that's interesting. I didn't really have.

John Dehlin [01:50:51] Well, I'll paint a picture. We'll give you time to think. So, like, is me as in high school, it's like, oh, yeah, the church is true. But, like, that whole keeping blacks from the priesthood thing, I don't get that. Or that whole polygamy thing that makes me feel uncomfortable. But I guess it's true because it's part of our history. You know what I mean? Or even, like, wait, we're the one true church, but we're only less than 1/2 of 1% of the population. Like, God's kind of inefficient. You know what I mean?

Camille Lewis [01:51:17] Fair.

John Dehlin [01:51:18] Or other churches, other Baptists really believe their faith, and I believe mine. So, like, why do we Both is the Holy Ghost just like confused, like how epistemology questions. So like did you have questions anything like that in high school?

Camille Lewis [01:51:33] If I had if about other churches because my mother was Catholic, raised Catholic, and my dad was raised Jehovah's Witnesses, we had a little bit more of an eclectic or ecumenical perspective on those other churches. Like. Oh, you know, it's just different. My parents were heavily involved with local ministries too. So there would be lots of other kinds of Protestants involved. And you know. Oh, so there's, you know, there's charismatic over there and there's a Pentecostal over there. So it was a little more breezy.

John Dehlin [01:52:04] They weren't invalid churches.

Camille Lewis [01:52:06] Yeah, they weren't invalid. They're just not ours.

John Dehlin [01:52:07] See, that's the thing. The Mormon Church, it's the only true church.

Camille Lewis [01:52:11] Yeah. And that.

John Dehlin [01:52:12] It invites that question that I have. The only church.

Camille Lewis [01:52:16] Yeah, right. The, the harsher the marker, the more you want to question it. And maybe that. Because my parents were like, well, no, that's different.

John Dehlin [01:52:23] Okay, that makes sense.

Camille Lewis [01:52:24] It was not as much of a worry, but I did in. In for. I don't know why, but in high school, in my 12th grade year, I did some research for a. You know, you have to write. We had to write a big paper on Prohibition. And I was. That's kind of funny that it was the 1920s again. I don't know what it is with that decade. The, that research into prohibition made me realize there was some flaky politics in my, in our tradition. So maybe that was more my questioning.

John Dehlin [01:53:02] So we've talked about just flat out racism. Homophobia.

Camille Lewis [01:53:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:53:07] Anti women stuff.

Camille Lewis [01:53:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:53:10] Did any of that register with you or bother you?

Camille Lewis [01:53:13] It, it, the, in high school, the racism. I didn't, it didn't. It just passed me by.

John Dehlin [01:53:21] If someone were to come to you in high school and say, what do you think about black people?

Camille Lewis [01:53:25] Oh, yeah, they're fine.

John Dehlin [01:53:26] Would you ever be friends with the black person?

Camille Lewis [01:53:27] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would be friends with a black person.

John Dehlin [01:53:30] Are they equal?

Camille Lewis [01:53:31] I had a, I had a situation. We don't do missions like, like Mormons do, but you're heavily encouraged to go on some sort of a thing, like a mission. And so one of the kinds of things I did was working for Child Evangelism Fellowship in the summers, doing backyard Bible clubs. So like a vacation Bible school. I don't know if you have a vacation Bible school tradition, but a little one week fun thing for kids, but in backyards. And my partner was a black lady. And you know, we were. It was no big deal.

John Dehlin [01:54:05] If you had dated a black boy

Camille Lewis [01:54:06] in high school, that would have been

John Dehlin [01:54:08] a problem to you or your parents?

Camille Lewis [01:54:09] My parents. Not to me. To my parents. They would have been upset about that.

John Dehlin [01:54:12] But you. And did you have any gay friends? And if so, would you have had any opinions about that? I know it's pre will and grace. Right.

Camille Lewis [01:54:20] So I. When was the. Not in high school. I don't know of any of my classmates that are. Have come out.

John Dehlin [01:54:30] Was your church haranguing against gay people as part of their, you know.

Camille Lewis [01:54:34] No, I don't think that was on the radar yet.

John Dehlin [01:54:37] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:54:38] That would come in the 90s as I remember.

John Dehlin [01:54:40] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:54:41] Wait. Yeah, the 90s. That's when it started.

John Dehlin [01:54:43] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:54:45] I remember when it started in it. Bob Jones though.

John Dehlin [01:54:48] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:54:48] And the ranging was. Because of an event in San Francisco which I can talk about when we get there.

John Dehlin [01:54:58] And would you have been okay with the civil rights movement? Martin Luther King?

Camille Lewis [01:55:01] I mean based on the. Based. Yeah, I think I would have because it's for. It's for equality. Who's against equality? That's the. The kind of. Maybe again because of the neurodiversity, I would think. Well, aren't we all for equality? I remember at Bob Jones, my fresh. No, my sophomore year hearing a public speaking classmate give a speech about how Martin Luther King was evil. And it's like, I don't know that. Why would you say that? There's, you know, he was a communist. He plagiarized all this just typical right wing stuff. And it, it was the first time I had heard it.

John Dehlin [01:55:41] Yeah. I didn't really get. I didn't really learn that until I was at BYU either.

Camille Lewis [01:55:45] Oh, okay. Okay. Interesting.

John Dehlin [01:55:47] I didn't get that growing up in high school.

Camille Lewis [01:55:48] Interesting.

John Dehlin [01:55:49] About Martin Luther King. Yeah. Evil.

Camille Lewis [01:55:51] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:55:52] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:55:53] So. So there really wasn't. And I didn't date in high school. Oh, I went on some dates, but I, the, the boys were not interested. They were not. You know, I was the. Obviously I intimidated them.

Margi Dehlin [01:56:09] As.

Camille Lewis [01:56:09] As my.

Margi Dehlin [01:56:10] You weren't playing by the rules?

Camille Lewis [01:56:12] No. The gender rules. And I was looking. I wanted, I wanted to date a person that I didn't have to be. Not me with. And those weren't those boys.

Choosing and Attending Bob Jones University

John Dehlin [01:56:27] So you know, a faithful Mormon kid is going to go to one of the BYU's. That's just the way it is. So your dad had gone to University of Michigan and graduated?

Camille Lewis [01:56:36] Yeah. Oh yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:37] But he was a convert. So what was the expectation regarding university that's funny.

Camille Lewis [01:56:43] It. It. Because of. I. I would probably say because of the experience in Christian day schools where nearly all the teachers were BJU trained, if you were bookish, you kind. And a fundamentalist, a faithful fundamentalist, you kind of went to Bob Jones.

Margi Dehlin [01:56:58] Okay.

Camille Lewis [01:56:58] That was just.

John Dehlin [01:56:59] And that's what your parents wanted for you.

Camille Lewis [01:57:01] By that, they would have been okay with anything. Now, my brother went to Bob Jones. He's eight years older. There's a. Even though he's eight years older, there's a little competition there. You know, if Steve did it, I can do it, too. Steve has. Yeah. Steve has a PhD in rhetoric. I have a PhD in rhetoric, which is a little bit like, if Steve could do it, I could do it, too. So there's that. Not. Not competition as much as. Not rivalry, more like, I can do it, too.

John Dehlin [01:57:32] And how would that sort of, like, go to BJU University idea have been framed for you growing up?

Camille Lewis [01:57:39] Because we visited Steve. You know, we would drive from Detroit to Greenville, South Carolina, twice a year to visit him. It was just like almost. I. I knew that place. It was. I. I associated it with my brother, who was, you know, loved him. It was fun. I met his friends. You know, seemed like a.

John Dehlin [01:58:03] A natural step because that's a major part of the business model. You get those kids. Oh, yeah. At a religious university where they're dating people of the faith.

Camille Lewis [01:58:15] You're right.

John Dehlin [01:58:15] And then they get married young and start having kids while they're indoctrinated.

Camille Lewis [01:58:21] Yeah. Then that would fit.

John Dehlin [01:58:23] And then they. Then they become tithe paying, devout members, more likely for the rest of their lives.

Camille Lewis [01:58:29] Because. Because Grant and I started dating our sophomore year, and we got married right after we graduated, and then we got our master's degree at bju, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

John Dehlin [01:58:39] Yeah. Okay. Okay. So it really wasn't a question. You were gonna go to bju.

Camille Lewis [01:58:43] No, it wasn't. I mean, I could have gone. I could have gone to, you know, Wayne State or whatever, but that. It was just.

John Dehlin [01:58:50] And so did you know what you were getting into as a freshman at bju? And because you didn't live BJU standards, you know, outside of school.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:01] Did your brother ever talk about it?

Camille Lewis [01:59:03] Well, Steve. Steve and I are pretty similar in that you just kind of. I have a friend who jokes that academics can just be a head on a stick, that we just, like, we're all. We're all up in our brains and we forget there's a body. And I think Steve and I are both that way that we kind of forget about anything. Anything.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:25] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [01:59:26] So he told. I mean, I heard about it from him again, he's male, so maybe it was different. But I heard about it and saw it and I guess I didn't. I just guess I didn't accept. When I arrived at Bob Jones in 1986 in the fall, my parents dropped me off and they said goodbye, you know, and I went right into the meeting for first year women students to hear all the rules. And I sobbed through the whole thing.

Margi Dehlin [02:00:01] Oh.

Camille Lewis [02:00:02] And I'm like, did I know? Did my body know what was. I'm about to. Why am I sobbing? I still don't know why I did that. But it, There was something that I absorbed that I was like, oh, this is different. This is more scrutiny maybe.

Margi Dehlin [02:00:18] Yeah. What's being at. What is going to be asked of you to make. Yeah. And I was,

Camille Lewis [02:00:24] you know, I got 11 demerits, so I was a good girl. I obeyed. If at BJU, if you got fewer than 10 demerits in a semester, they were erased. And if you got two semesters of no demerits, so 10 or fewer in two semesters, you got what we called a goody goody letter at the end of the year from Bob Jones iii where he praised you for being such a model Christian. And so I have three of those goody goody letters because that one time I got 11. Oh, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:01:01] So.

Camille Lewis [02:01:02] Oops. Nesta.

John Dehlin [02:01:03] So you stopped hearing, hearing all the rules.

Camille Lewis [02:01:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:01:06] You didn't, you didn't know what you're getting into.

Camille Lewis [02:01:08] I, or, or my body knew and my brain didn't. I think maybe, I think maybe that was something going on.

John Dehlin [02:01:16] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:01:17] Again, the head on the sick. It doesn't necessarily connect.

John Dehlin [02:01:21] Were the academic. Like BYU within Mormonism has been perceived as a relatively academically rigorous institution.

Camille Lewis [02:01:30] That's the perception from. As an outsider, I don't think that bju. BJU likes to say they have that rigor. They really think they do. But it wasn't accredited until.

John Dehlin [02:01:43] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:01:44] 2014.

John Dehlin [02:01:45] Yeah, yeah. That's a, that's a big difference.

Camille Lewis [02:01:48] That's a huge difference. I mean, because you can take a BYU degree and go anywhere. If I understand.

John Dehlin [02:01:53] Oh, like the accounting program was like number two in the country and you know.

Camille Lewis [02:01:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:01:57] Their program, the law school was, you know.

Camille Lewis [02:01:59] Oh, I didn't know they had a law school. Okay.

John Dehlin [02:02:02] Yeah. I mean, yeah, historically there were certain, at least certain degrees or departments that were world class.

Camille Lewis [02:02:10] They like to think that they're world class, but that's I think that's more propaganda. I mean, bju. We made jokes about byu. Bju. There were jokes. Y' all probably don't make those jokes.

John Dehlin [02:02:22] No.

Camille Lewis [02:02:22] Why would you even think about bju?

John Dehlin [02:02:24] But we would only hear about BJU in the context of, like, a political debate.

Margi Dehlin [02:02:28] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:02:29] Makes sense, right? Well, because the law school, it comes up in. In law classes because of the Supreme Court decision.

John Dehlin [02:02:36] Yeah. Okay. Okay. So. So did Bob Jones University have that stink when you attended?

Camille Lewis [02:02:46] Oh, yeah, it did.

John Dehlin [02:02:47] And were you aware that it had a stink?

Camille Lewis [02:02:49] No.

John Dehlin [02:02:49] You had no idea?

Camille Lewis [02:02:51] I didn't.

John Dehlin [02:02:51] Except my freshman year, I should say stigma, not stink.

Camille Lewis [02:02:54] It's. Okay. My freshman year, my brother was on faculty, and so, you know, teaching rhetoric.

Margi Dehlin [02:03:05] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:03:06] And he had not had his PhD yet, but he was teaching those classes. And he. He and I talked a lot. And it was the typical. Is that we say Kaminsky argument. And an argument's not a bad thing.

Margi Dehlin [02:03:18] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:03:18] It's just a discussion. And I would hear the. The antagonism about Billy Graham from the pulpit, from chapel. And I asked him, steve, why do we hate Billy Graham? I don't get it. And Steve, remind me again. And Steve, who was, you know, we're cut from the very same cloth. He was raised in the same house. He was like, I don't know. I really don't know. It has something to do with liberalism, but I'm not sure. I said, but we really. Why do we hate him? And it bothered me. It really. I didn't get it because mom and dad would talk about Billy Graham and, you know, like, oh, he's a good man. You know, he preaches the gospel. He's a good guy. That typical, you know, accepting, egalitarian or ecumenical, I should say, perspective. And so there. Because BJU was so harsh and was so pervasively harsh, the rebellion and those questions started.

John Dehlin [02:04:16] So three hours thinking or learning about bju. I think I know the answer. It's the. It's that Billy Graham was too progressive on racial issues.

Camille Lewis [02:04:25] Yes, precisely. I know that. I absolutely know that now.

John Dehlin [02:04:28] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:04:29] Absolutely. And. Because in. In.

John Dehlin [02:04:32] You were raised in it. Yeah, but I. I figured that out in three hours. You were raised in it, and you couldn't answer the question.

Camille Lewis [02:04:37] And.

John Dehlin [02:04:38] But that's the bubble that we live in.

Camille Lewis [02:04:40] It is. It's a bubble.

John Dehlin [02:04:40] And.

Camille Lewis [02:04:41] And the. They would. They would. Again, I sound like a speech teacher, but they would take the word segregation. They were really against his racial integration. They were preaching racial segregation, but they called it separation or ecclesiastical separation. And so it was cloaked. It was hidden. The, the racism was hidden. The white supremacy was hidden.

John Dehlin [02:05:05] This may be totally irrelevant or even feel inappropriate, but I have to ask because you say you have a Polish background.

Camille Lewis [02:05:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:05:14] Is it a Jewish Polish?

Camille Lewis [02:05:16] No. I looked because I wondered. I got the DNA probably through some Mormon company and no, it wasn't. I thought, I was curious because my dad is from, I'm not going to say it correctly. He would want me to. In Poland and there is a heavy Jewish population. And because my grandparents were Russellites, they tended towards Zionism. And I thought, well, maybe they were. So, I mean, because my dad taught me from, and mom early on that antisemitism was wrong. That was vivid. And I thought, oh, maybe there's Jewish background. But no.

John Dehlin [02:05:59] Okay, okay. Just curious.

Camille Lewis [02:06:01] No.

John Dehlin [02:06:02] Okay. So what was your time at Bob Jones University like? Did you love it? Did you hate it? Was it.

Camille Lewis [02:06:07] Well, if I had left after four years, I probably would still be a fundamentalist. As an undergraduate, I was fine. I, it was big enough and I had learned to disappear enough that I could operate fine. I could, you know, be an academic, be, be bookish and enjoy that world, you know, the book world. I, I, I was, I knew how to look obedient and I was pretty obedient. But like my friend, I had a friend who, she didn't look as obedient. She looked more European, a little edgier. She got in trouble more when she and I were doing the same things, but it's just I didn't get scrutiny in quite the same way.

John Dehlin [02:06:58] So normal ish university experience. Go to classes.

Camille Lewis [02:07:01] Go to classes. I was on time. I, I, you know, I met my husband. Yeah, I dated. Yeah, I dated. It was casual. It was all casual until I met Grant. And he was awesome.

Margi Dehlin [02:07:16] So what did you love about Grant?

Camille Lewis [02:07:17] What stood out about Grant was a gentleman. He is the only. My dad would, when we were walking, my dad would treat me like a princess. He would say this gallant story of the, the, A gentleman always walks on the outside of the sidewalk so that the carriages as they're, as they're driving by, they don't splash on her dress. He would tell me this gallant little story. And Grant is the only person I've known who knew that story as well. So I was impressed with that. Grant was hilarious. He was so fun. He is, he's funny. He made me laugh. And we could talk about anything. He, we're still talking about anything, which is awesome. So we just, we just, he was funny, he was kind and we got along very well.

John Dehlin [02:08:15] How orthoprax and orthodox was his upbringing.

Camille Lewis [02:08:18] That's interesting. He would say, now he is. He's from Missouri. He's from St. Louis, Missouri. So his Baptistness was a little more connected to the Texas Baptist, which could be a little bit more. Could be a little bit more hard nose. But his parents too were not, you know, you. You obey at school, but when you come home, you can go to movies, you can wear shorts. It was a little more dance. Oh, no, not that. No, don't dance.

Margi Dehlin [02:08:54] Don't take it that far, John.

John Dehlin [02:08:57] Well, again, you're saying all the things you didn't necessarily observe at home.

Camille Lewis [02:09:01] He could. He could go to movies. I mean, it's like I could. I didn't go though. But he would go to movies and his. His mother wore pants. But no, dancing Baptists don't dance. Yeah, we're bad at it. We're just.

John Dehlin [02:09:15] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:09:17] I remember seeing my son's dance. First time I saw children, my children dance at a wedding. And it was glorious. They were so good. They were so good. But anyway, not me.

Margi Dehlin [02:09:30] There's a. There can be like an embodiment. Like you kind of have to be in your body.

Camille Lewis [02:09:34] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [02:09:35] Yes. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:09:36] Yes. And Gavin, he was four and he was doing the worm on the floor. It was just.

Margi Dehlin [02:09:41] Oh, child, this is funny.

John Dehlin [02:09:44] Yeah, this is totally going back in the timeline. But I didn't. I didn't have you talk about the graffiti you found in your yearbook. Do you want to tell that story? Just because. Yeah, I apologize for going back. Yeah, we're back in high school. Just for a second.

Camille Lewis [02:09:58] I was, I was bullied something fierce in high school. And I don't know. Well, I do know why I'm. I'm like I've said in the outline, I'm neurospicy. And so the, the, you know, kids pick up on that. And I was. There was all kinds of things that they did drive by my house to. I don't know what they were doing there, follow me, prank phone calls.

Camille Lewis [02:10:26] I did have two different of my classmates come to my house years later and apologize for the way they treated me. And I always appreciated that. So it was so it was known. But one of the things was in our. I was on yearbook and we had a little cubby for our work that we'd keep our work in. And everybody's name was on it. And someone just put, my name was Camille Kaminsky. And they put Camille Kaminsky will die. And you know, well, that's True.

Camille Lewis [02:10:58] It was. It was indicative of the hate that I got. And I. I don't know. Again, it was just my. I think my neurodiversity that caused that, which. Which probably also made me more distant from those kids.

John Dehlin [02:11:16] Was there a religious connection to that at all, or.

Camille Lewis [02:11:19] I don't.

John Dehlin [02:11:20] Just random.

Camille Lewis [02:11:21] Random. I think.

John Dehlin [02:11:22] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:11:23] I think.

John Dehlin [02:11:23] Okay. All right. Just checking.

Camille Lewis [02:11:25] And it was small. I mean, those Christian day schools are not big. I mean, there were 23 in my graduating class.

John Dehlin [02:11:30] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:11:31] So it's, you know, it's easier to pick on somebody, you know.

John Dehlin [02:11:34] Twelfth grade.

Camille Lewis [02:11:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:11:35] Graduating class had 23 people. Oh, wow.

Camille Lewis [02:11:39] So I was the, you know, the. The. Yeah, the token neurospicy person.

John Dehlin [02:11:46] Okay.

Margi Dehlin [02:11:47] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:11:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:11:48] Okay. So normally college was where my questioning of the church really accelerated, because for me, I'm learning about evolution. I'm learning about Age of the Earth and geology. I'm learning about the civil rights movement and literature, and I'm reading the great books and seeing how diverse the world is. And so byu, weirdly. And I had liberal.

John Dehlin [02:12:15] Not politically liberal. But they were politically liberal. But that's not what I mean. They were sort of theologically liberal professors that were like, you know, abortion's complicated and evolution's not probably not true, and Noah's story probably isn't literal, and Adam and Eve probably may not have been literal. And the church has made mistakes, and maybe the priesthood ban was a mistake. And, you know, I was getting all that at byu, but it was in an honors class. So, like, there are other people were at BYU who wouldn't have gotten those messages. And I apologize for the length of this question, but the.

Camille Lewis [02:12:51] That's okay. No, I got it.

John Dehlin [02:12:52] The reason I'm asking it is, did you have any intellectual awakenings in your undergraduate years? No, not.

Camille Lewis [02:12:59] What. Because they were very careful to not do that.

John Dehlin [02:13:02] So you had no liberalness.

Camille Lewis [02:13:04] Now, when I was teaching those same classes, of course I'm not there anymore. Probably part of this. When I was teaching those classes, I would push, but my teachers, I don't remember any of them pushing in grad school. I started to get some of it.

John Dehlin [02:13:20] Okay, so we'll get there.

Camille Lewis [02:13:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:13:21] So as far as undergrad goes, up until even getting married, no. No doubts, no questions, business as usual. And you said you just stayed small and that's how you survived. No big conflicts or trauma, traumatic events as an undergrad, you know, not really. Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:13:38] No.

John Dehlin [02:13:39] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:13:39] No, it was pretty peaceful.

John Dehlin [02:13:40] Okay. That's crazy.

Camille Lewis [02:13:42] Yeah, it is. And pretty boring, you know, in a sense, okay.

Marriage, Parenthood, and Corporal Punishment Beliefs

John Dehlin [02:13:45] Okay. So you all got married what year?

Camille Lewis [02:13:47] 1990.

John Dehlin [02:13:47] Which would have been your. What, senior year.

Camille Lewis [02:13:50] Senior year.

John Dehlin [02:13:51] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:13:51] Right after we graduated.

John Dehlin [02:13:52] And was the plan. Did they have the quiverful thing where you have as many kids as possible?

Camille Lewis [02:13:57] Not really.

John Dehlin [02:13:57] No.

Camille Lewis [02:13:58] I think that came later.

John Dehlin [02:13:59] Really?

Camille Lewis [02:14:00] Yeah. Because we didn't. There was a presumption. In fact, I. I don't know that it was ever stated, it might have been unstated, that you were not to have children while you were in grad school.

John Dehlin [02:14:13] Whoa.

Camille Lewis [02:14:14] At Bob Jones. What?

John Dehlin [02:14:16] Wait. But, I mean, would they have wanted people to go out into the world and delay having kids? Because our church is like, yeah, you're married as soon as possible, have as many kids as possible. You know, that's healthy.

Camille Lewis [02:14:26] It was not that unusual that we were not.

Margi Dehlin [02:14:29] She was like, y'. All.

Camille Lewis [02:14:31] Sorry. It was not that. I didn't feel it.

John Dehlin [02:14:35] Oh, okay.

Camille Lewis [02:14:35] I didn't feel it. Now again, I. Maybe the head on the stick problem is going on and it just. Whatever. I mean, my mom was 39 when she had me, so, you know.

John Dehlin [02:14:46] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:14:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:14:47] Okay. So not the pressure to get married young and have as many babies.

Camille Lewis [02:14:51] You got married young. You got married young. So you have sex.

John Dehlin [02:14:55] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:14:56] So I mean, we got married as soon as it was legitimately possible in 1990, you know, right after we graduated

John Dehlin [02:15:03] from grad school or.

Camille Lewis [02:15:04] No, from undergrad.

John Dehlin [02:15:05] Okay, okay, okay.

Margi Dehlin [02:15:06] But then being in grad school. School, you're not necessarily feeling pressured to have kids.

John Dehlin [02:15:10] Interesting. That's different.

Camille Lewis [02:15:12] It is different.

John Dehlin [02:15:12] That's different.

Camille Lewis [02:15:13] It is different. You were presumed to go on the pill. That's usually what we did. Now, I don't know if that was written down or anything, but that was presumed. It was in the ether.

John Dehlin [02:15:21] Okay. So we. Early on, contraception was viewed as evil. So y' all don't have that history?

Camille Lewis [02:15:27] Not when we were young married. Okay. I think some of. Some of them now feel that way. Yeah. But not when we were young.

John Dehlin [02:15:33] 50s, 60s, 70s. In the Mormon Church, contraception was viewed as evil.

Camille Lewis [02:15:38] So, like the Catholics, kind of.

John Dehlin [02:15:40] Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep. And we changed that at some point, but.

Camille Lewis [02:15:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:15:43] Okay. Okay. Okay. So you. Okay, so here's a question that's going to feel very jarring for those who are listening and who didn't hear the intro. Were. Did your parents believe that they should hit children and tell. Oh, tell our audience why I'm asking you that question.

Camille Lewis [02:16:04] Okay, so. My parents.

John Dehlin [02:16:12] You may not want to answer.

Camille Lewis [02:16:13] Yeah, no, my parents spanked me twice.

John Dehlin [02:16:15] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:16:17] Maybe three times.

John Dehlin [02:16:18] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:16:18] I remember Two or three times. Yeah. And it was an extreme. Meaning we knew it was. It was presumed to be an extreme thing. Not required, not necessary, but meaning you don't have to hit often. So I. It did exist. I always felt my mom was a little bit skeptical of it.

John Dehlin [02:16:42] What was taught.

Margi Dehlin [02:16:43] Reluctant.

Camille Lewis [02:16:43] Reluctant.

John Dehlin [02:16:44] What was taught about hitting children? When you were growing up, the church,

Camille Lewis [02:16:48] it was presumed that you must spank. I heard that from the pulpit. That God requires. That God requires parents to physically cause pain. So the children learn that they're sinners, so that they learn that they need a savior and that they learn to obey.

John Dehlin [02:17:08] But it's almost sounding like. Like a, like with the Pentecostals, there's the speaking in tongues rite of passage. Yeah. It's almost like a parent would have a rite of passage of hitting their kid. Oh.

Camille Lewis [02:17:19] See, I've compared it to a sacrament. Like they almost think it's a means of grace. You know that isn't it? That there's a means of grace to that hitting, to pain?

John Dehlin [02:17:32] No, sometimes it's a rite of passage.

Camille Lewis [02:17:33] Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right, you're right, you're right.

Margi Dehlin [02:17:35] That's kind of like the two by twos too.

John Dehlin [02:17:37] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:17:38] Oh, yes, I heard that. And the two by twos. I heard that conversation.

John Dehlin [02:17:43] You're right. And there's probably a biblical verse. Spoil the rod, spoil the out shout or something. Some verse.

Camille Lewis [02:17:49] They, they, they do. They take proverbs very literally. Which Proverbs?

John Dehlin [02:17:55] What?

Camille Lewis [02:17:56] Which says, you know, the blueness of the wound causes healing or, or. Or cleansing. And there's some others, you know, the, the clobber verses, the.

Margi Dehlin [02:18:05] The.

John Dehlin [02:18:05] We have no idea what.

Camille Lewis [02:18:07] Sorry, The. In proverbs, there are a few verses that could be taken, if they're taken literally, that you have to hit your children.

Margi Dehlin [02:18:14] Mm.

Camille Lewis [02:18:15] This person here as, as I sit here would say they're proverbs. They're not to be taken literally. They're proverbs. Like, you know, a stitch in time doesn't literally save nine. That's not why we say that proverb. It means do a little work now so you don't have to do a bunch of work later.

Margi Dehlin [02:18:32] Got it.

Camille Lewis [02:18:32] And those proverbs are not intended to be. The rod is not intended to be a literal rod. It's a parents authority to say to bring in a child and to protect a child. That's how this person would say it.

John Dehlin [02:18:48] Okay. So, I mean, like I was spanked a couple times by my dad and my mom. Yeah, my mom There are a couple times she'd hit me on the head with a ring or get a yardstick and swap my legs. But, I mean, I do not feel like I was abused.

Camille Lewis [02:19:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:19:04] I don't think they were taught that. It's certainly. I don't think it was ever part of a curriculum. So it was. We experienced that. I don't know if it was sort of like. That sounds formalized into the religious culture.

Camille Lewis [02:19:17] I think it was because my parents were converts. It didn't. They weren't as Maybe indoctrinated into a curriculum by the time my children came along. However, their. Was a formal curriculum. Literal. From Gary Ezzo. I don't know if that term, that man means anything to you.

John Dehlin [02:19:39] No. Tell us.

Camille Lewis [02:19:40] Growing kids, God's way. Oh, what a terrible name. Where he would say, who's this guy? Some South Carolinian who has created a curriculum for fundamentalist parents about how, even from infancy, to raise them so that they. Have to earn their connection with their parents. That's how I would summarize it. A baby. Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you have to teach a child from feeding them to, you know, newborn. That they only get food when you decide, which is setting a child of control involved.

John Dehlin [02:20:27] And then. Isn't there something called blanket parenting?

Camille Lewis [02:20:30] Yeah, that. That. And I think.

John Dehlin [02:20:31] Tell us what that is for those who.

Camille Lewis [02:20:32] That's more of.

John Dehlin [02:20:33] Is it called blanket parenting? What's it called?

Camille Lewis [02:20:35] Michael Pearl does that. Michael Pearl is another blanket. Blanket training.

John Dehlin [02:20:40] Blanket training. And a kid can't get off the block.

Camille Lewis [02:20:43] Yeah. And you hit him if he. If he goes off the blanket.

John Dehlin [02:20:47] Right.

Camille Lewis [02:20:47] A baby, you know, crawling, which is not good. That's not good. It's not good. It's just. I mean, it's so hot.

John Dehlin [02:20:55] Take that.

Camille Lewis [02:20:56] Is not. Not good. Sorry. You know, And. And there's a lot of hitting. And Michael Pearl's another one. Yeah, he's.

John Dehlin [02:21:05] There's. There's a hitting and spanking. Right.

Camille Lewis [02:21:07] I say the. I say hitting because I don't want it to be. It's a strategic choice.

John Dehlin [02:21:15] It's more than a slap of the open hand.

Camille Lewis [02:21:17] Yes, that's true.

John Dehlin [02:21:18] Right?

Camille Lewis [02:21:18] That's true. There's. I mean, for the blanket training, I think you. The mother is supposed to sit there with a ruler or a glue stick. That's a big deal. It's a hit with a glue stick.

John Dehlin [02:21:30] Wow.

Margi Dehlin [02:21:30] For a baby.

John Dehlin [02:21:31] Oh, yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:21:32] And you hit the hand.

Margi Dehlin [02:21:33] So we're making. We're making light of this, but this is actually really.

Camille Lewis [02:21:38] Yeah, I've seen glue sticks Used for toddlers at Dollywood, that is. I mean, because Dollywood is kind of the. The place you go for vacation, and it's near Sevierville, where the Church of God has their headquarters. So you have a lot of Pentecostals there. So a mom will come around with her, and you'll see several glue sticks sticking out of her diaper bag, and she'll just yank it out, hit the child in line at the ride. And.

Camille Lewis [02:22:09] Yeah, I usually stop when I see it because I. It's. And I. We were in line for the cars with my kids, and I was going, the lady was hitting her. Her toddler. And I was like, what are you doing? It's just. He's not doing anything bad. He's just been a little kid. It's an amusement park. He's just noisy. Grant takes armies. Come on. You don't want to get in a fight at an amusement park. But.

John Dehlin [02:22:35] Okay, don't judge me. Until today, I'd never heard of the term clobber verses, so.

Camille Lewis [02:22:41] Oh, okay.

John Dehlin [02:22:42] So I. I chat. GPT them.

Camille Lewis [02:22:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:22:45] Okay. It's the one thing I trust Chad GPT for. I'm going to read a few of them.

Margi Dehlin [02:22:49] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:22:49] Okay. Margi, have you heard of clubber verses before?

Margi Dehlin [02:22:51] No.

John Dehlin [02:22:52] Okay. It's. It's apparently a thing.

Camille Lewis [02:22:53] Yeah, it is a thing because you said it, and Chad said my LGBTQ friends use. They have the same term, but they use it for. For verses that are taken out of context.

John Dehlin [02:23:03] When I first Googled it. Yeah, there was an LGBT context to the responses, so then I judged BTD. All right, so Proverbs 13:24. He that spareth his rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him, chasteneth him betimes. Okay, that's one. Is that familiar?

Camille Lewis [02:23:23] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:23:23] Oh, yeah. I heard you moan. Why are you moaning over there?

Margi Dehlin [02:23:26] It's just a rough go, but, I

Camille Lewis [02:23:28] mean, if you're gonna take it literally, the rod is a literal rod. PVC pipe. Luke Lustic paddle. Sorry, why do I know that? And then it's dark.

John Dehlin [02:23:42] Yeah, we're laughing, but it's dark.

Camille Lewis [02:23:43] It is dark.

Margi Dehlin [02:23:44] And we'll take a sensitive take, too.

Camille Lewis [02:23:47] Yeah, the. The. The. My. This person here is saying. No, the book is trying to say the Proverbs trying to say, don't refrain from using your authority to protect your child.

John Dehlin [02:24:01] Okay, sorry. Proverbs 22:15. Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. Margi, thoughts?

Margi Dehlin [02:24:16] We're not doing this dance. You just keep reading.

John Dehlin [02:24:20] Okay?

Camille Lewis [02:24:21] It's a dance.

John Dehlin [02:24:22] Any commentary, Camille?

Camille Lewis [02:24:23] Well, that. I mean, yeah, that was. That's used. I just read that.

John Dehlin [02:24:26] I mean, that's. I. I am interpreting it.

Camille Lewis [02:24:29] Yeah, you. That's how they interpret it.

John Dehlin [02:24:30] Yeah, that's. I'm giving it a cold reading.

Camille Lewis [02:24:33] Yeah, I. I just did a little article for the Encyclopedia Bible and its reception about punishment. And I quoted Michael Pearl, who quoted that verse exactly. And he said, see, that means you need to hit. You need to punish your.

John Dehlin [02:24:46] This gets worse.

Camille Lewis [02:24:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:24:47] Proverbs 23:13, 14. Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod and shall deliver his soul from hell. This is a Mormon Bible. And like, I make fun of Mormons for never reading, like, DNC132, where Joseph is. Where God is commanding Emma to let Joseph have polygamous wives, else she be destroyed. This is in the Mormon Bible and I've never paid attention to it.

Camille Lewis [02:25:25] Yeah, that's horrendous. It is horrendous. It's horrendous. And what my gentle parenting friends and I would wanna say is, look, we know you obviously can beat a child to death. You can't. I mean, it's a terrible thing to

John Dehlin [02:25:40] say, but God's promising you your child will be okay.

Camille Lewis [02:25:44] So we reason. It can't mean that literally. It's gotta mean something else, because you can beat a child.

John Dehlin [02:25:51] Well, I mean, there are ocd, scrupulous, ultra orthodox, ultra orthoprax religious people of

Margi Dehlin [02:25:59] any tradition or less than. Than good intention.

Camille Lewis [02:26:04] Less, Right?

John Dehlin [02:26:05] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this is that.

Camille Lewis [02:26:08] And that's. That's a big one, that one you just read. That's the. And the blueness of the wound one. I don't know where that is.

John Dehlin [02:26:13] I'll see if I find it. So there's Proverbs 29:15. The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame. Who freaking wrote Proverbs? Who wrote Proverbs?

Camille Lewis [02:26:25] I also think. Well, it was also traditional. You know, it was like.

John Dehlin [02:26:28] He's viewed as wise.

Camille Lewis [02:26:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:26:30] What the.

Camille Lewis [02:26:31] He's also. It's an anthology. He's gathering all the things that he's heard. You know, I'm sorry to be. That was my rhetorician coming up.

John Dehlin [02:26:40] Your apologist.

Margi Dehlin [02:26:41] You know, aside from less than good intentioned, it just provides a justification for parents lashing out when they can't emotionally regulate, then they can come back and justify it with a belief set of. Like, it's for their own good.

Camille Lewis [02:27:00] Absolutely.

Margi Dehlin [02:27:01] I'm doing it because I love them. And look, it's. It's right here. They need it.

Camille Lewis [02:27:06] Absolutely.

Margi Dehlin [02:27:07] They. And that's the really troubling aspect of it.

Camille Lewis [02:27:11] Absolutely. And that's exactly what happens.

Margi Dehlin [02:27:14] Yeah. As a. As opposed to adults that.

Camille Lewis [02:27:17] Actually, I'm the adult. That's. I mean, this is what I tell My. Told myself. I'm the adult. You're the baby. I'm. I'm gonna.

Margi Dehlin [02:27:23] That's right.

Camille Lewis [02:27:24] Take care of you. I'm.

Margi Dehlin [02:27:26] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:27:29] Hitting is just so ridiculous.

John Dehlin [02:27:32] Okay. And I'm. I'm actually. Okay. And then Proverbs 20:30. The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil. So do stripes, the inward parts of the belly. Now, I think of stripes as Jesus was hit while he was being tortured. So stripes. I think of his physical beating.

Camille Lewis [02:27:56] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:27:57] So it's basically saying, bruise your kid.

Camille Lewis [02:27:59] Yeah, that's what. That's how they take it. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:28:03] Jeez. The proverbs needs to be stricken from the Bible, man.

Margi Dehlin [02:28:10] But it's just another area. I mean, in the Bible. The Bible says a lot of specific things.

John Dehlin [02:28:19] It's one I was not aware. Like, I'm 55. I've been studying religion for a while.

Camille Lewis [02:28:26] Long time.

John Dehlin [02:28:26] Did you know the Bible had this.

Margi Dehlin [02:28:28] I knew that it had. Had it. I did not know the specific verses,

John Dehlin [02:28:33] like, to what I said. I didn't know it had this literal. Anyway.

Camille Lewis [02:28:36] Wow.

John Dehlin [02:28:36] I'm shocked.

Camille Lewis [02:28:36] Okay, so you see why I objected.

John Dehlin [02:28:41] So for. So back to your story. So for someone raised in the 70s and 80s, it sounds like you had a normative amount of corporal parental.

Camille Lewis [02:28:53] I think so. I think so. For 70s and 80s. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:28:55] Okay. Okay. It was similar to mine. Yeah. Like, maybe my dad spanked me with the belt once.

Camille Lewis [02:29:00] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:01] But. Okay. I think my mom spanked me more than my dad, honestly.

Camille Lewis [02:29:07] Because she's around more. Right.

John Dehlin [02:29:08] No, for sure. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So. All right, so fast forward to Bob Jones University. Are there religion classes at Bob Jones

Intellectual Awakening and Graduate School at BJU

Camille Lewis [02:29:17] University you have to take. You have to take one every semester.

John Dehlin [02:29:20] Same with byu.

Camille Lewis [02:29:21] Oh, I did not know that.

John Dehlin [02:29:22] Yeah, yeah. Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants. Are they. Are they, you know, Old Testament rigorous? I mean, some are.

Margi Dehlin [02:29:28] They can be. It depends on the professor.

Camille Lewis [02:29:31] Okay. Because ours were the easiest and most academically.

John Dehlin [02:29:36] It depends. Like, I took a New Testament class from a Wilfred Griggs, who was a Greek scholar.

Camille Lewis [02:29:42] Oh, well, that'd be good then.

John Dehlin [02:29:43] So I mean, it was. But also there were these cheesy, weird.

Margi Dehlin [02:29:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:48] Professors that talk this folk doctrine.

Camille Lewis [02:29:51] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:29:51] You know, that was really damaging.

Camille Lewis [02:29:53] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:29:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:54] Completely anti academic.

Camille Lewis [02:29:56] That's where I got that 100. Got 100, man was from Bible doctrines.

John Dehlin [02:30:00] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:30:00] Yeah. So.

John Dehlin [02:30:01] Okay, so would you have. Is that where you get indoctrinated to, like, the real Baptist stuff or.

Camille Lewis [02:30:07] Not that. A chapel.

John Dehlin [02:30:10] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:30:10] I mean, you hear it. Chapel would be more. They kind of tried to make it varied, so you'd have a guest speaker and. And different topics, you know, different themes for a week or whatever. So. And that's where it got more political than, I think, the academic classes.

John Dehlin [02:30:27] And the reason I'm asking is because, like, I'm trying to figure out, when does your intellectual awakening begin? And I'm thinking if in a religion class or a church you were taught beat your children, I would wonder if Camille would have, like. Wait a minute. Wait. Did someone just say beat your children? Like, I'm not gonna do that.

Camille Lewis [02:30:46] They didn't say that in a. Now they didn't. They didn't say beat your children in a Bible class, but we call them Bible classes. They would have said that in the pulpit. And maybe I would have just again, the. The. Let it. Let it pass over me because it wasn't affecting me yet because I didn't have children yet.

Margi Dehlin [02:31:06] That's right.

Camille Lewis [02:31:06] So it just, you know, whatever.

Margi Dehlin [02:31:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:31:09] So maybe you could have even interpreted it that loosely or metaphorically, even if they use the words. Yeah, you could have maybe even interpreted it.

Camille Lewis [02:31:16] Yeah, but it was. I mean, they said it. They did say it a lot. I do remember. And you know, the. Lots of sermons about that, about rock and roll, about movies, about separate separation. Religious separation. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:31:27] And I'm wondering if you're thinking, John, that she has this, you know, cognitive awakening, and then later on, it's the child. But I actually. It is what happened.

Camille Lewis [02:31:41] I think that might be what happened. But I want to hear your action.

Margi Dehlin [02:31:43] Oh, I was curious, though. Like, I could see it happening. For many people, the visceral experience of a child being threatened in this thing as being the first thing that, like, wakes you out of it, where you're like, no, you won't be hitting my child, actually. And then it starts the.

Camille Lewis [02:31:58] That. I think that.

John Dehlin [02:31:59] Spoiler alert.

Camille Lewis [02:32:00] Yeah, that would describe it.

Margi Dehlin [02:32:02] No, because of your questioning.

John Dehlin [02:32:03] Yeah. No, for sure.

Margi Dehlin [02:32:04] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:32:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:32:05] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:32:06] And the fact that it took so long to get him.

John Dehlin [02:32:09] Okay, we'll get there. So it sounds like you were in Bob Jones University in some Ways without being of Bob Jones University in a. In sort of a indoctrinated sense.

Camille Lewis [02:32:25] Okay, maybe.

John Dehlin [02:32:26] What do you think? I mean, you were. You were passing, you were obeying, you were conforming.

Camille Lewis [02:32:31] I would have thought that I was of. Because, I mean, I would have thought on the COVID of all the catalogs and calendars and phone books and everything for the 1991 school year is a picture. Was a picture of my husband and me as we were walking down the sidewalk. So I referenced that because we were literal poster children. I mean, we were the ideal couple, you know, dating but not touching, walking down the sidewalk. So I thought I was of Bob Jones. I clearly wasn't, but I thought I was.

John Dehlin [02:33:06] Yeah, of course. Yeah. And that's weird. Like, with my parents, it's like, wait, your church Was racist before 78? And they're like, we loved black people. You know, my parents were in some ways in the Mormon Church without in always being of the Mormon Church.

Camille Lewis [02:33:21] Yeah, fair enough.

John Dehlin [02:33:22] And that. That gave me a different upbringing.

Camille Lewis [02:33:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:33:25] Than some of my friends whose parents were Bruce Armor Conkey. Hardcore orthodox. Right.

Camille Lewis [02:33:33] Right. I. Yeah, I definitely. I have a friend who. Her dad was a board member at Bob Jones, and she had. She was much more.

John Dehlin [02:33:43] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:33:43] Like you're describing.

John Dehlin [02:33:44] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:33:45] Loyal, even.

John Dehlin [02:33:46] Okay. All right. So y' all get married and maybe we go to starting to have kids.

Camille Lewis [02:33:51] Okay, well, grad school. It took us a while to have kids.

John Dehlin [02:33:53] Yeah. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:33:54] So it's GR School at Bob Jones.

John Dehlin [02:33:57] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:33:58] My. It was a master's in public speaking. And I have to tell you this because I did. This is part of the awakening, I think I was. My master's project was about early feminist arguments for women's equality from the Bible. And my. My teacher, my professor was fine with it. He was like, yeah, that sounds good. He. He got me.

Margi Dehlin [02:34:27] He.

John Dehlin [02:34:28] He.

Camille Lewis [02:34:28] He. He's probably a little bit of the head on the stick personality, too. And he was like, yeah, that sounds good. And so he was all for it. The way BJ's program worked was you write your argument, you're kind of like your thesis early in your process, and then you form it into a public presentation that you deliver to the undergraduate audience in 60 minutes.

Camille Lewis [02:34:55] On my committee was Bob Jones III's wife, Bennett Jones, and she did not approve. It is wrong for women. It is wrong for Christians. She said it that way. To argue for rights. And even though you can say that it's there, you know, there are some arguments for equality from the Bible. You just. This isn't right. And that's when I started to think, okay, wait a minute there.

Camille Lewis [02:35:24] You're not. You're not being logical. You're not being. You're not reading the Bible. You're. Nor are you knowing the history of these arguments. I don't know what my teacher said to her. She. He said, I'll take care of it. He said, don't worry about it. And he wrote her and man. And smoothed things over for me. I don't know what he did. And I did it. I did that presentation. But she did object. So there's. There's that difference starting to come through.

John Dehlin [02:35:54] Okay, so you're starting.

Camille Lewis [02:35:55] So then we are. We come. We. We teach there for four years. We graduate. My husband has a. He taught voice, I taught speech. We stay there for four years, and then in 1996, we go to Indiana University to get our doctoral degrees. That was. The school paid. Bob Jones paid for that. Oh, wow.

John Dehlin [02:36:21] And would that be accredited doctoral degrees?

Margi Dehlin [02:36:24] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:36:25] I mean, Indiana University, Big ten.

John Dehlin [02:36:27] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:36:28] Big research school. Yeah. I mean, it was. Now, I didn't get in at first for. Grant got in. I didn't get in because my. The professor said, BJU's not accredited. And your. Your. Your recommendation letters were a little strange. He said. He said, but you can. You can take classes. So I. I did the thing where you take classes to prove myself. And I did get in eventually. So. But he. I was like, what are strange about my recommendation letters? That's weird. So I opened them up. I wanted to. I had, you know, back then, I don't know if you remember, we would. They would seal the letter and write on the seal of the envelope. And that's what you handed in to

John Dehlin [02:37:19] know that it wasn't Dr.

Camille Lewis [02:37:20] Right. So I had an extra set. So I was like, I'm going to read these. And the dean. Everybody who's from Bob Jones knows who the dean is, said in my letter, since we were. Since we were. When Camille graduated with her master's degree, since we were hiring her husband, a fine lyric tenor, we decided to hire her as well.

John Dehlin [02:37:46] So you were a spousal hire.

Camille Lewis [02:37:48] I was a spousal hire, yeah. And. And Grant was really the stellar one. And now he is a fine lyric tenor, by the way. But then I was like, oh, yeah, okay, so I'm chopped liver. I know who I am at this point. And, you know, I. I learned in grad school at Indiana that you're the best rhetorical criticism comes from criticizing your own stuff, your own culture. And Right. When I Was in. Oh, gosh. I was. I had just. I was going in for a DNC because I had a missed miscarriage. I was in grad school. It was March 3, 2000, was my first pregnancy loss. I was in the lobby of the hospital going to go in for a dnc. You know, I was very crowded. You know how those things are. And it was the same day that. That John McCain was confronting Bob Jones University for its racist past.

John Dehlin [02:38:53] You said 2000. Ish.

Camille Lewis [02:38:56] Yes, May 3rd, 2000. And so everybody knew who Bob Jones University was and knew what it was all about. And I go up to. And I was still under Bob Jones employee on a leave of absence. I go up to pay my insurance, and the lady says. She looks at my insurance card, she says, bob Jones University. Sorry, that was really loud. I apologize, but she said it really loud. Everybody heard. And I was. That is the first time I felt utter humiliation at being associated. That was the first time I felt humiliation of being associated with that place. And of course, it only grew from there. Sorry that I was loud.

Margi Dehlin [02:39:38] You were making it realistic.

Camille Lewis [02:39:40] Was. I was. But that was another.

John Dehlin [02:39:48] The world thinks we're weird.

Camille Lewis [02:39:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:39:49] You know, the world thinks we're bigots, and we were.

Margi Dehlin [02:39:52] And you're outside the bubble.

Camille Lewis [02:39:53] Huh.

Margi Dehlin [02:39:54] Huh.

Camille Lewis [02:39:55] In a vulnerable place.

John Dehlin [02:39:56] But it's weird that you're in adulthood and you don't know yet that the world thinks you're bigots and weird. Right, Right. Somehow Mormons get a sense for that very early.

Camille Lewis [02:40:05] Really? Oh, really?

John Dehlin [02:40:06] Oh, yeah. I knew.

Camille Lewis [02:40:07] And, you know, that might be me, though. It might be. Again, the head on the sick person.

John Dehlin [02:40:12] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:40:12] You know.

John Dehlin [02:40:13] Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it might be me. Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:40:15] I can see that.

John Dehlin [02:40:17] Well, I mean, I grew up in a Baptist town where, like, they would teach Mormons and other cults as like a. Oh, yeah. Like a seminar. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Margi Dehlin [02:40:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:40:24] So kids would come to school. You're a Mormon. Do you have horns on your head? You have any wives? Do you have. You know that you get that starting as a young kid.

Margi Dehlin [02:40:31] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:40:31] Okay, so you were an outsider early on. And I guess I was as a. As a fundamentalist, but it was.

John Dehlin [02:40:39] I guess you went to. You went to Baptist Christian School.

Camille Lewis [02:40:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:40:44] So you. You. That. That keeps you in a bubble.

Camille Lewis [02:40:47] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:40:48] Interesting.

Camille Lewis [02:40:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:40:49] Okay. I mean, that's mind blowing. Like, I don't know a lot about Bob Jones University, but it blows my mind that someone could reach adulthood being affiliated with the religion that feeds into Bob Jones University and not know how they're perceived Nationally, I think it is.

Camille Lewis [02:41:06] It is so pervasive. The. The apology is so pervasive. Or the apologetics about it. Oh, no, that's just religious freedom or. No, that's just. We love everybody. And that's part. It was pretty consistent.

John Dehlin [02:41:22] Yeah. Wild.

Camille Lewis [02:41:23] So when we. That was in 2000, we returned to Bob Jones that fall, that summer and bought a house. My husband and I and I wrote. Sat down to write my dissertation, which was confronting how BJU handled Campaign 2000.

Margi Dehlin [02:41:42] Oh, wow.

Camille Lewis [02:41:43] Yeah. So I was. Since my teacher said the best criticism comes from criticizing your own.

John Dehlin [02:41:49] Oops.

Camille Lewis [02:41:50] Yeah. And he said, he said to me, are you sure they're gonna let you do that?

John Dehlin [02:41:56] Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm thinking.

Camille Lewis [02:41:57] At Bob Jones, the provost said, are you sure they're gonna let you do that at Indiana? So that was kind of funny. So I was trying to play with that inside, outside thing that was going on and I wrote the dissertation and

John Dehlin [02:42:12] did you criticize your culture at that point?

Margi Dehlin [02:42:14] Oh, yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:42:15] I mean, it was so gentle.

John Dehlin [02:42:16] What was it?

Camille Lewis [02:42:17] What was the critique that they are. And this is talking insider baseball a little bit, that they are. They try to be comedic, they try to be comic, which is kind of a progressive term in their outsider status, but they are too bent towards tragedy, towards. Towards hurting themselves, really.

John Dehlin [02:42:42] I mean, that is really like self inflicted wounds culturally.

Margi Dehlin [02:42:46] That does feel very soft.

Camille Lewis [02:42:48] It's very soft. So gentle. So gentle. Oh, gosh.

John Dehlin [02:42:55] They're racist bigots.

Camille Lewis [02:42:56] No.

John Dehlin [02:42:57] Oh, no.

Camille Lewis [02:42:57] That.

Margi Dehlin [02:42:57] That's.

Camille Lewis [02:42:58] This book, this latest book.

Margi Dehlin [02:42:59] That wasn't.

Camille Lewis [02:42:59] That came later. Yeah, that came later. So we returned. I wrote my dissertation. As I was writing my dissertation, I became pregnant with our second. My second pregnancy.

John Dehlin [02:43:14] And let me ask really quickly, did the swimsuit story come before this?

Camille Lewis [02:43:17] It did come before this.

John Dehlin [02:43:18] We tell that story real quick. Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:43:20] So when we were in 1992, we travel. My husband and I traveled on what we called then ensemble, which now they call ministry team.

John Dehlin [02:43:28] It's a choir singing.

Camille Lewis [02:43:29] Yeah, it's just. It's four people singing, traveling. It's just four. And we all pile in. It was. There's a pianist, four vocalists and a preacher. We all pile in a Suburban and drive around the country. We started in Spartanburg, went all the way down to McAllen, Texas, up the coast of California and then Utah, covered Utah. And last was in Little Rock. Before we left, they. They gave us clothing and it was nice. I mean, it was. They went to Talbot's, bless them. So that was. It was pretty good. But Bennett Jones Bob Jones III's wife told us that we. She wanted to see our swimsuits on us.

Margi Dehlin [02:44:12] Oh.

Camille Lewis [02:44:14] Not see them in front of the right, but to put them. To model them in front of her.

John Dehlin [02:44:21] You're a married woman?

Camille Lewis [02:44:21] I'm a married woman, yeah. I was like, I, I. No, I thought that once I got married, I was myself and it was between my husband and me. Or me. I mean, ideally it's between me, but I was not going to do that. It just pissed me off.

Camille Lewis [02:44:43] And of course, I ranted to Grant about it, too, and so I lied. I said I. It hadn't. I just said, I. It hadn't come in yet. I had ordered it from Lands End, which is the most. I hear you, modest. Swim trunks. Swim trunks. Listen to me. Swimming suits you could get.

Camille Lewis [02:44:59] And I showed her a picture and she said, okay, that's fine. But I. I was like, I thought. I thought the goal of this purity culture that I was in was to get to the altar as a virgin. I had done that. So now if I'm faithful to my marriage vows, it's none of your business.

Margi Dehlin [02:45:23] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:45:23] Apparently that wasn't. I. I was still open for bodily scrutiny.

Margi Dehlin [02:45:29] Right. That's so interesting.

Camille Lewis [02:45:31] It's so weird. It's so bizarre. And so speaking of the bodily scrutiny, when I was pregnant, I tell my students the story and they all go, what?

John Dehlin [02:45:39] They.

Camille Lewis [02:45:40] This is a weird, confusing story. And I don't. I haven't made sense of it yet. I was pregnant with Elise, with my daughter, and my friend Anne and I were planning a musical group for a little thing for our big annual conference. Bible conference is what they call it. All women. And I had a cute little pink suit. So, you know, everything was covered. It was cute. I looked cute. I was going to wear that. And so we were starting to plan it, and the male planner said, oh, no, no, no, you can't have her sing me. He says to Anne, you can't have her sing when she's visibly pregnant.

John Dehlin [02:46:26] This is like Lucille Ball vibes of, like, early 60s, you know, it is. We're like, oh, you can't be pregnant on national TV back in the early, late 50s, early 60s. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:46:36] I had not put that one together. And. And Ann and I were, like, befuddled. Why? We'd never heard of this rule. I thought being pregnant was good.

John Dehlin [02:46:47] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:46:47] You know, I mean, I waited this long. We had been married 11 years at this point.

Margi Dehlin [02:46:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:46:56] But there's like, somehow if you. If you're visibly pregnant in a public setting, it Denotes that sex must have happened. That's what.

Camille Lewis [02:47:03] That's the only thing I can think of.

John Dehlin [02:47:05] Yeah. And we don't want body that sex actually ever happens.

Camille Lewis [02:47:08] Yeah, it's calling attention to her. Yeah, yeah, that's the only thing I can figure. And so I think they said, okay, she can do it if she is in the back. And so Anne and I were like, this is weird. Then I ended up getting the stomach flu and I didn't do it at all. So I was like, oh, well, you know that problem solved with that.

John Dehlin [02:47:30] No, I just read a doc. I just read a biography of Ricky Ricardo.

Camille Lewis [02:47:34] Oh, really?

John Dehlin [02:47:34] I saw no Desi Arnaz. Desi Arnaz. And then there's a documentary on Lucy Ball and Desi Arnaz Jr and there was a time where you couldn't say the word pregnant.

Camille Lewis [02:47:45] I remember that Lucia's enceint, whatever they said.

John Dehlin [02:47:49] And she and he were the first to kind of break that barrier. And at the end of a season, they actually had their real baby. And it was like a global event, but it was a breakthrough, watershed moment. And it sounds like Bob Jones university was like 20 or 30 years. Yeah, that sounds right behind the times.

Camille Lewis [02:48:09] Yeah, it would be what, 50 years behind the times. That sounds about right. Anyway, Yeah, I think.

Margi Dehlin [02:48:14] Can we just highlight a couple things about that too? Is just how oftentimes when you're in these high control religions, how we get used to people really having boundary breaking behavior, it's like normalized. So that is a key example of just. And then the second thing is just that continued experience of like, yeah, your body's not your own. It's what men actually are experiencing.

Camille Lewis [02:48:46] About, about your body. Yeah, about. Around. Because.

Margi Dehlin [02:48:49] Around.

Camille Lewis [02:48:50] Yes, any. Any preposition you put there. And yeah, it was, it was really weird. And I, and I still, I do tell my students that story when we're talking about feminist rhetoric and they're all, you know, it is a very suspicious, odd thing.

Camille Lewis [02:49:08] So that was Elise. She was, it was. This is in March of 2000. And she on due date was July 3, 2000, July 4th. We went out, saw some fireworks. I remember that vividly. July 5th. I. My. My parents were in town to see her birth. We went out, we went to the museum.

Camille Lewis [02:49:43] It was at Bob Jones, the art gallery at Bob Jones, which is world, it is world renowned. It is a very. Was when it was open, a very fine gallery and walked around to try to get me into labor because she was overdue at this point on July 6th, which is. Was our 11th wedding anniversary. I didn't feel her move anymore. And it just felt weird.

Margi Dehlin [02:50:14] She.

Camille Lewis [02:50:14] I couldn't feel her. So we went to the radiologist to get an ultrasound. And that was a really quiet ultrasound. And I remember the radio, the. The tech did it. Then the radiologist came in and it was very quiet. And I remember him putting up the wand or whatever, slowly and saying that she had died and her room was ready. You know, we had diapers in. In her drawer, everything. You know how you do before baby's born, you got everything all set.

Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Institutional Control

Camille Lewis [02:51:02] And the radiologist said, we've called your doctor, so go to his office. And BJU has had this thing. They don't do this anymore. Where you had to have. You had to have BJU doctors. It was a means of control of the person and of the finances, but of the person is what you felt. But this doctor, I'll say his name, Dr. Terrell, was a fine doctor. He was very gentle with us. Very, very kind.

Camille Lewis [02:51:36] Walked into the clinic and that's when it hit me because I saw the grief on their faces. And so he was very gentle. But, you know, he's. Here's the procedure. So we went to the. Went to the hospital. She was born on the seventh again born still. And there's a lot of crying. It was a very. It was just difficult.

Margi Dehlin [02:52:06] This sucks.

Camille Lewis [02:52:07] There's nothing good about this.

Margi Dehlin [02:52:08] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:52:10] But after she was born, when my milk came in, that was the most useless I had ever, ever felt. That was very hard. So after that was in July, I then would have. I would go on to have two more miscarriages for. And every one of them was different causes according because they were really now investigating. So, you know, the. The doctor now you get a lot of attention at this point, and they're really trying to help. So Isaac, my oldest, was conceived and born, and he would be born in December 2003. I wanted to make sure I did everything right. I mean, because I did feel like he was going to be my screamer.

John Dehlin [02:53:07] And this doesn't matter, I guess, but how old are you at this point?

Camille Lewis [02:53:10] See, 20 says 2003. So I'm 35.

John Dehlin [02:53:13] Okay. And you tried to have kids for.

Camille Lewis [02:53:17] Hello since 2000.

John Dehlin [02:53:20] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:53:21] Yeah, actively, yeah. So I wanted to do it right. So I read all those fundamentalist parenting books. I read them. You know, I wanted to do this. This is going to. This one's going to work. I wanted this one to work. Well, he was. Because they were worried about Elise, you know, about what caused Elise and They weren't sure. He was born a little early. They induced a little early. I was under those induction drugs, whatever. I can't remember what it's called now. For four days. So that was kind of rough.

Margi Dehlin [02:53:51] Wait, they, meaning they.

Camille Lewis [02:53:53] What is that stuff they put in?

Margi Dehlin [02:53:54] Pitocin.

Camille Lewis [02:53:54] That's it? Yeah. Pitocin for four days? Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:53:58] Can I have a moment? Like, that's a go. Oh, gosh.

Camille Lewis [02:54:01] With Pitocin, I mean, they would take. Right. They take it off at night so I could rest. And they'd say. They tell Grant, because they don't let you eat when you're on that. And they'd say to Grant, okay, go get her some food. And he'd. My sweet husband, bring me a large chocolate milkshake from McDonald's, large fries, and a double quarter pounder. And I was so hungry. Of course, then it went back. We'd been back on. Well, he finally was born, my sweet little screamer. And he. I. Oh, it was great, my sweet. But he breathed in too early. So he was in the nicu, which meant that he had a hard start with nursing, which is normal. I mean, that is normal. I had to nurse him for my healing, for my peace. Because it was so hard with Elise. When my mill came in, I had to nurse Isaac.

Margi Dehlin [02:54:55] Yes.

Camille Lewis [02:54:55] It wasn't. I now. Now know that it wasn't just economy. It was really my. My healing. I needed to do it. So he finally. He was born on three days before Christmas. He was in the NICU for 10 days. He came home on New Year's Day. So that's when he came home, New Year's Day, 2004. And he finally, finally got it. He finally latched on. It was working on New Year's Day. The fundamentalist parenting book said to nurse every. This is Gary Ezzo says nurse every three hours for 30 minutes. That's part of the discipline that you have to teach your newborn.

Margi Dehlin [02:55:39] So wild, isn't it?

Camille Lewis [02:55:42] My joke is Isaac hadn't read the books.

John Dehlin [02:55:45] Wait, why is that so wild? Margi?

Camille Lewis [02:55:46] Yeah, go ahead.

Margi Dehlin [02:55:48] Well, I'm assuming he's not a doctor.

Camille Lewis [02:55:50] No, he's. Oh, no, he's not.

Margi Dehlin [02:55:52] And this idea of having a parent plan for a being that's just been born, that's going by instincts alone. It needs to eat.

Camille Lewis [02:56:05] Of all things.

John Dehlin [02:56:06] It kind of knows what it needs to eat.

Margi Dehlin [02:56:09] This is kind of biology, right?

John Dehlin [02:56:11] Right.

Margi Dehlin [02:56:11] Right. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:56:12] Again, Isaac hadn't read the book, so he would eat every two hours for an hour.

John Dehlin [02:56:16] But it's kind of about objectifying the kids from the start. Right.

Margi Dehlin [02:56:19] It's kind of that I. It.

John Dehlin [02:56:21] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:56:21] Making the child the it. And like I am gonna. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:56:27] The child is an it to be trained and molded.

Camille Lewis [02:56:31] Molded. Molded by the parents will.

John Dehlin [02:56:32] Yeah. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:56:33] Like God's will.

Margi Dehlin [02:56:34] Right.

Camille Lewis [02:56:35] That's. Which is weird.

John Dehlin [02:56:36] Yeah. It seems. Yeah. It. I didn't realize how dark it was. Yeah. Like, when I read the outline, I'm like, huh. You know.

Camille Lewis [02:56:42] Yeah. The parents, not God, but they're trying to make the parent into a kind of God.

John Dehlin [02:56:45] Yeah. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:56:46] Which is a huge, huge ego boost. But Isaac wasn't. Again, he ate every two hours for an hour. And I would say now he's 21, and his two highest values are coziness and carbohydrates. And so nursing was everything that appealed to him.

John Dehlin [02:57:05] So if you tried to go three hours. Oh, he was 30 minutes.

Margi Dehlin [02:57:09] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:57:09] He would. He would scream.

Margi Dehlin [02:57:10] I feel like all of my kids would have fair.

Camille Lewis [02:57:12] I think. I think my mother in law would say the same thing.

Margi Dehlin [02:57:15] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:57:15] And my mom.

Margi Dehlin [02:57:16] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:57:16] That's one of the things I realized.

Margi Dehlin [02:57:17] Ill informed. Not.

Camille Lewis [02:57:20] Both my mother in law and my mother were like, you feed him, period. And I'm. And. And I would realize that, like, wow. That, you know, he's gonna be. He's gonna need what he needs. In a sense. He was. I don't know if he was high need, because that was the phrase that they used back then. I don't know if he was high need. I don't care if he was high need. He needed the food.

Margi Dehlin [02:57:43] Yes. Right.

Camille Lewis [02:57:44] And I thought to myself, wow, the Gary Ezzo and his whole. That whole fundamentals parenting thing was all wrong. Everything about it's wrong. It's not working. I wonder what else he was wrong about. There's the breakthrough.

John Dehlin [02:57:58] Here it comes.

Camille Lewis [02:57:58] Here it comes.

John Dehlin [02:57:59] Here it comes. Where's the light bulb coming out of for Camille?

Camille Lewis [02:58:03] And it was with that little Isaac. It was with that little Isaac.

John Dehlin [02:58:06] I would have never guessed in a million years that a Christian faith crisis would begin with nursing a baby.

Margi Dehlin [02:58:12] But don't you love that, though? Because I do think there's an aspect for what we can't see for ourselves. We can see that for our children, for people we love.

Camille Lewis [02:58:25] And it wasn't just a head on a stick at that moment.

Margi Dehlin [02:58:27] Yes. Right. I think that was more connected to your body.

Camille Lewis [02:58:30] Literally. I had. And I had to be for him.

Margi Dehlin [02:58:33] That's right.

Camille Lewis [02:58:34] And. And that organicness. I was like coming. I was like realizing and healing from the. From the. From Elise's birth, too. So I found a friend that I had met in grad school who's a Gary Ezzo employee. And I thought, I wonder what. Her name's Lori Moody and she's still a friend. I wonder what Lori Moody's doing now. Since I'm sitting there nursing this baby forever and I find her. She had left the whole punitive parenting thing, too, and the whole strict nursing.

John Dehlin [02:59:11] And is it safe to assume Bob Jones III endorsed this?

Margi Dehlin [02:59:15] Oh, yes.

John Dehlin [02:59:15] This parental approach.

Camille Lewis [02:59:16] When you went to the doctor, because you had to go to the doctor, their doctor, the pediatrician there would tell you to follow Gary Ezzo.

John Dehlin [02:59:24] Okay. Because T. Barry Brazelton. But Bob Jones version.

Camille Lewis [02:59:28] Right, I get.

Margi Dehlin [02:59:31] Oh, I hear what you're saying. Because I'm like, T. Barry Braselton was like a whole.

John Dehlin [02:59:34] He was like the authority when we. You know what I mean?

Camille Lewis [02:59:36] He was.

Margi Dehlin [02:59:36] And he.

Camille Lewis [02:59:36] But he was a.

Margi Dehlin [02:59:37] He was child centered.

John Dehlin [02:59:38] No, I know.

Camille Lewis [02:59:39] I'm saying I remember that name.

John Dehlin [02:59:40] Bob Jones version.

Margi Dehlin [02:59:42] Right? Yes. Got it.

John Dehlin [02:59:43] Okay.

Camille Lewis [02:59:44] But parent centered.

John Dehlin [02:59:46] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [02:59:47] I'm sorry, that's just. With a newborn.

John Dehlin [02:59:50] Parent centered parenting. I love it. Parent centered parenting with the newborn.

Camille Lewis [02:59:56] So I found Lori, and Lori had left the. She had an epiphany, too. And she had left that whole cruel parenting thing. And she had a whole deconstruction of those clobber verses on her website. This is back when blogging, mommy blogging was big. I've heard you talk about mommy blogs, too. This is when mommy blogs are big. And she had on her blog a whole deconstruction of that. I printed it out and put it in my diaper bag or the kids, you know, Isaac's diaper bag, and read it every time I was nursing him. Because I was like, can it possibly be that this is all not what it. What I've been taught it means?

John Dehlin [03:00:41] Mm.

Camille Lewis [03:00:44] Is it possible? And so Isaac was around four months old, four or five months old. And I mentioned it to Grant. I finally, finally got the courage. I said, I am not going to spank him. I am never going to hit him. And Grant was. Of course, he had not come to the. You know, he had not had quite the physical relationship with the child as I had. And he said, I don't know about that. I don't agree. I said, okay, that's fine. You don't have to agree. He said, you don't have to. But I. I'm not agreeing to this. I'm like, okay, that's fine. I understand that. I also said, I will clarify however, that I'm going to do everything in my power to make it so that you never feel the need to hit him. He said, okay, now I will say, maybe the spoiler alert. We've never hit our children.

Margi Dehlin [03:01:38] Okay?

Camille Lewis [03:01:38] So FYI. And that's because there's no need to do it. You don't need to hit them. So Isaac was still around this time, infant. I was starting to get my sea legs, you know, with. With parenting and everything. My. But I was sitting so much, you know, Again, he ate every two hours for an hour. And there's no streaming. The Internet was not quite what it is today. I was kind of getting bored. My friend Kathy Tealey, her son is the host of Prairie Home Companion. I don't know if you know that. Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:02:17] Love prayer.

Camille Lewis [03:02:18] Yeah. So Kathy Tealey saw me say on one of these mommy blogs, I'm bored. She said, why don't you read every verse in the Bible that mentions nursing? Now, that's a very fundamentalist project. We loved to do that kind of thing. I was like, that's great. I'm going to do that. I'm going to find every verse in the Bible on breastfeeding while I'm breastfeeding my child. And I saw a whole new side of God I had never seen before because he often irks God, often describes God's self as a mother, as a. As a gentle mother.

Camille Lewis [03:02:57] And it was graduation morning at Bob Jones. I'm sitting in my doctoral robes watching students graduate. And you at Bob Jones, you don't get those services last so long. And you get bored. But you don't get in trouble if you read your Bible.

Camille Lewis [03:03:17] So you entertain yourself by reading your Bible. No one's going to get mad at you if you're reading your Bible. So I was doing my reading, and I think it was Isaiah. Excuse me, 49. I think it is where Isaiah says that God says, can a nursing mother forget her child?

Camille Lewis [03:03:34] So I can't forget you. This was the longest time I had been away from Isaac all graduation. And I was starting to get a little bit antsy, you know, like, I missed him. And I was like, I can't. I get this. I get organically. I get what this verse is saying. I cannot forget Isaac.

Camille Lewis [03:03:58] Wait a minute. God feels about me like I feel about Isaac. That's different than I thought. And then I'm watching my students and bj you had cultivated a very antagonistic relationship with students, with everybody. And I thought, wait a minute. God loves my students like I love Isaac.

Camille Lewis [03:04:23] And that's when everything changed. Because then I felt a responsibility to be kind and loving towards them. And that's what got me in trouble with the administration as well. That and my insistence on protecting Isaac, too.

John Dehlin [03:04:43] Let's go there.

Camille Lewis [03:04:44] Okay. So Isaac was he

John Dehlin [03:04:52] child.

Camille Lewis [03:04:53] He's. He was such a snuggle bug. And so, you know, chubby and rolly and wonderful. About 2005, I started to realize that we needed a second child. And so I put. This is the mommy blog age. I put on my blog.

Camille Lewis [03:05:14] Something like, this is in the summer of 2005. Pretzels are all Sharpened was the title of it. And that was my way of saying, I am now ready for number two. I bought. I referenced two books that I bought to get ready for number two, which was Siblings Without Rivalry and. And Adventures in Tandem Nursing.

Camille Lewis [03:05:39] And that book has a. Adventures in Tandem Nursing has a picture of. It's a cartoon of a mommy wearing a superhero cape, flying through the air with her toddler and her infant. That's all it was. This was in the summer we conceived Gavin. That summer.

Camille Lewis [03:06:01] The next January, I get a call from the dean, my dean, who said, you have a post up on your blog that you need to take down because it caused a student to stumble into pornography. That was the phrase they used, stumble into pornography.

Camille Lewis [03:06:26] So that book with the cartoon mommy caused a student, a male student, to stumble to, I don't know, Google search for porn. I don't know what it was. He got d. He got his leadership things taken away D. ABC'd. Demoted. Yeah. And he was in trouble.

Camille Lewis [03:06:52] And that was considered my fault because of the nursing book that I posted a link to, which is another kind of weird scrutiny again, of my. Of me.

Margi Dehlin [03:07:02] How are you responding?

Camille Lewis [03:07:04] How am I responsible for that?

Margi Dehlin [03:07:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:07:06] But you know, nursing involves breasts.

Camille Lewis [03:07:08] That's right. And that's like.

John Dehlin [03:07:09] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:07:10] Yes. And that.

Margi Dehlin [03:07:12] And a woman's body is a problem.

Camille Lewis [03:07:15] It is. And it caught any kind of attention to it, even a cartoon picture.

Margi Dehlin [03:07:20] Wow.

Camille Lewis [03:07:22] So that was odd. That was an odd moment. That was in January of 2006. Gavin was born in April. He was. He was. I did not have four days of labor with him. So he was lifting up his head on our way out of the delivery room. He was a little, powerful little guy.

John Dehlin [03:07:43] My little.

Camille Lewis [03:07:44] My little pumpkin. And then the next year, the 2006, 2007 year, that's when everything really fell apart. I.

John Dehlin [03:07:57] And you're working at the university.

Camille Lewis [03:07:58] I'm working at the university as a teacher. I was a head of the Rhetoric and public address department. So middle management.

Margi Dehlin [03:08:06] How was your. Did you get any maternity leave?

Camille Lewis [03:08:09] I did get maternity leave. Weeks. Eight weeks. But it was, you know, they did it with Isaac. I got half a semester, so I guess that was eight weeks because he was born in December. With Gavin, it kind of spilled over into the summer because he was an April baby.

Margi Dehlin [03:08:25] I see.

John Dehlin [03:08:26] And then did the university provide daycare?

Camille Lewis [03:08:28] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:08:29] Okay.

Camille Lewis [03:08:30] That's part of. That was part of the employment. It like they would give you the money and then take away the money so you got taxed on it. That was their strategy. But it. We did get campus daycare for both children. And that, frankly, I've heard later that they considered me kind of a. An odd duck there. But again, Kelsey Priest, because I was nursing so long, if you follow the Gary Ezzo plan, usually moms fall off with nursing about four months. Yeah. Because it's not going to work if you're only doing it for three hours.

Margi Dehlin [03:09:09] That's right.

Camille Lewis [03:09:10] And a lot of those children have failure to thrive. It's really a bad thing. So. I know, but I, I had arranged it so that I could put both Isaac and Gavin down for their naps. I just planned it that way. So. So it was. I, I, the, the, my building was right across the street from the campus daycare, so I could run over there anytime. I felt very involved and, and blessed and I thought they were fine. The, the workers there were fine with it. But I did hear later that they thought I was a weird person. I also did some baby wearing, I don't know, slinging, and it was so easy. Right?

Margi Dehlin [03:09:56] Yes.

Camille Lewis [03:09:57] And that marked me.

Margi Dehlin [03:10:01] I bet, I would bet you were marked because you were, you stood out. You weren't doing the way, you know,

Camille Lewis [03:10:08] and I didn't care in a way, I didn't care because Isaac was so happy when he was. And Gavin was so happy when they were in slings. Because you're right, they're right up here. You get to kiss their little noggins and they're seeing everything.

Margi Dehlin [03:10:23] They've got your heartbeat right there.

Camille Lewis [03:10:24] Right there. I know. And he was. They were so sweet. They were such great, great little babies. So we started this in August 2006. The way they do it is the first day of the. In service. You know, the, the getting ready for the semester.

Camille Lewis [03:10:45] They give you a big packet of stuff. Calendar of events, phone book coupons, your assignments, you know, your class assignments. And everybody gets one. So. You know, my husband was sitting here. He had one, I had one. And I'M looking through it.

Conflict with Administration Over Childcare and Discipline

Camille Lewis [03:11:02] Another friend is sitting next to me, and I look through my packet, and in my packet is a letter from the campus daycare that said, because we want to raise children biblically, we will use corporal punishment for Isaac. Please sign this memo to give us the permission to do so.

Camille Lewis [03:11:32] I took that out of the packet and I laid it on my knee, and I. It was just sitting there the whole. I just stared at it during the whole meeting. And I had not planned on telling anybody that we weren't going to spank. I had just thought, I'm going to wait till they're 18 years old and awesome and then maybe I'll tell somebody.

Camille Lewis [03:11:50] I was just not going to tell. It was nobody's business. I didn't want to hear the lectures. I didn't care what other people thought. They're my babies. I had worked so hard for them. They're my babies. God gave them to me.

Camille Lewis [03:12:04] So I saw this letter, and I was like, what am I going to do? I'm not. He. Isaac was two and a half. I was not going to let some lady hit him, some stranger hit him. Why would I let him. Them do that? So I had some. I got some advice from a mom friend who was also a social worker in Wisconsin.

Margi Dehlin [03:12:28] And

Camille Lewis [03:12:31] she said, don't you just not sign that because you don't want a mistake to happen. You need to write a memo that says the opposite, that they are not allowed to hit your baby because they need to know this is. Don't go. It's not business as usual with this child.

Camille Lewis [03:12:52] I'm like, okay, that's good advice. So I did that. I wrote something. I used the exact verbiage that she had in her. In the memo. And I said, you are not allowed to hit Isaac. I think I even said, because we want to raise Isaac biblically and God has given the responsibility to his father and me. You are not allowed to hit Isaac. I probably said spank. You're not allowed to spank Isaac. If you. If some. If an event arises in which you feel it is necessary to spank, you may call Grant or me and we will come over immediately and deal with it again because we're both in the same building right next door.

John Dehlin [03:13:28] So

Camille Lewis [03:13:30] then I was marked.

John Dehlin [03:13:32] Okay, can I just restate this for a second?

Camille Lewis [03:13:35] So the year is 2006, August 2006,

John Dehlin [03:13:42] in the United States, in South Carolina. Your son is how old?

Camille Lewis [03:13:46] Two and a half.

John Dehlin [03:13:47] Your son is two and a half in South Carolina. And Bob Jones University wants you to Sign a waiver granting them permission to hit your son at their own discretion.

Camille Lewis [03:14:02] Right. And they only gave that kind of memo to children of faculty kids and staff kids, employees. They had not employees in their care. The people who are not employees, outsiders, town people I think they called them. They don't get that memoir. So there is a distinct difference in the way BJU sees faculty staff children and not faculty staff children.

John Dehlin [03:14:34] Any idea why the discrepancy?

Camille Lewis [03:14:36] I think they really believe they need to control the bodies of employees employees and children employees children.

John Dehlin [03:14:48] Wow.

Camille Lewis [03:14:50] So I did that and it went to the dean, my dean. Which is bizarre. Why would it. It's just bizarre that that interaction between campus daycare and a parent would go to an academic dean. So it was October 16th. I remember the day that I was called up to the dean's office. I remember it vividly. Had been raining. My dad had had a mini stroke that week. I remember that too. So there were all kinds of things going on.

Margi Dehlin [03:15:29] Going on.

Camille Lewis [03:15:29] Yeah, yeah. And it was a meeting with my dean and my chair, my chair was sitting next to me. And they didn't just bring up, I mean they did bring up the memo. They said, so we understand something. The dean said it was Darren Lawson. Everybody knows who it was. I mean not everybody at BJU knows now Darren Lawson was three years older than I was. It's not like he's, I mean I was his classmate in grad school. We were interesting, you know, I mean he's not like he's hoary headed and elderly. He's. I felt like he was my peer.

Camille Lewis [03:16:14] I could been wrong, but that's what I felt like. So he said, I, he says, I don't remember how he brought it up, but I said, I, I, you know, yes, I don't want the CDC to spank Isaac. And he said, well, you're a young mom.

Camille Lewis [03:16:32] Okay. I was 38. Generally that's not considered young. He's 41, I'm 38. So he's. Now we call that mansplaining. He's mansplaining me. I thought, here I go again. I thought I had been through enough in this, you know, with all the pregnancy losses that I would be allowed the privilege of making decisions for my children.

Camille Lewis [03:17:00] That was not true. I, that I had made a bad. They made it clear that I had made a bad decision. I wasn't going to change my mind though. I don't. This is similar kind of thing that I had happened in with the young boy in high school where I was Supposed to change for him. No, no, no, I'm not changing for you, Dean. You. You're wrong. But I understand that you don't like what I said.

Camille Lewis [03:17:28] That's fine. Then it continued. One of the things that. At least it. In this version of a high control group, they don't allow you to have one thing that you've done wrong. They bring up everything that they could possibly think of that you've done wrong.

Camille Lewis [03:17:46] So I had given a book to a student who was struggling. The book was called. Tired of Trying to Measure Up. They didn't like that.

Margi Dehlin [03:17:57] I.

Camille Lewis [03:17:58] You are requiring students to read. I said, no. He was having a hard time. I gave him a book. It was a gift. There's no. There's nothing suspicious or sinister about it. They. I had begun con. Talking with a publisher to publish my dissertation.

Camille Lewis [03:18:19] Dissertation, which I described to you earlier, which was very soft and kind to bju. And so Darren, the dean, brought up. He said, I understand you're publishing your dissertation. He thought he had caught me in a. In a secret. I said, yes, yes, yes, I am. I am. I would love readers. I said, would you all like to read it? I mean, because, you know, you're. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no.

Camille Lewis [03:18:44] He said, I would caution you against. I remember this vividly. I would caution you against the. That Camille, we really like you and Grant, and we wouldn't want any. Want you to do anything to jeopardize your time here. I was like, there's the threat. There it is. It's coming.

Margi Dehlin [03:19:04] Okay.

Camille Lewis [03:19:08] There was. I mean, those are the highlights that I remember from the meeting. And I cried a lot after it was over because it was like, okay, we're marked. I mean, you could tell. I knew it. This was it. And so everything from then on that I did was even more scrutinized.

Camille Lewis [03:19:29] The dean told my friends to not be with me, to not be my friend, because they didn't. They didn't want to get in trouble. I would pass the dean in the hall, and he wouldn't say hello to me, which is weird. It's a. It's a. It's a microaggression. It's not a big deal. But it's like, what are you. What are you hiding? I mean, what. Why are you shunning me? It was so dumb.

Camille Lewis [03:19:55] By the next. I continued publishing my dissertation. I continued with that process. There was nothing wrong with my dissertation. It's a good dissertation. Academics. This is. This is your goal, to find someone. The man who. Who put out the call is Marty Medhurst. Y' all don't know him. Marty Medhurst is a gentleman and a scholar. He's has since passed away. And when I contacted him about it, he said, I was hoping you would write me. Camille. That was a. That was huge. That he wanted my dissertation.

Camille Lewis [03:20:32] So I continued forward with that. It was March that Darren Lawson was even more upset that I was publishing my dissertation. I had begun to answer to add a chapter

Margi Dehlin [03:20:53] again.

Camille Lewis [03:20:53] My dissertation was about how BJU intersects with the public sphere. I added a chapter about BJU's reaction to 911 so it fit, which was that that they hyper evangelized. They published a special little book all from them about how they were going to, you know, win souls in New York City. And so they would go up there and pass out books.

John Dehlin [03:21:17] This little 911 was an opportunity to convert.

Camille Lewis [03:21:21] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:21:21] People.

Camille Lewis [03:21:21] Yes, yes, yes. Tragedy is our chance to show them that we love them. That's how they would frame it. And this was not okay. I don't. Again, again, I. I sometimes say when I had a working brain, womb and mouth, in that order, I was forced out of Bob Jones University. I was forced out of fundamentalism.

Camille Lewis [03:21:51] So the brain was the. Was the finishing the PhD. The womb was Isaac and Gavin. And then the. The mouth was publishing my dissertation. And it just. It started this whole cascade of meetings. There were so many meetings where they're scrutinizing you, me and my husband.

Camille Lewis [03:22:16] In May, we met with the president, who was Stephen Jones, and the executive vice president, who is Gary Weir. And I think they were trying to trap us, I think because Gary, who was another PhD in rhetoric, his is from Purdue, said, we want you to write a document describing your sin theology.

Camille Lewis [03:22:52] That doesn't make any sense. Sin is theology. So I think he was trying to set it up in such a way that we were going to fail. Grant and I talked and I said something like, I think what he really wants to know is our doctrine of salvation. Now, neither of us were theology professors.

Camille Lewis [03:23:13] Our training was really just in what we got from Bob Jones. Except I had had this epiphany about the fact that God loves my students like I love Isaac. That was the only difference. So I wrote it. I started the document. I wrote it. It was a doctrine of soteriology of salvation.

Camille Lewis [03:23:38] I used good sources, I consulted good people. Grant edited it, we submitted it, and then we get a email a few weeks later that says we need to talk. Okay, we go in. It was Friday the 13th of July in 2007. And they hand us one copy of a document, single spaced. I think it was six pages or so. Grant takes it and we start talking theology.

Margi Dehlin [03:24:17] So they've looped. Sorry, go ahead. They've looped Grant in.

Camille Lewis [03:24:22] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [03:24:22] Based on your. Your decisions.

Camille Lewis [03:24:27] That's a great question.

Margi Dehlin [03:24:28] They.

Camille Lewis [03:24:28] Well, that's a good question. I think it might have been more. I was in trouble and he needed to correct me.

Margi Dehlin [03:24:35] Right. Because it would be fall under his responsibility.

Camille Lewis [03:24:37] His responsibility. There's that head of household thing and

Margi Dehlin [03:24:40] maybe wanting to bring him in line to his role there.

Camille Lewis [03:24:44] I think that's it. I think that's it. And they still do that. Like if they don't like me now, something I do, they call Grant.

Margi Dehlin [03:24:53] Okay, okay. And then was Grant supportive about the whole cause? We didn't get an update on Grant with regard to how he eventually felt about spanking, but I'm gonna just assume, yeah, he supported you in writing the letters.

Camille Lewis [03:25:10] Nope. Right.

Margi Dehlin [03:25:11] Don't spank our child.

Camille Lewis [03:25:13] He never saw a need to do it. And he realized that. Some people call it positive parenting. Some people call child centered parenting works. That's just what it's about.

John Dehlin [03:25:24] And was he wanting Bob Jones staff to be able to spank his children? Did you have a position on that

Camille Lewis [03:25:30] or did my husband? Yeah, he didn't. He didn't. He didn't care.

Margi Dehlin [03:25:34] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:25:35] He didn't care what other people he. Grants again, the. He's got that head on a stick quality too. He's like, whatever, I don't care what other people do. This is my responsibility.

Margi Dehlin [03:25:43] Right.

Camille Lewis [03:25:44] So he didn't.

John Dehlin [03:25:46] He didn't care if Bob Jones staff spanked his children.

Camille Lewis [03:25:49] Oh, he didn't want that.

John Dehlin [03:25:50] That's what I meant.

Camille Lewis [03:25:51] I'm sorry. I'm sorry. He did not want that.

Margi Dehlin [03:25:53] He supported her.

Camille Lewis [03:25:55] He supported me. He wasn't sure if he wasn't yet committed about his response.

John Dehlin [03:26:01] No, I meant the Bob Jones.

Camille Lewis [03:26:03] He did not like that.

John Dehlin [03:26:04] Okay.

Margi Dehlin [03:26:05] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:26:06] I remember a moment before, before this controversy with the administration. I think I was with. I think it was holding Gavin and I was outside the campus daycare. I think Gab. Isaac was. Was in a class. He was behind me. The window was behind me and they were having a little like a little lesson time, so I didn't want to disturb him. So he was.

Camille Lewis [03:26:30] Gavin and I were standing out there and I see the four year old teacher marching down, looking angry, marching down the sidewalk with a little four year old boy named Joshua. I don't know who. I just know that she heard him say Joshua. She's marching, marching mad. Taking Joshua into the. The daycare director's office.

Camille Lewis [03:26:55] There's several minutes let pass and I see them marching back and Joshua was sobbing. Obviously he got hit. And I hear her say, happy heart, Joshua. Happy heart. So you're supposed to get hit and not get upset. You're supposed to not be crying, which is irrational. That's irrational. You just caused pain on this little guy, a little four year old boy. And I knew boys would get more of it than girls because of the, the way they get targeted. And I thought, I am never gonna let that happen to my boys. I never want that woman. And I was thinking of her, never want there to say happy heart because it's a, it's a threat. It's a. It's, it's, it's.

Margi Dehlin [03:27:50] They're gonna hurt you.

Camille Lewis [03:27:52] Yeah. And then, and then you got to be glad about.

Margi Dehlin [03:27:54] That's right.

Camille Lewis [03:27:55] That's psychopathic.

Margi Dehlin [03:27:56] You can't acknowledge that you've been hurt in any way.

Camille Lewis [03:27:59] Yeah, it's wrong.

Margi Dehlin [03:28:02] Yeah. My last question was just. You had said that they reached out to your friends and had said that you, your friends shouldn't be around you. So did your friends stop being around?

Camille Lewis [03:28:16] Yeah, they obeyed. And that was rough because we were having lunch together every day, you know.

Margi Dehlin [03:28:22] Yeah, that's.

Camille Lewis [03:28:23] It was. And, and the, the one of the friends in one of those meetings we had at the end that she was encouraged to confront me and she said, and Grant was there. So Grant was there and this friend and two other women and the dean and the chair, we're all in this conference room. And she said, you negatively affected my prayer life, Bible reading and spiritual condition.

Camille Lewis [03:28:58] I said, you can't say that. That's not logical. You can't say that. I don't have any, I don't have any effect on your prayer life. I'm a separate person. And she said, she threw up her hands, she looked at the chair and she said, see, I can't talk to her.

Camille Lewis [03:29:17] I was like, what? I don't. That isn't. You're. You're blaming me for something that is not my responsibility and I'm supposed to just take it for. I don't know what some, some blame game. I don't know what it was. It was weird. So I jumped around a little bit.

John Dehlin [03:29:38] How did this all come to a head?

Camille Lewis [03:29:40] And in May, in May, no, July, they handed us this document to respond when we created that doctrine of soteriology. They responded to it with another document. They had taken our statement and Given it to the dean of the seminary and asked him to criticize it.

Camille Lewis [03:30:03] They gave us his criticism and then they put. At the very end. Now Grant's talking with. With Gary and Stephen. I asked Grant for the paper. I look at the paper and I knew, because I know how they work, that the. The punch, the bomb of their love bomb or whatever was going to be at the end. So I turn to the last paragraph.

Camille Lewis [03:30:24] It says, your statement is orthodox. We only disagree in emphasis. But if you cannot hold your position and keep from publicly presenting it to students, employees and others at a distance from the university, we must come to a parting of ways. So that was the ultimatum. If you can't be quiet, it's.

Margi Dehlin [03:30:56] We're firing.

John Dehlin [03:30:57] About which thing?

Camille Lewis [03:30:58] About the. The sin theology.

John Dehlin [03:31:00] The soteriology.

Camille Lewis [03:31:02] The soteriology that. That God loves.

John Dehlin [03:31:04] Did you care about. Well, I was evangelizing.

Margi Dehlin [03:31:07] It feels so arbitrary.

Camille Lewis [03:31:08] It does, yeah.

John Dehlin [03:31:09] They're the ones who asked. It's not like you were. Well, you tell me. Did they feel like you were teaching your views of sin in class?

Camille Lewis [03:31:18] I wasn't, but they must have. I mean, I gave that book to the boy that was having. That was struggling, and that book did match up. That. You know, if you're tired of trying to measure up, maybe you need to stop trying to measure up.

John Dehlin [03:31:29] It's basically an anti perfectionism book.

Camille Lewis [03:31:31] Yes, yes.

John Dehlin [03:31:32] In a Christian context.

Camille Lewis [03:31:33] Yes. That's essentially it.

John Dehlin [03:31:35] They wanted perfectionism.

Camille Lewis [03:31:36] Wanted perfection. And they didn't want. So they, they believed that I was being. I was evangelizing and Grant was too. We had just realized, you know, God loves you. And we were repeating that. That God loves you. That was it, as far as I understood. It is. That was it. And so when I got to that sentence, I interrupted Grant, I said, wait a minute, I want to know what this means. What is this? Others at a distance from the university. That's new. What does that mean? And Gary Weir went. He wouldn't define it. And that's another thing high demand groups do, is that they don't give you the benefit of clear lines.

John Dehlin [03:32:23] No, no, they're going to get. If they want to get you, they're going to get you.

Camille Lewis [03:32:27] Yeah, yeah, I heard you say that. It's true.

John Dehlin [03:32:29] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:32:29] And they're going to. They're not going to let you leave with your dignity intact, I think is what you said. Yes, and I said. I repeated it. I said, look, I don't want to mess this up. What does this mean? And he did it again. He struggled.

Forced Resignation and Loss of Career and Community

John Dehlin [03:32:42] Yeah,

Camille Lewis [03:32:45] I Was like,

John Dehlin [03:32:49] so what kept you from just saying, okay, I'll obey?

Camille Lewis [03:32:53] Well, we were numb. We were numb, completely numb. And we left and we just kind of. I, I was numb. Maybe I shouldn't speak for Grant. Grant may have been more awake than I was, but within 10 days, Grant had seen a job offer at a local Southern Baptist university, North Greenville University.

Camille Lewis [03:33:12] He had had, he had submitted an application. He had had his audition because he's a, he's a voice teacher, so he had to audition. He had had interviews and an offer. And he, Grant and I went to the Burger King because they had a little indoor playground and we sat there and talked about the kids played.

Camille Lewis [03:33:34] Well, we, you know, while they, we ate bad fries and talked about, should we leave? Can we do it? Is it possible? Because that was, we were going to be breaking contract, and you don't want to break contract. That was like the setup, the thing that they had set up for the rule, that's how you be a good person, is that you don't break contract.

Camille Lewis [03:33:57] Well, we said, we can do it. And this was a Wednesday. I said to Grant, look, you take care of the boys. I'm gonna go move out. And I, at 10 o' clock at night, from 10 to sunrise, I moved out of my office. Grant gave me a handcart, he was with the kids. And I moved out in the middle of the night. Which is bizarre, huh? That's bizarre.

Camille Lewis [03:34:26] I took my name tag, I, I, I, what's it called? Cleared out my computer, my office computer, wiped it because Grant told me to do that, because they're gonna, they're gonna find something. And I moved out and came home. On the way home, the sun was rising, I stopped, got an egg McMuffin for Grant, me, and arrived at home.

John Dehlin [03:34:52] So this question doesn't matter, but I'm curious how you'd respond. So, like, I was thinking, what am I going to call this episode? Or what's the thumbnail going to say? And it's like Bob Jones University fired me for not letting them spank my kid. Well, the truth is, they would say you weren't fired.

Camille Lewis [03:35:11] Right, right. I, I call it a forced resignation.

John Dehlin [03:35:15] But you also, I broke, they would

Camille Lewis [03:35:17] say I broke contract because you did,

John Dehlin [03:35:20] like, what I, when the church gave me that letter. And basically I had a meeting with my stake president who said, take down Mormon Stories podcast and we'll even think about whether you can keep your membership. But I wasn't, you know, willing to do that. But also I was trying, you know, Marg you'll know. And the audio for all of this is up online. But, like, I was like, well, what. What's wrong with my beliefs? What am I allowed to believe? What am I not allowed to believe? And they didn't want to, you know, get specific.

Camille Lewis [03:35:49] Yeah, okay, similar, but.

John Dehlin [03:35:52] But ultimately, you know, I had to think, do I want to force them to pull the trigger or do I just want to resign? You know, whatever. And I decided I wanted to make them go all the way. So I did. You know what I mean? And it took them a while. You know, I got the letter, I don't know, mid year in 2014, and they didn't excommunicate me until 2015, like February 2015. So you didn't decide to force them to pull the trigger?

Camille Lewis [03:36:23] We took the power. It's the way we felt about it. We took the control. This is how we're leaving. I wrote my students first that I was, we were resigning. I then wrote my, my colleagues and then we told the administration. And that was strategic on purpose because we didn't want to give this, the administration, the stick.

Margi Dehlin [03:36:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:36:43] I mean, is it possible that they would have just like, forgotten about it?

Camille Lewis [03:36:47] No, I don't think so. I think I was under scrutiny.

Margi Dehlin [03:36:49] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:36:50] I would have been flagged. I was big time flagged. There was no way, especially, Especially as the kids get older and something. They would have. Yeah, because I was going to publish. I was going to publish no matter what, I was going to publish that book.

John Dehlin [03:37:04] Okay. And so that was my next question. Like, let's say there's a pie chart of. You're speculating on the reasons they excommunicated you. There's not letting them beat your kids. There's your publishing your dissertation. There's your theological. So I would say each of those are the.

Camille Lewis [03:37:20] A third.

John Dehlin [03:37:21] It's a third. I would see three things.

Camille Lewis [03:37:23] Yes, I, I think, I think that, put it this way, all three of those things got brought up in the last year of our employment.

John Dehlin [03:37:32] So it's not obeying our spanking policies, criticizing the church, and not believing and teaching the right sin theology.

Camille Lewis [03:37:44] Right.

John Dehlin [03:37:44] Is that right?

Camille Lewis [03:37:45] Perfectionism. Right. Yeah, that's fair.

John Dehlin [03:37:49] And you feel very confident that if you hadn't have taken your power and left, you would have been you and your husband.

Camille Lewis [03:37:58] Yeah, both us.

John Dehlin [03:37:58] And was he being punished for his sins or. And I say sins metaphorically. So that's weird. Like your, your apostasy. I'll call it apostasy, because that's how we would frame it. Your Apostasy and disobedience impacted his standing at the university.

Margi Dehlin [03:38:15] Like, is it that severe that he wasn't doing his role? That's what it is to warrant that he gets.

Camille Lewis [03:38:20] Yeah, he was supposed to tell me. He was supposed to tell me to knock it off and shut up. Now. That's not Grant. Grant would never do that.

Margi Dehlin [03:38:33] He's.

Camille Lewis [03:38:33] He. We are. We are a team. You hurt one, you hurt both. I mean, he is my. My watchdog. So.

Margi Dehlin [03:38:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:38:45] Dang. Okay, so I mean, the, you know, the other option would have been to like, force them to fire you and then like, sue them or go to the news media and like, start a huge. Yeah, like, media hubbub. Bob Jones University fires professor for not letting them be.

Camille Lewis [03:39:06] Yeah, that could have happened.

John Dehlin [03:39:07] Like that. That didn't come across. No, see, we think differently.

Camille Lewis [03:39:12] Yeah, you're right. You're right.

John Dehlin [03:39:14] It didn't even.

Camille Lewis [03:39:16] Because the.

Margi Dehlin [03:39:17] The.

Camille Lewis [03:39:17] The two options. When we were sitting in that Burger King discussing the options, the two options would have been resign or lay low for a year and get a new job. So those were the two that we were thinking of. Just. Just lay low.

John Dehlin [03:39:35] But would you. Would you. Do you feel. And I don't care about what's on the thumbnail, but, like, do you feel okay with the story being framed that they fired you for not letting you know them, for not letting them beat your kid?

Camille Lewis [03:39:50] I. I mean, I guess that forced me to resign would be accurate if I'm going to be. You know.

John Dehlin [03:39:54] But.

Camille Lewis [03:39:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:39:55] Is that a technicality in your mind?

Camille Lewis [03:39:56] I think it's a.

John Dehlin [03:39:58] You were gonna be fired.

Camille Lewis [03:39:59] Yeah, I was gonna be fine.

John Dehlin [03:40:00] And mainly that would have been enough. Would that be even if you hadn't had the soteriology problem? I guess they framed you to do the.

Camille Lewis [03:40:07] Yeah, I think Sotira.

Margi Dehlin [03:40:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:40:08] Okay.

Camille Lewis [03:40:09] It was a trick.

Margi Dehlin [03:40:09] Almost felt like a diversion.

Camille Lewis [03:40:11] It. Yeah, maybe so.

Margi Dehlin [03:40:13] Like something.

John Dehlin [03:40:14] Okay, so was it 50, 50 criticized and you wouldn't obey with the child beating thing, was it more 50. 50.

Margi Dehlin [03:40:20] Do you know what? I wonder. I wonder if there's an overlay too, of how you responded to their request.

John Dehlin [03:40:26] Oh, yeah, you're.

Margi Dehlin [03:40:26] It was also just like she. Look at how many times we asked her to fall in line. And she hasn't fallen in line for one.

Camille Lewis [03:40:34] One thing. And I wouldn't.

Margi Dehlin [03:40:36] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:40:36] Absolutely would not. I'm sorry. I am. That baby is my baby.

John Dehlin [03:40:41] Cuz. Cuz when we asked you the. The hierarchy of sinning.

Camille Lewis [03:40:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:40:45] You put disobedience to authority, like, right under. Right under lgbtq. Right?

Camille Lewis [03:40:52] Yep.

John Dehlin [03:40:53] So you were disobedient to authority, and that's what it comes down to, the Mormonism.

Camille Lewis [03:40:56] You're right. You're right. You're right. Everything was it. You're right. That was it.

John Dehlin [03:41:02] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:41:02] Because they. They said, don't publish. Well, I'm not publish. You just don't. I was thinking you just don't know anything. You boys don't know. Listen to me again. Listen to me. Calling them boys.

John Dehlin [03:41:14] Hmm.

Camille Lewis [03:41:18] There. There's something in there that I'm a smart woman and I.

Margi Dehlin [03:41:22] The.

Camille Lewis [03:41:22] Those boys are dumb.

John Dehlin [03:41:25] Yeah. I often say that obedience to authority is the most sacred doctrine of Mormonism.

Camille Lewis [03:41:31] Okay. That would fit. That would absolutely fit.

John Dehlin [03:41:34] Yeah. So that's what happened.

Camille Lewis [03:41:36] I think you're right.

John Dehlin [03:41:38] So y' all resigned.

Camille Lewis [03:41:39] We resigned. And we thought. At this point, we thought, we are free now. We can. We can. If we want to be in Sunday school, at church, we're not going to be overworked. Because BJU would overwork you. I mean, he had so many meetings and requirements and all this. We were not gonna be as overworked. I can. I would be free to do this,

John Dehlin [03:41:58] and you would stay in the same town and go to the same church.

Camille Lewis [03:42:02] Same church. We were. We went to our pastor. We know that at bju, the first person that says something, or in fundamentalism, the first person that says something kind of has primacy. Has. Has. Gets to control the narrative. So we went right to our pastor and said, here's what happened. We showed him the document. He lives just down the road from here now in Riverton. I looked him up.

John Dehlin [03:42:27] Oh, wow.

Camille Lewis [03:42:28] Yeah. So anyway,

Margi Dehlin [03:42:32] we.

Camille Lewis [03:42:32] He said. He looked at the document. He said, they changed the contract on you when they said that you can't share with people outside of the university. That's changing the contract. They broke contract. And we were like, hey, you're right.

John Dehlin [03:42:47] Like that.

Camille Lewis [03:42:47] Yeah. I was like, thanks. And so we felt stronger. And he said, we do not want to inhibit your

John Dehlin [03:42:56] worship.

Camille Lewis [03:42:57] Freedom and worship. Yeah. You know, and we were like, great. And so I. I volunteered to be in a Sunday school, you know, with a Sunday school class with. For the little kids. And I was all excited. And he had lunch with Grant one day at the beginning of the next school year. So this is 2007. He had lunch with Grant at North Greenville University, where Grant was employed. And it was a great visit and everything felt good.

Camille Lewis [03:43:26] Within 24 hours, he had emailed us a several. I don't remember how many pages. Several pages, email, single space. Bible verses, quoting about all the things we were doing wrong. And then he said, at the end, he said something like, grant, you're not going to be allowed to sing solos anymore because if when people look at you, they're only going to see you're leaving Bob Jones.

Camille Lewis [03:43:58] And we think somebody got to him. We think somebody, of course, yes, told him, bring them back, discipline them. And Grant was, I was too. But I think Grant was more hurt because he had had the lunch with Danny, sorry, our pastor, the day before. And Grant wrote him back and said, look, I don't know if you're right and I don't know if you're wrong, but I can't believe that you think it's okay for you to email this to us like this. After we had just had a conversation at lunch and that was, that was August or so, and we met with Danny again in November.

Camille Lewis [03:44:44] I said his name again face to face. And he, he said, at this point, I had, I had a pretty prolific blog and I had said something like, you know, now we're, we're free. I was analyzing fundamentalism from, with inside fundamentalism, and now I'm outside fundamentalism. And I can look at fundamentalism from the outside as an academic and I can analyze it. And I was kind of excited about that prospect.

Camille Lewis [03:45:16] And Danny said to me, you've got to lay this down. That was this phrase. You got to lay this down. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. It's a proverb that he quoted. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. And there is no example in the Old Testament of the New Testament of what you're doing, meaning what he.

John Dehlin [03:45:38] You're doing what you're doing.

Camille Lewis [03:45:41] Calling out fundamentalism for its abuse.

John Dehlin [03:45:44] So criticizing a church for its abuse is not biblical.

Camille Lewis [03:45:48] Is not biblical. And I said, wait a minute. The prophets, that's what they're doing. The fact that we know that Paul confronted Peter from Acts means that they were doing it. There's, there's all kinds of people calling out Jesus, called out the Pharisees. There's all kinds of calling people out.

Camille Lewis [03:46:12] There's all kinds of speaking. I just would say this now, speaking truth to power. What are you talking about? And he just said, there's no example of what you're doing in the Old Testament. The New Testament now is your chance to be a stay at home mom and just focus on your kids and do something else.

Camille Lewis [03:46:28] And I was like, nope, you're wrong. I mean, I was a stay at home mom for a few years and that's Great. I love my time with my boys. They are awesome humans. But that was not his call or no, no, no, no, no. And so we left.

Margi Dehlin [03:46:45] We.

Camille Lewis [03:46:46] We Left that in November 2007. Left that, left that church because it. It felt like it was roiling towards church discipline.

John Dehlin [03:46:59] Do they communicate?

Camille Lewis [03:47:01] They don't excommunicate. Well, wait a minute. They don't use that word. Excommunicate.

John Dehlin [03:47:05] Interesting.

Margi Dehlin [03:47:06] What is church discipline then?

Camille Lewis [03:47:07] Isn't that interesting that that is church discipline means that you will be kicked out of the church, which is excommunication. But you know, it starts with a. It. They. They were pretty formal about it. Starts with a one on one confrontation and there may be many one on one converse confrontations. And then eventually it comes to a larger group confronting you. And then if you refuse to submit, you're kicked out. But yeah, you're right, it is excommunication. They just don't use that word. I don't know why I don't use that word.

John Dehlin [03:47:44] It doesn't have good optics. Yeah, maybe that's sort of. It gives. It gives medieval, you know, vibes. Right?

Camille Lewis [03:47:51] Yeah. All right. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. Maybe it is just branding.

John Dehlin [03:47:55] Yeah. Oh, I think so.

Margi Dehlin [03:47:57] So if you were gonna look for a church in that area, is there a feeling that many of the churches in that area are actually bju?

Camille Lewis [03:48:10] Absolutely.

Margi Dehlin [03:48:10] Okay, so your options.

John Dehlin [03:48:12] You didn't finish your question.

Margi Dehlin [03:48:13] Or what are connected to Bob Jones, like where the pastors are actually, you know, kind of in on have gone through that education, you said where they.

John Dehlin [03:48:26] There's multiple fundamentalist Baptist churches in that town.

Camille Lewis [03:48:29] Oh boy, there's lots of.

Margi Dehlin [03:48:31] Because I was trying to think if you would have options like that community. You're feeling like, oh, okay, he's been reached. This pastor has been reached. And I was curious if you were like, oh, we'll just go to another one.

Camille Lewis [03:48:43] If you'd be like, oh, no, you'd be marked. They would contact. So I knew and Grant knew too. We both knew we were not going to go to a church that was just a phone call away. And the church that we chose is a church that was on BJU's blacklist. Now it's not on, technically not on BJU's blacklist anymore, but it was when we joined it because they supported the Billy Graham crusade in 1966. Isn't that bizarre that I even just said that? Did I even know that?

John Dehlin [03:49:21] Pardon me, what was the church?

Camille Lewis [03:49:22] It's Mitchell Road Presbyterian Church.

John Dehlin [03:49:24] The enemy of My enemy is my friend.

Camille Lewis [03:49:27] And I talked to an old timer once. I think, you know, as I heard through the grapevine that that had happened. And so I talked to one of the old timers, which is one of the reasons I like this church is because it's been around a while. There are a lot of non BJU people there, and you feel connected to people that are not.

Margi Dehlin [03:49:44] But it's weird. It was black listed at that time for a decision that was made back in 1966.

Camille Lewis [03:49:54] Yeah, the mayor of. I know an irrational amount of details about this. The mayor of Greenville at the time was a member of Mitchell Road and who was working very hard at starting an ecumenical prayer breakfast. And BJU did not like that. And so. And then the Billy Graham crusade, and so it all bundled up.

Aftermath, Faith Transition, and Life After BJU

John Dehlin [03:50:16] So what's it like for you and your husband both to lose your jobs, your careers in a way, at first, and your church and your faith?

Camille Lewis [03:50:32] It was weird. It was weird. And to be in the same place,

John Dehlin [03:50:35] which I know you all understand, and stay in that.

Camille Lewis [03:50:38] To stay in that place, and I. It was weird.

John Dehlin [03:50:41] Oh, I should have said all your friends and your community, too.

Camille Lewis [03:50:44] Right? Right.

John Dehlin [03:50:46] That's a lot to lose in one. In one month. Right.

Camille Lewis [03:50:49] I was at the mall. What a weird story. I was at the mall in September of that year after we had left, and I saw a lady who was a. I knew. She. She was, I think, my former student. She was my age, but she was my student and she is still an employee. And I said, hi, how are you? Are you ready for the new semester? Normal stuff. And she said, I'm fine, thank you. And she wouldn't. She couldn't leave because she was checking out. But I was clearly Persona non grata. I wasn't. I was blacklisted. I could tell.

John Dehlin [03:51:28] Yeah. So there was always the question, you know, Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists, they do hard shunning. And so then there's the question, do Mormons shun? Yeah. And I call it soft shunning.

Camille Lewis [03:51:38] Okay, so what do you.

John Dehlin [03:51:39] It's not like, cut you out of your life completely, but just a complete withdrawal of emotional intimacy or affection and a cold, distant. Anything from like, a cold, distant, like, grouchy look to just like. We're no longer. We no longer can really associate. You know what I mean? I love you. I love you so much. And we're never gonna do anything together again or talk or have any real connection. Soft shutting.

Camille Lewis [03:52:04] That's soft. That is absolutely. What happened at the Beginning. So what's hard shunning?

John Dehlin [03:52:08] Oh, it'd be, you're out of my life. You don't exist. I'll never say your name, never talk, never be seen with you, never talk to you in any way. You're dead to me, basically.

Camille Lewis [03:52:18] Okay. There was a. An instance when we were still employed. Some dear friends of ours left, broke contract, and I decided right then when. And they were our friends, that I was not gonna shun them in any way. I want to still be their friend. You know, they're. I mean, we love them. Why would we do. Why would we shun. That's stupid. Stupid. This was in 2005, and the next. They were in my department, and in the. They know who they are. The next departmental meeting that we had, my chair said. Mentioned their names and said, their reputation is black. And he raised himself up out of the chair, and he did this gesture.

John Dehlin [03:53:06] For doing what?

Camille Lewis [03:53:06] For breaking contract. And that was all they did. I mean, it wasn't even as dramatic as what I did. That's all they did.

John Dehlin [03:53:13] There was no child abuse, no. Adultery.

Camille Lewis [03:53:16] No.

John Dehlin [03:53:17] The bezelment.

Camille Lewis [03:53:18] No. They. They.

Margi Dehlin [03:53:21] They.

Camille Lewis [03:53:22] The. The husband was wanting to have some changes, physical changes done to the classroom space, and it wasn't happening fast enough. And he was like, I'm not. I'm not doing this anymore. It was that kind of a thing. He just got first. Typical frustration, I think, my understanding of it. And because they broke contract by leaving in May, the reputation was black. I've told them the story, so they

Margi Dehlin [03:53:50] know it in your community, as you, let's say, were grocery shopping.

Camille Lewis [03:53:56] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [03:53:56] Or out and about.

Camille Lewis [03:53:58] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [03:54:00] How. How, like, did you feel like, how many people knew about it? Did you feel like kind of the majority of people you met were aware of this situation? Did you feel like, oh, nope, I can still. There's room enough for me to plant a new life here. There. There.

Camille Lewis [03:54:19] Not initially, but within a year.

Margi Dehlin [03:54:22] Yes, within a year.

Camille Lewis [03:54:23] Yeah. I mean, I had. I remember one of my friends who. Who was right there in the thick of it with us. Her name's Molly. Molly was one of those people. Her kids are the same age as my kids, so she was one of those people that I could connect with. We'd go to the playground together, and so I could find people.

Margi Dehlin [03:54:47] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:54:48] But it was hard. But if I did run into a BJU person, and you can, you know, you see them a mile away. You know who they are, although they don't recognize me anymore. So when I sat next to one of the post office the other day. She had no idea who I was. But at first, it was pretty hard. Yeah. Pretty hard.

Margi Dehlin [03:55:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:55:13] Yeah. So, I mean, you lost all your BJU friends and community and family after having served BJU for how long?

Camille Lewis [03:55:21] 17 years.

John Dehlin [03:55:21] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:55:22] Long time. And that's as a. As an employee.

John Dehlin [03:55:25] Yeah. And so I guess. And we can move on. But, like, for me, it was devastating. For me, it was psychologically, emotionally devastating to lose my friends, family, community, faith, church, you know, everything. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:55:43] And you're just.

Margi Dehlin [03:55:44] You.

Camille Lewis [03:55:44] You. I would make memes to therapeutically work out my angst. It was hard. My current church was very gentle about because we slowly brought back in to church life. And you can't sit next to my husband in church without knowing that he's a singer and he's a great singer. So these gentle people would say, what, you know, you all want to join the choir? And we were scared. We were scared of putting down roots because we didn't want to get pushed out. But the three organizations in Greenville who have been honorable in our treatment has been the church, our current church, Mitchell Road, my kids, school, they have protected us. And my employer, my current employer, Furman University, they have all acted honorably and protected us in ways that other institutions have not.

John Dehlin [03:57:01] Well, I'm glad y' all were able to make it through.

Camille Lewis [03:57:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:57:04] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:57:05] Thank you. I am, too. It was. It was rough, but it's better out here. Freedom is better and kindness is better.

John Dehlin [03:57:13] So did your beliefs, Christian beliefs, change.

Camille Lewis [03:57:16] They changed in the sense of. I don't. They match more. I would say they match more of the love and God's love and care that I learned from my parents, that the current place where I am matches that better. I still believe in Jesus. I still believe that I still can affirm the Nicene Creed, but my righteousness is not absolutely dependent on me and my actions.

Margi Dehlin [03:57:52] I.

Camille Lewis [03:57:52] It's okay if I fail. That makes sense.

John Dehlin [03:57:56] Yeah. And so, like, I'm just like. Again, this is like, where from, Morris? Mormon stories. Context.

Camille Lewis [03:58:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:58:02] It's just like, what? Like.

Camille Lewis [03:58:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:58:05] Pretty much everyone I interview.

Margi Dehlin [03:58:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:58:07] The end of their Mormon stories is I don't know if I believe in God anymore. I don't know if I believe in Jesus anymore. Do you notice that?

Camille Lewis [03:58:13] Yeah, I do.

John Dehlin [03:58:14] And a lot of my.

Camille Lewis [03:58:15] A lot of my fundamentalist friends don't believe anymore.

John Dehlin [03:58:17] Okay.

Camille Lewis [03:58:18] Which is which I. I get. I guess I feel like, okay, God, they were placed in this situation, this bad, bad, abusive world. You're gonna have to work that out. But I Do believe God's gonna work it out.

John Dehlin [03:58:36] Yeah. Okay, so that's interesting that you can experience, effect, an excommunication for apostasy.

Margi Dehlin [03:58:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:58:45] After giving your life to a church and really your faith is almost unscathed. That's mind blowing to me. And cool. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:58:55] It's almost deeper because.

John Dehlin [03:58:58] Deeper your faith deepened because I know

Camille Lewis [03:59:02] what I know that fundamentalism was wrong, its lack of grace was wrong, its lack of love was wrong, and that God is a loving God. So that's where I land.

John Dehlin [03:59:14] Fascinating. Okay, beautiful. All right. So you joked maybe in our email correspondence that you're aspiring to be the Sandra Tanner of Fundamentalist Baptist.

Camille Lewis [03:59:29] I love her.

John Dehlin [03:59:30] Can you tell us how your career advanced and what that has meant in terms of how you have spent the last, what, 10 years? How many years now have you been.

Camille Lewis [03:59:44] What is that?

John Dehlin [03:59:45] I guess. Yeah, I guess maybe more. 20 years. 20.

Camille Lewis [03:59:49] 18.

John Dehlin [03:59:50] 18 years, yeah.

Camille Lewis [03:59:51] 18 years. Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:59:52] How have you become? I mean, there are all sorts of words for it from apostate to like anti Mormon would be what we would say.

Camille Lewis [04:00:00] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [04:00:00] Would they be. Would it be anti Baptist?

Camille Lewis [04:00:03] They'd call me anti fundamentalist.

John Dehlin [04:00:04] Anti fundamentalist.

Camille Lewis [04:00:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:00:06] In your context, meaning anti Baptist. Fundamentalist.

Camille Lewis [04:00:09] Yeah. Right, right, right. Which I, you know, I have Southern Baptists actually, that gets, that gets complicated. But I get them. They're very similar to Protestants. There's a lot of cross pollination, just like there are with you Mormon folks and us. So what happened was, and I think this is typical for academics, when you go through a trauma, the ripping out you research, it's. It's coping. It's a coping mechanism. So I thought maybe, I wonder if there are other people that have been through what I've been through, if through at Bob Jones. And I, boy, did I discover people that had been through this.

John Dehlin [04:01:07] Whoa. Like the.

Camille Lewis [04:01:09] Which parts of this, the pushing out and the, the standing up for an issue, an issue, whatever issue it was, and then getting pushed out of the, out of that camp. There was. And, and what happened? What has happened is that I've become a collector of these stories so that people, I've had people call me to say, hey, listen, let me tell you this story about me, or let me tell you the story about my history professor at Bob Jones. So, for instance, there's one man named Morton Brown who was a history professor at Bob Jones in the 50s, and he did not want his wife to go to a BJU doctor for her births for childbirth.

Camille Lewis [04:02:02] And he had many reasons why, and he objected and they fired him in the middle of semester. He went to East Tennessee State and he documented everything and it's all there, which I got. I went to. To their archives and I have his papers.

Camille Lewis [04:02:19] There was a man named Jack Peters who taught in the missions program and he. He had a earned PhD. His daughter called me and told me his story. Jack Peters object. He had spent many years as a missionary in Africa and he protested that BJU would not let a black employee. This is in the 60s. They would not let a black employee take her free class. Every employee gets a free class every semester. They wouldn't let her take it because she wasn't married and she was black.

Camille Lewis [04:03:06] He objected and I think they let her take the class. But then they fired him there. So there were so many. I found a. In. What's his name? H.L. mencken. Do you know H.L. mencken? Have you ever heard that name?

John Dehlin [04:03:22] Yes.

Camille Lewis [04:03:23] He was the reporter that covered the Scopes trial that made it so famous from the evolution.

John Dehlin [04:03:28] Right?

Camille Lewis [04:03:28] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He had in his magazine an article by a. An a letter from a current employee at bju, bjc Bob Jones College, who was describing all of the terrible things that were going on. And he published it. It's from the 40s. It sounds just like today. It sounds exactly like all these requirements that I've described. All these difficult things. It was no different. And I was like, it has not changed. It's. And I found story after story after story.

John Dehlin [04:04:06] And because fundamentalism means do it the way it was originally done. Don't change. Don't change it.

Camille Lewis [04:04:12] Yeah, don't change it. And don't say. Don't change it the way we say it was. It used to be, I mean, you know.

John Dehlin [04:04:18] Yes, obey. Yeah, obey. And also, you know. Yeah, obey, obey. And don't challenge authority ever. Don't question.

Margi Dehlin [04:04:26] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [04:04:27] Don't speak truth to power.

John Dehlin [04:04:28] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Camille Lewis [04:04:30] So it opened up all this. These people that I hadn't. I didn't know before and I didn't know they'd all gone through this. And while I was researching this, I found out. Well, at the same time, this was about 2008, and I know you have sometimes give a caveat about politics. This might be a necessary caveat about politics here, but this is part of my story.

John Dehlin [04:04:57] As you said recently, Mormon stories wants everyone to feel comfortable across the political persuasion and people also get to tell their story.

Camille Lewis [04:05:08] That's right.

John Dehlin [04:05:09] So, you know, be mature.

Camille Lewis [04:05:12] Okay. That's right. So in 2008, I was now, not a fundamentalist. And I was like, I. And part of being a fundamentalist meant you were a Republican.

Margi Dehlin [04:05:21] Okay.

Camille Lewis [04:05:22] I was like, I am going to listen to both sides of the equation now that I am not a fundamentalist. And I really liked what Barack Obama was saying. But as I listened, I heard people in the Republican side saying, and I quote, this was. Her name was Lisa Schiffrin. Schifflin. Schifflin from National Review, which is a pretty staunch conservative publication.

Camille Lewis [04:05:46] She said, we know that Barack Obama was raised by communists because his parents had a mixed racial relationship or mixed race marriage. And I was like, wait a minute. Why is this woman from New York City in the National Review repeating something that I heard from Year for years from the pulpit at Bob Jones University? How did a secular Republican sound so much like a South Carolina fundamentalist?

Camille Lewis [04:06:23] And I got to figure this out. I got to figure out how did we conflate integration with communism and segregation with conservatism When a world, when the.

John Dehlin [04:06:37] I'm just jumping in. When the world turns against racism, then you can't be racist. So then you use a different justification.

Camille Lewis [04:06:48] Yes, yes, I think absolutely right, right, right, right. That is how it gets conflated. And so I, I asked. I had a older professor friend, not my. He was never my teacher, but I knew him. And I asked. He was long standing liberal. And I asked him about it. He said, yeah, I don't know about that. I don't know where they. That came from. He wasn't sure. So I just started digging and digging and digging. And part of my digging was that I wanted to find a. Now I'm a, you know, a speech critic. I wanted to find the infamous sermon that Bob Jones preached. Is Segregation Scriptural? Now this is Bob Jones Senior. It was so important to the BJU world that they transcribed it and sold it in a little pamphlet in the bookstore.

John Dehlin [04:07:38] What year?

Camille Lewis [04:07:40] Well, he delivered in 1960. But in 1986, when I was a student, I was required to read that and sign off that I had read it like it was a creed. And I did. I did.

Margi Dehlin [04:07:52] I didn't.

John Dehlin [04:07:52] I mean, it says what? Like the most offensive thing about it

Camille Lewis [04:07:55] is there's a reason the China Chinese are in China. You don't want to make trouble. Don't go messing up the lines. The, the boundary lines between us. Don't. And don't listen to evangelists of a certain. What he call him, a certain kind

John Dehlin [04:08:19] dog whistling against interracial.

Camille Lewis [04:08:21] Yes.

John Dehlin [04:08:22] Dating and marriage.

Camille Lewis [04:08:23] Yes.

John Dehlin [04:08:23] Okay.

Camille Lewis [04:08:24] Is Segregation Scriptural? Was the title of it?

John Dehlin [04:08:26] Yeah, okay.

Camille Lewis [04:08:27] I couldn't find a copy of it.

John Dehlin [04:08:28] Yeah, okay. In what year?

Camille Lewis [04:08:30] This is 2010.

John Dehlin [04:08:31] Okay.

Camille Lewis [04:08:32] I couldn't. I was like, so many of us had to read this. I can't find a copy. So I. No library had it now. The BJU library had it. I wasn't yet banned at this point.

John Dehlin [04:08:47] From the campus.

Camille Lewis [04:08:48] From the campus? Not yet. That came in 2012. But. But I knew that they wouldn't let me look at it. I knew that I was still a Persona non grata. So I. And at the time, if you did go up to see that sermon into the BJU archives, you. You could not take a picture, you could not photocopy it. You could only write it out, write out the whole thing with a pencil because you're in an archive. They didn't want people to have a physical copy of it.

John Dehlin [04:09:16] And there wasn't a copy of it on the Internet?

Camille Lewis [04:09:17] No, not yet.

John Dehlin [04:09:18] That's crazy. This is kind of like the Mormon temple ceremony. Yes. That was kept secret. It's exactly like that until somebody exposed it on the Internet.

Camille Lewis [04:09:27] So I.

John Dehlin [04:09:28] Or in books.

Camille Lewis [04:09:29] Yeah. I got three people, different people, friends of mine that gave me their. Had pieces of the copy. None of them had a complete copy, so I had to get pieces of it. Mark Robinson, Harry McCall and Greg Easton all gave me copies and I pieced it together, I transcribed it and I posted it on my blog.

Camille Lewis [04:09:54] So now it was public. And I thought, I gotta research this more. I gotta do my speech teacher thing, my speech critic thing. He delivered it on April 17, 1960. I thought, what could have provoked him to do that?

Camille Lewis [04:10:16] So I went to the newspapers. Well, first I went to the calendar. I found out this was on Easter morning. He delivered the sermon on the most holy day on the Christian calendar, the day that we celebrate the resurrection and salvation. He's preaching about racial segregation.

Camille Lewis [04:10:40] Come to find out on the Good Friday before. The day before. Excuse me. The Good Friday is when we. We remember our sins. What put Christ on the cross as you all put in the garden of Gethsemane. We focus on the cross.

Camille Lewis [04:10:57] Billy Graham had published in his syndicated column calling Southern white Protestants to push out Jim Crow. He said Jim Crow must go. He was calling them to integration. I found this was in 1960. I found out that there had been a long standing antagonism with Billy Graham and race. I found very. Several expressions of it. But 1960, it was his saying Jim Crow must go that antagonized Bob Jones senior so much that he went to Rage on his radio show and delivered that sermon.

Camille Lewis [04:11:42] And I thought, that's it. I realized that's why we hate Billy Graham. That question that I'd asked my brother as a freshman, why do we hate Billy Graham? I don't know. He would say that was why. Because Billy Graham. And he's got. There's a lot of reasons to criticize Billy Graham. I understand that.

Camille Lewis [04:12:01] But he was foregrounding, thanks to probably what Eisenhower asked him to do, he was foregrounding integration, and that was beyond the pale for Bob Jones Senior.

John Dehlin [04:12:15] So basically, you're bju, Sandra Tanner and Matt Harris. Yeah.

Camille Lewis [04:12:19] Okay, okay, okay, okay.

John Dehlin [04:12:20] Fair enough.

Camille Lewis [04:12:21] Fair enough.

John Dehlin [04:12:22] But you signed. You signed that.

Camille Lewis [04:12:24] Well, I signed it. I'm 18. I signed it. I didn't, I didn't understand it. I know I didn't understand it, and I don't know that I really read it.

John Dehlin [04:12:33] Yeah, okay, but.

Camille Lewis [04:12:34] And I don't think I had to sign that. I agreed with. With it. I had to sign that. I read it. Okay, but, yeah, but I mean, Bob Third. The kids call him triple Sticks, but Bob Third would preach about. I mean, he would rant and rave about segregation a lot in faculty meeting. It was very important to them. It was very important.

John Dehlin [04:12:58] Yeah. I mean, I, I. That part we can totally relate to is like, growing up with one understanding and learning later that your faith was built on a rotten core of bigotry and that that was at some point withheld and even, you know, put down the memory hole to prevent current members from learning about the church's past. Very important. Central core doctrinal past. Right.

Camille Lewis [04:13:32] Clearly it was important to him. And when. When Bob Third went to Larry King to, To remove the rule Larry King show on March 3, 2000, when he was in the middle of Campaign 2000 and all that scrutiny, he said this. This doesn't mean a thing to us. Our students don't hear it preached. We don't care. Everybody's making a big deal about this, and we don't care. No, we all knew. We graduates knew this was a big deal. And he's lying again, like you're saying.

John Dehlin [04:14:03] And our Gordon B. Hinckley went on Larry King Live and said, well, we don't really, you know, polygamy. I don't. You know, that it's not. It's not really doctrine. You know what I mean? Even though it really is. But, like, what he was trying to say is we don't practice it, but we still believe in it. You know, but it's still scriptural. But we stopped doing it, but he just nuanced it and said it's no longer doctrinal. You know what I mean?

Camille Lewis [04:14:29] What year did he do that? Remember?

John Dehlin [04:14:31] Wow. I'm going to say in the early 90s.

Camille Lewis [04:14:37] Okay, okay. So. So earlier. So probably we got that from you all going on Larry K. To defend and twist and.

John Dehlin [04:14:45] Yeah. And he also, we. We have the belief that Mormons have. The belief that Mormons become gods.

Camille Lewis [04:14:51] Right, right.

John Dehlin [04:14:52] Under scrutiny. And then eventually Gordon B. Hinckley said publicly, I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it. Because as the God Makers movie. Yeah, I remember, starts coming out in the early 80s. God makers, that means they think they're going to become gods. Evangelicals didn't like the.

Margi Dehlin [04:15:14] That.

John Dehlin [04:15:14] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [04:15:15] Oh, boy, I remember that.

John Dehlin [04:15:16] So, you know, Gordon B. Hinckley had to thread this needle of telling the world. Now we don't. We don't have that weird belief that you could become God. So we could be friends with the evangelicals. But then it would come back and he would say that publicly. And then he would come back to the Mormons and sort of joke and say, some people think I don't understand Mormon doctrine, but let's just be clear. I understand. Understand Mormon doctrine. And everyone would laugh. And so, like, he could. He could code switch and speak one way to the public and then another way back to the membership. And so, so Larry King was doing that shuffle with Larry.

Camille Lewis [04:15:54] Okay.

John Dehlin [04:15:54] Gordon Hinkey was doing that shuffle with Larry King Live. Just like triple sticks. Yes, was.

Camille Lewis [04:15:59] Exactly. That's amazing. I need to go back.

John Dehlin [04:16:02] There's a lot of parallels.

Camille Lewis [04:16:03] Yeah. Boy, that is striking. I need to go back and listen to that. Just for, for empathy's sake. To, to feel it with.

John Dehlin [04:16:09] Or like, when they'd ask Gordon Hinckley about, like, black people or gay people, he'd be like, we love everybody. We welcome all to come.

Camille Lewis [04:16:16] Everybody.

John Dehlin [04:16:17] You know, just. But, you know, not. No apologies, no taking responsibility.

Camille Lewis [04:16:24] Never apologize.

John Dehlin [04:16:25] Right.

Camille Lewis [04:16:26] The.

Margi Dehlin [04:16:26] The.

Camille Lewis [04:16:26] The. The phrase is standing without apology. That's how BJU sees itself.

John Dehlin [04:16:30] Oh, my gosh. We have our. Our number two in command is. Is on record saying we neither request nor give apologies.

Camille Lewis [04:16:40] That's interesting.

John Dehlin [04:16:41] Yeah. I swear we have the same lawyers,

Camille Lewis [04:16:44] the same consultants, and the, the apologies. I don't know why they think it's so bad. I don't know.

John Dehlin [04:16:49] Because it means they weren't led by God.

Camille Lewis [04:16:50] Well, okay, that. I guess you're right.

John Dehlin [04:16:52] That's why you can't disobey and that's why you can't question, because then they're not led by God. It's all about authority, ultimately.

Camille Lewis [04:17:01] Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Totally, Totally.

John Dehlin [04:17:03] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [04:17:04] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [04:17:04] And. And they are the authority. You know, in the. In the whole Animal Farm, you know, some of us are more equal than others. Everybody's equal, but some of us are more equal than others.

Current Life, Scholarship, and Connecting with Others

John Dehlin [04:17:13] So how are you guys today? How are you doing?

Camille Lewis [04:17:16] Well, we're fine. We're great, actually.

John Dehlin [04:17:19] I'm surprised. Like, do you ever worry about your safety staying in that home, Hometown?

Camille Lewis [04:17:24] Oh, yeah. I've had the. You know, I have the Furman University police on my contact list. I've had. That's when I say that my kids, school, my church, and Furman have protected us because BJU people have targeted my kids at their school. They've called my church to create trouble, and then they've. I've gotten death threats that caused the Furman police to protect me.

John Dehlin [04:18:04] So that's serious.

Camille Lewis [04:18:05] Yeah, it. Women. When women speak, even women speak online, they're gonna get targeted is how I figure. But I'm thankful that I have that protection around me, that people don't like women acting. That's just it.

John Dehlin [04:18:26] Why stay in the shadow of bju? Why not move?

Camille Lewis [04:18:28] That's a great question. I don't know the answer to that. That's a great. I mean, lots of people say, why don't you leave? I'm like, I don't know why.

John Dehlin [04:18:36] I would never do that.

Camille Lewis [04:18:39] I don't know why. I mean, really. I mean, it is my home. I do like Greenville. I've lived there a long time. The weather's nice. And now my kids are two South Carolina boys who love pulled pork barbecue and pimento cheese. And so that's where we are.

John Dehlin [04:19:03] Yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons we brought you on Mormon stories, because that's kind of cool. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [04:19:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:19:09] I mean, it's kind of punk rock. I'll say.

Camille Lewis [04:19:11] There we go. Hey, that's cool. I just. I don't know why. I don't know if it. Because I. You know, there are things that I still get kind of. South Carolina mystifies me because I am a Detroiter, and I understand Detroit, but that's where I am.

John Dehlin [04:19:30] So tell us real quickly some of the articles or books you published tied to bg.

Camille Lewis [04:19:35] Okay, so I. My dissertation is called Romancing the Difference, and that was through Baylor University Press. That's the first one.

John Dehlin [04:19:43] So, like, the other types of Baptists were okay publishing the dig on the Fundamentalist Baptist. That's fun.

Camille Lewis [04:19:50] And Marty Medhurst, who's Catholic. Bless. Anyway, then my second book was an anthology of. Called White Nationalism and Faith. And it was a conversation from the last century, how religion uses racist arguments, essentially. And then my third book was the era book with my friend, another anthology, 100 Years of Women Debating the Equal Rights Amendment.

John Dehlin [04:20:23] And, you know, the Mormons. Yes, we kind of take credit for.

Camille Lewis [04:20:27] You should. Yeah, you should.

John Dehlin [04:20:29] For defeating it.

Camille Lewis [04:20:30] Oh, for defeating it. But there's also formidable strain that. That has argued for it, though. Yeah. Sonia Johnson, though.

John Dehlin [04:20:44] Oh, yeah. But I mean, back in the 70s, our church leaders mobilized the membership to defeat the era with.

Margi Dehlin [04:20:52] With.

Camille Lewis [04:20:53] Barbara Smith was one of the voices that we.

John Dehlin [04:20:55] Like Utah, Wyoming, you know, they're Idaho. There were, like, several states that we made the difference, you know.

Camille Lewis [04:21:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:21:01] They kept it from being ratified.

Camille Lewis [04:21:03] Yeah, yeah. Which is. And. And. And on Sonia Johnson day in my class when we taught that I. She was part of the people that went on hunger strike. And she said, I. She didn't say this. She said, I. I just want some scrambled eggs right now. When she was on hunger strike. And a friend of hers said, I just would kill for a Fresca. So I brought in Fresca for the

John Dehlin [04:21:29] class

Camille Lewis [04:21:31] to relate to them because they had never had Fresca bless them. And then my final book is called Bob Jones at the Intersection of Race, Religion, and White Supremacy. And that is where this book took 15 years to research, write, and get published. It's been a lot of hustle, so it is done. And that's where I prove that Bob Jones senior, the founder of my alma mater, Bob Jones University, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and that he. His neighbors said that he founded Bob Jones College, quote, to teach clanism. Close quote. And that just floored me. It still floors me. So whatever it was that bj, Bob Jones College and Bob Jones University has taught, whatever it is that they have taught. That's Clandimentalism.

John Dehlin [04:22:35] Wow. So what would be like. That'd be like us finding out that Brigham Young or Joseph Smith was a Ku Klux Klan member.

Camille Lewis [04:22:42] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so when did Brigham Young die?

John Dehlin [04:22:48] Oh, I'm gonna say the 1880s.

Camille Lewis [04:22:52] Okay, so he. I mean, it.

John Dehlin [04:22:53] 1870.

Camille Lewis [04:22:54] That could have been the first Ku Klux. There's three clans generally, and that could have been the first clan, but that was the reconstruction plan, But I don't think it was very popular out. Out west here, so.

John Dehlin [04:23:04] Yeah. Yeah. Or are you saying he might have

Camille Lewis [04:23:07] been well, no, I mean, I'm just thinking how about I research that on ancestry.com but no, he probably wasn't because it wasn't the first Ku Klux Klan was mostly in the Southeast.

Margi Dehlin [04:23:20] Wow.

John Dehlin [04:23:21] Well, that's a pretty. I mean, I don't know. That's a distinguished academic record.

Camille Lewis [04:23:25] Well, thank you. Yeah, that's. Those are books. I've gotten articles. I've got articles on the sermon. Is segregation scriptural? Because I wanted that to be known of that it. And I wanted it to be connected with my research and. Oh well, I mean I do. I like to look for people who have resisted the Ku Klux Klan's dominance. So I have an article about a Georgian named Andrew Cobb Irwin who rescued. Resisted the clan.

John Dehlin [04:23:59] So that's cool.

Camille Lewis [04:24:01] I like to find those.

John Dehlin [04:24:02] And then how did you get turned on to Mormon stories?

Camille Lewis [04:24:06] My friend Wanda is another rhetorician and she and I were. We're comparing notes and she. She's al. She crochets. I knit. She crochets. She said, I am just going to sit down this winter break and crochet and watch under the Banner of Heaven. And she said it sounds really good. And I was like. She said, I'm just going to binge it. So I thought, hey, that sounds interesting. I'll watch that. This was this last Christmas and when the protagonist got to the red book in that story and he was hiding it, which is the Tanner's book. So Shadows is in the title.

Margi Dehlin [04:24:44] I can't.

John Dehlin [04:24:44] Mormonism. Shadow or reality?

Camille Lewis [04:24:45] Yeah, there we go. And he was hiding it and it was something that he couldn't. I was like, wait a minute. I got to figure out what is that red book and why is it verboten and who's. Who are the Tanners? And that just led me to Mormon stories and all the interviews and I've been binging on that too.

John Dehlin [04:25:03] So what. What. What about Mormonism has resonated with you?

Camille Lewis [04:25:08] The high demand religion is very similar. The scrutiny is similar. The. The. The way they. Your. Your comment a few weeks ago, they don't make it. They. They make sure that you don't leave with your dignity intact. It's like. That sounds familiar. What I think I. The Mormon stories helps me is that the ex Mormon community is robust enough and big enough and mature enough that it can give strategies for survival, for. For resilience and resistance. And I, I admire that about you all and I want to absorb it. So you're in your combination. You do of history and therapy,

John Dehlin [04:26:06] I

Camille Lewis [04:26:07] think, I think history is therapeutic. I think documenting is therapeutic. And so I, I find that same melding in your. In Mormon stories.

John Dehlin [04:26:19] Wow, that's so mind boggling to me that someone from your background would find our stuff curious enough to watch more than. No, I've watched half of it.

Camille Lewis [04:26:29] I'm one of the bingers. Yeah. Especially when it comes to the, the. Well, I just love the history part. That's just nerdy American history stuff. But the women, the, the Mormon feminists are formidable and I appreciate them. And your ability to listen with people who are not like you, I think is admirable too.

John Dehlin [04:26:56] Well, Camille Lewis, I can't thank you enough for being with.

Camille Lewis [04:27:00] Thank you.

John Dehlin [04:27:00] On Mormon Stories. Thank you. It's been lovely.

Camille Lewis [04:27:02] Good, good, good.

John Dehlin [04:27:03] We did it in one episode.

Camille Lewis [04:27:04] Wow. Good, good, good, good. I've enjoyed it. I hope it helps other people.

John Dehlin [04:27:10] Oh, it will.

Camille Lewis [04:27:11] Okay.

John Dehlin [04:27:12] And really quickly, I just want to say a couple things. Don't leave. Couldn't do this without our donors. So if you're a donor, thank you. We minimize our ads on Spotify and YouTube and we don't do product placements partly because we think that just desecrates what we do. So. So we exist based on donors. So if you're a donor, thank you. If you're not a donor and you value this type of content, all you gotta do is go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, become a monthly donor, and that will allow us to keep doing what we do.

John Dehlin [04:27:47] There are other ways to support us. Subscribing to our channels on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, et cetera. Liking these episodes, sharing them with others, commenting, emailing us, giving us feedback. All that is useful as well. Spreading the word.

John Dehlin [04:28:04] So thank you also, you know, hopefully y' all love us interviewing people from other faith traditions. We're going to have some Scientologists on soon. We're going to have a potentially a former rabbi and a rabbi son on if that works out. But we, we love interviewing never Mormons, and we also love interviewing Mormons. And the way you get on Mormon Stories is to go to MormonStories.org, apply to beyond, leave a little three minute video, fill out the application and then we'll review it. And if you can convince us that your story will connect with our audience in new and exciting, interesting ways ways, then we'll invite you. So that's how you got on.

Camille Lewis [04:28:52] That's right. That's right.

John Dehlin [04:28:53] And that's how the rest of you can get on. So yes, it's doable.

Camille Lewis [04:28:56] Yes, it is doable.

John Dehlin [04:28:57] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [04:28:58] And enjoyable.

John Dehlin [04:28:59] Yeah.

Camille Lewis [04:28:59] So thank you. So anyway, even you even get epiphanies from the two of you listening. I appreciate that.

Margi Dehlin [04:29:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:29:06] Yeah. All right. So anyway, if people want to get a hold of you, Camille Lewis, how do they do?

Camille Lewis [04:29:11] Yeah. Well, probably the best way is Queen Lewis gmail.com.

John Dehlin [04:29:20] okay. Q U E E N L E

Camille Lewis [04:29:23] W I W I. Yeah, I was the. I'm the only woman in the house, so that's where I got that.

John Dehlin [04:29:30] Okay. Queen Lewis gmail.com.

Camille Lewis [04:29:32] yeah.

John Dehlin [04:29:32] All right.

Camille Lewis [04:29:33] All right. Thank you.

John Dehlin [04:29:34] Thanks so much, Camille. Thanks to everyone for joining us today. Thanks to Margi, thanks to Brooklyn and Julia and our board at the Oba Stories foundation that make all this possible. Give us your ideas, give us your feedback. If you love this, if you didn't love this, if you have other ideas, we want to hear it. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care of.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.