I first read Cornbread and Caviar when I was in high school. Bob Jones Jr.’s love for fighting fire with fire and his willingness to say embarassing things about the yet living made it entertaining fare. Stories about Ma Sunday filching fried chicken? Check. Broadsides against Billy Graham? Check. As a teenager, a line like this was just fun: “What a tragedy to see him [Billy Graham] building the church of Antichrist, masking the wickedness of popery, and providing a sheep’s cloak of Christian recognition for the wolves of apostasy.” After receiving a new copy of the book from my uncle last week, I decided to reread it and see what caught my attention now that I’m a graduate student with an interest in twentieth century fundamentalism.

The first thing that stood out was Jones’s apologia for the racial order of the Old South. Jones questioned whether slaveowners were prone to violence toward their slaves. His own great-grandmother, Rachel Napier, owned several plantations and over 300 slaves and is protrayed as a gentle, caring paternalist who only sold slaves in family groups, taught them Scripture, and restrained her overseers. Jones then repeated a line often used in defense of slavery: “One thing is certainly true. The average black slave was in every respect a thousand times better off than he had been in Africa.” (23) And, of course, Jones asserted that the Civil War “had not been fought primarily over the issue of slavery but, rather, over states’ rights.” (24) He finished the section with a fond recollection of eating his lunch as a schoolchild while sitting on the spot where Jeff Davis took the oath of office as President of the Confederacy.

Keep in mind that Bob Jones Jr. published these thoughts in 1985, just two years after Bob Jones University v. United States and only fourteen since the school dropped its whites-only admission policy. The school had begun to change to face the realities of the times, but Jones himself remained unreconstructed. Jones’s defense of the old southern racial order is a sharp contrast to the current administration’s apology for the school’s history of racial discrimination.

I was struck by Jones’s distrust of Zionism. He staked out a moderate position by condemning acts of terrorism by both Israelis and Arabs. He praised the Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, as effusively as he complimented King Hussein’s hospitality (and Jones included signed pictures from both). Jones was greatly annoyed by a group of fundamentalists who had declared their support for Menachem Begin, then the Prime Minister of Israel; instead, Jones condemned Begin’s persecuation of Christian Arabs and the massacre of Arab civilians he ordered at Deir Yassin. “I have a great love for both Jews and Arabs, but I hate tyranny, terrorism, and violence just as much on the part of a Jewish government as I do on the part of an Arab government.” (141) Jones’s moderate views towards Israel and the Arab nations were a marked contrast to the growing support for Zionism among American evangelicals at the time.

Cornbread and Caviar also evinced, what I’ll call for lack of a better term, fundamentalist enlargement. When A. C. Dixon published The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth in the 1910s, fundamentalism was a minimalist movement. The fundamentals were meant to be the basic doctrines of Christianity. They were a call to orthodox ecumenicism, cooperation across denominational boundaries and despite secondary doctrinal differences. A postmillenial, reformed Presbyterian like J. Gresham Machen and a premillenial, dispensationalist Baptist like William Bell Riley could both be considered fundamentalists. Separation was theoretically reserved for those who transgressed a discrete set of fundamental doctrines.

Since the 1910s, the fundamentals have been enlarged. The fundamentals evolved from a set of essential doctrines — e.g., the deity of Christ and the inspiration of Scripture — into a far more detailed list of secondary doctrines and proscribed behaviors. That transformation surfaces briefly in Jones’s discussion of eschatology. “I have never had any agreement with the postmillenial position…it goes contrary to the whole teaching of Scripture and, like Christian Science, is an affront to intellectuality and hard common sense as well. … Postmillenialism is a menace to the spiritual life of fundamental, Bible-believing churches today.” (110) Premillenialism had become a de facto fundamental. Interestingly, Jones did not add cessationism to the list of fundamentals, although most fundamentalists today do. Jones greatly admired O. Talmadge Spence, a Pentecostal preacher and a board member at Bob Jones. He acknowledged their disagreement over the cessation of the apostolic gifts, but he called Spence “as much of a Fundamentalist as I am.” (181)