An Interview with Camille Kaminski Lewis

by William Trollinger

Camille Kaminski Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Rhetorical Studies with a minor in American Studies. Her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism, was a scholarly attempt to stretch the boundaries of both Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory on tragedy and comedy as well as stretch conservative evangelical’s separatist frames. (The story of that publication is available at The KB Journal.)  In 2020 she published an edited volume, White Nationalism and Faith: Statements and Counter-Statements on American Identity (Peter Lang). In 2023 she published a remarkable piece here at rightingamerica: “The Unholy Trinity in Fundamentalist Parenting: A Rhetorical Analysis.” And in the past few weeks Clemson University Press has published her newest book, Klandamentalism, which is the focus of this interview.    

1. In Klandamentalism you critique (rightly so, I have to say) the ways in which both Bob Jones University-trained historians and outside historians have told the story of Bob Jones in particular, and the KKK-fundamentalism connection in general. Could you talk a little about what you find problematic in these historical treatments?

There are three problems with the historical treatment of Bob Jones, Inc. First of all, gross inaccuracies get repeated. Secondly, scholars have no desire to interrogate those inaccuracies. Lastly, there is an inability to look across several sources at once. 

Let me explain how these problems happen: Scholars presume that if you want to get the facts about anything, you need to go to “the source.” They presume that the information you get there will be comprehensive and accurate. I have noticed over the years that if I read an article or a book that mentions that they visited the BJU archives in their research, then their conclusions will pivot toward an overly glowing view of all things BJU. 

I surmise that in the scholar’s process the BJU archivist insinuates himself (gendered pronoun is intended). I have several examples of this over the years – where a BJU alum pivots to BJU’s Aura of Goodness.™ I don’t mind including those, but it’s a little off-topic. Since I am banned from the BJU campus, I cannot go to the archives. So I had to start elsewhere or even everywhere else. Frustrating this presumption that “the source” is accurate and comprehensive is a simple failure to check the source’s story. 

Maybe it’s a lack of curiosity. Maybe it’s a need to prove a different point and not wanting to get waylaid, to get too far into the weeds. I think there’s a naivete in all this. Since fundamentalists claim to be super-duper pious, they wouldn’t lie, would they? ::clutches pearls:: 

I know BJU, Inc. lies. So I started there. What actually happened with X? What does BJU, Inc. say happened? What do BJU’s neighbors say? Their allies? Their antagonists? And what shape does their lie take? Is it consistent? 

Here are two mistakes that, I believe, can be eliminated when you look across several sources: One of the mistakes I found was from an exceptionally fine historian, Wayne Flynt. He repeated a mistake about the 1889 Dothan Farmer’s Alliance riot.  In Poor But Proud, he said it occurred in 1899 (254). If you dig into his footnotes, his source is a single Alabama newspaper that cited the wrong date. It happens. And it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Because of the digitization of American newspapers, I can look across many, many locales, dates, and audiences. While Professor Flynt was likely looking at a microfilm version of a single-page of a single edition of a newspaper, digitization allows the scholar to go back and forth looking in every which way to get a fuller picture.

Another fine historian Sean Wilentz uses the “Stollenwerck Panorama” in the introduction of his Oxford UP book, Chants Democratic. It kind of cracked me up because he uses that invention to describe Pierre Martin Stollenwerck as a kind of “Yankee Yeoman,” a middle-class everyman. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just a few years prior his family was trafficking human beings in the Caribbean as part of the Code Noir. Is this important to Wilentz’ larger point about upward mobility in the early 19^th-century? Heck yeah, it is! If the Stollenwercks were able to come to this country because of the wealth they accumulated from enslaved labor, that says a lot about the white supremacy cloaked in “upward mobility.”

2. At the heart of this book is the metaphor of a puzzle. How you make use of that metaphor in the book? And when it comes to Bob Jones, what is the final piece of the puzzle?

I struggled for a way to explain all this data I collected from fifty years of Bob Jones’ life. Kathleen Turner’s metaphor of the puzzle in her Rhetorical History seemed like a concrete and accessible explanation. Rhetorical theory is just a metaphor that has been cemented in some way after all. While I was thinking all that through, we were putting together that “magic puzzle” at my in-laws that Thanksgiving. And everything made sense to me too. 

The final piece of the puzzle is this: Bob Jones, Sr., the founder of my alma mater Bob Jones University, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He repeatedly denied it. His biographers ignore it or deny it. Other historians don’t want to take it on (for whatever reason). But after all of all my work, the evidence is plain. 

3. You make the argument that “throughout his entire career, at least from 1911 through the 1940s, women are his most consistent target.” And you back this up with innumerable examples, including his infamous “Modern Woman” sermon. What did Jones in particular and the KKK in general have against women?

This one was the hardest one for me to confront. It really, genuinely alarmed me. And frankly, I’m still processing this one. If I were to say it simply, it would be this: women do not conform to the middle-class masculine code of conduct (whatever that means), and, thus, they are nearly impossible to control. 

Now others don’t conform to that code of conduct either. Anybody who is not-them (cis-het-white-Protestant men) cannot have power. There are some men that are not yet at the center of power, but they might grow up to be. And the Klandamentalist power players are fine with them. But everyone else must be kept on the sidelines. The Klandamentalist must receive all the attention. 

Women can keep busy with their womanly things: childcare, housekeeping, cooking, praying. But those are all done outside of the masculine sphere. So, in sum, I think what they have against women is that they are potentially uncontrollable and distracting. 

4. What sorts of responses to this work have you received/do you imagine receiving from folks within the Bob Jones University orbit? Put another way, given how thoroughly you have researched this story, what possible objections could they make?

Funny story: A few weeks ago in a BJU alumni “in good standing” Facebook group, an unwitting member posted a link to this book from Clemson University Press. I am not a member of this group, by the way, because I am a Persona Non Grata in fundyland. But countless people sent me the screenshots of this conversation. Within twenty-four hours, the post was deleted. So most BJU alumni will pretend this book doesn’t exist. 

I sent a copy to Bob Jones III with a note saying that I hoped he would read it because when “we know better, we can do better.” I doubt he will read it. His second wife has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, so she might, but I doubt it. 

The hate hasn’t come yet, but I am bracing myself. When you live in Greenville, you are an easy target. I anticipate that someone will try to bring me up on charges for church discipline or threats. Both of those things have happened in the recent past, so it might happen again. 

5. In your conclusion, in particular, you connect Bob Jones and his Klandamentalism with Donald Trump and contemporary Klandamentalism. Could you elaborate on this connection?

This startles me too. I can’t NOT see the parallels, to be honest. Donald Trump and Bob Jones, Sr. are both the centers of their universe, both demand complete loyalty (as they capriciously define it), and both have no credentials. Further, both demand a certain “appearance” for women around them, both have a cadre of young and compliant men to do their bidding. They both superficially use a vocabulary of religion, both draw stark divides between themselves and their cohort and everyone else, and they both violence on the “everyone else.” Donald Trump and Bob Jones, Sr. are both malignant narcissists, what we rhetoricians used to call demagogues. 

If I were to continue this analysis, I would need to map out Trump’s rhetoric. I mean, is he the subject of all his sentences? If he is, then Donald Trump and Bob Jones, Sr. are the same. 

6. Given the prodigious research involved in producing Klandamentalism, it makes all the sense that you take a break from research and writing. That said, do you have any projects in the work?

In my 2023 self-evaluation at Furman, I summed up the year be calling it a “year of rejection.” I had so many rejections that year. It was demoralizing. I have a book chapter coming out this year in from University of Pennsylvania Press, Bodies and Beliefs: Purity Culture and the Rhetoric of Religious Trauma. My chapter is called, “A Working Brain, Womb, and Mouth: The Female Body in Bob Jones University’s Purity Culture.” It’s an autoethnography, so that was a different kind of interrogation of the same thing.

I’m also in the middle of producing an edited volume with several fine scholars, called William Jennings Bryan: Haunting American Populism for 100 Years through University of Tennessee Press. Bryan died 100 years ago this summer, so we are looking back at his legacy as a way to understand our current political climate.

But the thing I’m most excited about is this: a volume called She Sang, He Sang: What Dolly and Bruce can Teach America. I’m working on this with my ethnomusicologist friend, Joanna Smolko. She and I both see hope in how Dolly Parton and Bruce Springsteen respond to public conflict. That’s what I’m working on this summer.