AP photo ‘We were trying to enforce ... a principle,’ said Jones on ‘Larry King’ of the interracial dating ban.

“Why can’t black kids date white kids?” Larry King asked Bob Jones III, president of South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, as one of his first questions on the March 3 “Larry King Live.”

“We don’t let them date because we were trying to enforce something, a principle,” Jones answered. “We stand against the one-world government, against the coming world of the Antichrist, which is a one world system of blending … into one big ecumenical world.”

A few questions and responses later, however, the president of the 73-year- old fundamentalist college made the announcement that the school’s 50-year-old ban on interracial dating, which had sparked a storm of controversy, had been dropped.

The issue drew nationwide attention since Republican presidential hopeful Gov. George W. Bush spoke at BJU a few weeks ago.

Bush was harshly criticized by many, including Republican rival, Arizona Sen. John McCain, for failing to criticize the school’s racial policies and anti-Catholic views. A week later, Bush wrote to New York’s Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal John O’Connor, saying he regretted not having spoken out.

The Greenville, S.C., school banned interracial dating in the mid-1950s when the campus was embroiled in a controversy over the religious implications of an Asian-Caucasian couple, according to the university.

The dating rule was one of a longer list that still includes no music, no dancing, no movies, no television, no holding hands and no approaching a member of the opposite sex within six inches (dating is allowed). What sparked extensive rancour, however, was the racial issue and BJU’s stance on Catholicism.

Jones, president since 1971, once said in 1987 that he would rather “speak to the devil himself” before he would meet with the Catholic Pope John Paul II who visited Columbia, S.C., that year. On the CNN show, Jones said he did not hate Catholics.

“The way we feel about the Catholic Church … or anything else, is that we wish these people knew the Lord Jesus Christ,” he said.

Jones, who has called Catholicism a cult and Pope John Paul II the Anti-christ, expressed his disapproval of the Catholics’ creed of “infallibility of the pope” and their claim that “grace is imparted [by] the transubstantiation [in] the offering of sacraments.”

The stance on Catholicism along with its policies on many aspects of the Christian faith, exemplified by the ban, has made Bob Jones University a symbol of extreme fundamentalism.

The school is also a popular stop for political candidates seeking conservative support. Past visitors included Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp and Alan Keyes. Democrats are not invited, nor are some Republicans such as McCain, whom Jones considers too “liberal.” “I never believed he was really a conservative,” said Jones of McCain. “He could very easily have the Democratic label upon him.”

The reasons given for dropping the ban under the apparent pressure of bad publicity have “not shown true repentance” for an institution that has, for so long, “been concerned with the devil’s influence instead of the power of God’s grace,” said Calvin Provost Joel Carpenter.

“The policy was morally reprehensible and a violation of Scripture,” said Carpenter, who wrote “Reawakening of American Fundamentalism.” “As the Scripture tells us, we are all made in the image of God. The story of Revelation 7, which speaks of a gathering from every nation and people, says to me that the society we are headed towards, as people of God, is a multiracial one.”

“They need to repent and be saved,” said history Professor Randal Jelks of those who imposed the ban. “They’re heretical if [they drop the ban] and leave their policy attached to what they still say about Catholics.”

Jelks, who thought the removal of the ban was “too little, too late,” said, “You can’t tell me you love me and hate your brother.”

The change in school policy was made, Jones said in the King interview, because “now we realize that a interracial marriage is not going to bring [into] the world the Antichrist by any means." However, Jones added, “The principle upon which [the ban was] based is very, very important.”

Bob Jones University, which admitted its first black student in the 1970s and “does not keep or give out” information on numbers of minority students, is the only college now in America that is not tax-exempt. It lost its exemption status in 1983 after a 13-year court battle with the Internal Revenue Service, which said the school’s practices were discriminatory.

According to Jones, the university still opposes the blending of racial, church and national differences into the “coming world of the Antichrist.”