The landscape of conservative Christianity has also shifted. There are more Christian colleges than ever, and schools like Patrick Henry College, the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and Pat Robertson’s Regent University are more focused on training future political operatives and placing them in positions of power than Bob Jones ever was.

When Bob Jones III recently questioned whether President Obama is a Christian, it was a reminder not only that the fundamentalist leader is controversial but also how little the political world has heard from the man and the rock-ribbed Christian school that bears his name.

The relative silence emanating from Bob Jones University is all the more remarkable given the intensity of the Republican primary in South Carolina, and the power that the religious right here holds.

In many ways, the school is still recovering from the 2000 campaign, when George W. Bush spoke without mentioning the school’s ban on interracial dating. Bush got hammered for the lapse (as well as staying mum on the school’s view of Catholicism as a “cult”) and apologized.

The university has since dropped the interracial dating ban, but no candidates visited the campus during the 2008 primary—a sea change for a university that has been a must-stop venue for every Republican since Ronald Reagan.

So far this year, the closest any candidate has come is Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose wife Anita made a low-key lunchtime visit to nursing students in mid-October.

Since the 2000 controversy “a lot of candidates have shied away from us,” university spokesman Brian Scoles said during a recent tour of the 210-acre campus. “It’s just the perception that remains.”

Bob Jones III acknowledged in a Nov. 12 interview with the National Journal that he hasn’t endorsed any candidate, in part because it “might actually hurt” whomever Jones backed.

But there’s another, perhaps more consequential reason for the school’s muted political voice: a subtle but steady shift in its approach to the world.

It started in 2005, when the mantle of university president passed to Stephen Jones, Bob Jones III’s son and the first person not named Bob Jones to lead school since its founding in 1927.

The youngest Jones quickly distanced himself from the political legacy of his predecessors. “There were things said back then that I wouldn’t say today,” Stephen Jones said in 2005.

In 2008, he told a local newspaper, “I don’t think I have a political bone in my body.” That same year, Stephen Jones had the university apologize for banning interracial dating.

“We conformed to the culture rather than providing a clear Christian counterpoint to it,” the statement says of the “segregationist ethic” that had prevailed. “In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry.”

The transformation is evident in other ways, too.

Long gone are the towering hedges and chain link fences that once kept the world out and the students in. Now a modern-looking sign welcomes visitors to the tidy, well-groomed campus.

Most faculty now live off campus and the students look much like they do everywhere. More than a few male students sported hipster porkpie hats on a recent visit, and while knee-length dresses are still required of young women in class, they can now wear pants at other times.

“We’re not this strange society in the northwest corner of Greenville County,” says Andy Rouse, 21, a senior. “There will always be stereotypes. That’s the way the world works. But you will be judged by your actions.”

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