In 1883, when Bob was born, Alex Jones, a Confederate veteran, was working a small farm in Dale County, Alabama, but within months the family moved to Brannon Stand west of Dothan.

"[3] Jones must have quickly overcome his stage fright, however, for by 1895, as a twelve-year-old, he gave a spirited, twenty-minute defense of the Populist Party while standing on a dry-goods box in front of a Dothan drug store.

At age 12, Jones was made Sunday School superintendent, and he held his first revival meeting at his home church—seeing sixty conversions in a single week.

"[5] American evangelistic meetings received more newspaper publicity at the turn of the twentieth century than before or since and were often boosted by the town fathers out of civic pride.

Crowds might be as large as 15,000 at a time, virtually necessitating the sustained volume, hyperbolic language, and extravagant gestures that became stereotypical characteristics of period evangelists.

Jones later recalled that in 1924, his friend William Jennings Bryan had leaned over to him at a Bible conference service in Winona Lake, Indiana, and said, "If schools and colleges do not quit teaching evolution as a fact, we are going to become a nation of atheists.

[9] On April 14, 1926, a charter was approved by the circuit court in Panama City, Florida, and Jones promoted real estate sales to raise money for the college.

"[10] Bob Jones took no salary from the college, and in fact, for years afterward, he helped support the school through personal savings and income from his evangelistic campaigns.

Nevertheless, the reputation of both the school and its founder continued to grow, and with the enactment of GI Bill at the end of World War II, the college was virtually forced to seek a new location and build a new campus.

Nevertheless, the elder Jones continued to raise money, preach regularly at chapel services, and provide inspiration to the hundreds of ministerial students who flooded the campus during the 1950s and revered him as "Doctor Bob."

[12] New mass entertainment, such as radio and movies, helped put an end to an era of citywide evangelism typified by the ministries of Bob Jones and Billy Sunday.

(In the same year, Jones also made a religious film, which because of its graphic—for the era—portrayal of certain sins, was slashed into an "unrecognizable mess" by the Pennsylvania State Censorship Board.)

The Bob Jones University creed (composed by journalist and prohibitionist Sam Small) was an abbreviated statement of traditional orthodoxy, emphasizing those aspects of the faith that were under attack during the early twentieth century.

Perhaps because of the tension between his mother’s Primitive Baptist views and his own long-standing membership in the Methodist Church, Jones sought to split the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism.

Although Jones believed that man was depraved by nature and that salvation was through Christ and by grace alone, his early revival sermons stressed opposition to social sins such as drinking, dancing, and Sabbath desecration and the possibility that they might be ameliorated by legislation as well as by individual repentance.

[15] Jones's view of academic learning was also practical; he advocated Christian higher education yet insisted that faith could not rest on human argument.

He could quote Goethe and Cicero without affectation, but he urged his students to make “truth simple and easy to grasp”—to put “the fodder on the ground” and give “all the animals from a giraffe to a billy-goat” an equal chance to understand the gospel.

Jones wrote that he was an old man who did not want to “get into a battle” but that he would not go “back on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The notoriety of the Graham-Jones split marked a more-or-less permanent division among Bible-believers into smaller fundamentalist and larger evangelical factions.

Although Jones rejected lawlessness and lynching, he sympathized with the Klan's professed endorsement of religious orthodoxy, Prohibition, and opposition to the teaching of evolution as fact.