My Experiences with Pensacola Christian College
Pensacola Christian College is a non-accredited college in Pensacola,
Florida. It is owned by Dr. and Mrs. Horton (the doctorate is honorary),
who have also made millions by "hiring" student workers (in exchange for
giving them less tuition) to produce and send out the ABEKA textbook
series.
PCC is based on a fundamentalist "Christian" outlook. Those who are
in authority there are extremely legalistic and controlling, to the point
that the students are under constant surveillance. Every aspect of college
life there is monitored with video cameras, censors, and an extensive
"student leadership" (i.e., the students are encouraged to rat on each
other) system. Every aspect of student life is controlled: Where you eat,
when you sleep, what you wear, where you go to church, even whether you are
sick enough to stay away from class. In short, Pensacola Christian College
is a cult.
Before I say anything else, I will note that I am not trying, in any
way, to put down the Christian faith. I am a born-again Christian myself,
and more conservative than average. However, what PCC does is not
Christian; it is legalistic and hypocritical.
May I also note that my experiences are only the experiences of one person. Some people have gone to PCC and loved it there; others were so disturbed by the experience that they renounced Christianity altogether. I am a "PCC rebel", somewhere in between.
If there are any questions-and I anticipate many, if any great number
of people read of my experiences-you can either
e-mail me, or leave a
review.
The reason I came to PCC in the first place is that I was sixteen and
my stepfather delighted in controlling me with fist, loud voice and drill-
sergeant manner, punishing the slightest offenses with numerous bruises,
which I regarded as honorable war-wounds. I had after all won one major
battle when I had called the police after my father was arrested for
counterfeiting, refusing to let my mother the time to destroy the evidence.
That little stunt got my dad five years probation, and me the decided
disfavor of my male parental unit.
The only way out of this situation was PCC. This was for two reasons: Because of my status as a minor, subject to my parents' authority; and because of my parents, who had visited PCC and gotten the red-carpet treatment reserved only for visitors. My mother was especially impressed by the tight security, little realizing that it had more to do with controlling students than keeping them from harm. My stepfather, who loved to gamble, realized the $5000-a-year tuition, room, and board would cut least into his gambling funds. I was sixteen, almost seventeen-I had skipped the eighth grade-and had no control over where I went to college. I was, after all, a minor.
My first experience with PCC took place when I was about eleven. I was going to a church-school which had just gotten a new principal, Mr. Pierce. I was young, naïve, and at that point deeply disappointed that I, the top student of that class, was not the teacher's favorite (that title belonged to a girl one year older than me and about fifty pounds heavier, who delighted in twisting the arms of younger students, making good use of the fact that she was the preacher's daughter to avoid any sort of reprimand.)
The new vice-principal happened, as I later learned, to be a PCC graduate. He immediately began switching the school over to the ABEKA program, and had I stayed a year longer at that school I would have been part of the new video classes.
A year later, after I had become a Christian, I was attending a
Lutheran school. For a short time, my mother permitted me to go to church
at the same church which had been a part of the church-school I had
attended the year before.
One Sunday night, an ensemble from PCC, probably invited by Mr.
Pierce, came to sing for us. I was fascinated-I had never heard anyone
sing so well. Afterwards, I picked up every brochure on the table-not
because I was seriously considering attending PCC, but because it was my
habit to pick up every scrap of paper offered me, in the rather irrational
hope that any given piece of paper might hold some important fact which I
could not afford not to know. It may have been those very brochures which
first introduced my mother to the PCC Machine.
About one year later, that church-school dissolved amidst a great scandal, the nature of which I will not mention, but of which Mr. Pierce and the pastor were the cause and nexus. I did not know about Mr. Pierce's part in the scandal, his connection to PCC, or his invitation to the ensemble, until my mother told me about it just the other day.
I did not hear of PCC again until my high-school years. I was fifteen and in the eleventh grade when my English teacher first mentioned PCC to me. Her son, she said, was attending college there and paying his own way, through the work program. I knew I was going to college, and it was evident that with my parents' income below poverty level, I was going to have to work my way through.
That summer, my mother and stepfather visited PCC in Florida. Unbeknownst to me, and my mother, my stepfather was actually trying to privately settle a $20,000 child support debt-but the effect, nevertheless, was that of getting my gullible mother onto the PCC campus. My mother was impressed, and while I had not seriously considered PCC before, my mother immediately marked it as the college I would attend. After that, I had no choice in the matter.
I did not know then that my teacher had a daughter who had also attended PCC. She had come there for two weeks, as a part of the summer work program, then had decided that she needed some time alone. Not realizing the ramifications of such an act, she went off-campus alone to Barnes & Noble. She was, in some way or other, caught-probably the usual way, by being ratted out. In the Deans' Office, she was asked if she would go off campus alone again. Probably in an effort to be honest (and probably still not realizing the seriousness of her situation), she told the Deans that maybe she would. She was immediately expelled.
I am not blaming on PCC the fact that after having lost the possibility of a college education, this girl immediately lost all motivation to try to better her situation and ended up frequenting bars and hotel rooms. A stint in a reform school did her no good-probably more harm than good. A very ingenious girl, she was the first girl to escape from that reform school and return home. Since then, she has obtained some stability in her life through marriage and a child.
My teacher's son, she later admitted to my mother, also wished to leave PCC but could not because he could not pay for any other college, to which his unaccredited credits would not transfer anyhow.
Still, before I knew it, I was standing in front of Bradley Tower, bags in hand, waving good-bye to my youth pastor (a PCC graduate), who had brought me to PCC.
My first summer, I had a roommate named Rachel. Though she was fully aware of the "goldfish bowl" effect, she was quite happy at PCC. She had a fiancée who traveled with the ensembles. He wrote her over a hundred letters that summer, not counting the seventy or so separate envelopes, each with a letter (of the alphabet) in it, and which could be unscrambled to form the song, "You are My Sunshine". Oh, I knew it was sappy, but it was the first serious relationship I had ever observed, and I was sincerely happy for Rachel.
Tragedy struck Rachel's happiness (admit it, you knew I was going to say this) because of her fiancée's illness. He was manic-depressive, but keeping it under good control with medicine. I will never know if it was due to PCC's aversion to anything psychological, but he decided to stop taking his medicine. Predictably, he went into a manic phase. He went AWOL from his ensemble group and immediately bought two new cars with his credit card. When the College found him a week later, they expelled him. So did Rachael-the engagement was broken the same day. Rachael is still at PCC, not knowing or seeming to care where her ex-boyfriend is. She will graduate next spring with an Elementary Education degree.
That was also the summer I got sick with some sort of bug that ended up landing me in bed for two weeks. Every day, I had to visit the Sports Center (conveniently located across campus) to check into the Clinic. I had been taking penicillin and evidently had an allergic reaction, because soon after I began taking it I woke up unable to breathe well. Even though my roommate had a car, I had to wait at least a half hour for two floor leaders to take me to the emergency room (dressed in proper off-campus attire, nylons included!) Thankfully, this did not endanger my health.
A girl I met in my freshman speech class duplicated my experience in a
more dangerous form. She had a heart problem she did not know she had, and
one night she began experiencing chest pain. She ended up waiting about 45
minutes for two floor leaders to take her to the emergency room. Once she
got there, she would probably have died if they had not injected her with
epinephrine. As it was, she returned to class for one day, wearing a
portable heart monitor, after which she went home. Such an emergency
dictates an immediate trip to the emergency room-forget the protocol.
Besides this girl's story, which I heard firsthand, I have heard
several second- or third-hand accounts dealing with the same subject-one, a
guy with a broken nose who was told to go to classes, after which he could
go to Sacred Heart, another, a girl in Home Ec, who sewed through her thumb
and had to get a pass to go get the needle removed. Rumors or not, after
my own experience and that of the girl in my Speech class, I don't have
much reason to doubt them.
During my second semester at college here, the famous Griffith Tower
birth took place. A friend of mine worked at the Clinic, and she told me
this (paraphrased):
"This morning, this girl came in, and she was just panicking, crying, she said, 'I can't stand it anymore. I can't stand her screaming, she told me not to tell, but I can't stand her screaming anymore!' It turned out that a freshman girl in Griffith had had a baby. She was probably pregnant when she came here [apparently, to escape a bad home situation]. Miss Baer (a Dean) followed her to the hospital and expelled her. The girl insisted she didn't know she was pregnant; probably she was trying to protect her roommates and suitemates. But they all got shadowed anyway; I think they were expelled." (Shadowed: A procedure during which a student who is in trouble must spend every day with a Floor Leader, sleeping on that person's floor at night and not speaking to anyone but the Floor Leader.)
Now think what would have happened if the Administration cared about this girl. They probably would have been supportive. Since she got pregnant before she came here, they might even have given her a second chance. They might have offered her counseling. They certainly wouldn't have expelled (or shadowed) her roommates and suitemates. And they would never have told the floor leaders to give anyone who talked about the incident fifty demerits. Trust me-it wasn't to keep the rumors from proliferating, which they did anyway. It was mostly to keep people on the outside from knowing.
I could tell you more stories-half of which I have personally witnessed, and the other half of which are probably true, with some embellishments, due to their similarity to events I have seen.
The point is that much of the reason I left PCC is that the Administration, while individually sincere and mostly "nice people", are hedged in by a system which forces them to think first of PCC, always. Individuals are not important to them.
I wrote out all the reasons I want to leave PCC, as well as the reasons I wanted to stay (which was at first my inclination). But once I realized these things, it became plain to me that I could not continue to patronize an institution which stood for things I violently disagreed with. You may disagree with some, most or all of them, but I hope you will hear me out:
- When dealing with people, PCC has an infuriating double standard. Guests, reporters and the general public are treated like kings. Staff, students, and anyone the Administration doesn't like is treated like dirt. Once they have you, they can take off the mask.
- PCC cares only for the survival and reputation of the organization, rather than focusing--at all--on the needs of the individual student. An example of this is the expulsion (with no offer of counseling) of someone who has made a suicide attempt.
- The Campus Church, the official church of PCC and the only church its students can attend, is attached too closely to the administration to function as a New Testament church at all. The Campus Church is akin to having a state church which forces everyone to attend.
- PCC refuses to trust its fully adult, Christian students. 24-hour surveillance is the norm. If you were to get into serious trouble and get called to the Dean's Office, be sure that any witnesses to the incident, your roommates, and your friends, have already been called up to the Dean's Office and interrogated. I personally experienced this: When the Deans suspected me of mental illness, all three of my roommates, as well as (I am not sure of this) several of my friends, were called up to the Dean's Office and interrogated before I got there. Chances are they will (they did this to me) ask you the same questions over and over, usually for hours, maybe for the whole day, looking for inconsistencies in your story (that's why they write everything down). Then they'll go back to your friends and ask them the same questions they asked you. Have you ever studied the interrogation methods used by the Communists? Except for the lack of physical force or drugs, the techniques match.
- PCC's rules are unfair and hard to follow. Many have no discernible reason for their existence; many others simply serve to make PCC look good or to control PCC students. Few are actual Biblical standards.
- PCC, with rules, thought control and constant searches and monitoring, attempts to control every aspect of the student's life-including his or her thoughts. Such an attempt has been successful in many people I have met: They are practicing 1984-esque doublethink, in which they both know the Administration is doing wrong, but believe them right in whatever they do.
- Expulsions are all-too-frequent and often on a whim of the administration. About 350 students a semester (this from a very reliable source) is many more than other colleges. Many expulsions are on the grounds of the student "not conforming" to the spirit of PCC. I personally have witnessed three expulsions. With my small social circle, that has much to say about the College's unwillingness to tolerate anything that may tarnish its reputation.
- Teachers are rigidly controlled in the way they teach their students. Disagreement with any small doctrine of the College is a sure way to get fired.
- PCC is extremely intolerant of those who believe things it does not preach. Opposing viewpoints are squelched as though they were poisonous, even such small matters as thinking you should be allowed to kiss your significant other before you're married.
- PCC regularly equates its rules with the law of God, its administration with the messengers of God, its college curriculum with the Word of God, and going on staff as just about the only way to serve God. Such self- deification very nearly forces idol-worship upon anyone who buys into the College's doctrines. Note that I am not saying PCC actually states this outright: It does not. However, more often than not, PCC will say, or imply, something like these statements, at different times, over and over (these are from College Days): Every Christian has a Christian ministry. If you don't have a ministry, you're ignoring God's calling. If you're ignoring God's calling, you're out of the will of God. Attending a Christian college is the only way to prepare yourself for a Christian ministry. If you don't prepare yourself, you'll be ineffective. PCC is a Christian college, in fact, the best Christian college, and besides, probably the only Christian college you can afford. Like a proof in geometry, these three statements combine: If A is true, and B is true, the C must be true: Thus, if you do not attend PCC, you are out of the will of God and cannot minister effectively. This sort of subtle reasoning is used everywhere, so much you can't get away from it. With PCC's complete control over every physical aspect of a student's life, and their insistence on College-controlled church attendance, Bible classes, chapel, and prayer groups, they very effectively can and do practice thought control.
- Students' lifestyles are deliberately altered and forced into PCC's squeaky-clean mold. Even when something a student does, wears, or says is completely without reproach (e.g. such things as Rollerblading or wearing camouflage shirts), PCC still tries to force that student into its own image.
- Student workers and staff people are treated like dirt. Student workers work for minimum wage with no benefits; staff is just as bad. Firing a student worker or staff person is done on a whim, just like expulsion. Contract workers have it the worst: They have no way of escaping the system. Summer workers are paid $7.50 with free room and board, the only reason for this being that otherwise no students would stay over the summer. Summer workers are often given no option about working 50-55 hours a week. Girls can't even work off campus, forcing them to be employed for minimum wage, even if they are skilled enough to earn $10 an hour or more. Thanks to their lack of "green cards", most International Students are in the same boat.
- Privacy at PCC is nonexistent. At any hour of the day or night, you can be checked on by a floor leader, watched as you pass by a dress-checkpoint, or monitored by security guards or video cameras. Your room can be searched, your mail opened, and your phone conversations tapped, all without a search warrant or even a reasonable suspicion of your breaking a rule.
- Extra-biblical standards are presented as biblical. PCC has almost a Pharisaical adherence to Baptist tradition, then preaches such things as not drinking at all, going to every church service, or tithing as if they were Biblical principles rather than Baptist tradition. (What the Bible actually says: Drinking is a bad idea; don't get drunk. Don't forsake going to church. Tithing is an Old Testament principle; the New Testament asks for free-will giving.)
Just as in a Communist nation, the people at PCC are not the problem—the system is. Like communism, PCC's system is a nearly undefeatable system that flourishes if it can (and it does) totally control every individual-even those who are in power. That includes the Deans, the floor leaders, the teachers, and probably even President Horton. Once such a system is in place, it will continue under its own power, forcing people through like a machine. In one end as an awestruck freshman, out the other end as a hardened Dean of Men or Women.
The only way to defeat communism, or any other totalitarian system, is when the masses of the people realize the truth about their system. The system cannot survive without the belief of its subjects that it is the right system, the only system, the morally upright system-or, at the very least, their belief that it cannot be defeated. When people begin to think for themselves, such a system will inevitably fall. PCC, probably subconsciously, realizes this. They expel or fire those that do not agree with them. They vehemently criticize any organization that does not agree with them-witness the videotapes made when PCC had that famous battle over textual criticism. I do not know if this is a delusion of grandeur-it may be-but it may well be true that if PCC read this letter, I would be expelled.
Because of these things, I cannot in good conscience patronize this institution.
If any of those who read this have gone to PCC, I hope you are not angry at me for saying these things about your alma mater. You are free to agree or disagree.
I wore only one mask, and that very unsuccessfully, when I was at PCC- that of being content to go to college there. I trust you will not judge me for this, and perhaps it was time I told you my true opinions about this place-that it is as far from Christian as a Christian college can be, just as the Pharisees were as far from true Judaism as they could have been. By going to the extremes of obeying the letter of the law, the PCC system does not take into account the spirit of the law-mercy, love, patience, forgiveness. They have forgotten that they are not the supreme authority on Christian behavior; they do not realize that every individual has a personal responsibility to obey God alone; rather, they say that their authority is God-ordained, so that everyone who does not bow to it is not in obedience to God. In saying that disobedience to the Handbook is sin, they are right. However, they have forgotten that it is also their responsibility to obey God, as much as it is ours to obey those in authority over us. Since I cannot live in rebellion to their rule without being in sin, and cannot live in obedience to a system that does not care about anything but its own supremacy, I have chosen to leave. I am blessed to have that choice, as people under Communist rule do not.
I do not know how I am to pay for any other college but this one; I am afraid that I may not be able to survive outside PCC's safety zone; I do not know if I will be able to be a witness for God in a world that does not know God as so many people here do; but I feel that I have no choice but to leave.
So there you have it, in all its bad-English, worse-composition glory- why left-"gave up", as they've said in countless chapel services.
PLEASE READ ALL 8 CHAPTERS (you have just read chapter one; all BULLIES need to be exposed!)
This book is frighteningly accurate. Pensacola Christian College is a
horrible religious cult. At PCC people are sadly expendable, rules are all
that matter, and you won't find any love in that terrible place. When I
moved from the island of Guam to Pensacola in 2021, I decided to go check
out Campus Church at PCC. The church is on PCC's property, a chapel
basically for their students to meet for religious purposes. It is not a
legitimate church and I wish PCC would stop calling it a "church."
