Kathryn Joyce talking:
in 2012, there was some pretty remarkable news that came out of Bob Jones University, which for decades has been the flagship school of fundamentalism in this entire country. In a lot of ways, Bob Jones is more than a school. It’s the center of a nationwide network of Bob Jones-affiliated churches, feeder schools. They ran a curriculum business, a music publisher. It was really just a foundational institution in the most kind of extreme conservative Christianity that we have schools for in this country. But in 2012 they announced that they were hiring this organization, GRACE, to come in and do an assessment of how they had handled allegations of rape, of sexual assault, of sexual harassment that had happened on their campus. And it was really surprising, not just because Bob Jones has been such a remarkably insular institution, with people kind of being born at the hospital on Bob Jones campus and living their entire lives within this kind of total institution, but because they were reaching out to Billy Graham’s grandson, Boz Tchividjian, because Billy Graham and Bob Jones Sr., Bob Jones I, had just a historic falling out, that really led to the schism that we see today between evangelicalism and fundamentalism.
Tina Anderson was a 15-year-old church member of a church, a fundamentalist church in New Hampshire. And about 15 years ago, she was raped by her church deacon, for whom she babysat. And she became pregnant. And when she and her mother went to their pastor, who was, by the way, a board member of Bob Jones University, rather than help them go to the police or confront her rapist, he had her stand before the entire church while he read a confession of her pregnancy and then sent her away, essentially, out of state to deliver her child. So, for a lot of critics of Bob Jones, former alumni who had become dissatisfied with the way the school handled a lot of different things, including sexual assault and harassment, this became a sort of emblematic moment: This is how Bob Jones deals with rape—they blame the woman, they send her away. And so this became a really galvanizing moment, and from there, they demanded that GRACE be hired.
Chuck Phelps, went on to become the president of Maranatha Baptist Bible College in Wisconsin and served on the board of trustees of Bob Jones University, as well as on its missionary and youth camp boards. And so, once again, here, as in the stuff we’ve been looking at the Catholic Church, we’re seeing this church trying to handle this all internally, protecting the perpetrator, and no criminal charges or even exposure beyond the church occurring.
this is sort of the message that GRACE says that they put out there, is that way too often churches respond to these stories, which do happen in all culture, which happen in secular cultures just as much as in religious cultures, but a lot of times churches respond by circling the troops, by saying, “We need to protect the cause of Christ. If we let this get out, this is going to damage our ability to save souls, and so we need to keep this quiet.” That’s just—that’s horrifying, to put that on a young girl and make her carry, you know, the weight of that assault in order to protect the church’s reputation.
the Bob Jones investigation is still ongoing currently. The report has not yet been released. But what happened was, after about a year of doing interviews with about—I think more than 100 students and former staff and current staff, Bob Jones pulled back, and just a few weeks before GRACE was finishing its last interviews with staff, Bob Jones pulled back, and then they sent, out of the blue, a termination letter to GRACE saying, you know, “We’re letting you go. You’ve done amazing work, but we’re terminating you. And let’s get together and form a new contract.” There was no reason given for this. And everybody who was observing this and everyone who was close to the matter thought that there was really only one explanation, which is that GRACE had found things that Bob Jones did not want them to find and make public. There was a massive outcry. This was covered everywhere from The New York Times to The Washington Post. Conservatives were condemning it just as much as liberals. The American Conservative wrote some very scathing pieces about Bob Jones’s decision. And eventually they hired them back. And as far as I know now, GRACE put out a statement about a month ago saying that right about now they are finishing up their interviews and beginning to draft their final report. So we should see that in the next couple of months.
Boz is a lawyer, and he got his start in his career as a criminal sex-abuse prosecutor in Central Florida. And while he was there, he told me that he noticed this upsetting pattern among his colleagues. A lot of them tended to plea out sex-abuse cases very quickly, as though it was too horrible to dwell on, to take to court. And so he eventually asked the district attorney if he could take on all of those cases, and he ended up establishing a sex crimes unit within the DA’s office there. And they prosecuted hundreds of cases over eight years that he was there.
And during that time, he came to see some, also, additionally troubling patterns with regards to how religion played a role in this. Whenever pastors came to court in a supportive role, almost always, he noticed, they were sitting on the side of the accused. They were sitting behind the defendants’ table, rather than there to support the victims. He was starting to hear stories from around the country. People were calling him and asking, saying, “I had this situation in my church where, you know, some girls were molested. The father went to the pastor. The pastor counseled them that, you know, ‘Look, the abuser is very repentant. How about we just have him get more involved in church life, and will that be repentance enough and we can forgo reporting this to the police?'” So, he was starting to see some patterns of just kind of the absolute wrong reaction to sex abuse and molestation and rape.
there are a lot of churches that are being very proactive about this. And GRACE has a hand in that. I got to attend one of GRACE’s sex-abuse prevention trainings at a relatively small church in Calvary in Central Bucks County in Pennsylvania. It was Calvary Chapel Church. And the pastor there had made it mandatory for all of his staff and volunteers to come and learn about this, so there were hundreds of people that were attending this training, because they were mandated to, and then hundreds more came just because they were very concerned about the issue.
And I understand that that’s something that is happening really kind of across the board, in the mainline churches, as you said, the Methodists and the Presbyterians, but also in the more conservative churches. To give credit where it’s due, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest Protestant denomination in this country and the second-largest church after the Catholics in this country, they passed a resolution last year saying that the denomination had to be better about responding to and reporting sex abuse. I know one of the conservative Presbyterian denominations is doing the same thing later this year.
And for the missionary kids, these were the subject of GRACE’s two first investigation, two different very large international missionary groups, where the children of the missionaries being stationed in foreign countries, known in Christian culture as MKs, missionary kids, they were enduring just kind of epidemic levels of sexual abuse in a number of different countries. GRACE’s reports focused on two in particular, on the New Tribes Mission and their boarding school in Fanda, Senegal, and also ABWE, another missionary organization, and what happened on the mission field they had in the 1980s in Bangladesh. And two different situations, but a lot of similarities, in some ways, in that these were both kind of very authoritarian atmospheres where children were expected to do what any adult kind of in their world was telling them to do, and this made them, sadly, kind of very vulnerable to abusers who came by.
And obviously, not all very conservative Christians or all members of the self-described patriarchy movement are going to be abusive. But reading all of these reports and looking at all of this and speaking to dozens of people, it kind of does become clear—and GRACE’s assertion—that a main factor contributing to abuse and the silencing of abuse, of victims, is authoritarian structures that focus much more on rigid rule following, on hierarchies within a church or within a community, on the subordinate role of women and children. And when you have all of these things coming together alongside a culture that sees it as imperative to cover up mistakes so that you can still promote the cause of Christ, that you are being a good evangelical witness, a lot of these things conspire to make abuse not just more common, but much more invisible.
what surprised me the most was watching in real time this pattern happen of GRACE going and starting and doing this investigation, getting a year into it, having spoken to dozens, a hundred of people, and then having the institution back out. This had happened once before with the mission group ABWE, and then it happened again with Bob Jones. And it was very interesting to see that. And it raised this interesting question about whether or not there is a catch-22 at the heart of GRACE’s incredibly admirable mission, that they are being hired by the groups that they’re investigating. And I think that that’s a really interesting question to ponder, but I think we also have to look at their work and say that this is very well—very much needed.
— source democracynow.org
Kathryn Joyce, reporter and author. Her new cover story in The American Prospect is “By Grace Alone: As Sex-Abuse Allegations Multiply, Billy Graham’s Grandson is on a Mission to Persuade Protestant Churches to Come Clean.” She is the author of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.