This is the last part of a three-part story. Read part 1 here, and part 2 here.
For most of us, it is clear not just beyond reasonable doubt, but ALL doubt, that Donald Trump is manifestly unfit for office. And yet, he’s making a third tilt at the presidency. The biggest reason is that the religious right is still bowing and praying to an orange god it helped make—and is attempting to bully the nation into doing so. We shouldn’t have been surprised when the nation’s so-called moral guardians told us that Trump’s debauched comments didn’t matter nearly as much as his promises to give them everything they wanted and then some on policy–and above all else, stack the courts with conservative judges.
Granted, we already knew why the nation’s so-called moral guardians prostrated themselves before Trump. But how they were able to do so remained far less clear. How could the prospect of rolling back abortion and marriage equality be so important to them that they were willing to condone this man?
A large part of the answer to that question can be found in the way a number of evangelical leaders have responded to sexual assault in their own ranks. In recent years, we have heard stories of survivors turning to their churches or other faith communities for support, only to be greeted with indifference or even outright hostility. If these leaders are willing to take such a cavalier and unsupportive attitude toward their own, it should come as no surprise that many of them were willing to dismiss Trump’s depravities with women.
For example, when Guidepost Solutions delved into the extent of a years-long cover-up of sexual assault in the Southern Baptist Convention, it revealed that one of the SBC’s longtime titans, Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist Church in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, willfully and recklessly disregarded his legal and moral duty to protect children. According to the report, when Graham learned his youth pastor, John Langworthy, had molested a number of boys, Graham simply hustled him out of town rather than report him to the police. Langworthy would remain at large for 20 more years, during which he molested boys at his new church in Mississippi.
Another evangelical titan, John MacArthur, found it acceptable to publicly shame domestic violence survivor Eileen Gray for refusing to take back her abusive husband. This public shaming was the culmination of one of the most outrageous campaigns of victim-blaming and victim-shaming on record, which included both pastors and laypeople at MacArthur’s Grace Community Church attempting to browbeat Eileen into reconciling.
Former SBC president Johnny Hunt had his reputation sullied when the Guidepost report revealed he’d sexually assaulted another pastor’s wife in 2010. Four of his fellow pastors, supposedly convinced that Hunt had come to a mature understanding of his behavior, greenlighted him to return to public ministry in November 2022 after he completed a “restoration” program, much to the chagrin of SBC president Bart Barber. Hunt has since sued the SBC for defamation, displaying precious little of the “genuine brokenness and humility” that the pastors overseeing his “restoration” claimed to have seen.
In May 2022, John Love II, founding pastor of New Life Christian Church and World Outreach in northeast Indiana, was all but forced to resign after being confronted about committing what he described as “adultery” more than 20 years earlier. It turned out that for more than a decade, he’d carried on an affair with a member of his church young enough to be his daughter. Several former members of Love’s church revealed that other pastors, as well as Love’s son frequently groomed and sexually assaulted women and covered it up.
But believe it or not, one man makes these so-called men of God look like a choir boy. Namely, Bill Gothard of the Institute for Basic Life Principles—the guru of America’s most infamous babymakers, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar.
For the better part of two decades, Jim Bob and Michelle led us to believe that they were helming a very large, very quirky, and very conservative Christian family. But that sheen fell off in the summer of 2015 when it emerged that the oldest of their 19 children, Josh, had sexually assaulted a number of girls in 2002 and 2003, during his teen years–including his own sisters—and that Jim Bob and Michelle had dragged their feet in reporting it. It took 16 months, and at least three assaults, for Jim Bob and Michelle to finally realize they had to send Josh away and report the matter to authorities. As we now know, that amounted to taking Josh to state trooper Joseph Hutchens for “a stern talk.”
A number of conservatives, like longtime family friend and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, wailed that those pillorying Jim Bob and Michelle were just out to smear them. But in May 2015, Wende Brenner of Homeschoolers Anonymous, a community of people who share their experiences of being raised in the evangelical homeschooling world, revealed information that proved said smearing was more than deserved.
Brenner noted that Jim Bob and Michelle were big fans of Bible teacher and homeschooling guru Bill Gothard; they were frequent speakers at seminars held by Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles. A frequent feature of one of those seminars is the “umbrella diagram,” representing the principle of “Authority.”
The infamous "umbrella diagram"
In this principle, the father has authority over the household. As long as the father has no sin in his life–represented by holes in his “umbrella”–nothing bad can happen to you as long as you stay under his protection. However, if you step outside your father’s protection, you expose yourself to all manner of evil.
So in this world, if something terrible happens to you and your father hasn’t done anything wrong, in all likelihood it happened because you were outside your father’s protection. Therefore, it’s your fault. That includes sexual assault. According to Brenner, who was homeschooled in a Gothard-inspired curriculum, this alone prevents survivors from “even disclosing their abuse,” since any attempt to do so is all but certain to trigger “questions about sin in their life.”
That’s not the only way that Gothard considered survivors to be responsible for bringing their ordeals on themselves. Brenner got her hands on a handout from a counseling seminar run under the auspices of Gothard’s homeschooling curriculum, the Advanced Training Institute.
How Gothard "counsels" victims of sexual assault
Students at this seminar were taught to ask the victim if there was any way they were at fault for the attack. The most obvious manner in which a victim could be at fault is if they “defraud” their attacker by stirring up lustful thoughts in their attacker. According to Recovering Grace, a support group for IBLP survivors, you defraud someone when you “stir up in them desires that cannot be righteously satisfied.” In this world, it’s possible for a woman to defraud a man with something as innocent as a toss of the hair.
For some time after Josh’s depravities came to light, whenever I heard people saying that liberal bloggers like myself were going after the Duggars just because they were conservative Christians, I wanted to scream. After all, it’s a near-mathematical certainty that at some point, Josh’s sisters were told that they brought the assaults on themselves. At the very least, they had that lesson drilled into them from the time they could walk. No parent with any kind of love for their children would tell them, or allow them to be told, that they are to blame for being sexually assaulted.
It also casts the Duggars’ ultra-strict dress code in a new and disturbing light. Women do not wear pants, and skirts must go below the knee. Men and women aren’t allowed to wear shorts or tank tops, since everything from the neck down must be covered. In a 2012 post at her now-defunct TLC blog, Michelle said that they dressed this way because they didn’t want to chance “a visual element that might defraud someone.” When you put that next to Gothard’s teachings on what “defrauding” really means in this world, it sounds like Michelle was telling her kids, “If you don’t dress the way we tell you and someone violates you, it’s your fault.” The thought that any parent would even think sending that message is remotely acceptable is almost too damn obscene for words. And if calling out Jim Bob and Michelle for instilling that mentality amounts to partisan hackery, something is very wrong.
Just how deeply victim-blaming and victim-shaming were baked into the IBLP world became clear in the summer of 2023 with the release of “Shiny Happy People,” an Amazon Prime docuseries that delved heavily into the Duggars and the culture that spawned them. The series featured a number of IBLP survivors who recalled that “19 Kids and Counting” felt like a microcosm of their own childhoods. One of them, Lindsey Williams, recalled being “weirded out” when the Duggars first got a full-blown show. As she put it, “I don’t need to watch this, because I’ve lived it.”
The survivors revealed that at IBLP seminars, there were actually lessons on how to tell when a woman was wearing clothes that could potentially stir up lustful desires in men. Footage from one conference showed a female speaker, Kay Hill, reminding the audience of the need to avoid “eye traps” for men. Survivor Brooke Arnold recalled that one of ATI’s “wisdom booklets” had a lesson that called for students to identify the potential “eye traps” in certain outfits–as she put it, “instead of learning math, you’re learning slut-shaming.” Another survivor, Lara Smith, recalled being locked in a “prayer room” at an IBLP training center for four days because her team leader thought the small heels on her shoes were “sinful and distracting to the men.”
According to the survivors, another factor was the heavy-handed discipline that is all too common in IBLP-influenced cultures. Amy Duggar King, the daughter of Jim Bob’s sister, Deanna Duggar, recalled seeing her cousins spanked with rods–”encouragement,” as Uncle Jim Bob and Aunt Michelle put it. The Duggars, like most IBLP families, took as gospel Michael and Debi Pearl’s book, To Train Up a Child, which encourages spanking as a way to break the will of children.
Another common practice is “blanket training,” in which an infant is placed on a blanket with a toy just outside the child’s reach. Whenever the child reaches for the toy, the parent hits them. Michelle was seen perkily describing it as a way to teach her kids how to “obey Mama.” Homeschooling expert Eve Ettinger put it less sanguinely–it was intended to “break the rebellious spirit they are born with.” Smith agrees. Recounting how she was sexually assaulted by a boy at an IBLP training center, she said she didn’t really know how to tell him to get out because “any back talk was beat(en) out of us at a young age.” That mentality apparently explains why Josh’s younger sister, Jill Dillard, felt compelled to take part in an interview with Megyn Kelly in 2015; Dillard now says she regrets the interview, but felt at the time that she had no other choice but to go along.
None of the survivors profiled in the docuseries were at all surprised when the news of Josh’s depravities broke. According to one of them, Heather Heath, it’s common knowledge in this world that “brothers do that.” Heath believed this, and the other forms of harsh discipline she and others experienced, sent the message that “your body belongs to the church and the authorities that be.” She saw it as a form of grooming, since it sets a child up to be “the perfect victim.”
Along similar lines, Ettinger believed the sexually repressive environment in IBLP actually led to a form of “hyper-sexuality.” Smith was of a similar mind; she bluntly said that this world “raises little predators.”
By the time Josh’s depravities came to light, Gothard had joined the list of predators. In 2014, he had been forced to resign in disgrace from the IBLP amid a welter of reports that he sexually harassed female employees and failing to report child abuse. As many as 34 former IBLP employees claimed Gothard had harassed them. Many of those allegations had been ferreted out by Recovering Grace; some of them went back as far as the 1970s. An internal IBLP investigation found that while Gothard’s actions didn’t cross the line into criminal conduct, he had still “acted in an inappropriate manner” and had thus disqualified himself from any “counseling, leadership or Board role” with the ministry he had founded.
In all probability, though, it would have come to light far sooner if not for Gothard adopting a rather twisted interpretation of Matthew 18:15-17, which deals with how sin is addressed in the church. While that verse calls for people to first address matters privately, then with another person, then with the church as a whole, Gothard interpreted it as a requirement to simply settle disagreements in private. According to historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, this was construed as making it “impermissible to gossip”–with “gossip” being broadly defined as “any allegations against leaders.” She argued that this rule makes it “incredibly difficult” for anyone to report abuse.
Indeed, looking at these instances of sexual assault being swept under the rug in churches, one theme is all too common: an authoritarian atmosphere. Granted, the authoritarianism at IBLP and New Life was far more extreme than was the case at Prestonwood, GCC, and New Life. But the basic character of all of these groups is the same.
How else do you explain a Prestonwood deacon feeling empowered to bully the parents of a victim into silence—despite knowing full well that his own daughter was friends with some of the victims? How else do you explain GCC’s elders trying to bludgeon a woman into taking her abusive husband back? And how else do you explain New Life employees being told that there are only three ways to do things there—“the right way, the wrong way, and Pastor’s way”?
One other theme becomes apparent—keeping up appearances for the sake of saving souls. Remember, in many SBC circles, victims are seen as putting people in danger of never hearing about Jesus, and thus potentially being consigned to hell. At GCC, abuse victims are urged to stay in their marriages in order to be more like Jesus. And the Duggars were willing to bring cameras in their house so soon after the equivalent of a five-alarm fire in order to air what Jim Bob billed as a ministry, but what in practice became paid ads for the IBLP and its doctrine.
Suddenly, it also becomes a lot easier to see how churches like these had no qualms about rallying their flocks to Trump’s standard. If they were willing to treat their own members in this manner, they could hardly be expected to care about the women who claimed Trump assaulted them. In their eyes, such details weren’t nearly as important as stacking a Supreme Court that could overturn Roe v. Wade.
It has been amply established that evangelicals’ hidebound attitude toward sexual assault has delayed a long-overdue reckoning on how our nation responds to this scourge. But there is something that can be done in the interim. As more victims come to clarity and bravely step forward, we should stand ready to listen to them, to be shoulders to cry on.
It might surprise many to know I’ve been loath to cull all but the most obnoxious Trump supporters from my Facebook friend list. Eileen Gray, the victims at New Life, as well as celebrities like Jill Dillard, are ample evidence that the scales will eventually fall off survivors’ eyes and they leave their church. We need to be there to support them when they sacrifice that community.
In these hyper-polarized times, there are some things that should never be partisan. Supporting victims of sexual assault is one of them.
This is a three-part story. Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.
