There are many ways we can come to define what compromises a Cult. There are a couple of podcasts on the concept of Cults and they fairly do a broad sweep of the subject which can include Bravo’s Housewives franchises to certain types of diets. My personal favorite: The Cult of Dolly Parton. I have to admit that while I respect fandom there is this point where you cross lines, but I am not sure I have heard of anyone altering their body physically and dressing like Dolly daily, relocating to Tennessee and taking up residence near Dollywood to be closer to their icon where her songs are on permanent playlist. The Cult of Kardashians however…..
But the point is that when you become obsessive to the point where all rational thought and all spare time and energy is devoted to a singular subject that you are willing to change your lifestyle, your appearance, donate your money or turn over your finances and independence in which to pursue and remain in the society in which you are a member, you are in a cult. There is the Sarah Lawrence Cult that was in the news of late and a subject of a Documentary and now a play. That is a cult.
There are cults around business, NXVIM is one that stands out as perhaps the most bizarre of those, but I would include Scientology as that is a publishing industry as well as a Real Estate Firm despite having the designation of a “Religion” enabling them tax breaks and exemptions. Nice work if you can get it.
And that is the biggest cult of all – Organized Religion. The idea that you can have a “house” as it is called for worship, draw people in to listen to someone read a version of a book, take that an interpret its meaning, then demand fealty, in turn submission of one’s soul to that and demand money in which to enable you to do it all again and then not pay taxes on earnings, that is to say a hell of a cult.
And like all Cults sex is the big tool, pencil in which to draw and of course the weapon to further the submission of now both body and soul. The Catholic Church really mastered that craft and with that there are more Revelations than in the Bible (pun intended) about other organized Churches that have similar problem, the Southern Baptists are one such example. With that the promises of investigations and repentance, the big tool of Churches that one there, in which to ostracize those who harmed others. In other words, like Police who get busted for shooting/killing/harming someone they are just moved to a new place on the Chess Board. They then spend their days hoping to not get caught again for doing the same or just at least not outed for something they did in the past and promise, pinky swear, to never do again.
When one thinks of Cults almost always you think of Religion. There are many and the cross the globe. The fill a Wiki page and include largely those centered on the concept of faith. But they are more than that. You really have to examine what a cult is, and despite the idea that they are some sort of thrown together crazies who are nuts is actually kind of right and wrong. Charlie Manson was an example of that but when you look at the Cult of Nike Shoes, aka Heaven’s Gate, they were not. They were highly organized, had a dogma, a Hierarchy and in turn financial records, established income and were to all their members it was a “religion.” If they had the appropriate tax documentation and legal registration filed that I cannot answer but I suspect they did. And yes there is a podcast about them too.
And with that the idea of Mass Suicide aka Homicide features in many cults. There was Jim Jones, the above mentioned Heaven’s Gate and this cult in Kenya that had members starve themselves while the founder managed to survive. This is not unlike the one in Tennessee, subject of another documentary The Way Down, about the Remnant Fellowship and their founding Minister, Gwen Shamblin, who died in a plane crash. Guess weight was not a problem in why that plane crashed.
And there is a debate that groups like Heaven’s Gate and many other established groups, almost all of them subjects of movies, documentaries, podcasts and books, such Wild Wild Country. And are they in fact organized religions that simply like Scientology have a different angle on historical canons or are they are a cult? Again, I think ALL and any of it are cults but again I will say that you are free to go in and out of a Church at any time and not feel compelled to shave your head, wear a costume, donate all your money and go live in social isolation dedicated to the faith. Oh wait? Never mind. Still love Audrey Hepburn in a Nun’s Story though.
I have found some similarities to cults, they are all started by Men and then they get Women involved to be the recruiters, the beards, the front faces to show the legitimacy of the organization. Even Jeffrey Epstein had Jizzehlda/Ghislaine or Beard, to pose as his companion in which to enable him to move among the movers and shakers of leadership and finance in which to gain trust, gain money and fuck young girls. The revelations of that family/cult/business is still coming to light. I love the denial by all those whose interests coalesced with Epstein in pursuit of more money (sure but really isn’t sex part of that?) I love that they never saw a “young” girl in his company or on his properties and planes. Really you didn’t? They seem to remember you.
Yes folks Money is a type of cult, where the Billionaires and Millionaires meet, greet, fuck and do it all again in pursuit of money and fame. And all of that comes or do I mean cum, in the forms of buying, planes, boats, art or homes in which to prove how your bank account and dick are the biggest. Look at Newport or Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, Manhattan where they have erect ones lining the sky. Islands or Ranches are another way to hide one’s crimes right in the open and with that they are telling us to fuck off as this is an exclusive cult where membership is closed.
There would be no NXIVM or many cults without the Multi Level Marketing one sees in other business oriented “cults” such as Amway and Herbalife. That is how that nut, Raniere, in NXIVM made a living prior to his founding of that cult. MLMs have been called many names, including network marketing, social marketing, pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, product-based sales, referral marketing, and direct sales. MLMs are pyramid schemes that focus on recruiting people to recruit others, presumably giving a cut of the income up the chain. Bernie Madoff anyone?
When you dedicate yourself to preserving a belief, a lifestyle, a type of faith falls in line. Without that you have well just life and free will, and cults do not want free will, they want submission and obsession. The idea that you will have a better life, maybe not on this planet or even when alive but later so keep on believing, starving, earning, worshiping or fucking. That last one is always the biggest element in most cults. Remember they are almost all started by Men. Gwen broke that glass ceiling literally and is now with her God so I assume she can eat now, you don’t need food in heaven. And that Men are well men and they are ruled by the Dick. Why do you think all are Warriors of God and carry a big Sword there?
There are many cults and many types of them. The John Birch Society, the KKK, the White Supremacy movements that have many extensions the same way the Southern Baptists have Churches. Where to you think White Christian Nationalism comes from? I often recall the Westboro Baptist Church. But think of all the Pro Life Movements, where they literally killed Doctors, so much for pro life. And Politics make for strange bedfellows and none are more strange than the obsessive histrionic belief in Donald Trump. I have long said he hit the boxes of having money and fame. We all know that both are due to bluster and production values that the show The Apprentice provided. Like all Churches, Businesses have the Front of the House and the Back of the House. The back runs it all, they collect the money, hide the money and disperse the money, to themselves. It is all a type of grifting, or the long con. And without a certain type of believers that continue to come through the doors there is no way a business can last and you need that door open 24/7. Thank GOD for the Internet as now you never are closed.
The rise of Social Media parallels the rise of White Supremacy as it enabled, permitted, tolerated and allowed it. There were always factions and groups who in their isolation found support but then you have a massive communication too to facilitate it. Fox News and Tucker Carlson became the de facto propaganda machine and in turn those incidents of violence prompted by racial and religious animosity were easily dismissed and the faux rise of “antifa” became the new warrior cry and ones to blame. In my day it was Hippies, before that Communists and so on. The same way the lay elections at Soccer Moms, Tea Partiers and other “groups” that will be the determining factor are just concocted by the Media in which to bring eyes to screens, now those screens are more than Televisions, they are Phones, Computers, IPads and any form of technology one uses to find like. And as in all Math equations, like likes like.
As I watched the recent film on Showtime on Waco and I began to realize the complex web of how Guns and how those with guns meet, interact and the individuals, almost all exclusively white men who are lost and misdirected and use often Religion as their expression of frustration it allowed me to learn more about the way we use whatever tool we have in our kit to become a weapon. McVeigh was prompted by Waco and led him to find an enabler or more than one (which we still do not know and never will) I do find it ironic that it was the current DOJ Head, Merrick Garland who Prosecuted him but I am not sure I agree that it was flawless as he failed to realize that others were involved to help him plan and act upon it. And when we look at many of the mass shootings they are prompted by far more than a lone wolf who did not get laid, were bullied, were Racist, were Homophobic, Misogynist, Anti Semitic or whatever “ist” you need to validate your rage.
Jeffrey Toobin has written a new book, Homegrown, documenting some of this history behind Waco and the fanaticism that grew out of the 90s. The culmination of that was in fact Columbine. I had read the great book by Dave Cullen on the subject and knew the boys were not in fact bullied or sad losers. They had been in fact arrested and with that they conned their Parents, the Authorities that they were not a problem. But the myths remain. The same way a Teacher called that trigger by the drawings by one of them, the same was true in Michigan and yet the Parents there did know and in turn took off running. Denial is the same as complicity in many of these young men who are enabled to get guns, to hide the second life in the same way a Man hides a Mistress. Talk about Cults again and its relationship to reality TV take a look at Scandoval. What a farce that took up hours of rage and mob mentality to denigrate an idiot on a “reality” show and his affair. Do you actually know these people? Why do you care? Apply that rationale to the angry white men/boys who for some reason seen others as enemy’s and wish to do them harm. And when I got into an online argument with someone who was convinced that Columbine was a standard school shooting (again are any?) I pointed to the facts behind their reasoning, how they were perceived in legal filings as “good young promising men” by Therapists and Law Enforcement. Their parents relieved and meanwhile they planned on. Their killing of most of the victims was in the School Library and they took pleasure while shooting them. It is not a pretty story but again we have a gun problem, we have a massive mental health problem and we have no way of stopping or circumventing any of it. Time and time again we have failed to see signs, ignore flags and in turn we are so afraid we in fact contribute to it by buying more guns. And I will write a post about the history of how guns became the most significant issue in America today, a type of de facto defense mechanism that has little to do with the 2nd Amendment but more about money and strategy by the NRA and Gun Manufacturers. As all things in life there is always history and a back story.
But without a leader, a type of person, either dead or alive, in which to draw members there is no cult. Think Jesus and that is the starring member of that cult. When one looks at many “cult” fanatics there are usually patterns of behavior and failed businesses that often push one to form a type of community and in turn prove the naysayers wrong. The intent may be benign, but usually it evolves and becomes grander in both scope and scale. They almost always do. But as Americans we are illiterate, we like to emote, we like to believe what we believe and refuse to spend anytime doing the homework, taking the time to ask questions, and expect that our “instincts” are right. Really? Your instincts? We have two: Fight or flight. And with that we have some with higher order thinking skills motivated largely by the biggest motivator – Money. Money is the only thing that matters regardless of Class, Race, Gender etc, etc etc. And anyone who tells you different is either a Charlatan aka a Cult Leader or a Pathological liar aka a Cult Leader. Some are better than others at manipulating people to BELIEVE and not all of it is about a belief but it is about money. See Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos on that one.
It all falls to those who are Believers, Followers and those who are Leaders. And they are distinctly different. It is the Cult of Personality.
Amy Coney-Barrett, the newest Supreme appointed by the former twice Impeached, recently raided, facing numerous lawsuits and State/Federal investigations President, recently was brought to the front pages when a leaked video surfaced regarding the sect of the Cult of which she belongs. I am sure at this point Margaret Atwood should sue, as Lin Manuel Miranda, has a Church for copyright infringement and unauthorized use of a book to promote the cult like teachings from this branch Davidian type of sect.
I am an Atheist and with that I have always allowed room for those who need organized religion in which to congregate and build community. That said much of it in the last 20 years since the rise of the Moral Majority is to the exact opposite and in turn build a Nation that is bound by Christian dogma and belief. That line between Church and State, what has always been a thin one would now be utterly eliminated and the GOP and the Supremes seem intent on doing such. This is the basic premise of The Handmaids Tale and where Gilead is born as nation state dedicated to a form of Theology all driven by men and their Misogyny. Margaret Atwood and Stephen King need to write a book together as The Stand was also not far off the mark.
The Supremes are composed of many members of the Catholic Church and are strongly influenced by the doctrine of said cult as we have seen in their supporting documents, be affirmative or dissents, regarding decisions they have made. The most recent Dobbs V Jackson, the one regarding Roe and the right to abortion is perhaps the most significant with that regards. The Praying Coach may be another as the one regarding Maine schools another as well. More is coming. And we know from texts of their varying speeches and other talks given to private groups their beliefs and personal feelings regarding highly charged subjects as Abortion, Gay Rights and other cultural battles that of late seem part of the landscape. The ones largely accepted by most Americans but still to many a combustible issue that runs against their beliefs. Ah yes their beliefs…..
I wrote in the last post about how many seem to think how one’s own personal opinion is wrong, the words used to express said opinion wrong and often will reprimand if not excoriate anyone who has the audacity to counter a held belief or experience to remind them they are just wrong. No room for discourse, the difference of experience or the reality that not all peas in the pod are the same. We really do fear others as they challenge all of it, as in our beliefs and our way of life. How can we have same sex parents, a person who elects to change gender, who expresses doubt about the existence of God, who simply does not look, speak or act like us? Then when countered further go for the jugular, attack them in a manner that is personal, their looks, their family, their own identity. Then when all else fails attack them for their grammar. That is the online world folks summarized in a nutshell.
And while all that is going on the righteous indignation and verbal retaliation under the guise of “he/she/it/shim hurt my feelers” the powers that be, a motley crew at best without big hair or instruments, continue their march to the Nation State, combo of Theocracy with a touch of Federalism. This way it allows some States the ability to retain civil rights and liberal leanings but ones that will implode when all Immigrants, Homosexuals and Liberals move there. Last Bus out of town to Seattle at 5 standing room only! Just this article on how Seattle is trying to document their homeless, whoops I mean unhoused, population will tell you there are problems in many of these “it” cities regardless of who is in charge of the Government. It is not a new problem but a long standing one, since I can recall growing up there we always had a large housing challenged group (I came up with that one on my own), only now as the world grows in population so does this problem. Sorry folks, Nashville Tennessee has the same problems just they don’t mention it much or hide it via more laws and restrictions, as it affects their plan to become the bestest red state that people will go get drunk, convene and fuck each other and leave and by leave, I mean money. NashVegas Baby! Meanwhile in the rest of Tennessee it is praise the Government, pass the Ammunition and Pray! The state is run by religious zealots and almost all of them end up in the slammer at one point and under investigation by the Feds. Hmm where I have heard that of late? I lived there and there are good people there but they are trapped and cannot leave and with that won’t as the South has a hold on them in ways that transcend policy.
Which brings me to the Supreme Coney-Barrett. I read this and my hair stood up on end. It is dystopian and bizarre which makes me ask why she is in fact a Judge, other than to bring pain and horror to others which women excel at. God must of chosen her as her working is contrarian to her beliefs. Well hypocrisy is a track well run by this group. Praise be… even the name is very Atwood. Call the Attorney’s Mags.
Revealed: leaked video shows Amy Coney Barrett’s secretive faith group drove women to tears
Wife of founder of People of Praise says members ‘were always crying’ during discussions about women’s subservience to men
Stephanie Kirchgaessner The Guardian 26 Aug 2022
The People of Praise, a secretive Christian faith group that counts the conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, considered women’s obedience and subservience to men as one of its central early teachings, according to leaked remarks and writings of the wife of one of the group’s founders.
A leaked video of a recent private People of Praise event, marking its 50th anniversary, shows Dorothy Ranaghan explaining how some female followers of the faith group cried intensely in reaction to the group’s early teachings on “headship” and the “roles of men and women”, in which men are considered divinely ordained as the “head” of the family and dominant to women.
Asked in an interview during the anniversary event about the years after the group’s members first made a “covenant” to join People of Praise in the early 1970s, Dorothy Ranaghan said: “Some of the women – who are still in my women’s group, as a matter of fact – were wearing sunglasses all the time, because they were always crying and would have to hold on to their chairs every time somebody started teaching, because ‘What are we going to hear this time?’”
She then added, as the audience and her interviewer laughed: “But it all worked out just fine in the end.”
The comment marks the first time a statement about some women’s negative early responses to “headship” teachings has been published. The leaked footage was shared with the Guardian by a source who asked to remain anonymous.
Former members of People of Praise, many of whom are critical of the group’s dominance over members’ lives, have described the group as calling for complete obedience of women to their husbands.
The Guardian has previously reported that one of the group’s former members described in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s that Kevin Ranaghan – a group co-founder and Dorothy’s husband – exerted almost total control over the former member when she was living in the couple’s household, including making all decisions about her finances and dating relationships. The group also embraces traditions like encouraging members to speak in tongues, and performing exorcisms.Women in my People of Praise group ‘were always crying’, says Dorothy Ranaghan in leaked video
Barrett, who lived in the Ranaghan household while she attended law school at Notre Dame, has never publicly disclosed or discussed her membership in the Christian charismatic sect, where her father had a leadership role and where she previously served as a “handmaid”. Barrett has said she is a “faithful Catholic” whose religious beliefs would not “bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge”.
But while Barrett’s personal faith-based opposition to abortion rights and Roe v Wade were known before her 2020 confirmation and before she joined a majority of justices in overturning the landmark ruling that protected abortion rights nationally, less is known about the culture in which Barrett was raised and its views on women and childbirth, suffering, and their role in society.
Barrett has never addressed how the reversal of Roe might affect a woman’s life. But during oral argument in Dobbs v Jackson, the supreme court case that ultimately overturned Roe, Barrett referred specifically in questions to the availability of so-called “safe haven” laws across the US, which allow mothers to abandon newborns in designated locations without the risk of punishment.
Barrett suggested that the availability of such legal protections for new mothers meant that while women might be forced to give birth if Roe were overturned, they would not necessarily be forced to become parents, or be burdened by parenthood.
The line of reasoning was decried as “cruel and dangerous” by pro-choice activists and writers, who said that seeing safe haven laws as a viable replacement for reproductive choice ignored real health risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth, and ignored women’s rights to bodily autonomy.
Barrett’s question also appears to echo the People of Praise culture in which she was raised and has chosen to remain a part of, which emphasizes the importance of childbirth, pregnancy and the abandonment of autonomy and privacy it supposedly entails, as a core part of what it means to be a woman.
In her early writings, Dorothy Ranaghan emphasized the need for women to be “self-giving, responsible and reserved”. In a 1978 article that appeared in New Covenant magazine, called “Fully a Woman”, childbearing is described as a “central reality of womanhood” that “determines our presence in the world”, even for those who “by chance or choice” did not have children.
“The child in the womb expands the mother’s body, changing its dimensions. As her body yields, so do the borders of privacy and selfishness. Her very existence gives to another.” Women who are most admired, she wrote, “are not private persons, but are surrendered and available to care for others”.
“Pregnancy teaches a woman that others have a claim on her very person for the service of life. Rather than annihilating her, pregnancy makes her a new person, radiant and strong: a mother,” she wrote.
Once women gave birth in the People of Praise, work to care for them is divided on gender lines, according to Adrian Reimers, a Catholic theological critic and early member of the People of Praise who was dismissed in 1985 and wrote about his experience.
Reimers’ book critiquing the group, called Not Reliable Guides, states that men in People of Praise “were quietly taught by their heads and leaders not to change or rinse out diapers” and that women’s emotions were “distrusted”. Pastoral problems were often addressed by asking a woman where she was in her menstrual cycle.
Women, Reimers wrote, played a “decidedly secondary role to men” and a married woman was “expected always to reflect the fact that she is under her husband’s authority” and under his pastoral care. A guide on the group’s approach to outreach in the Caribbean, Reimers said, explicitly stated: “We should probably deal with the Caribbean matriarchal system by quietly developing an alternate rather than encouraging a confrontation.”
Reimers has written that he believed that the People of Praise’s views on women were rooted not in the Catholic tradition, but rather in Kevin Ranaghan’s involvement in the 1970s National Men’s Shepherds Conference, which was co-sponsored by Protestant leaders and believed that men were ordained by God to lead.
“It is no surprise that all these communities see feminism as one of the principle [sic] ideological evils of our time,” Reimers wrote.
In a statement released after publication of this article, Dorothy Ranaghan said: “My remarks were meant as a joke as most of the people in the room understood. I would never be part of a group that oppresses women and I never have been part of one. But I have been proud to be one of the women leaders in the People of Praise for more than 50 years.”
She added: “I’ve been in the company of many strong women – lawyers, doctors, educators, businesswomen, wives and mothers, and we are in no way oppressed or dominated. We are responsible for our own decisions; we are free and happy. Furthermore, it is unconscionable to me that any of the more than 40 men and women who have lived with our family over the years would consider my husband an oppressor. As those who know him would agree, he is a kind, gentle man who listens carefully and respects the opinions of women and men and he always has.”
It is both Father’s Day and Sunday and that is the irony of the Religious Right, for whom do you both thank and worship? The sperm donor who fertilized the egg or the Sky Daddy and his son, Jesus Christ, who is their raision de’tre for living?
Well I go with neither as in reality we are at a crossroads right now on what defines a Father and how they acknowledge, accept and support their progeny as we are always redefining family and no month more than June which is also Gay Pride month in where often the families we are assigned are not the ones we end up choosing. And with that I also provide this column by Sociologist and Physician, Nick Christakis on what is the concept of Fatherhood. The comment section is a particularly amusing as it descends into conventional if not provincial arguments about the nuclear family. The only other that escalated and “de”volved was yesterdays column on Emma Thompson’s new movie and the attitude of aging and bodies with regards to her new film. That was by far more entertaining than what I saw on Broadway yesterday, Macbeth, starring Double 007’s Daniel Craig. That was a tragedy in a new sense of the word.
And with today also being a religious day, many will attend Church and listen to sermons about Fatherhood and how Jesus was the Son of Christ so willing to die for his Father and his beliefs that we must fear God and in turn revere him. See the connection of fear and the idea that it is critical to faith. I don’t worship anything I fear, that is bizarre. But this is the idea of building a myth or mythology you have to create some firewall in which to ensure that the power you have remains and if you build enough fear in people they will do whatever it takes to maintain that allusion and delusion of beliefs. The Church is a destructive force and with it it is showing cracks of imploding from within. The Southern Baptists are the new members of this covenant that the Catholics made centuries ago. Welcome to the new world.
And with that I reprint an essay from a couple of weeks ago about the Religious Right and their inconsistencies when it comes to well critical thought, analysis and logic with regards to their Christian beliefs and their political ones.
The Doctrine of the Irreligious Right
By Nate Hochman Guest Essay|Opinion|The New York Times|Sunday, June 5, 2022
Mr. Hochman is a fellow at National Review.
Even for an insider like me, the whirlwind of energy and debate within today’s conservative movement can be bewildering. But what’s clear is that the Republican Party is changing. A new kind of conservatism, represented by right-wing elites like Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo and Tucker Carlson, is making itself known. We are just beginning to see its impact. The anti-critical-race-theory laws, anti-transgender laws and parental rights bills that have swept the country in recent years are the movement’s opening shots. They have made today’s culture wars as fierce as they have been in decades. But this new campaign is also distinctly differentfrom the culture wars of the late 20th century, and it reflects a broad shift in conservatism’s priorities and worldview.
The conservative political project is no longer specifically Christian. That may seem strange to say at a moment when a mostly Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a reversal of the landmark 1973 ruling would be more of a last gasp than a sign of strength for the religious right. It’s hard to imagine today’s culture warriors taking any interest in the 1950s push for a Christian amendment to the Constitution, for example. Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation. Although it enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.
Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.” “Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Middle American small-business owners and skeptical liberal atheists may not seem to have much in common,” he wrote in 2020. But all of those demographics are uncomfortable with the progressive social agenda of the post-Obama years.
Rather than invocations of Scripture, the right’s appeal is a defense of a broader, beleaguered American way of life. For example, the language of parental rights is rarely, if ever, religious, but it speaks to the pervasive sense that American families are fighting back against progressive ideologues over control of the classroom. That framing has been effective: According to a March Politico poll, for example, American voters favored the key provision of Florida’s hotly debated Parental Rights in Education law, known by its critics as the Don’t Say Gay law, by a margin of 16 percentage points. Support for the initiative crosses racial lines. In a May poll of likely general election voters in six Senate battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the conservative American Principles Project found that Hispanics supported the Florida law by a margin of 11 percentage points and African Americans by a margin of four points.
The upshot is that this new politics has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent. It appeals to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet. As the terms of the culture war shift, Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — the mix of millennials, racial minorities and college-educated white voters whose collective electoral power was supposed to establish a sustainable progressive majority — is fraying, undermining the decades-long conventional wisdom that America’s increasing racial diversity would inevitably push the country left.
That thesis was prominently advanced by the progressive political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, but both of them have grown alarmed about the rightward movement among nonwhite voters in recent years. “If Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not canceled out entirely,” Mr. Teixeira wrote in December. “That could — or should — provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.” In the absence of that sea change, however, it is likely that disaffected people of all races will continue to move into the Republican coalition.
But is all this good for American conservatism? Particularly for social conservatives older than I am, who have sustained a long string of losses in the culture war, the potential for a new Republican majority is nothing to sniff at. But some have already expressed misgivings about this coalition. “We must not allow evangelical political priorities to be co-opted by functional pagans simply because we share a limited set of political objectives,” wrote Andrew T. Walker, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Pushing back on “woke lunacy” is valuable, he said, but it may not be worth embracing a politics that “causes Christians to adopt or excuse the disposition of cruelty and licentiousness.” As of now, the new secular conservatives and the old religious right are bound together in an uneasy partnership to fight the cultural left. But they may yet find themselves at odds about the country’s future.
The Rise and Fall of the Religious Right
The Republican Party hasn’t always been the natural home for conservative Christians. In the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, some Republican governors — including Ronald Reagan of California — helped liberalize state abortion laws. In 1970, Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s liberal Republican governor, signed what Planned Parenthood’s president at the time, Dr. Alan Guttmacher, approvingly called “the most liberal abortion law in the world.” Democrats, on the other hand, were hardly all social liberals. In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s presidential bid was backed by Pat Robertson, a leading voice on the emerging religious right and the son of a Democratic senator. Mr. Robertson’s ally Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition declared that “God has his hand upon Jimmy Carter to run for president.
All of that began to change with the inflammation of the culture wars in the final decades of the 20th century: Roe, the rise of mass-produced pornography, the Supreme Court’s ban on school-sponsored prayer, the gay rights movement and the push for an Equal Rights Amendment all drove the religious right to organize as a political force. As Democrats moved left on these issues, the G.O.P. pivoted right. In 1980 the Democratic Party platform added its first plank on gay rights, prompting the conservative columnist Pat Buchanan to remark bitterly that Mr. Carter was “not the sort of simpleton to allow biblical beliefs to get in the way of carrying San Francisco.”
When Mr. Reagan ran for president, he disavowed the abortion bill he signed in California as a “mistake” and courted the Moral Majority. In 1983 he published “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation” — the first book written by a sitting president. By the time George W. Bush was elected on the backs of evangelicals and born-again Christians in 2000, the culture war battle lines were clear. He went on to carry 80 percent of voters who ranked “moral values” as their top issue in 2004.
But American church attendance was declining. The share of self-identified Christians in the United States dropped from 75 percent in 2011 to 63 percent in 2021 while the share of religious “nones” — i.e., those who identified as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” — jumped from 19 percent to 29 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. The G.O.P. has not been immune to this trend. The share of Republicans who belong to a church dropped from 75 percent in 2010 to 65 percent in 2020, according to Gallup. Although the sharp drop-off in religiosity began in the liberal mainline Protestant denominations, it has spread to their conservative counterparts as well. Fewer than half of Republicans said “being Christian” was an important part of being American in 2020, according to Pew — a 15 percentage point drop from 2016. Across the ideological and theological spectrum, organized religion is waning.
As a result, the religious right’s influence in the G.O.P. has been declining since the Bush era. The party’s 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain, repeatedly flip-flopped on Roe, voted against a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman and decried Jerry Falwell as one of several “agents of intolerance.” Mitt Romney, who sat atop the G.O.P. presidential ticket in 2012, had a similarly spotty track record on social issues.
While President Donald Trump delivered on a number of religious conservative priorities — most notably, appointing enough conservative justices to the Supreme Court to cobble together a likely majority of anti-Roe votes — he is a lifelong pro-choicer and sexual libertine who made explicit appeals to gay and lesbian voters on the 2016 campaign trail and was the first openly pro-same-sex-marriage candidate to win the presidency. “It is hardly surprising that the religious right is no longer even perceived as a relevant force in U.S. politics,” George Hawley concluded in The American Conservative. “Far from a kingmaker in the political arena, the Christian right is now mostly ignored.”
Revolution From the Middle
The decline in Republican church membership directly coincides with the rise of Mr. Trump. As Timothy P. Carney found in 2019, the voters who went for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were far more secular than the religious right: In the 2016 G.O.P. primaries, Mr. Trump won only about 32 percent of voters who went to church more than once a week. In contrast, he secured about half of those who went “a few times a year,” 55 percent of those who “seldom” attend and 62 percent of Republicans who never go to church. In other words, Mr. Carney wrote, “every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa.”
The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American radicals,” or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles. As Ross Douthat noted, nonchurchgoing Trump voters are “less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced” than those who regularly attend religious services. No coincidence, then, that a 2021 Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Republicans now support gay marriage — up from just 28 percent in 2011.
These voters are more nationalistic and less amenable to multiculturalism than their religious peers, and they profess a skepticism of the cosmopolitan open-society arguments for free trade and mass immigration that have been made by neoliberals and neoconservatives alike. “M.A.Rs feel they are members of an exploited class — excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions,” Matthew Rose wrote in “First Things.” They “unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.”
In this sense, the fierceness of today’s culture wars is actually tied to the decline in organized religion. Frequent church attendance is correlated with more negative attitudes toward gay men, lesbians and feminists, but as the pollster Emily Ekins noted in 2018, it softened respondents’ views of culture war issues such as race, immigration and identity. Nonchurchgoing Trump voters are more likely to support a border wall, tighter restrictions on legal immigration and a ban on immigration to the United States from some Muslim-majority countries. They are less inclined to agree that “acceptance of racial and religious diversity is at the core of American identity.” While the majority of religious conservatives eventually fell in line behind Mr. Trump, the political and cultural energy he represented was primarily a reflection of the nonreligious right.
What is occurring on the right, then, is a partial realization of the program that the hard-right writer Sam Francis championed in his 1994 essay “Religious Wrong.” He argued that cultural, ethnic and social identities “are the principal lines of conflict” between Middle Americans and progressive elites and that the “religious orientation of the Christian right serves to create what Marxists like to call a ‘false consciousness’ for Middle Americans.” In other words, political Christianity prevented the right-wing base from fully understanding the culture war as a class war — a power struggle between Middle America and a hostile federal regime. He saw Christianity’s universalist ideals as at odds with the defense of the American nation, which was being dispossessed by mass immigration and multiculturalism. “Organized Christianity today,” he wrote in 2001, “is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.”
Mr. Francis’ position, of course, has always been far outside the mainstream of conservative opinion. Conservatives have traditionally viewed religion as foundational to Western heritage, and they have seen its moderating influence on identitarian conflicts as a crucial component of civic harmony. But as a description of recent trends, his assessment holds some weight: The decline of organized religion on the right has, in fact, supercharged the culture war.
Many observers — including Mr. Francis, whose writing became more openly white nationalist toward the end of his career — have been quick to suggest that this new energy is, in essence, white identity politics. It’s true that the decline of religion as an organizing force on the right has made other forms of identity more prominent — and in the absence of a humanizing Christian ethic, white racial consciousness could fill the void. There are and always have been strains of white-supremacist politics that reject Christianity for that reason. (The American eugenicist Madison Grant, for example, echoed Friedrich Nietzsche in denouncing Christianity as “the religion of the slave, the meek and the lowly.” Christianity tends “to break down class and race distinctions,” Mr. Grant wrote in 1916. “Such distinctions are absolutely essential to the maintenance of race purity in any community when two or more races live side by side.”)
But it would be wrong to reduce these developments to racial animus. In a speech at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, Mr. Rufo, a leading conservative activist, described the New Right’s project as a counterrevolution: “The goal is to protect these people, Middle Americans of all racial backgrounds — working class and middle class — to protect them against what I think is a hostile and nihilistic elite that is seeking to impose its values onto the working and middle classes to bolster their own power, prestige, status and achievement.”
Mr. Rufo, like many of his contemporaries, rarely discusses matters of faith. Today’s right-wing culture warriors think in distinctly Marxian terms: a class struggle between a proletarian base of traditionalists and a powerful public-private bureaucracy that is actively hostile to the American way of life. In lieu of Mr. Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative avatars of today’s culture war look more like Mr. Rufo or — at the level of elected office — Governor DeSantis of Florida. A hero of the new cultural right and a prospective 2024 presidential front-runner, the governor is nominally Catholic and is politically friendly to conservative Christians. But he rarely discusses his religion publicly and almost never in the context of politics. (He did cite his “faith in God” and “in the power of prayer” when discussing his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis last November.)
Overthrowing the New Left
Whereas the old Christian conservatism was about defending an old order, the new social conservatism is about overthrowing a new one. The transformation of the right is a direct response to a shift on the left. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional moral order, many individualists, rebels and eccentrics found themselves aligned with progressives. Today the reverse is true. The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right.
In recent years, American progressivism has departed from its traditional live-and-let-live philosophy on social issues, graduating from a push for rights (e.g., same-sex marriage) to a demand for affirmation (e.g., mandates that religious bakers custom-make cakes celebrating same-sex marriage). Progressives and religious conservatives alike have argued that this was the inevitable conclusion of the gay rights movement — that the logic of civil rights law required the transformation of the public square to accommodate L.G.B.T.Q. Americans once they were recognized as a distinct class.
The left’s program is now not so much securing equal rights for certain groups as punishing those who hold views toward those groups that — while well within the mainstream just a decade or two ago — are now deemed unacceptable. Religious conservatives, for their part, have increasingly retreated from a battle for the public view of sexuality and marriage to the defensive crouch of “religious liberty.”
Today’s left-wing cultural program represents the tastes and worldview of an insular class of often white progressive elites, who now sit to the left of nonwhite Democrats on any number of social issues, including race. (A 2017 Pew survey, for example, found that 79.2 percent of white liberals agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many Black people can’t get ahead these days,” whereas 59.9 percent of Black Americans said the same.) Though a group Pew calls the ‘progressive left’ — which is 68 percent white — makes up just 12 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, its members are more likely to donate to campaigns and turn out to vote than other Democratic constituencies.
As a result, they exercise an outsize influence over the social agenda of the Democratic Party. Moderate Democrats in Congress have regularly broken with progressives on economic issues like regulation and spending, but the entire party is generally in lock step on most social issues. All but one of the 225 House Democrats elected in 2018 are co-sponsors of the Equality Act, which would write gender identity and sexual orientation into federal civil rights law, and House Democrats have rarely, if ever, publicly acknowledged that ideas central to critical race theory are being taught in public schools, let alone criticized that fact.
As Democratic elites have embraced a more aggressive form of social liberalism, the party has alienated a swath of its traditional working-class base. Many Americans of all racial backgrounds are deeply uncomfortable with at least some aspects of post-Obama cultural progressivism. A recent poll from the American Principles Project, for example, found that Hispanics and African Americans in six battleground states supported “laws that prohibit biological males who identify as transgender women from participating in girls’ sports programs both in K-12 and at the collegiate level.” When it came to “banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and physical sex-change surgeries for children under the age of 18 who identify as transgender,” Hispanics supported such measures by a margin of nine percentage points and African Americans by a margin of 15 points.
All this challenges the conventional wisdom among Republican elites. The G.O.P.’s post-2012 “autopsy,” for example, argued for a strategy of moderation on cultural issues — paired with a recommitment to low taxes and deregulation — to make inroads with nonwhite voters. In fact, the opposite strategy seems to have been successful. In 2020, Mr. Trump won more votes from nonwhite people and Hispanics than any other Republican presidential candidate in modern American history and a higher percentage of nonwhite and Hispanic votes than any other since Mr. Bush in 2004, running on an aggressive culture-war platform that simultaneously eschewed several tenets of Republican economic orthodoxy, from welfare cuts and government spending to immigration and free trade. To rephrase James Carville’s famous adage on the 1992 campaign trail: It’s the culture war, stupid.
Conservatism in a Secular America
The future of the emergent, not-so-silent majority remains uncertain. If Roe is overturned, it may well heighten the contradictions within the uneasy alliance of the new and old forms of social conservatism. In the days after the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion, the Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy — perhaps the most prominent representative of M.A.R.s — declared that if Republicans tried to ban abortion, he would become a Democrat. Just let a “woman do what she wants with her body,” he said, with an expletive for emphasis.
A controversy at last year’s Turning Point USA, a conservative youth conference, was instructive in showing the potential cracks within the new coalition. Brandi Love, a pornographic actress who describes herself as a “sex, drink and rock ’n’ roll conservative,” purchased tickets to the event, but after a backlash online, she was barred from attending. She slammed the move, describing it as “a worst-case example of cancel culture” to a writer for The Daily Caller. She added that if Turning Point USA “is the future, then the future is run by puritanical, fanatically devout Christians who will demand compliance or else.” A number of prominent conservatives echoed the claim: “I couldn’t care less who bangs who, and I missed the part of the Constitution that addresses threesomes,” tweeted the TV commentator John Cardillo. The Federalist’s Ben Domenech concurred: “The right has an opportunity to be the big tent party. Don’t be a bunch of prudes.”
At the time, I voiced my own objections to Ms. Love’s presence at the conference. I rejected her argument that she had been canceled by free speech hypocrites because, I wrote, it assumes that “the only valid alternative to political correctness and left-wing cultural orthodoxy is the absence of any social or cultural standards whatsoever.” This is the heart of the distinction between anti-woke liberals and traditional social conservatives: The disaffected recent converts in the conservative coalition often object to the new left-wing puritanism for the same reason that they objected to its old right-wing counterpart: It prevents them from doing and saying whatever they please, free of social repercussions. That is its own kind of libertinism. Social conservatives, in contrast, do not oppose the enforcement of social norms as such; they oppose the enforcement of left-wing social norms on the grounds that they are the wrong norms.
A resolution of these contradictions will not be necessary for the new conservatism to succeed. Every political coalition contains its fair share of internal tensions. But old social conservatives will need to decide how much they are willing to concede in exchange for a political future, and secular converts will need to decide if they are more alienated by the left’s cultural authoritarianism than they are by the G.O.P.’s positions on issues like abortion.
If it can be sustained, however, the secular right may be able to deliver on the old religious right’s priorities. Indeed, if Roe is overturned, it will have been due to the election of a president who exemplified the new conservatism. In many ways, the new conservatism is winning where the old conservatism could not. The parental backlash against progressive pedagogy, for example, has inspired a wave of states and localities to crack down on obscenity and sexually explicit content in school libraries. Whereas the religious right failed on gay marriage, school prayer and a number of other social issues, the new conservatism — which has yet to even fully take shape — has already notched a wave of important victories. At least 17 states have passed laws aimed at restricting the teaching of critical race theory, and 14 have barred transgender athletes from competing in single-sex sports corresponding to the gender they were not assigned at birth.
Where religious conservatives fit in all this remains uncertain. Some have pointed to a new strain of Catholic thought known as postliberalism, championed primarily by Catholic academics such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, as one promising alternative path for the New Right. Thinkers in this tradition want to implement a specifically — and sometimes explicitly — Catholic political order. But the relationship between these intellectuals and the grass-roots energy has always been uneasy. Insofar as there is crossover between the two forms of conservatism, the Catholic post liberals could be understood as intellectual fellow travelers in the Trumpian culture war. But they do not define its ethos, and in some ways, they are at odds with it.
While the old religious right will see much to like in the new cultural conservatism, they are partners, rather than leaders, in the coalition. That may be the best thing they can hope for in a rapidly secularizing country. The new cultural conservatism may protect the embattled minority of traditionalist Christians; it will not restore them to their pre-eminent place in public life, as the old religious conservatism hoped to do. But it may have an actual chance at winning. And that, from the conservative perspective, is worth a great deal.
I love to cruise through religious nonsense on Facebook and Instagram where the young Christians tout their faith, their bands or their products that advertise and commercialize their dedication to their faith. What.Ever. One of my favorites is a dimwit from Nashville who has a Crowd Heaven start up of garbage merch that once the Evangelical Gilead take over will be resigned to the garbage heap. We will be covered up more than any woman in Afghanistan could ever imagine. Think this is hyperbole? Here is another moronic woman running for office who only wants sex to be legal between (of age) married couples. I am going with the “of age” belief that the minute the Bitch is fertile let’s get her hitched and breeding. I have said repeatedly that women own the anti abortion movement and their role in the January 6th insurrection has yet to come fully forward but they funded a lot of the travelers to that destination that day and gave the men the clubs and reasons behind the movement. Men will do whatever it takes to get laid and that includes committing a federal crime. As noted by this whackfucking job. If men thought more with their heads and less with their dicks the world would be a better place and with that onto the story below.
I have made my point about the Evangelical religion, particularly the extreme sect of that group the Reformation Baptists. With all of the most conservative of the faith is the Southern Baptists whose belief in the role of women in the Church is not one of leadership nor in fellowship. They are to teach girls how to be women who serve. That serving part is to the Lord first and then the family. So a Bible in one hand, a fry pan in the other. This is an excellent essay on the role of women in the Church and where they are with regards to the fellowship of the Southern Baptist. And this is why finally this extreme behavior which includes assault, rape, child molestation on the level of the Catholic Church came to light. And irony the same group hate the Catholics. I wonder is that they got a better hold historically of both cash and child abuse? And kid not (pun intended) they are equally Anti Semitic which explains a great deal of the bullshit of Replacement Theory being repeated in much of the rhetoric of the movement, because if the Church says it then it is the word of law. They are a mishmash of idiocy and arrogance that explains why Trump embraced their bullshit, it was as if he finally found his people. **I am envisioning Trump as Moses upon the Mount going, “Let my people go.” There are some great laughs there. And with that he also said “Be ready for the third day. Do not go near a woman.” Again with the sexual references, the Bible is obsessed with it, but sexually abuse a kid… ****
Yes folks the Atheist reads the Bible, well unlike the current morons in office who feel banning books will stop one from getting triggered, I do read it, get upset and laugh as I have this ability to critically analyze and debate the words in it. Me smart and stuff. But when you speak to anyone who takes this shit as sacrosanct they dismiss this and remind you that the FEAR GOD and are a WARRIOR FOR CHRIST. As you saw on January 6th, take that shit seriously as they are dangerous when afraid. I think of the drinking game, Never have I ever, which is a double negative challenge and that right there explains the Evangelical faith.
If more women had a significant leadership in the role of the Churches, if they were less strident about the Patriarchy and the code of silence to protect sinners as they be sinning, this might not have happened for as long as it did. The same goes for the Catholic Church as it still is covering tracks for their Pedophile Priests. Religion is a cult, they subscribe to the idea that suffering for one’s beliefs is essential and that being a Martyr is the key to heaven. So if that you are hurt for your faith, including abuse both physical and sexual, then suffer on. It is also why they eschew education outside the avenues of the Church as that learning and stuff, being exposed to knowledge and the “others” can do great harm in master manipulation and bullshit proselytizing. To that I say, IN HIS EYE. What I mean by that – I spit in it.
Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says
Among the findings was a previously unknown case of a pastor who was credibly accused of assaulting a woman a month after leaving the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention
By Sarah Pulliam Bailey The Washington Post May 22, 2022
Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The findings of nearly 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years.
The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious institutions in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.
The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Many of the cases referred to in the report were considered outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.
The report, compiled by an organization called Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned more with protecting the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.
“While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations came to light in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states
While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman just one month after he completed his two-year tenure as president of the convention. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vice president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama City Beach, Fla., vacation in 2010.
The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the woman but acknowledged that he had interactions with her. After the report was released, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a statement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”
Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he called the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”
Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the facts around many of the stories they have already shared, but many were still surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the highest levels of leadership.
“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that is through and through about power. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any way reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”
The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past presidents of the convention, a former vice president and the former head of the SBC’s administrative arm.
The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 focused on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.
For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were told the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders because it would go against the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while keeping it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also includes private emails showing how longtime leaders such as August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”
In an April 2007 email, the convention’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be implemented consistent with SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and present ministries to help churches in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “immediate action to signal the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this area.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.
For a denomination designed to give more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.
“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly chose to stay on the same path all these years,” said Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”
During Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to records of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the advice of convention lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.
The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe the Executive Committee was not doing the “will of the messengers,” or following the lead of lay leaders who had already voted in favor of doing so. It also led to the resignation of the Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also once served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The decision over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.
According to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for comment.
Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches in multiple states, has long advocated a churchwide database and was met with hostility. The report states that when she met with SBC leaders in 2007, a member of the Executive Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and another chortled.”
“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked hard to try to make something happen, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit partner for their own decision to choose institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”
The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual meeting, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include providing dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.
“We must be ready to take meaningful steps to change our culture as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in a statement.
Since decades of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer of abusers to other churches. Unlike the Catholic Church, the SBC has a non-hierarchical structure.
In March 2007, the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a priest and canon lawyer who first warned of the looming Catholic sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could be falling into some of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.
The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over local churches” but that they would attempt to use their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not immediately return a request for comment.
Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist task force on the issue and said that the report shows a need for institutions like the SBC to seek outside expertise on sex abuse.
“It shows a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”
The issue of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar way to how Nikita Khrushchev shocked the Soviet Union when he detailed Joseph Stalin’s crimes in a speech in 1956.
“The depths of wickedness and inhumanity in this report are breathtaking,” Moore said. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”
Moore said he hopes the SBC will consider replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past two decades fighting for reform.
I have been writing a great deal about Religion for two reasons: One, due to my experience in Nashville and particularly with regards to my encounters with Ethan who is now Ministering in his family Church and spreading hate speech in each Bible interpretation. From Homosexuality, to the role of women in the church, Ethan spares no rods and beats the hate down, much like I suspect his Father did to him, in the same was his Grandfather did to his Father. Yes folks all of that kind of family loathing and introspection is often part of the Section Baptist Church Sunday AM and PM services. Ramshackle does not describe it. You can find that on YouTube or Facebook as that is how these ministries bypass filters and checks. And while their Church is not a large scale ministry, Ethan is soon interning at one where they franchise the hate like McDonald’s does burgers. Coming to a town near you, a Pastor with self-loathing misdirecting and projecting anger onto the believers and more importantly the sinners whom they wish to convert to that old time religion.
The second reason is due to the Evangelical embrace of Trump and their role in the January 6th insurrection. They are not backing down and like Trump are embracing another Big Lie. That first one is about Jesus, the son, the myth, the legend.
I had heard of this book and had no reason to read it as I lived around it for three years. It is why I call the women “cum dumpsters” as the men in their lives see them as nothing more than receptacles of their seed and to breed as much as possible in which to keep the white man supreme. The Southern Baptist Convention held in Nashville, aside from being a super spreader Covid event, barely came to terms with their hating of Blacks, Women and the LGBQT community, sex abuse in their ranks, as well as public health and safety. Vaccines are Satan’s tool and all that. Covid makes a nice keepsake to bring home to the family. And with the election and divisiveness of their committees I don’t see the Baptists being anything progressive when it comes to America and it not being first without Trump at the helm. They truly believe he is the MAN.
And this also explains some of the cultural rub off in Hispanic/Latin and Black communities where a part of their history and belief system is in fact very Misogynistic and compares to their White Evangelicals when it comes to religion, that old time one. Again Christianity is like Judaism and Islam with regards to factions of their faith (well none in Islam) that embraces modernity and contemporary roles in society when it comes to accepting those who are not conservative if not rigid in their beliefs.. aka “their truths.” Love that I can take a Millennial expression and turn it into exactly what Conservatives love, that truth has alternative facts. Thanks Kellyanne, a staunch Catholic, along with William Barr, which is why Trump embraced them as well. (I remember when America feared JFK as a Catholic President.) That conservative view of family and cultural mores that somehow have us all put into our cages, gilded for some, for others not so much, has always been the bell weather of Conservative Politics. Long before Fox, Rush Limbaugh and friends, Father Coughlin beat the airways like a drum to warn of the Liberal scourge. When I listen to Ethan and his father preach it is that same long winded incoherent messaging that reminds me why I abandoned religion years ago. And they are more common then not as that is the idea, bury a message of hate in amidst of bullshit. Quote some scripture, make up a meaning and viola! Now pass the plate. New age rhetoric is equally obtuse and full of bullshit and they too are embracing the lies and conspiracy theories at a fast pace as who wants to be left out of the revolution!
Here is an article about the Book that compares Trump to John Wayne, also a made up character and actor. Charleston Heston is another figure to whom the right love as he played Moses, another fictional character. The idea that Q’Anon is somehow so out there and full of bullshit seems nonsensical when it comes to anyone advocating and following it, has clearly never been to a Yoga commune or a mega Church. Same diff as they focus and follow the gibberish and made up stuff with some real tangible shit and then they press the button that is the trigger warning that you are coming close to a connection of pain and trauma. With that they have you hooked, like drugs it is a free first taste that will have you coming for more. Drugs can kill you and toxic masculinity can as well. The opioid crisis anyone? Child abuse? Domestic Violence? Street violence? Mass shootings? Nothing makes boys Prouder than being a member of a group that calls themselves a militia with their guns the extension of their dicks. They are standing up and standing by alright.
How a book about evangelicals, Trump and militant masculinity became a surprise bestseller
When historian Kristin Du Mez’s latest book, “Jesus and John Wayne,” came out in the summer of 2020, it received little attention from mainstream gatekeepers and reviewers.
But the book, which explores evangelical fondness for former president Donald Trump and strong masculine figures, has since sold more than 100,000 copies through word of mouth, podcasts and book clubs. When it came out in paperback last month, the book shot up to No. 4 among nonfiction paperbacks on the New York Times bestseller list.
As journalists and academics tried to explain how evangelicals could bring themselves to vote for Trump, Du Mez argued that evangelical support was not a shocking aberration from their views but a culmination of evangelicals’ long-standing embrace of militant masculinity, presenting the man as protector and warrior.
“In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values,” Du Mez wrote. “In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.”
The book also described a pattern of abuse and its coverup by several mainstream evangelical leaders, many of whom are still in leadership. Du Mez contended that evangelical leaders’ emphasis on militant masculinity created a culture where abuse was able to flourish and often kept secret, an argument that has both caught fire and created controversy.
Du Mez, who teaches at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich., wrote that mainstream evangelical leaders such as John Piper, James Dobson and John Eldredge, preached a “mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity — of patriarchy and submission, sex and power.”
“The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation,” Du Mez wrote.
Piper, Dobson and Eldredge did not return requests for comment.
Russell Moore, who was the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm until earlier this year, said in an email that everywhere he goes someone asks him about the book.
Moore, now a public theologian for Christianity Today magazine, said that many evangelicals are trying to understand recent developments like Trump’s rise and revelations of sexual abuse in evangelical spaces. Moore said that Du Mez has shown that “much of what has passed for evangelicalism over the past decades was more John Wayne than Jesus” and that some of the characters in her book who have been portrayed by some as fringe turned out not to be fringe at all.
“ ‘Jesus and John Wayne’ is not the whole picture, but it’s on target in enough places that we should take seriously the mirror put to our faces to reform ourselves by the gospel we believe,” Moore wrote in an email. “I don’t agree with this book on everything, by any means, but there are key aspects that are necessary for us to see, and that can help us make sense of some things.”
The book showed how masculine pop-culture figures like John Wayne could influence the evangelical imagination and shape the way people act and think, said Karen Swallow Prior, who teaches English at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“Among my own group of friends and peers, this is the book that they have been talking about more than any other in recent years,” she said. “I can’t think of the last one that people talked about this much.”
In his review for the journal Christian History earlier this year, Yale University historian Jon Butler called the book one of the most important on modern evangelicalism in the past four decades. A review for the Christian website Mere Orthodoxy said the book should be required reading for evangelicals. Du Mez’s book also inspired a three-part episode for the popular Holy Post podcast and was named book of the year last year by Englewood Review of Books.
“Having announced her thesis about militant Christian-nationalist, male-patriarchal supremacy, she mines American history for classic biblical,” Daniel Harrell wrote for Christianity Today. “On the other hand are plenty of white evangelical men canceled out for political acts never committed but only assumed and whose patriotism gets distorted as nationalism simply because they’re white, Christian, and male. As a political force they barely register compared to Amazon, Facebook, and Hollywood.”
One of the more frequent criticisms she receives is from the subtitle of her book: “How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.” Du Mez said that she wanted to challenge White evangelicals to examine their core beliefs about Jesus’s teachings to “turn the other cheek,” love your neighbor and love your enemy.
“I wanted to make clear that I wasn’t going to woo evangelicals or cater to evangelicals,” she said. The Bible lists virtues like love, peace, kindness and gentleness that Du Mez argues would contradict the model of militant Christianity that leaders have held up.
Raised in a Dutch immigrant community in Sioux Center, Iowa, Du Mez’s mother was a Dutch immigrant and her father was a longtime Reformed theologian at Dordt University, where in 2016 Trump famously told a crowd he could shoot someone in the middle of New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters.
Du Mez said she began working on the topic around 2005 when she started teaching at Calvin, a Christian university rooted in the Reformed tradition of Protestantism. Du Mez was teaching a class on U.S. history and lecturing on President Theodore Roosevelt to show how American ideas about masculinity have changed over time through economics, foreign policy and race.
Two male students came up to her after class one day and suggested she read the book “Wild at Heart,” by Colorado-based author John Eldredge, which has sold more than 4 million copies. She bought a copy and found “a particularly militant conception of masculine Christianity that Roosevelt had been promoting.”
In the early years of America’s war with Iraq, Du Mez considered how Eldredge’s vision of masculinity promoted militaristic ideas about America as an empire. Du Mez said she also reviewed data that showed White evangelicals were more likely to condone the war in Iraq and the military’s use of torture.
“I was trying to tease out: Is this mainstream or is this fringe?” she said in an interview. “As a Christian scholar, I thought, is this what I should be doing? If this is fringe, should I hold this up as though it’s mainstream?”
Du Mez set the topic aside for a few years but picked it up again in 2016 in the days after the “Access Hollywood” tapes came out — in which Trump is heard making vulgar comments about women — and many evangelical leaders came to Trump’s defense. That’s when she decided what she had been working on wasn’t fringe.
Du Mez is a longtime member of a Christian Reformed Church, part of a denomination under the umbrella group called the National Association of Evangelicals. She was influenced by cultural evangelicalism through popular Christian music and the “purity culture” movement that encouraged sexual abstinence before marriage. However, she wasn’t exposed to popular evangelical leaders like John Piper, Wayne Grudem or Jerry Falwell Sr. until adulthood.
Her book, published by a nonreligious publisher called Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Co., found its way into the evangelical world through powerful word-of-mouth networks. Du Mez’s editor Daniel Gerstle said “Jesus and John Wayne” was the publisher’s “surprise hit” of 2020, selling over 300 hardcover copies every week in its first months of publication. The first jump came in late December when the book began selling more than 900 copies a week. Popular Bible teacher Beth Moore, Gerstle noted, has tweeted about the book, describing it as the one she hopes evangelicals read in 2021.
While the book is almost entirely focused on White evangelicals, Du Mez said she has received feedback from a number of Black Christian leaders about it as well. John Onwuchekwa, a Black pastor in Atlanta who left the Southern Baptist Convention last summer, said he felt “vindicated” when he read the book because it seemed to affirm his experiences and connected dots for him.
“The book was refreshing because it wasn’t someone who [seemed] angry or vindictive,” Onwuchekwa said. “There was a courage, a boldness, a matter-of-factness.”
Du Mez said that many “troubled” evangelicals who have read her book are going through a “religious reckoning” where they’re grappling with what they have been taught both culturally and theologically. However, she said she hasn’t seen much change by many evangelical institutions.
Evangelical leaders and institutions continue to promote their versions of masculinity. This weekend in Dallas, thousands of evangelical men are expected to gather for a conference called Promise Keepers that will include speakers who once sat on Trump’s evangelical advisory council. Attendees are promised “biblical and spiritual tools that will empower you to be the man Christ intended you to be.”
And by that I mean the eponymous girl group of the 60’s lead by Diana Ross, as those are the only Supremes that matter to me.
As a person who loves words I note that the root word is Supreme, a word that means the best or a word that can be taken to mean suppressive. As according to Webster;s: Extending to prevent the expression of certain of one’s desires or to resist the emergence of mental symptoms. Or as commonly known as “Gaslighting.” Where you work to convince the other individual recounting the incident as remembering something incorrectly and then of course casting doubt on one’s veracity and sanity of recall. It is a very common form of manipulation and control used by perpetrators of violence, like Trump and his cult dogma. His version of events always seem to contradict fact and that hence becomes a version of one’s truth, say it enough and they will believe your version.
Another who use variations of this are cults and/or religious organizations – same diff. We have seen with regards to the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists a rounding of the wagons and deny deny deny until the loudness of claims overwhelms them and then out comes the checkbook, the lack of admission of guilt or responsibility but a form of reckoning takes place, some lose jobs, some are “reassigned” and then promises are made that institutional changes will be made and this will never happen again. Until it happens again and until then, “We’re good, right?”
We are about to embark into new territory regardless of who wins in November as the sea charts were made, the ship sailed and to land we will be either with the Captain who planned this voyage or his first mate who had to pick up after the ship crashed ashore. Either/or, neither/nor we are here and and we need to fix this shit. And that is when we turn to the elders or those experienced in these type of situations, we assume they have the knowledge and the ability to resolve conflicts and settle disputes as they arise over the issues that come from marking a new territory. Ever watch Dogs do this, the piss on it and when all else fails another dog pisses on it and then sometimes they fight it out. Sometimes as in most of the times no dog comes away unscathed and the humans watch in horror, blame each other for dogs being dogs and then pay expensive vet bills. That is the price for teaching socialization skills to animals.
In our Democracy we have a system of checks and balances that is to sort of settle the dog fight and in turn we have the Supreme Court as the Vet to ensure that we have done the right repairs and can heal from the wounds we are still licking. And sometimes those wounds leave scars and we never really heal. Roe v Wade anyone? But we trust that the Court will do the right thing, use knowledge and law over emotion and be rational when all else seems irrational. Well sure on paper that is the ideal, but the reality is by far more a reflection of the humans that wear the robes.
And that is what we all are when it comes down to it – Humans. We have frailties, we have vulnerabilities and we have the desire to fight or flight when crossed. We seek rewards, companionship, we get angry, we can be happy, we can want more and seem to want less we are just like the dogs we love, we abandon and we kill. We kill dogs humanely when they become ill and can no longer live a full life (we don’t allow that same grace to people) and we kill them when they are violent and dangerous the same way we do Capital Punishment. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and we are all hungry.
Right now are kennels are packed full and we need to solve the crisis, find them homes or kill them. This is America where the solution to some is a resolution to kill, gun ownership is off the roof, we have taken to the streets to howl at the moon and the dog catchers have shown up with rifles in hand. They vow to God and Country to save us, but from whom exactly?
When you have a focus on God over Country you are relying on myths, stories and lies concocted by those of an ancient time whose language we have never shared, with authorse unknown and facts not verifiable. We created a country where that was removed from the equation, and a separation of church and state was rooted in a document we can see, whose author’s were known, in a language we shared and a place and time well documented and recorded. That said what many thought and believed often were in contradiction to their behaviors they were ostensibly in search of the greater good and the idea was to build a platform, a foundation in which to grow and evolve this country called the United States of America. We have never been a united country and we sure as hell are not know but for some 200 plus years we did our best to try to do so and the Presidential elections seemed on the surface as way to demonstrate the unification, despite the fact that at the time of the creation of the document that defines our laws we were a third of the nation we are now. Hindsight is a view in a rear view mirror and that did not exist in those days as did cars. So in other words, things change and to use a word the religious right loathe, evolve.
The nomination of Amy Coney Barrett has been laughable from the start, as this is all Micke Pence as all of it is from him, a former Catholic, now Evangelical whack job going to the largest Catholic insititution in the country to find a Professor who was the epitome of a female extremist in the same nature Scalia was. How perfect and how well it all worked out that a Jurist would die a few months before a major election that was will be decided once again in the courts and not in the ballot boxes as intended by that document that has made it clear, the elections are never decided by the ballots cast but by electorates who choose to. This alone is why we have such poor voter turnout and why in many states, such as Tennessee where only one-third vote have a super-minority ruling the majority. And why populous States are akin to states where there fewer in total to those where cities have more in those states. The population of New York City pre-pandemic is larger than the population of North Dakota. ND has 762,000 residents, NYC has 8.4 million. Why do we have two Dakota’s? Maybe this explains why the resistance to the Census, that blue states have more people and therefore more power? That could really hurt the gerrymandering as well as access to that federal purse that red states so love when it comes to them and they have those hands out and open the same way the pass the church plate. Funny it always goes back to religion.
Had I not ever lived in Nashville I doubt I would have understood the effects of religion and how it is used to subordinate and educate their members. They are the dumbest and most arrogant people I have ever met. They are extreme in their views, judgmental and utter hypocrites as they use their Bible not as a tool but a weapon. They accuse others while excusing themselves of the same actions. They are the antithesis of Christianity or how it is conceived but then again life begins at conception and they love to fuck which is again funny as they seem confused about ways to circumvent pregnancy and want none of it. Yet again like dogs they just assume that natural selection will take care of it and when that fails who cares, we got guns to do the rest.
Justice Barrett (yes folks she will be confirmed) will be presiding over a divided nation of which the majority of Americans are not in agreement with her appointment let alone her life choices. Where she could be ostensibly a remarkable statement about a working woman and mother and how one balances a challenging career with that, something we learned via Justice Ginsburg who gave all that credit to her husband, we have instead the Good Housekeeping wife of 1950 who seems to have it all. Right. What. Ever.
What we do know is she was a member of a cult seceded from the mainstream Catholic Church. To say they are nuts is actually disservice to nuts, which I love. They are batshit crazy and we know bats are disease carrying rodents that bring Covid. We are fucked there is no other way to say it.
People of Praise hire lawyers to investigate historical sexual abuse allegations as former members speak of ‘emotional torment’
Some ex-members who spoke to the Guardian said they were deeply concerned that too little was understood of People of Praise.
Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court has prompted former members of her secretive faith group, the People of Praise, to come forward and share stories about emotional trauma and – in at least one case – sexual abuse they claim to have suffered at the hands of members of the Christian group.
In the wake of the allegations, the Guardian has learned that the charismatic Christian organization, which is based in Indiana, has hired the law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to conduct an “independent investigation” into sexual abuse claims on behalf of People of Praise.
The historic sexual abuse allegations and claims of emotional trauma do not pertain specifically to Barrett, who has been a lifelong member of the charismatic group, or her family.
But some former members who spoke to the Guardian said they were deeply concerned that too little was understood about the “community” of People of Praise ahead of Barrett’s expected confirmation by the Senate next week, after which she will hold the seat formerly held by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Two people familiar with the matter say that more than two dozen former members of the faith group, many of whom say they felt “triggered” by Barrett’s nomination, are participating in a support group to discuss how the faith group affected their lives.
“The basic premise of everything at the People of Praise was that the devil controlled everything outside of the community, and you were ‘walking out from under the umbrella of protection’ if you ever left,” said one former member who called herself Esther, who had to join the group as a child but then left the organization. “I was OK with it being in a tiny little corner of Indiana, because a lot of weird stuff happens in tiny little corners in this country. But it’s just unfathomable to me – I can’t even explain just how unfathomable it is – that you would have a supreme court justice who is a card-carrying member of this community.”
Barrett was not asked about her involvement in People of Praise during her confirmation hearings last week, and has never included her involvement with the group in Senate disclosure forms, but has in the past emphasized that her religious faith as a devout Catholic would not interfere with her impartiality.
People of Praise is rooted in the rise of charismatic Christian communities in the late 1960s and 1970s, which blended Pentecostal traditions like speaking in tongues and prophecy with Catholicism. It is an ecumenical group – meaning it accepts members of different Christian churches – though its members are mostly Catholic. Proponents say charismatic Christians are bound together by members’ shared personal presence of Christ, and “empowerment through the Holy Spirit”.
Its handbook emphasizes an insular view of the world, stressing obedience and devotion to other members, and communal living.
Barrett’s father has served as a leader in the community. Barrett was also listed as a “handmaid” in a 2010 directory, or female leader, served as a trustee at a school associated with the group, and has been featured in People of Praise magazines that were removed from the group’s website following her appointment as an appeals court judge in 2017.
The Guardian has confirmed that Barrett lived in a household led by one of the founders of the People of Praise, Kevin Ranaghan, while she was a law student at Notre Dame, and lived with another People of Praise family – Barbette and William Brophy – in Virginia after she graduated.
Proponents of the faith community have said in other press reports that they are misunderstood, and that it is a close-knit community that seeks to support other members “financially and materially and spiritually”.
But former members paint a different picture. Allegations and concerns center on claims of the intense subjugation of women by the community leaders; control of members’ lives and decisions, including marriage, living arrangements, and child rearing; and in one case, the mishandling of allegations of sexual abuse. Members who admit to having gay sex are expelled from the group, which staunchly opposes same-sex marriage.
For Sarah (Mitchell) Kuehl, a 48-year-old former member who grew up in the community, discussions about Barrett’s possible nomination prompted her – after years of trying to figure out how to address it – to send an email on 23 September to Craig Lent, the current head of People of Praise who also works as a professor at Notre Dame. In it, Kuehl claimed she had been sexually abused decades earlier by a “household member”, a male member of “the community” who had lived with the Mitchell family as part of the group’s communal living practices. Single people were expected to be celibate and live in family households which were expected to provide an example of married life, former members say.
After her alleged abuser – who along with her family was technically a member of a precursor group called Servants of the Light/Lord that merged in 1984 with People of Praise – admitted to her father that he had been molesting Kuehl, he was moved to another household and eventually had a marriage “arranged” for him, she said. She was four years old when the abuse began and it lasted for two years. At the time, her family also lived with other single men and women.
It’s unfathomable to me that you’d have a supreme court justice who is a card-carrying member of this community Esther Advertisement
“I have struggled for years on whether to hold PoP accountable for what they knew, when they knew it and their attempt to hide and cover up. Like the Catholic church, who covered up and moved priests around, PoP has had a history of these same behaviors,” Kuehl alleged in her email to Lent.
Letters provided to the Guardian by Kuehl dating back to the late 1980s and early 1990s substantiate claims of abuse and attempts by her parents to address the issue with senior leaders of People of Praise. The documents include references to a psychological evaluation of the alleged abuser and confirmation that he did abuse Kuehl. The documents also revealed there were additional victims and that other minors were at risk.
Years later, when Kuehl sought to discuss the issue with her “handmaid” – a female guide and senior member of the organization, when she was at college – she said she was discouraged from talking about it.
“She told me NOT to talk about it with anyone because it could ‘hurt the reputation of the community’,” Kuehl wrote in her letter to Lent.
Weeks later, on 5 October, Lent responded to Kuehl’s email. He wrote: “I am just reaching out to you to let you know that we take this matter very seriously.”
He added: “We very much want to look into this. To that end we have contracted with Diane Doolittle of Quinn Emanuel, who specializes in exactly this sort of investigation. (This took some time to arrange.) I want to stress that, although she is a lawyer, her role is not to defend PoP, but rather she is very much in the role of an independent investigator. We thought that better than trying to investigate it directly ourselves. We want to know the truth of the matter. She will be talking to other people as well.”
Doolittle’s online bio states that she is a Silicon Valley-based trial lawyer who is involved in “high-stakes complex commercial, intellectual property and white collar cases”. She is also listed as having been engaged in “sensitive #MeToo cases, including by conducting corporate internal investigations”.
But People of Praise’s choice is also noteworthy because of Quinn Emanuel’s ties to the White House. William Burck, who serves as Quinn Emanuel’s co-managing partner in Washington DC, has counted Steve Bannon as a client, among others, and was a friend and associate of supreme court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. During Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation hearings, it was Burck – a “Washington super-lawyer” – who was charged with culling Kavanaugh’s documents for review before the Senate hearing.
There is no evidence that Burck has been personally engaged in the People of Praise investigation. Advertisement
In a statement, People of Praise spokesman Sean Connolly said: “We believe that one of our highest callings is the bond of trust around our community’s safety, and we take allegations of abuse or misconduct very seriously. In this matter, we understand the survivor’s abuse occurred in the mid-1970s when the survivor’s family and the perpetrator were members of a different religious community called the Servants of the Light/Lord in the Minneapolis area. People of Praise did not exist in Minnesota until October 1983.”
He added: “We understand that this is a deeply painful matter for the survivor and her family and we extend to them our prayers”
Connolly also said People of Praise had adopted a child safety policy that included mandatory law enforcement reporting obligations in instances of alleged child abuse. He did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about its decision to hire Quinn Emanuel or whether the group was aware of its representation of Trump administration officials.
Kuehl told the Guardian she was eager not to be seen as seeking revenge on People of Praise, or questioning Barrett’s character, intelligence, or her legal mind. As a devout Catholic who regularly attends mass and is a mother of five, she is also not anti-religious, but rather feels a “deep concern regarding the culture of secrecy, abuse of power and male-dominant hierarchy” at People of Praise.
Esther, who approached the Guardian but did not want to be identified, described how her parents had become members of People of Praise after a family tragedy upended their lives. The next eight years of her life, she said, were filled with “emotional torment” as she watched her parents “obediently embrace one conspiracy after another”.
“Anyone who was not charismatic was not to be trusted and most likely an operator for ‘the evil one’. The devil was always trying to trick us and the only way to stay safe was to follow obediently the rules set up by ‘the co-ordinators’,” she said. “I was not allowed to watch TV for two years until that was no longer a directive; my mother could only cook with natural foods until that was no longer a fad … I was prohibited from owning a record/tape unless it was Christian rock.”
She added: “We were devout Catholics too but there were strong insinuations that the diocese had strayed and could not be trusted.”
People of Praise did not comment on allegations of emotional abuse and trauma experienced by other former members.
Today the Boy Scouts of America join a long line of organizations that file Chapter 11 to stave off obsolescence and financial destitution. Much like the Catholics that preceded them requiring them to selling off properties and examining the long term legacy that pedophilia brought the same goes for the Scouts. They tried to allow Girls to join to prove they were a modern organization (or have a bigger pool in which to catch fish) while eschewing those kids who identified with the LGBQT community and in turn continuing to ignore the rot within. The fish always stinks at the head first.
Yesterday I was thrilled to buy some Girl Scout Cookies and my Scout was a child of Indian descent really proving that I live in a diverse community and that the Girls appeal to all girls everywhere so thanks for those Tagalogs and Thin Mints they remind me of my days hawking cookies and well I don’t miss it but I appreciated the time I was a troop member as it taught me that basically girls are bitches when in a cluster but if you are secure in independence you are secure overall. I am sure that is not what they wanted me to learn but my lifelong suspicion and loathing of my own gender came long before the concept of mean girls ever came into existence.
As the news continued to air the story of another Mother taking her son to a hospital for help with her son who was having a mental health crises and of course ended with the child being arrested, beaten and pleading guilty in court; All for a crime that will sit on his record until 18 where he can of course if has the money and ability to have it expunged. You know like Trump wants to do with his impeachment.
Well I could also have a unwanted pelvic exam I mean I am just laying there. Again the medical field never fails in its horrific manner of first doing harm.
But I have one better a 6 year-old being taken to a mental health facility when the school called 911 on the girl who was having what we used to call a tantrum. There is nothing in that story that makes me feel better about being a Teacher and in Nashville this happened quite a bit, not the Police and Mental Health facility where frankly they needed to go but the Thorazine to the demeanor of the little girl that demonstrated she was well normal. Again not the first. In fact one of 30,000. This takes the concept of zero tolerance to new heights. Again in Nashville the children are exceedingly violent and dangerous and show signs of deep mental illness but nothing was or is done. They got other shit to do, like worry about soccer stadiums and Amazon coming to town. Maybe they should look inward as the state is run in the same way the United State is with a moron in charge allowing legislation to pass without any second look and the new rash of lawsuits will eat up more money that could be better spent. But fuck that shit we got the MLS and the Predators.. whoops we mean the hockey team not the other kind.
Ah Nashville in a week I will be there for my last visit and there are no mixed feelings about it as the last hostage payment will be remanded and I will be free. Funny I don’t feel that way as it means now I have no excuse to move among the living but how does one after three years that were part of the seven where I felt that those who should have helped failed and the pain that I doubt will ever heal. It appears as I review story after story of Police violence, Prosecutorial Misconduct and Medical Malpractice I am one of many and if we had a conference Madison Square Garden would not be big enough. But sadly we would have to have a section roped off for those who could not be their physically as they did not survive their encounter and in turn a life ended prematurely because of THEM.
I keep thinking of the lyrics to the theme song from the Ghostbusters: Who ya gonna call? Well clearly not 911. Shit if I want to end up dead or beaten then yes but then again I prefer my beatings to be from professionals so a Dominatrix might be a better bet and come away with far less bruises.
What the last three years did teach me was the power of lies by those in power. It is amazing how they can wield their position to cover up their own malfeasance, their own crimes and misdemeanors and in turn lay blame, point fingers and utterly ruin lives all while having the audacity to present a bill to you, to the taxpayer or to larger state and be compensated for it. Wow, just wow.
Yesterday I did laugh however at one news soundbite and that was from Ted Cruz, the Senator or other moron from Texas who decided to express his anger at a bill being presented in Alabama, a state ground zero for zero tolerance of civil rights, women’s rights or just any right of an American not white nor male.
Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, has given an unwitting boost to an Alabama lawmaker’s attempt to push back on restrictive abortion laws in her state, by tweeting about her proposal to force men to have vasectomies when they reach the age of 50.
Democratic representative Rolanda Hollis introduced the measure to the state House last week, intending it as protest against a law passed by the Alabama legislature last year to outlaw abortion in almost every case unless the life of the mother was at risk.
“The responsibility is not always on the women. It takes two to tangle [sic],” Hollis wrote in a tweet acknowledging that her long-shot House bill, which would also a mandate a vasectomy after the birth of a father’s third biological child, was intended to “neutralize the abortion ban bill”.
Senator Cruz took to the medium most common to idiots these days, Twitter, to write: “Yikes. A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything… literally!”
Naturally the crowd bit back and this is my favorite response: “It’s outrageous to have government involved in these personal reproductive decisions! So glad you are pro-choice, Ted! I am trying to recall if I ever met anyone from Alabama with any type of sanity and intellect and the answer to that is no. The two individuals that come to mind are so damaged, such prodigious liars and have drug and or alcohol problems I can see why few individuals are elected there to actually represent the public. Rolanda Hollis is the exception there being both a woman and one of color to actually get that the bullshit associated with the reality of women having the right to choose, to make their own decisions is no ones business but those she CHOOSES to share that with. I think of another infamous Alabamian, Jeff Sessions, who redefines idiot. But my personal favorite will always be Roy Moore a man who could always become a Boy Scout Leader, oh wait his prediction was for young girls. Maybe he could convert and become a Catholic, the Priesthood is calling.
That said the controversial Alabama abortion measures, signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey in May 2019, was struck down by a federal court judge in October, two weeks before they were due to take effect. The law, which threatens doctors with up to 99 years in prison for performing abortions at any stage of pregnancy, is intended by its supporters to bolster efforts to have the US Supreme Court overturn its 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling, the landmark case that legalized abortion across the country.
Ah yes the Evangelical movement who cares only about the baby in the womb but little about it after birth as almost all of these fuckwits don’t want to pay taxes for pre-natal care, post natal care, education, child care or any other matter of import that contributes to the long term health and growth of the child. Again, I would visit Alabama to confirm my worst fears that the concept of developmental disorders are rampant but then I don’t have to as I can walk into my friends bar and watch Darian molest young men or go to my coffee shop and watch Ethan have a meltdown and self medicate with alcohol. Sounds great! I take a pass I have better things to do than watch, hear or care about the Southern drama kings and queens. They were harmed as children and as adults can choose to do harm or fix the damage done. They made their choices and I want no part of it. I recall everyday in the schools there and I know who they will be and again I am afraid and so should you as this shit stinks that no pot pourri can ever cover up.
This is a common practice among Evangelicals, the laying of hands upon the sinner to be healed and prayed for. But it is common among most faiths as it is referred to in the Bible or as I call it the Book of Myths with many connotations. I will let you the faithful or faithless examine the many contradictory and confusing reasons hands are laid upon you by reading this site, Desiring God.
I of course read the word desire and go immediately into a more prurient meaning and in turn think they should change the concept of pray to prey as it seems no faith/religion is exempt from the practice of sexual abuse towards their congregants/members.
The Catholics have been busy praying and paying off the massive debt accumulated from Priests whose hands more than wandered away from the business of prayer. Recently the more “modern” sect of Catholics were hoping that the New Pope, same as the Old Pope, would be open to indoctrinating women and allowing for some Priests to marry in those regions where it is difficult to find a fully vested individual willing to join the Priesthood with its archaic concept of celibacy forsaking family and all that material stuff that the Church requires. Well no said the big Chief but remember when he was the breath of fresh air and enlightened hope? Well watch the Two Popes on Netflix or the New Pope on HBO they do offer a much better perspective of the convoluted politics of the Church.
But the nice thing is that while the morally superior Evangelicals have a direct channel to the White House they are not any better at keeping their hands off either. Comforting, I know. The Southern Baptists have long suppressed any sexual issues as of course a failing of the individual and victim blaming when any assault occurs as we learned at Baylor University when Kenneth Starr was abdicated from his throne of leadership. Really is that not what it is with religion a type of Monarchy disguised as Theocracy?
And just like the Catholics the moving of leaders/ministers/perverts between Churches without a heads up is another common denominator that the Evangelicals do. And yet the Reformists aka the Legalist sect of that faith hate Catholics and see them as the original Roman faithless as they were once polytheists and clearly way more fun. They may be right after all! Who knew! Oh wait it was Christianity that destroyed the Empire, wrong again! In a continued effort to make themselves feel good enough, Christians find those who are worse than they. They point fingers, they shame shame. They blame others, find scapegoats. They exclude, persecute, and eventually plot to destroy the sinners. Sounds great sign me up!
While always turning the mirror outward they can avoid looking at their own reflection. But the truth is that all Churches regardless of their origin need to clean their houses. This article from USA Today discusses in length the damage done by the Southern Baptists and their own role in sexual abuse and more importantly the denial and covering up. Bless their hearts! But this quote stood out: Once your faith is used against you, he said, it is hard to trust again. I never was molested or touched by an Angel or any other less celestial figure. I liked Church and Religion as it offered a perspective on community, love and kindness. Funny I don’t even recall the messengers, just the message and it has always resonated with me and then I realized that I don’t need a Church or a ‘father’ figure to teach me empathy and compassion, I have that and had it all along. Strong faith comes from strong teachers and they have nothing to do with being religious or faith based. But then again I came to Atheism as a choice, like being a Vegan or Pescatarian or whatever choices one makes in life about their own well being. Reading the book of myths, taking classes on the science of Theology as a just that a science made me change my views and beliefs about religion. My choice and it was one that for years I even denied – I used agnostic or the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” Here it is simply put: I am an Atheist.
But here is my last message to the religious: GO FUCK YOURSELF. You will do way less harm and self love is the best kind of love.
ETA: Immediately after posting this I went to read The New York Times and found this opinion piece. I think it says it all about the bullshit of celibacy.
I Have a Story for Pope Francis About Priestly Celibacy
Who pays the price when a priest breaks his vow?
By Mimi Bull The New York Times February 17 2020 Editorials and Opinions Ms. Bull is the author of “Celibacy, a Love Story.”
Want the human story on priestly celibacy? Talk to someone who’s paid the price.
I am bitterly disappointed by the news that Pope Francis will not be relaxing priestly celibacy rules in remote parts of the Amazon. The idea — intended to make it easier to recruit priests in underserved areas — was supported by a Vatican conference in October, but in his papal document, released on Wednesday, Francis ignored their suggestion.
My interest in this isn’t the mild curiosity of a lapsed Catholic. I am the child of a priest who broke his vow of celibacy and left a legacy of secrecy that was devastating to him, to my mother and particularly to me.
To hide my father’s broken vow, I was told that I was adopted. I did not know until I was 35 that my “adoptive mother” was actually my grandmother and my “adoptive sister” was, in reality, my mother. But even then, I wasn’t told the whole truth. At the time, I was told my father had been a businessman from Pennsylvania.
If only I had known that my real father was the beloved young pastor of our local Polish parish in Norwood, Mass. He was a regular guest in our home, and we attended weekly Mass in his church. He died at the end of my freshman year at Smith College. I didn’t find out until the age of 50, on the day of my birth mother’s funeral, that the man I adored as “Pate” — my own nickname, short for the Latin “pater” — and the community knew as “Father Hip” was my father.
I was more fortunate than most children of priests. The man and woman I now know to have been my birth parents, chose to raise me, nurture me and, in the depths of the Depression, give me as normal a life as they could manage within a complex web of secrecy. My father chose to be involved in my life; he referred to himself as my “guardian,” and I found out after my mother died that he had held this title legally.
Nonetheless, all the secrecy took a toll on a sensitive child. I knew I was somehow different. I knew instinctively that there were things I could not mention casually — the frequency with which my mother, Pate and I got together alone, for instance, including trips to Boston for dinner. Secrecy became second nature.
I was well trained to revere priests, so the idea that Pate might have literally fathered me never occurred to me. I adored him and saw him frequently, but he was my parish priest and my “guardian.”
After he died, I paced the dormitory floors at night, experiencing something I had no word for. It was depression. At that point in my life, I had no idea he was my father, yet his death had a profound impact on me. Desperate to keep my scholarship, I kept my depression hidden — a lifelong habit that led to thoughts of suicide before I was able to be free of it. It affected my marriage, my parenting and my own creative use of a fine mind and education. I felt set apart and unworthy.
I also mourn how the secret affected my parents. My father died at 47, held back in a small parish and unable to fulfill his larger ambitions. Did my existence have something to do with the fact that he, as a mutual friend informed me later, was passed over for a position at a larger and more challenging parish? I’ll never know and can only speculate. My mother was burdened to her death with the truth she never shared with me or the husband she married six years after Pate’s death.
I am one of the 50,000 people from 175 countries who reportedly visit Coping International, a website for children of priests. I expect there is a vast spectrum of stories to be told, many much harder and more painfully unresolved than mine.
Some priests’ children are denied their identities and recognition by their fathers’ families. Others are rejected outright by their fathers and witness the hardships of their mothers’ complicated lives. These experiences shape us and stay with us.
I consider celibacy a serious and valid religious practice if it is entered willingly. It should be available to those who seriously wish to live a celibate life. For nine centuries, though, it has been the rule for all ordained Roman Catholic priests — and it must stop. To live alone and celibate is to deny the most basic drive. Not everyone who would make a fine priest is made for the celibate life.
While I was happy to see the church grappling with the issue, allowing married priests in remote regions would have been a tiny step. It would have done little to confront the root of the problem: the human toll that enforced celibacy has taken on priests and others around them.
What to do? We must lift the veil of secrecy and shine a light on the children born under rules of celibacy. Talk to us. Help us reclaim our identities, reclaim the halves of our families we have been kept from and help us remove the slur of “bastard.” Help us heal.
And join with us in urging Pope Francis to reform the celibacy mandate, so no other child has to suffer.
Well I am packing as fast as I can but I can’t get out of here soon enough. Another day of bizarro world when the Director of Schools compares the recent arguments about salary and favoritism in the Nashville Public Schools is akin to Trayvon Martin. HUH? He is been murdered for wearing a hoodie? What the fuck is this man talking about?
From the Report: With his administration facing a sexual harassment scandal and questions about no-bid contracts, Joseph has suggested those questions are motivated by the same fears that led to the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
I have given up trying to understand how I am somehow akin to George Zimmerman or any of the other fragile white people that call Police or shoot Black individuals for wearing a hoodie, walking their dog, knocking on their door, eating an ice cream or wearing shower shoes to the pool. When you generalize everyone you are as guilty of the same. Again: He who accuses, excuses.
But once again I am relieved to find the white people who live here as idiotic if not more so with their insanity.
‘If I was raped, I would move’: Speaker Glen Casada doubles down on support of Rep. David Byrd Natalie Allison, Nashville Tennessean Published Feb. 19, 2019 |
House Speaker Glen Casada says he will continue to defend a Republican lawmaker accused of sexual assault against multiple former students, recently questioning the credibility of the women who came forward and implying that victims of rape should move.
In a video published by The Tennessee Holler, a newly created liberal media website, former Democratic candidate for Congress Justin Kanew questioned Casada about his support of Rep. David Byrd, R-Waynesboro.
Three women last year accused Byrd of sexually assaulting them in the 1980s when they were teenagers playing on the Wayne County High School girls basketball team, which Byrd coached.
In a story last spring, WSMV included audio from a phone call recorded by one of the women as she talked to Byrd about what happened when she was 15. Byrd said he was sorry, though he does not say specifically for what he is apologizing.
The recent video of the conversation with Casada was taken at a town hall event last month in Franklin, Kanew said.
On the topic of the women’s credibility, Kanew told Casada that the women had been ostracized in their community as a result of coming forward with allegations against Byrd.
“If it’s important, and it is — it’d be important to me if I was raped, I would move,” Casada said. “And hell would have no fury.”
Kanew replied that he believed Casada couldn’t answer what he would do if he were “raped as a woman in rural Tennessee.”
“Or as a man, I could,” Casada said. “There are just certain codes of conduct.” Casada defends decision to appoint Byrd to chair education subcommittee
In response to a request for comment about his remarks in the video, Casada released a statement echoing what he has said before about his support of Byrd, who was reelected by more than 55 points in November.
“One of the most sacred rights we have as Americans is the concept of being innocent until proven guilty,” Casada said. “Rep. Byrd is doing a fantastic job as Chairman of our Education Administration Subcommittee and I am proud he has agreed to serve.”
Christi Rice (center) discusses explains why she is helping a new political action committee dubbed Enough is Enough Tennessee on Sept. 27, 2018. Rice says Rep. David Byrd inappropriately touched her when she was 15-years-old and he was her 28-year-old coach. (Photo11: Joel Ebert)
Casada has appointed Byrd to chair the House’s newly created education administration subcommittee.
Byrd, who graduated from Wayne County High School in 1975, coached there for 24 years and was the school’s principal for eight years.
Both former House Speaker Beth Harwell, R-Nashville, and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, R-Oak Ridge, called for Byrd’s resignation last spring.
When asked about the video on Tuesday, Gov. Bill Lee would not comment directly on Casada’s remarks or on whether he believed Byrd should step down but called for the situation to be taken seriously.
“I think we have to take very seriously allegations of sexual misconduct, and sexual misconduct should never be tolerated either in state government or the private sector, as well,” Lee said.
Kanew, who said he had been in contact with Enough is Enough Tennessee, a political action committee seeking Byrd’s ouster, told Casada he and others are opposed to Byrd being in a position of leadership.
“We’re not asking for a conviction,” Kanew said. “You have the authority not to empower men like that and make it OK. Because what happens is the next guy sees that nothing happened, and he’s going to do it.”
A video published last fall by a PAC run by Casada likened Byrd to President Donald Trump and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying the men had been attacked by “unhinged liberals.”
In the encounter last month, Kanew asked Casada if he believed the women who came forward.
Kanew said he had planned to ask Casada publicly during the town hall, which included others from the Williamson County legislative delegation, but was not called on.
He said he had not attempted to schedule a meeting with Casada over his concerns because he didn’t want to get “canned answers” about the issue.
“This is our state’s biggest shame right now, is the fact that this man is still in the legislature in a position of power,” Kanew said. “It shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
The Tennessee Holler website does not disclose who is running the the site or list any staff members.
Meanwhile Tennessee’s Senator Blackburn is avoiding committing to Trump’s wall but she believes it will stop Sex Traffcking. Well she should look right in her backyard to see what the Baptists have been up to with regards to that. They hate to think all the Catholics are having all the fun here. Southern Baptist sex abuse crisis: What you need to know Duane W. Gang and Holly Meyer, Nashville Tennessean Published Feb. 19, 2019
Southern Baptists across the country are grappling with a sex abuse crisis in the wake of a startling investigative report detailing more than 380 cases where church leaders and volunteers have been accused of sexual misconduct.
In total, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News found more than 700 victims.
Here’s what you need to know about the story and how Southern Baptist Convention leaders are responding.
Why did the news organizations investigate the church?
Victims of sexual abuse had long criticized church leaders for not doing enough to combat the problem, including tracking how many church leaders are accused of sexual misconduct. So the news organizations set out build their own database.
What was the reaction to the news?
Calls for reform and change came quickly. Southern Baptist leaders vowed to address the problem.
Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear, a pastor in North Carolina, called sexual abuse by church leaders and volunteers “pure evil,” and apologized to victims.
“We are profoundly sorry,” Greear, along with fellow Pastor Brad Hambrick, wrote in a article posted on Greear’s website the day after the news broke. “It is an unjust tragedy that you experienced abuse in the past. And it is unjust and tragic that you feel fear in the present.
“We, the church, have failed you.” What is the church doing about the problem?
Greear on Monday night unveiled the initial recommendations from a study group on sexual abuse that got started last year when he took over as president.
Those proposed changes including providing free training for ministry leaders and encouraging churches to review their policies on abuse.
The recommendations also call for a re-examination of the ordination process and ensuring that Southern Baptist churches cannot have a “wanton disregard for prevention of sexual abuse” and still be in good fellowship with the denomination, Greear said. Why can’t the change happen right away?
The Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention is a network of more than 46,000 churches that make up the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Unlike other Christian denominations, individual Southern Baptist churches are autonomous, which has been cited as a hurdle for reform in the past.
That means the implementation of all 10 recommendations is not a done deal.
Greear has said that level of local church control is a factor.
“The Baptist doctrine of church autonomy should never be a religious cover for passivity towards abuse,” he wrote in a series of Twitter posts earlier this month. “Church autonomy is about freeing the church to do the right thing — to obey Christ — in every situation. It is a heinous error to apply autonomy in a way that enables abuse.” What can Southern Baptist leaders do if individual churches don’t prevent abuse?
A particular area to watch is whether the Southern Baptist Convention expels churches that do not do more to prevent future abuse.
Greear on Monday night singled out 10 churches that deserve particular focus and could face removal from the network of churches.
“I am not calling for disfellowshipping any of these churches at this point, but these churches must be called upon to give assurances to the Southern Baptist Convention that they have taken the necessary steps to correct their policies and procedures with regards to abuse and survivors,” Greear said.
The convention has taken action against churches before. Last year, at the convention’s annual meeting in Dallas, a Georgia church got the boot over accusations of racism. Who is J.D. Greear and why does he matter?
Greear, who leads The Summit Church in North Carolina, took over as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention last year.
He is in his 40s and his leadership marks what is widely seen as a generational shift in for the denomination. He succeeded Pastor Steve Gaines, who leads Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis.
In September, the convention’s Executive Committee allocated $250,000 for the sexual abuse advisory group Greear created soon after he was elected in June.
The advisory group’s purpose is to figure out how Southern Baptists can better respond to incidents and prevent abuse from happening.
Greear said he formed the group because church leaders have “known that there is a problem.”
The advisory group came in the midst of Southern Baptist’s own #MeToo moment. In the run-up to the denomination’s annual meeting last year where Greear was elected, Southern Baptists were embroiled in months of controversy over a prominent church leader’s treatment of women and how he handled years-old allegations of sexual misconduct. Are church leaders from Tennessee accused of abuse?
The Houston Chronicle database includes 16 people from Tennessee.
Here are the convictions found in Tennessee:
Larry Michael Berkley, a pastor convicted in Lauderdale County in 2014, was convicted of 16 crimes, including four counts of aggravated statutory rape and four counts of sexual battery by an authority figure. He is serving a 33 year sentence.
Mark W. Mangrum, a pastor convicted in 2007 in federal court, was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison and 20 years of supervised release for distributing child porn to “induce a minor to engage in sexual conduct.” He is a registered sex offender.
Steven Carl Haney, a pastor convicted in Shelby County, was convicted of a 2003 sexual battery by an authority figure and in state court of a 2001 rape. He was the pastor of Walnut Grove Baptist Church in Cordova for 20 years before resigning in 2006, according to an article from Baptist News Global.
Charles Alan Denton, an associate pastor convicted in Montgomery County, is now a registered sex offender for a 2014 sexual battery.
Christopher Douglas Ross, a youth pastor convicted in Wilson County in 2016, is serving a four year sentence in state prison.
Donald Brent Page, a youth pastor convicted in federal court, was convicted of crossing state lines with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor in Tennessee in 2008. He was sentenced to 36 months for coercion or enticement of a minor in Memphis.
Gregory Stanley Dempsey, a music minister convicted in Hamilton County, was convicted of a 2003 sexual battery by an authority figure.
Heath Tyler Ransom, a youth minister convicted in Madison County, is listed as a sex offender for a 2017 conviction of criminal attempt to commit solicitation of a minor.
Jason Evan Kennedy, a youth minister convicted in Knox County, is a registered sex offender for soliciting a minor for sex.
Joseph Todd Neill, a youth pastor convicted in federal court, is listed as a sex offender for two statutory rapes and a related pornography charge. He was convicted of the federal possession of pornography charge in 2014 and released in 2017.
Luke A. Cooke, a youth minister convicted in Shelby County and federal court in 2015, was convicted for “coercion or enticement of a minor” and transporting a juvenile with the intent of engaging in illegal sexual activity.
Timothy Neal Byars, a youth minister charged in Knox County in 2008, is a registered sex offender for rape and an attempt to commit sexual battery.
Timothy Ronald Felts, a youth pastor convicted in Cheatham County in 2009 and 2016, was convicted of sexual battery and later of three counts of aggravated statutory rape and attempted aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor.
Chad Eugene Luttrell, a church volunteer convicted in 2010 in Madison County, pled guilty to a charge of sexual battery and is a registered sex offender.
Cristopher Ryan Crossno, a Sunday school teacher convicted in 2015 in Montgomery County, is a registered sex offender with a conviction of sexual battery.
Mark Curtis Adams, a youth teacher convicted in federal court in 2018, pled guilty to a charge that he used a social media application to induce a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity.
As this is the center of the Bible Belt and the Southern Baptist organization houses its headquarters in Nashville just across from Lifeway the largest Christian Publishing house you wonder if they have a backroom for porn. The sheer hypocrisy boggles the mind as they are also the largest component of what comprises Evangelicals and this is the same group that loves Trump. Blow that horn! Whoops that may not sound so great.
I have been trying to understand why everyone marries so young here and I know that fucking is most of the guilt associated with that but the reality is as we are learning about the Catholics that perhaps abstinence and all is not a good idea and surpressing one’s sexuality also not a good plan. Those two, however, are not explanations or reasons behind molesting children. Abuse and molestation are not connected to those who chose to refrain from sex or who are Gay. That said when one is forced to not be true to oneself there is a great deal of confusion, secrecy and frustration that often leads to bad or misguided decisions.
Rape is I am afraid no longer just about power it is about sex and about the ability to exploit power to simply think that rules are not applicable when you are in power. And that means about everything from sex to money to laws. We are learning that fame and power are too high of an intoxicant to think that what you are doing is forcing consent you are simply manipulating what would have happened anyway, right? No but the mind of a moronic horned up man who is drunk on his power feels no empathy for his victims. The recent Ryan Adams saga is another story about someone who used drugs and women equally with no concept of what damage either was doing. R. Kelly was famous and made money and that regardless if it was true then why had no one called the Police. Well maybe this is what they mean when they refer to Black Women as disposable but again I seriously doubt that if they were white it would be any different. Or gay right? Ask that about Bryan Singer or Kevin Spacey’s victims.
So what State should all victims of rape move to? Utah? That Mormon thing would enable a large family type situation and they are sort of like a cult that would work? I like Wyoming it gave us Dick Cheney and that is one special type of sociopath. At least he is not a Rapist.
Yesterday I went to Franklin Tennessee to experience the Dickens Fair. The weather was cold and wet and the citizens who dress as varying Dickens characters were there but clearly it was rough but still charming as everything that town seems to do. That said when you are rich and white and live in a better “county”; everything is county related here in Tennessee and in turn that is how you identify places, Franklin is in Williamson County the apparently RICHEST county in the ENTIRE United States. Funny how they can’t pay for schools but priorities people we got Dickens to do.
The endless booths had more Christian references to the items they were selling and I took a pass as again I believe religion belongs where Gays were in the 50’s, in the closet. I managed to find a few things I liked and some new gloves to warm my cold hands and off I went to head to get food for the big storm that was expected and it passed over the area without leaving any further damage then wet roads. But in this area drivers need little encouragement to drive even more badly than they do every day. The car insurance rates must be huge here and hence I rent, drive largely arterial roads and rarely during rush hour. This place seems to never run out of ways to vent their rage if not with guns but with bigger armaments – SUV’s.
I am no religious but I do practice the idea of positive energy or that of the Goddesses – white magic. I threw down my Tarot cards and found that my perspective was about moving on past the negativity that has dominated my stay here. I have actually talked to kids in the schools this week and had good exchanges that just enabled me to feel better about the work. I know it is temporary but with only two weeks left and soon I go on medical “leave” I need to make this work to retain my faith in humans. Humanism the most challenging of beliefs.
Today I read the story below about the Nuns who at least lived up to my expectations of the Catholic Church, low ones. Nuns have been largely ignored during the recent controversies and that is simply oversight and neglect which Nuns have no less a role in the Church and its hideous history. A quick reminder that they ran Orphanages that were less than noble. They ran abusive orphanages that were clearly modeled after their male counterparts and which they too were aware if not participating in equally horrific acts even by their silence. The work camps which rivaled any during WWII. Much of it tied to the houses of shame they ran for unwed mothers who were sinners and had to repent for being knocked up out of wedlock. These it also enabled the Church to run a defacto adoption agency taking children from their mothers without consent. And when they knew too much they were likely murdered as the documentary on Netflix, The Keepers, discusses.
I recall the Nuns of my youth at St. Johns and when I think of brutal and bitches I can easily sum up recollections of those women who seemed to be like the people I meet here in Nashville, enraged and frustrated. Gee lack of sex, lack of individualism, no economic independence and co-workers who make Harvey Weinstein seem kindly, makes sense really. So much for faith in Mankind. Try faith in Humans and take men out of the word.
As I sit here I am watching the discussion about the rise in hate crimes and Anti-Semitism and despite my lack of faith I respect that they choose to continue to practice a faith that for centuries has been a source of wars, hate and retribution. And no that Synagogue in Pittsburgh was not the first house of worship that faced a gunman. There was Charleston, Antioch, Sutherland Springs. Those are just some of the many. So is it a rise in Anti Semitism or the rise of guns, hate and the ability to find a place that enables a fast kill shot? You know like the bar in Thousand Oaks, the bar in Florida, the concert in Las Vegas. That is not so much a singular hate message of hate but a really loud yell that we have a gun problem.
When Will and Grace during an episode does a bit where Jack argues with a bunch of people about which minority is the most maligned and marginalized in society it is played for laughs. It ends with the old women closing the door on the white male stating he was the most attacked and Jack thinking it was a ghost. So there you go we have a lot of groups who feel the same. And that rage can only be suppressed for so long.
Regardless of one’s faith, religion seems to lead to all kinds of bullshit and really has no place in modern society. It serves no one. And this story of the thieving Nuns will make a great Lifetime movie.
Nuns Stole $500k And Spent It On Gambling And Vacations Brendan Cole Newsweek December 9 2018
Two nuns in California allegedly stole more than $500,000 from the school they had been at for years, which they spent in casinos and on vacations.
Bank records show Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper and Sister Lana Lang had been embezzling funds from St. James Catholic School in Torrence for at least a decade, the Press-Telegram reported.
But officials from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles told parents and alumni of the school that auditors have not been able to trace all of the money trail.
Kreuper had retired as the school’s principal earlier this year and she dealt with the school fees, which she allegedly withheld and deposited into an account only she and Chang knew about, the paper said.
While investigators found the two gave some of the stolen money back to the school, the rest was used for their “personal gain.” Kreuper has admitted she took the money and expressed remorse.
Monsignor Micheal Meyers, the pastor at St. James Catholic Church sent a letter to pupils’ parents stating that Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, the nuns’ order, is cooperating with the parish and the Archdiocese to find out how much money was taken.
“Our community is concerned and saddened by this situation and regret any injury to our long relationship with the families of the school,” the Order said in a statement.
“The Sisters of St. Joseph both desire and intend to make complete restitution to St. James School,” the Daily Breeze reported.
Police have been informed but the Archdiocese does not intend to pursue criminal proceedings against the sisters.
“At our school, we have initiated additional procedures and oversight policies for financial management and reporting responsibilities,” Meyers wrote.
Archdiocese lawyer Marge Graf said the nuns’ order agreed to pay the school full restitution and impose “severe sanctions” on Kreuper and Chang.
Graf said: “We do know that they had a pattern of going on trips, we do know they had a pattern of going to casinos, and the reality is, they used the account as their personal account.”
There have been calls among some parents for the pair to be charged while others said they should be forgiven.
Jack Alexander of Redondo Beach said that the pair would often go traveling and gambling, claiming they had been given the money by a rich relative.
“These nuns took a vow of poverty and said, ‘Oh no, we’ve got a rich uncle’. The rich uncle was the parents of the St. James students,” he said.
Off the Rack Publishing 