As Sex-abuse Allegations Multiply, Billy Graham’s Grandson Is on a Mission to ?persuade Protestant Churches to Come Clean.
By Kathryn Joyce
It’s hard to overstate the significance of the hire. Bob Jones, founded in 1927, isn’t just any conservative Christian college; it’s the de facto center of the national Independent Fundamental Baptist network, which functions almost as a denomination unto itself, with thousands of affiliated churches, feeder schools, and businesses including Bob Jones’s textbook company, radio station, and music publisher. Outsiders call the school the “mother ship” of fundamentalism; the university prefers another moniker, “the fortress of faith.” To call Bob Jones insular doesn’t quite cover it. On its compound in Greenville, South Carolina, once surrounded in part by barbed wire, faculty children were, until recently, born at the on-campus hospital, raised in the K-12 Bob Jones Academy, educated at the university, then sent out into the world armed with a list of approved churches (mostly those that send the school students or money and that are often pastored by Bob Jones “preacher boys” like Phelps). Until the early 2000s, faculty were paid minuscule wages—hovering around $15,000 a year for a full-time professor—in exchange for subsidized living and the commitment that the school would care for them into old age (a retirement plan called “The Promise”). Rules for students are infamously strict—no TV, no holding hands, no Christian contemporary music, and, until 2000, no interracial dating. By 2012, though, the fortress no longer seemed inviolable. While Bob Jones was for decades the choice destination for conservative Christian students, enrollment at the school was dropping: down about 10 percent in the last decade and nearly 25 percent since its heyday in the early 1980s. Alumni blogs published pictures of what used to be an overflowing chapel, now left with hundreds of empty seats; two dorms are scheduled to be demolished this summer. Leaked minutes from a recent faculty meeting noted that Christian colleges are closing across the U.S. but that Bob Jones might find salvation in China and South Korea, where “the opportunity for Christian education” is still “unbelievable.” The school has begun selling off assets: the radio station, the music publisher, the hospital. “The Promise” to support retiring faculty has been rescinded.
Even so, the idea that Bob Jones would reach outside itself for help was stunning—especially considering to whom it was reaching out. GRACE was founded by a member of evangelical royalty: Boz Tchividjian (“rhymes with religion,” he likes to say), a former prosecutor who teaches law at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Jerry Falwell’s legacy school, and who is the grandson of “America’s pastor,” Billy Graham. Before he came to fame, Graham was a Bob Jones University dropout who Bob Jones Sr. said would never amount to more than a “poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.” Though the two later became friends, they split again in 1957 over Graham’s revival crusades—in particular, a crusade at Madison Square Garden that Jones, who’d warned Graham to avoid cities and politicians, condemned as too ecumenical and accommodating to modern society. The quarrel between the two men led to a rift between fundamentalists and evangelicals that persists today, as evangelicals seek to win souls by engaging mainstream culture and fundamentalists retreat from it. When Jones’s great-grandson Stephen Jones, now president of the university, appealed to Graham’s heir, it seemed like a transformative moment. Perhaps the fortress was raising its gates at last. It was momentous for Tchividjian and GRACE as well. Tchividjian had become convinced that the Protestant world is teetering on the edge of a sex-abuse scandal similar to the one that had rocked the Catholic Church. He is careful to say that there’s not enough data to compare the prevalence of child sex abuse in Protestant and Catholic institutions, but he’s convinced the problem has reached a crisis point. He’s not alone in that belief. In 2012, Christian radio host Janet Mefferd declared, “This is an epidemic going on in churches. … When are evangelicals going to wake up and say we have a massive problem in our own churches?” For years, Protestants have assumed they were immune to the abuses perpetrated by celibate Catholic priests. But Tchividjian believes that Protestant churches, groups, and schools have been worse than Catholics in their response. Mission fields, he says, are “magnets” for would-be molesters; ministries and schools do not understand the dynamics of abuse; and “good ol’ boy” networks routinely cover up victims’ stories to protect their reputations. He fears it is only a matter of time before it all blows up in their faces and threatens the survival of powerful Protestant institutions. In the past couple of years, Tchividjian has begun to look prophetic. Reports and allegations of sex abuse, rape, and harassment—and a culture that has badly mishandled them—have become more and more frequent. In fall 2012, former members of Sovereign Grace Ministries, a “family” of about 80 conservative churches from various theological traditions, filed a class-action lawsuit against the ministry for failing to report allegations of sex abuse in the 1980s and 1990s—including abuse perpetrated by church leaders’ immediate family members—and discouraging victims and their families from going to law enforcement. (The lawsuit was dismissed last year because of expired statutes of limitations and jurisdictional questions, but an appeal and criminal investigations are under way.) This spring, an expose in The New Republic revealed that Patrick Henry, the college of choice for evangelical homeschoolers, has covered up alleged campus rape and sexual assault, thanks largely to its victim-blaming emphasis on women’s purity. Allegations of similar practices soon surfaced against other Christian colleges, including Pensacola Christian College in Florida and Cedarville University in Ohio. A documentary released in February, No Place to Call Home, recounts the systematic sexual abuse of children in the 1980s at Jesus People USA, an evangelical commune in Chicago. The empire of Bill Gothard, founder of the fundamentalist Institute in Basic Life Principles, crumbled earlier this year after bloggers revealed dozens of sexual-harassment and molestation claims against him. “When you have this motley group of many denominations, this independent environment, and then this distortion of scripture, that’s an environment where abuse can flourish,” Tchividjian says. “But we’ve never been forced to deal with it on a Protestant-wide basis.” Common threads run through the stories: authoritarian settings where rule-following and obedience reign supreme; counseling techniques that emphasize victims’ own culpability; male leaders with few checks on their power; and, in the eyes of many Christians including Tchividjian, a perversion of the Bible to justify all three. “When you have this motley group of many denominations, this independent environment, and then this distortion of scripture, that’s an environment where abuse can flourish,” Tchividjian says. “But we’ve never been forced to deal with it on a Protestant-wide basis.” This will be a challenge. The Protestant world includes tens of thousands of denominations, plus thousands more nondenominational churches, ministries, mission boards, and subcultures. Unlike the Catholic Church, there is no Vatican, no shared leadership connecting, say, Calvary Chapel’s 1,600 churches with the Southern Baptist Convention’s 46,000. No common standards apply but the authority of scripture, which is interpreted differently from church to church, school to school, mission to mission. Even with its tightly controlled hierarchy, the Catholic Church has responded abysmally to sex abuse. “The Catholics have been forced through three decades of lawsuits to address this issue,” Tchividjian says. “The first decade, they gave it lip service, but after three decades, hundreds of millions of dollars lost, and publicity that devastated the Church, they were forced to begin addressing it. It’s my prayer that we’ll deal with it without being forced to.” GRACE’s mission grew out of a phone call that Tchividjian received from a reporter in the summer of 2003. Now in private practice, Tchividjian for eight years had prosecuted child sex-abuse cases as a district attorney in northeastern Florida. The reporter was looking for perspective on a story. In a Pentecostal church in Wisconsin, a convicted sex offender who’d been allowed to volunteer in Sunday school had allegedly abused two sisters, ages 8 and 12. When the girls told their parents, their father went to the pastor, who advised a sit-down with the volunteer. During this meeting, Tchividjian says, “the perp did what perps usually do: cry and ask for forgiveness, so happy he was caught.” The pastor said it sounded like repentance to him and that the accused could prove it by staying active in church life. Would that be enough to allow the father to forgive him, the pastor asked, and to forgo reporting the accused to “man’s authority”? The father said OK, if that’s what God wanted them to do. By the time the journalist called Tchividjian, six years later, the victims’ family had been asked to leave the church and the Sunday school volunteer was about to go on trial. The pastor’s mishandling of the case touched a nerve with Tchividjian, who had seen similar dynamics play out many times. When he’d started working in the district attorney’s office, criminal cases had been distributed to prosecutors “like a deck of cards,” each prosecutor getting a mix from grand theft to molestation. Tchividjian saw how his colleagues shuddered at the sex-abuse cases and tended to plea them out quickly, as though the facts were too awful to bring to court. “It was almost too painful for them to grasp,” he says. When Tchividjian requested to take on all the district’s child sex-abuse cases, the other prosecutors happily obliged. In time, he established a sex-crimes unit that handled hundreds of cases over eight years. All too often, he says, a pastor would come to court in a supportive role, almost always sitting on the perpetrator’s side of the aisle, not the victim’s. The Wisconsin case made Tchividjian think back on those pastors. He began to realize that he had a calling of his own: to teach the Protestant church to be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. “I was encountering survivors who were absolutely eviscerated as a result of disclosing abuse in the Protestant church,” Tchividjian says, “and the long-term damage is sometimes more from how the church responded, or failed to respond, than the abuse itself.” He contacted people he’d met over the years, advocates for abuse survivors he suspected were Christian, like Victor Vieth, former head of the Gundersen National Child Protection Training Center, and Diane Langberg, a Pennsylvania psychologist who specializes in trauma, including child abuse. Together, in 2004, they pulled together a board of lawyers, pastors, and therapists and formed GRACE. To their knowledge, this was the first group dedicated to educating Protestant churches about sex abuse and the ways in which religion can be used to sweep abuse under the rug. They started speaking at conferences, urging Protestants to take child sex abuse seriously and support survivors rather than blame them. Tchividjian wrote a booklet for the World Reformed Fellowship, a cross-denominational network, on “Protecting Children from Abuse in the Church.” Today GRACE, which still has no full-time staffers, offers prevention seminars for churches, along with consultations when abuse allegations arise. On a snowy Saturday afternoon in January, in a converted shopping plaza north of Philadelphia, Tchividjian stood before several hundred staffers and volunteers at Calvary Chapel of Central Bucks County. Though he’d be hard to pick out of a crowd, with his close-cropped brown hair, glasses, and blazer-and-khakis uniform of a Baptist college professor, when Tchividjian gets going—as his talks escalate from campus lecture to closing argument to full-on sermon—you can hear and see a flash of the fiery young Billy Graham. As he always does, Tchividjian delivered a scary set of facts: If general statistics apply—a quarter of U.S. women and a sixth of men have been sexually abused before age 18—Calvary Chapel’s 1,000-member congregation might easily include 200 victims. But even that doesn’t get at the scope of the problem, he said. Congregations need to understand that churches are targets and havens for abusers. One study has found that 93 percent of admitted sex offenders describe themselves as religious. Offenders who report strong church ties abuse more often, with younger victims. That’s not because Christians are inherently more abusive, he said, but because they’re more vulnerable to those who are. Tchividjian repeated what one convicted sex abuser told clinical psychologist Anna Salter in her book Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders: “Church people”—always looking to see the best in people, to welcome converts, to save sinful souls—are “easy to fool.” “When something does surface, all too often the church leadership quiets it down. Because they’re concerned about reputation: ‘This could harm the name of Jesus, so let’s just take care of it internally.’ Tchividjian rattled off ways in which Christians’ openness can allow abuse to go unchecked: Perpetrators tend to use scripture to coerce, justify, and silence. If they’re clergy, they will exploit their positions; if they’re laypeople, they will take advantage of a church hungry for volunteers and rely on the trust given to members of a church family. “The reason why offenders get away with what they do is because we have too many cultures of silence,” Tchividjian said. “When something does surface, all too often the church leadership quiets it down. Because they’re concerned about reputation: ‘This could harm the name of Jesus, so let’s just take care of it internally.’ “Jesus doesn’t need your reputation!” Tchividjian declared. “When somebody says that, it’s a lie. Keeping things in the dark and allowing souls to be destroyed by abuse, that shames the Gospel. Jesus is all about transparency.” Calvary Chapel’s pastor John Hessler, who preaches frequently about his own imperfect past as someone who enjoyed the 1960s, wants his church to be vigilant. “In the old days,” Hessler says, “if you had a pulse or could fog a mirror, you could serve in children’s ministry.” By the time Calvary Chapel was founded 15 years ago, holding its first services in a barn, insurance companies had begun to require that churches conduct background checks on all volunteers. Hessler has made those checks increasingly rigorous, but even in the church’s young life, he has run into a number of troubling situations. There was the middle-aged congregant who would drift out of service to linger around the Sunday school and who angrily quit the church when asked to stay away from the kids. There was one of the congregation’s most straitlaced members, an eager would-be missionary, whose daughter alleged at 16 that he’d been molesting her for eight years. So when GRACE came to Philadelphia for a training session in 2013, Hessler sent several staff to attend. After the staff came back shaken, Hessler invited Tchividjian to address his church. “It’s a balancing act,” Hessler says. “We don’t want to live skeptically. How do you live in such a way that you’re not suspecting that everybody is a dangerous person but are realistic enough to create boundaries so that a person who is a would-be perpetrator would find this too difficult an environment to operate in?” It’s a challenge for Tchividjian, too. Years of investigating abuse cases—“we spend our days swimming in Christian cesspools,” he says—has left him hypervigilant. Megachurches with thousands of volunteers unnerve him, and after working on too many cases where girls were molested by someone in their best friend’s family, Tchividjian and his wife no longer let their daughters spend the night at friends’ houses, let alone church camps or “lock-in” church-basement sleepovers. “But for my wife,” he says, “I don’t trust anyone 100 percent—I’ve seen too much, too many scenarios. What I have to wrestle with is how do I deal with that? How do I balance that tension, between not trusting anyone and knowing that we have to function in life? You have to figure that out for yourself. But know this: Offenders exploit trust.” II. The Missions In 2009, as invitations from church groups were multiplying, GRACE was tapped for a new kind of work. A Florida-based group, New Tribes Mission, was in trouble, as now-adult children of its missionaries were speaking out publicly about sex abuse at a New Tribes boarding school years earlier. Another phone call to Tchividjian, from out of the blue, led him from preaching prevention to once again investigating perps. With more than 3,000 missionaries across 20 countries, New Tribes members have been described as the “Indiana Joneses of the missionary world.” Founded by a Los Angeles missionary in 1942, New Tribes sends its staff to remote locales, from rural West Africa to the Arctic, to evangelize communities that don’t have translations of the Bible. Children of the missionaries are known in Christian shorthand as “MKs,” for missionary kids. About five years ago, a group of MKs whose parents were stationed in Senegal during the 1980s and 1990s started exchanging stories about the abuse they say they’d suffered. New Tribes had some 20 or 30 couples spread across Senegal, embedded with villagers they were trying to convert. New Tribes culture (though not formal policy) dictated that children, when they reached six or seven, were sent to a central mission boarding school so their parents could focus on evangelizing. In Senegal, the school was in the city of Fanda. The children lived there under the supervision of untrained and usually reluctant New Tribes “dorm parents”—some of them missionaries who’d failed in the field—and saw their biological parents infrequently until graduation. The dorm parents and the missionaries were themselves overseen by field leaders, whose power and control, GRACE would later write in its investigative report, “paralleled that of a pastoral staff, a congregational board of Elders, a set of church Deacons, an employer, a local civil government, and a family chieftain, all in one.” Former staff members are more blunt. They describe field leaders as despotic. The dorm parents—whom the MKs were taught to call aunts and uncles, and to see as representatives of God—were permitted to spank the children, and MKs describe spankings that were more like beatings, leaving children with welts after minor infractions like failing to sleep at naptime. Some say they were subjected to cruel and bizarre punishments like being forced to eat their own vomit. “The culture at school was one of fear,” says Bonnie Cheshire, a 34-year-old MK who was sent to Fanda at age 7. In the mid-1980s, one of the dorm fathers, David Brooks, who oversaw the “Little Dorm” for the youngest children, allegedly began sexually abusing girls, including Cheshire. The missionary kids say he would come to their beds at night under the guise of comforting them and touch them inappropriately. They say he taught them to masturbate and he encouraged the girls to take pictures of one another in the shower and to play games that involved finding objects hidden in his or other girls’ bathing suits. Another dorm father allegedly punished girls by holding them down and kissing them. One allegedly groped a missionary kid’s breasts. The wife of a New Tribes missionary allegedly had sex with a male MK. In all, seven staff members at Fanda were accused of sexual abuse. MKs’ letters home were censored, but when some of the girls told their parents what was occurring, and when parents told New Tribes field directors, they were told that they were gossiping and that their “slander” would “destroy another man’s ministry.” The kids say they were told that their complaints would condemn Africans to hell, because their parents would no longer be there to save souls. The parents of the MK who alleged statutory rape were sent back to New Tribes’ “boot camp” and eventually expelled from the field. In 1988, Brooks left Senegal for a medical furlough. In late 1989, while he was on leave in the United States, additional allegations of abuse emerged from Fanda. Brooks made a partial confession to New Tribes administrators and was asked to resign the following spring. But New Tribes never notified U.S. or Senegalese authorities, and he was never prosecuted. New Tribes’ Senegal mission exemplifies what Tchividjian and GRACE call “spiritual abuse”—wielding religious authority to persuade the victims that they were responsible for what happened to them. New Tribes’ Senegal mission exemplifies what Tchividjian and GRACE call “spiritual abuse”—wielding religious authority to persuade the victims that they were responsible for what happened to them. They say such abuse is often the by-product of “legalism,” a catchall term for rigid, rule-oriented Christianity wherein the state of your soul is reflected by the length of your skirt or how you discipline your children. “Legalism” is often used by moderate Christians to decry the petty obsessions of fundamentalists. But the term also reflects a seminal theological debate within Protestantism, which was originally grounded in the conviction that Christians are saved “by grace alone”—that is, by their profession of faith and not by their actions. Abuse victims often describe the communities they came from as legalistic: isolated and authoritarian bodies that placed obedience and rules above all else, where no one was allowed to make small mistakes and where crimes had to be covered up to protect the cause of Christ. New Tribes’ school in Fanda closed in 1997, officially because of security concerns as civil war raged within the country but unofficially because so many missionaries withdrew their children from the school that there were no longer enough students to maintain it. That same year, New Tribes conducted an ill-conceived internal investigation into the abuse claims. Mission officials sat in on missionary kids’ interviews, and in the end, all but one of the abuse victims declined to testify. Consequently, New Tribes identified just two perpetrators and cast the abuse that occurred at Fanda as an exception. New Tribes continued to operate schools in other countries it was evangelizing. In 2008, Kari Mikitson, another Fanda MK who claims to have been abused, contacted New Tribes looking for answers: What had the mission known about the alleged abuses while they were being perpetrated, and what actions had it taken to ensure it would not happen again in other New Tribes schools? The mission board and lawyers met with Mikitson and Cheshire to offer an apology and ask for forgiveness. That wasn’t enough. Mikitson and other MKs founded a website, fandaeagles.com, to publicize the alleged abuse. The site has had 3.6 million views and shows up on Google searches right below the New Tribes Mission website. New Tribes subsequently conducted a second cursory review of the Fanda allegations. When the MKs kept up the pressure, the mission agreed to hire a neutral party to investigate. The missionary kids were initially skeptical of yet another group promising a “Godly response,” as GRACE did. “This was the same terminology used against us by New Tribes to justify both the abuses and the cover-ups,” Mikitson says. “In evangelical-speak, ‘Godly response’ to abuse means using any means necessary to protect the institution’s bottom line, while piously pretending their real concern is protecting the name of Jesus.” But GRACE offered to fly Mikitson to Florida to observe one of its church trainings. She went prepared to “cross GRACE off the list” but instead heard such a staunch defense of victims’ rights that she became convinced that the group was right for the job. GRACE took New Tribes’s commission with two conditions: that the investigation would be independent and that its final report would be provided to MKs and their families, with New Tribes only learning the results after GRACE’s investigators completed their confidential interviews.
Their report wouldn’t lead to criminal charges, because the alleged abuses had taken place so long ago and outside the United States. Instead, GRACE aimed for another sort of reckoning. Tchividjian shies away from comparisons to truth and reconciliation commissions like South Africa’s, because of how the word “reconciliation” is often used in a Christian context: as an end point to be reached as expeditiously as possible, as code for cheap grace. True reconciliation, Tchividjian maintains, is the prerogative of the harmed; beyond that, it’s up to God. Instead, GRACE aimed for radical truth-telling. Its report would give New Tribes a factual accounting of how it failed the MKs so that it might confess, repent, and change its practices. “From day one,” Tchividjian says, “we thought the objective should be to demonstrate authentic repentance, to know where you’ve failed and to be transparent about it.” GRACE board members, including theologians and pastors, volunteered to serve on the investigative team along with former prosecutors Tchividjian and Victor Vieth and psychologist Diane Langberg. They expected the process to take a few weeks. Instead, it lasted more than a year, culminating in a 66-page report. The abuse turned out to be far more widespread and severe than anything even a former prosecutor could have imagined. “We lost a little bit of our soul on that investigation,” Tchividjian says. The investigators began by sending a confidential questionnaire to all the Fanda students from the 1980s and 1990s whom they could find. Fifty-six of 108 MKs responded (compared to a 3 percent rate when New Tribes tried), and GRACE’s team interviewed 21 in person or by phone, taking written statements from a dozen more. They also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of mission records and interviewed nearly 40 New Tribes staff who had been associated with the Fanda school. Released in August 2010, the report identified more than 20 victims of alleged sexual abuse and documented dozens more physical and emotional abuse allegations. The victims of spiritual abuse at Fanda, GRACE concluded, “may well include almost the total school population.” In addition, missionary kids from other New Tribes boarding schools around the world had gotten in touch with GRACE, with some reports going back to the 1950s, and it recommended that New Tribes investigate those claims as thoroughly as those from Fanda. “We have seen what the devil does with silence and inaction,” the investigators concluded, “and we reject it as the sin that it is.” The report offered a checklist of ways that New Tribes could demonstrate repentance: Establish a $1 million fund for victims’ and their families’ care; terminate 14 former dorm parents and supervisors; notify the abusers’ current churches; cooperate with future lawsuits; and, for those Fanda and New Tribes leaders who had ignored the abuse, require a penalty tithe of 10 percent of their paychecks for the victims’ fund. Tchividjian and the other investigators spent a day going through the report with New Tribes’ board of directors. They prayed together, and New Tribes agreed on the spot to most of the recommendations. The mission’s CEO, Larry Brown, told the conservative Christian World magazine that the board was “ashamed” by what GRACE had found and acknowledged that Fanda’s authoritarian atmosphere and theology—specifically its culture of “legalism”—was to blame. He pledged to find out what had happened at the other schools. “It seemed very clear to us that they got it,” Tchividjian says. But that was the immediate response. “The long-term response,” Tchividjian says, “was that New Tribes pulled back significantly from us. I think what was happening was other institutions were looking at them thinking, ‘Why in the world would you hire a group to do what they did? They dragged you through the mud.’” New Tribes soon announced new investigations of alleged abuses in at least nine other schools in eight other countries—but this time, it wouldn’t be hiring GRACE. The mission hired a new coordinator to administer investigations under the project name IHART, or Independent Historical Abuse Review Team. New Tribes has told the missionary kids that whatever information the research turns up “will be stored at a law firm,” accessible only through “a legal process.” (New Tribes leaders declined repeated requests for comment on the investigations and to answer questions about whether it has implemented the recommendations in GRACE’s report.) “I think what happened with GRACE and the Fanda report is they took New Tribes by surprise, and it was a huge blow to them when it came out,” says Rachel Steffen, a former New Tribes missionary who says that her two daughters were sexually abused by a dorm parent in the Philippines. “I think they vowed that they would never lose control like that again.”
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