UNITED STATES
Baptist News
By Bob Allen
A disgraced evangelical family expert accused in a lawsuit of sexually abusing or harassing 10 women was an early proponent of ideas now part and parcel of the Baptist Faith and Message.
A second amended complaint filed Jan. 6 in DuPage County, Ill., charged Bill Gothard and his ministry, Institute in Basic Life Principles, of sexual abuse, harassment and cover-up, with one woman claiming she was raped by Gothard and one of the ministry’s “biblical counselors.”
Today largely forgotten except for a recent brief mention that reality TV star Josh Duggar got counseling from a facility owned and operated by the Institute in Basic Life Principles after he sexually abused five minor girls as a teenager, Gothard once packed out 10,000-seat venues for his Basic Youth Conflicts Seminar, a conservative Christian counter to the hippie movement. It was characterized by a red notebook containing teachings that disciples were instructed not to share with anyone who had not attended a seminar.
One of his cornerstone beliefs, that God appoints husbands in an “umbrella of authority” over their wives, who are mandated by God to obey their husbands completely, is similar to later teachings in documents like the Danvers Statement, a collection of core values of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and a 1998 amendment to the Baptist Faith and Message, the official SBC confession of faith, stating: “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”
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