UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast
Alisa Harris
They collect documents, interview sources, and get thousands of Facebook shares. Meet the army of ex-fundamentalists exposing the misdeeds of the organizations they left.
In early March, blogger Samantha Field contacted her alma mater, the notoriously fundamentalist Pensacola Christian College in Florida, before she published an explosive story. Field, who blogs about “overcoming fundamentalist indoctrination,” was going public with allegations from two former students who said they had been raped at Pensacola, and that the school had shamed and expelled them instead of punishing the alleged perpetrators. The stories had come in after Field posted a call on her blog. She contacted four different departments at Pensacola to ask how such cases were handled, and was finally told by the college’s communications officer that the school didn’t respond to “blog-type articles.”
That didn’t last long. Field’s “blog-type article” was quickly shared tens of thousands of times, and Pensacola was forced to respond to the allegations with an official statement.
Pensacola isn’t the only evangelical institution suddenly feeling the heat from bloggers and online activists, often with an inside knowledge of their operations. After decades in which church authorities tightly controlled information and successfully isolated their disaffected members from society, the internet is making it all but impossible for fundamentalist churches, colleges, and other institutions to hide the scandals in their midst. Online “survivor” communities are obsessively documenting alleged abuses and letting those trapped inside fundamentalist movements know they’re not alone.
“If you have 100 stories that are really similar, the likelihood that they’re all made up is really low.”
The scale and impact of these communities has unfolded just in the past few months, as some of the biggest names in Christian fundamentalism found themselves in the crosshairs. In March, Illinois-based fundamentalist Bill Gothard resigned after a website published a slew of stories from women alleging sexual harassment. In February, a filmmaker released a 90-minute, Kickstarter-funded documentary alleging hidden sexual abuse in the Jesus People USA Evangelical Covenant Church, a Christian community in Chicago. In January, Bob Jones University terminated its contract with a consulting firm it had hired to investigate the college’s handling of sexual assault, and then reinstated the contract after an internet outcry. Another fundamentalist patriarch, Doug Phillips, recently resigned after admitting to an affair with a younger woman—with every micro-development, including Facebook status updates of former staff, reported by blogs. Sovereign Grace Ministries, a large association of evangelical churches, is facing not just a class action lawsuit but a phalanx of sites publishing documents, transcripts of its counseling trainings, and testimonies from people who say church leaders ignored abuse.
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