Bill Cosby and Father Figures: What Do We Do with Our Shock and Dismay When Our Heroes Fail Us?

I was several months pregnant with my first child, a daughter–and scared out of my mind. I’d always struggled with whether I would make a good parent. Growing up, I had a broken family, with all of the complication and pain that goes along with such an experience. I was struggling to visualize what family health looked like. I was wondering if I would go on to repeat the mistakes of my family of origin. I was wondering what “another way” looked like.

It was at this time that I started to watch The Cosby Show regularly. Just at the moment when I needed a visual representation of a happy, healthy, real family, I found the Huxtables. I learned how to delight in your children and your spouse, that it was ok to get frustrated with your kids sometimes, how to teach life lessons, how to ride the ups and downs of normal family life. I learned family can be a vibrant, beautiful thing. It doesn’t have to be the locus of pain as it often had been for me growing up. This visual representation gave me tremendous courage as I looked ahead to becoming a mother. I could do this. I could imitate the pattern I was seeing. I thought of it as a classroom for healthy family life.

Now, I understand TV isn’t life, but, even so, The Cosby Show was special. Its warmth and authenticity and good humor set it apart in a truly unique way.

I assumed that its main character, Cliff Huxtable, was the same person as Bill Cosby. Cosby certainly tried to give that impression, building his brand around family-friendly comedy, disdaining the “easy” use of swearing in stand-up, and encouraging young people to live lives of character. There’s no question that Cosby did a lot of good in this world.

I had heard whisperings about rape allegations, but because I believed the image, I gave them very little attention. Everybody knew Bill Cosby was a good guy. Right?

I think this reaction was common to a lot of people. We couldn’t bear to have the image of a beloved father figure dissolved before our eyes. So we wouldn’t listen to the voices of women crying out that he was not the man he appeared to be. We wanted to believe. We needed to believe.

Until we couldn’t anymore. I will be honest. When the cries of Cosby’s accusers began to get louder and more insistent, I investigated the story with an eye to holding on to Cosby’s image. I would find evidence that these women were making it up!

Except I couldn’t find this evidence. What I found instead were credible, brave accounts by separate women who shared common themes between their stories. Young, vulnerable, beautiful women said they were taken under Cosby’s wing, drugged, and then sexually assaulted. Particularly persuasive was Barbara Bowman’s The Washington Post first person testimonial about rape at Cosby’s hands. Also very credible was Tamara Green’s interview with Newsweek. I didn’t want it to be true, but it was becoming increasingly likely that it probably was.

It was monstrous. My heart went out to the women who appeared to have been so dreadfully attacked. Just because this was Bill Cosby did not mean we should keep pushing this under the rug. This was wrong, dreadfully wrong.

Not only was I grieved for the women caught up in this terrible story, but I was also nauseated by the implications for my own life. The father figure who I had looked up to and who had helped me approach parenting with confidence and hope was likely not real.

What do we do with our shock and dismay when our heroes fail us?

1. Original sin is real.

Bill Cosby reminds us that even our most cherished heroes are bound by original sin. As a former pastor and now a pastor’s wife, I used to be absolutely shocked when some hidden sin in a congregation or community member was revealed. But as time has gone by, such revelations have become less and less shocking to me. People have clay feet. They just do. Experience teaches us this. In the words of the lead character on the Fox show, House, “Everybody lies.”

I’ve come to realize how many of us walk around with masks on, never revealing the aches and sins and brokenness deep inside us, in our families, in our relationships. Granted, most people don’t rape somebody! That’s a whole ‘nother level of hideous (although, I can say with certainty that many, many more people you know have committed sexual crimes against others than you would ever guess). But most of us have things in other lives that are broken, things we don’t discuss in polite conversation, things that we feel shame or regret about. We all have times when our attempts at self-reformation fall flat to the ground. We all have times when we grievously hurt those around us. We are broken. We need fixing. We need restoration.

Heck, we need resurrection!

2. There is a Father we can trust.

Our culture is thick with trauma from the missteps and even abuses of father and mother figures. Our hearts cry out for a father who is good, a father we can trust. When we see the misuse of power by an authority figure, everything in our being cries out, “Dear God! This is evil! This is wrong!”

The problem is, we are constantly disappointed by earthly fathers. These disappointments run the spectrum. Fathers abandon children and fail to provide for them. They abandon their mothers. They choose alcohol and drugs over their children. They molest their children. They beat their children. Sometimes they fail their children in more ordinary ways: not keeping their promises, losing their temper, getting distracted. Whatever end of the spectrum we are talking about, the truth is that earthly fathers will fail us; hopefully, not this drastically, but they will disappoint us at times.

But our heart still beats with longing to find that safe place where we can know we are loved. That safe place we can trust.

Jesus knew that our hearts long for a loving Father. This is why He taught us over and over again that when we pray, we are to pray with immediacy and familial intimacy to the one Father we can trust. He told us the name we are to use for God: Father. By repeating this name for God over and over again, Jesus sought to teach us to be bold enough to call God our Father.

“This, then, is how you should pray:

“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name…”

–Matthew 6:9, NIV

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