Why I Hate Bill Gothard

Yeah. As the article puts it:

Gothard’s resignation from the Institute in Basic Life Principles, according to a letter sent to families affiliated with the ministry he founded, comes a week after he was put on administrative leave. According to an organizer involved in the whistle-blowing website Recovering Grace, 34 women told the website they had been sexually harassed; four women alleged molestation.

RNS spoke with several women who alleged they were sexual harassed, including one woman who alleged that Gothard molested her when she was 17.

I just was shaken up. But no, I didn’t hate him. I wasn’t there yet. It was just…this immense sadness and pain that all those experiences of my childhood were being twisted because we had faith in one of the most manipulative, dishonest conservative leaders out there. It just hurt. I feel putting it like that…really doesn’t capture everything, but all I have is words, so…yeah. It hurts. It may not make sense to you. OK. But that was my childhood — while others went to public school, did sports, etc….this was the entirety of my world. It was bad enough that none of it was true. It was a nightmare of fraud and deceit to realize it was all undergirded by a dishonest puppeteer.

The hate came later, on August 7th, five days before my 31st birthday.  I had come across an open letter written by a woman named Heather (last name omitted) entitled “Dear Mr. Gothard.”  Here was someone who “got it.”  So much of it echoed my own experience. She began working for Dr. Gothard because her family lived close to him, and she speaks of meeting him:

Naïve and wide eyed, being up close an personal with the man behind the [IBLP curriculum] was surreal. You see, our whole world had been shaped by you. My early memories were of being read stories from your books and being taught to think the way you thought Christians ought to think….

I was quite young. Eleven or twelve if my memory is right. Receiving your obvious favoritism was a breath of new air to me. And I liked it. I liked you. I felt safe with you. After all, you were the man who’d shaped my parents. You taught them the things they’d taught to me.

She goes on to talk about how the family sought Gothard out because the parents were escaping from a rough past. I know that was our situation, as well. I don’t want to talk too much about my parents’ history, but suffice it to say that clean, wholesome Christianity seemed like a beautiful break in some ways, an a fulfillment in other ways, for them. And it looked like that, from the outside. Bible-based, squeaky clean, wholesome structure.  I smiled widely enough when I got to read from Character Sketches. How must this 11 or 12 year old girl have felt hearing them from Gothard himself?

Then there were the other signs.  Gothard’s preoccupation with sexual purity — a preoccupation that was passed on to me so effectively that I still have, as an atheist, memories of the tips he gave twenty years ago, and can quote half of Romans 6, the chapter he said would save people from lust, verbatim. A preoccupation that drove people like my parents to tell their children dating was completely and totally off-limits — something of a sin — and had us thinking that arranged marriages was a more sin-free way to go. A preoccupation that led us to put our TV up for a couple solid years, that even got us to filter our Christian music choices based on how “sensual” a song sounded.  Something that bound us together within the strong structure of the physically-enforced biblical guidelines, that made us tight laced, narrow-road Christians, who were at the same time earnest and deeply close to each other.

And Heather was deeply entrenched in Gothard’s definitions of “sexual purity.”  When she began to get involved with other boys her age, Gothard came in and policed her sexuality. But it wasn’t about policing sexuality, ultimately. It was about controlling it:

You [Bill Gothard] asked me [Heather] how it felt [to receive attention from boys]. You wanted vivid details. But you didn’t just want them once. For months, we had the same conversations. Repeatedly. Alone. No parent sitting in. No accountability for you. No protection for me.

You violated me in your own way by repeatedly demanding me to talk about those graphic sexual acts with you. You taught me that there are no “vectims” in sexual abuse; only people who have un-confessed sin in their life and are now receiving their own. You taught me to feel shame for my body’s sexual responses. You held me responsible for what [the boys had] done to me, telling me that if I did not comply with our “counseling sessions,” you would have no choice but to take my situation to the local authorities. You coerced me…

And after each counseling session, you would have me kneel beside you next to the couch in your office. I can still see the stripes in the fabric and feel the tiredness of my knees and feet as we stayed in that awkward position for inordinately long periods of time.

I want to stop here and say, lest you state that this is a fringe cult, this kind of thing happens in Catholic churches and with pastors fairly frequently. The obsession over the sexual lives of members in the church is not about purity. It is about control.  The incidences throughout Christendom are symptoms of a larger problem, in which those with power tell a lie of purity so they can control the sexual whims of those who commit to their charge. Not all pastors do this — many buy into the lie of sexual purity themselves. But it seems, time and time again, as if this is a control tactic, one I — red-blooded, hormone-raging teenage male and all — brought into hook, line, and sinker, along with all the guilt that, to a major extent, deeply damaged my teen years.

And in the meanwhile, Gothard was showing this deeper meaning by cordoning the girl off and controlling her sexuality — as he had done for many others. This was the common mode in the homeschooling movement — there was a lot of criticism and scrutiny on the outside, so a lot of what we did was very in-house. We were honest in what we said, but we lied by omission, preserving the squeaky-clean image. Indeed, I’m now 32 years old, I’ve been blogging for…a long time, and this is the first time I’ve really told this story. And I know that family who reads it, even all these years later, might be bothered that I’m telling this much of our personal family history. It’s how I know exactly how Josh Duggar happened.  The self-conscious need to control the image of the movement while also controlling the lives of those inside led to stories of hiding from the authorities and surprising corruption inside the movement.  I’m surprised, infuriated, by the stories of corruption. But I understand why they happened, for the most part.  As a Talking Points Memo article on the Duggar scandal noted:

By keeping Josh’s confession—and punishment—in a small, closed circle, the Duggars were acting in accordance with the teachings of IBLP’s founder, Bill Gothard, and the Advanced Training Institute, IBLP’s exclusive homeschooling program that provides curricula to parents, holds conferences, and offers missionary and work opportunities. The Duggars have belonged to ATI since 1992, when Josh was four, according to their own accounts on 19 Kids and Counting.

But that was nothing compared to Gothard himself, who took full advantage of this double-consciousness. Heather continues talking about her prayer time after counseling session in this way:

Our bodies would touch each other’s as we knelt there, so close that your legs pressed against mine. My hands in yours. Sometimes an arm around my waist or your ankle crossing over mine….

You mingled just enough words of affirmation in your concoction of condemnation, guilt, and confusion to “hook” me…. Like an epic game of chess, no move lacked calculation….

You would see me across the room  when we arrived on Saturday night for staff dinner. You’d signal to me in a personal and private way that you wanted me to sit with you…. You’d slide your feet out of your shoes and play footsies with me. You would use your feet to feel my calves and knees and feet all the while, smiling warmly and winking at me in those fractions of a second when no one was watching….

One the one hand, you taught me to guard my heart and to not even think about boys, much less speak to them or look them in the eye. But then you would take special liberties with me that, should any boy have done that, he would have been excommunicated immediately.

And even here, I didn’t hate Gothard. Not yet. I despised what he did. But it takes more than that to hate someone. I like to think every individual has some sense of worth and value, no matter how much I disagree with them or dislike what they do. It was disturbing, yes. But not bad enough for hate.

Then, it got worse.

Days turned to weeks and then months and then years.  I wasn’t the pre-teen I was when we first met…. Your affection increased. I sometimes felt “held” in your office as if I was not there for any other reason than your viewing and touching pleasure. I learned to become accustomed to long awkward hours of you holding my hands or rubbing the tops of my thighs as you sat inappropriately close to me on your couch.

The older I got, the more you controlled me… you had already set up private access to what was going on inside of me emotionally and psychologically, but now, you wanted to control my physical appearance. You told me how to dress, how to fix my hair, how to smile, and how to fit the mold.  You noticed that I needed orthodontics. you pointed out other staff girls who were prettier than I was and asked me to emulate their look. Yet, you taught me at the same time that my beauty was a danger to me and that attraction toward and from the opposite sex was a great undesirable.  Looking back, I see lines that you drew for me that crossed over other lines that you drew for me. If one line conflicted with another line you wanted to draw, you just overstepped it as if it didn’t matter in the first place.

So…all those hours…all those years…all were based on the teachings of a man who didn’t believe it in the first place. All that twisting into place — and the beating of our family into place (both figuratively and literally) that our parents did regularly was based on a lie that Gothard knew he was making up.  KNEW. He knew exactly what he was doing, he was calculating, he was intentional…and he controlled people on a string. Heather was beat, too:

I made all the necessary changes. I obeyed the rules. I beat my heart into submission. When something did not make sense, I followed anyway because everyone knew that if Bill Gothard said it, it was right. We followed whether or not it made sense.

And then, finally, the hammer dropped. Heather approached her late teens. Her family situation was in shambles (thanks, Gothard principles) and Gothard gave “permission” for Heather’s mom and siblings to leave the father’s “Umbrella of Authority” — an infamous concept invented by Gothard that continues to have deep influence. And when they left…they needed a place to stay. And Gothard gave them housing…on one condition. As Heather put it, “The housing you offered them swung on my obedience to your desires for me. I was caught in an emotional tug of war as I wrestled between feeling angry that I would need to be the determining factor for the rescue of my family…and the innate desire to protect them. It was all too much for someone so young.”

And then Bill Gothard forced her to be pulled out of high school at seventeen, and employed by him full time to support her family in the situation, remember, that Gothard had put them in in the first place by saying they could disregard the “Umbrella of Protection.” To this day, Heather still has not graduated from high school. He even fired her twice, then waited and rehired her once he thought the experience had helped “make her heart right with God.” He used public embarrassment, making her “publicly apologize in front of hundreds of people for things [she] did not do.” He forced her to take care of his ill mother — a situation that demanded her to get up when it was dark and work until midnight, and that often led her to be hungry, as her need for food was hardly considered. When she complained once, he said that she needed more work and had her do his laundry (with special attention to his underwear). And when he came home after a long day at work, he would keep her with him for about an hour just for “the pleasure of [her] company.”

And as this happened, Gothard would remind her how much he was doing for her family…with the hint that it might stop if she became disobedient.  This led her to become angry with her family, and as punishment, Gothard once had her work as a janitor at a conference center for a month “to learn humility.”  There were hundreds of boys there, and she couldn’t so much as look (let alone talk) to them, and the girls dismissed her. She couldn’t call home. The hours were long. She says it felt like being locked up in prison. She had to attend meetings with wives of men in Gothard’s organization, where she was asked about her plans for the future, and when she said them, she was told that they were things for men, not “godly women,” and that the time alone as a janitor in the conference center was what she needed to start thinking straight.