Christians’ Constitutional Religious “Right” To Discriminate And Abuse Post-Hobby-Lobby, Wheaton And Gordon

** MAIL ON SUNDAY - ONE USE ONLY - NO LIBRARY - NO SYNDICATION***lcopl_005a (300).tif

Q: What kind of mental breakdown causes parents to pack a six-year-old girl off to a boarding school 500 to 1000 miles away that’s run by sadists and rapists?

A: Evangelical delusional thinking that’s what.

In the case of tens of thousands of evangelical missionaries the delusional breakdown that led to child abandonment was caused by believing that “all that stands between God burning the lost to death forever and their salvation is– me!”

And this “GOD” means business! After all, HE killed HIS OWN SON!

Dumping your own child by sacrificing her to Jesus is a small price to pay to save all those lost from eternal torment. Your daughter will only cry herself to sleep from age six on. The lost will burn forever.

Q: WHERE WERE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS BRAINWASHED INTO ACCEPTING THE “FACT” THAT THEY SERVED A RETRIBUTIVE MONSTER-GOD WHO WANTED THEM TO – LITERALLY – SACRIFICE THEIR CHILDREN FOR HIM?

A: Wheaton College and Gordon College and dozens of other Christian “colleges,” Bible Schools and seminaries.

Now, these very same institutions want to be allowed to legally discriminate against women and gays in the name of serving that very same GOD and what HE DEMANDS of them.

And in the name of “religious liberty” they are getting what they want. Just like kids got dumped for Jesus, now women’s access to contraception and gays’s access to employment is dumped for God.

TALK ABOUT GIVING THE KEYS OF THE ASYLUM TO THE INMATES

Following the Hobby Lobby/Supreme Court ruling giving Hobby Lobby the “religious freedom” right to discriminate against women employees by withholding insurance coverage for contraceptives, Wheaton College was given the same “right.”

A few days later another evangelical college – Gordon — was in the news because its president was one of 14 religious leaders to write to the president asking to be exempted from federal regulations preventing him from discriminating against gay men and women for just being gay.

Given that in all these cases the Christian schools and other organizations and/or Christian-owned businesses, are demanding exemptions from ordinary laws that protect women and gays from discrimination (in one case the right to employment, in the other the right to family planning) everyone else should ask this question:

HOW HAVE RELIGIOUS PEOPLE BEHAVED WHEN THE NORMAL SUPERVISION AND THE LAW IS REMOVED OR AT LEAST – OUT OF DEFERENCE TO RELIGION – NOT APPLIED?

For instance:

How have children fared in evangelical missionary boarding schools?
How have women and children fared in Irish Roman Catholic-run homes for unwed mothers and children ?
How are children doing in American evangelical-run youth institutions set up to discipline “unruly” youth through “biblical training”?
How well has the Roman Catholic Church worked with the police to prosecute their legion of pedophiles?

TOUGH LOVE FOR CHRIST

According to reports in The Missoula Independent newspaper, In March of 2011 Missoula Montana police apprehended two runaways from Pinehaven Christian Children’s Ranch in St. Ignatius, “bringing to six the total number of teenagers who had fled the private youth home for troubled kids since July of that year.” A growing number of alumni and former staffers claim that the ranch’s young residents are fleeing from physical and emotional abuse.

“The youth home draws from biblical teachings in its efforts to help troubled youth. ‘We don’t pretend to be a mental health treatment center,’ says ranch founder and director Bob Larsson. ‘We’re a Christian home for kids.'”

When the Montana Legislature moved to regulate private youth homes in 2005, at Larsson’s request, an amendment was introduced excluding religious facilities like Pinehaven from state scrutiny.

The state requires all “private alternative adolescent residential and outdoor programs” to achieve licensure through Montana’s Department of Labor and Industry. The religious freedom amendment specifically excluded religious youth homes. Larsson, argued that creating state mechanisms to oversee his Christian organization would violate religious freedom constitutional protections.

HOW HAVE ROMAN CATHOLICS FARED WHEN ABOVE THE LAW?

According to countless press accounts including an article in the publication of Child Abuse and Recovery (“Catholic mass grave sites of missing children have been found in Ireland, Spain, Canada”)... Pope Francis was being prosecuted by the International Common Law Court of Justice (ICLCJ) in Brussels for allegedly trafficking children of political prisoners through Vatican Catholic Charities during Argentine’s Dirty War.

“According to witness testimony last week some of those orphans ended up in a child mass grave site in Spain. Last year’s ICLCJ prosecution concerned… missing native Canadian children. There have been… mass grave sites uncovered so far in Canada, most of them on Catholic-run native residential school grounds.”

As the Child Abuse and Recovery article states:

Children of the Canadian Catholic native residential schools were determined to have been murdered or died of malnutrition, human experimentation, torture, Small Pox infection or as Eyewitness Irene Favel testified in this video, were thrown into a furnace. Favel claimed that in 1944 she witnessed a newborn infant incinerated by a priest at Muscowegan Catholic Indian School, Saskatchewan Canada. The child torture was documented for court in Kevin Annett’s “Hidden No Longer”

The 2013 award-winning drama film “Philomena” depicted the plight of 2,200 infants who survived Ireland’s Catholic homes. The children were forcibly adopted or placed into child labor situations, mainly in the US. Catholic officials have consistently denied they received payments for these so-called “adoptions” and insisted verifying documents were lost in a fire.

The Roman Catholic Church has systematically protected predator priests, allowing tens of thousands of children to be abused, a United Nations committee reported directly after Pope Francis became pontiff.

HOW HAVE THE MISSIONARY KIDS IN EVANGELICAL MISSIONS DONE IN FAR DISTANT UNSUPERVISED BOARDING SCHOOLS?

According to detailed reports by the MK Safety Net details the emotional, sexual, physical and spiritual abuse of Christian missionary children at Mamou Alliance Academy Boarding School in Guinea, West Africa, from the late 1940s through the 1970s are now a matter of public record. So is the cover up that followed until the missionary group responsible could stonewall no longer.

No one has gone to jail.

The Christian & Missionary Alliance, has had their “religious liberty” respected and been allowed to handle the abuse in house.

No police or prosecutors were called.

Mamou was the first evangelical mission Boarding School investigated for child abuse. Many more are now being investigated. The investigations are revealing that the level of abuse of children by these evangelicals would do any Irish nun proud.

According to Missionary Kids Safety Net, 21 other Christian denominations have reported child abuse occurring at countless missionary boarding schools.

Here are just a few examples of the types of abuse that children at Mamou suffered:

The first-grade teacher terrorized the children as young as six turning over whole desks (with the child in it) when she was displeased.
Both adult women and adult men sexually abused children.
The school was a perfect set-up for pedophiles, according to the now-adult survivors of this abuse.
Children caught whispering in bed after lights were out were beaten until they were bloody.
According to the official Grace Report ( p. 10), “the children were viewed as a hindrance to the work of God.“

All missionary parents of the time (early 60′s) were expected to send their children to boarding school the minute they were of school age (at five to six years old).

It was not a choice.

The missionary culture is still to this day alive and well at places like Wheaton and Gordon. They still are feeder schools for missionary ventures expert at indoctrinating their students to believe that they are following in the footsteps of God in doing “His work.”

CONCLUSION

In a New York Times article (“Ultra-Orthodox Shun Their Own for Reporting Child Sexual Abuse”) on why the Hasidim Jews of New York City so often avoid reporting the rampant abuse, rape and torture in their community this was said:

“ ‘They are more afraid of the outside world than the deviants within their own community,’ Dr. Heilman said. ‘The deviants threaten individuals here or there, but the outside world threatens everyone and the entire structure of their world.’”

There could be no better description of the evangelical and Roman Catholic worldview. This worldview now portrays the Roman Church and the evangelicals as “victims” of a secular culture. They interpret calls for having to abide by anti-discrimination laws as persecution.

The truth is that the Vatican and the evangelicals are more afraid of outsiders knowing the truth about them than they are of exposing their own flocks to evil.

Hence they want to be treated specially. They demand to be above the law lest the insanity of their views be scrutinized. They plead for special treatment because they know that the light of day will expose a retributive religion that is insane.

They demand a legal right to discriminate against women and gays and a legal right to “police” themselves.

Like the founder of the notorious “Pinehaven” home for youths arguing against reevaluation or regulation as a matter of religious freedom, the evangelicals want “religious freedom” to mean freedom from the law that protects people, people like women and gays.

This is madness. When will it stop?

And why is the US Supreme Court aiding and abetting groups who have proved themselves so abusive when they are not under close supervision? In fact in a sane society any college or for that matter kindergarten, that had a president that asked to be allowed to discriminate against people — be that female, black, white, gay or straight — would automatically be disqualified from the education field.

We have laws for reasons. And the rule of law should apply to everyone. As I say in my new book WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace: “Embracing paradox helped me discover that religion is a neurological disorder for which faith is the only cure.”

Believing in a retributive God is a mental illness. And it leads to horror. The people demanding special treatment in order to continue the madness into which they were raised are ill. Let’s not let them make our society as sick as they are.

Abusers don’t deserve to be given even more freedom from the law to abuse, be that to abuse women, to abuse gays or to abuse yet more children. If any group in our society merits extra human rights supervision, not less, it is the Roman Catholic Church, and the evangelicals and their institutions.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace