{"id":695,"date":"2014-05-08T13:16:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-08T13:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/by-grace-alone.html"},"modified":"2014-05-08T13:16:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-08T13:16:00","slug":"by-grace-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/by-grace-alone.html","title":{"rendered":"By Grace Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
In November 2012, Bob Jones University, the longtime flagship institution of fundamentalism, announced it had hired GRACE (short for Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), an independent group of evangelical lawyers, pastors, and psychologists, to investigate the university\u2019s handling of sexual-abuse and -harassment reports. Bob Jones officials said they were taking the step after watching the pedophilia scandal unfold at Pennsylvania State University the previous year. They vowed to ask forgiveness of any students they may have \u201cunderserved.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
In truth, the origins of the investigation were closer to home. In 2011, an abuse scandal from years before had become national news with a\u00a020\/20<\/em>report. Tina Anderson, a 15-year-old who lived in New Hampshire, was raped and impregnated in 1997 by one of her church\u2019s deacons, then in his late thirties, while she was a babysitter for his family. When Anderson and her mother told their pastor, Bob Jones graduate Chuck Phelps, what had happened, Phelps had Anderson stand before the congregation while he read a confession of her pregnancy. She was then sent to a family in Colorado until the baby was born and given up for adoption. Anderson\u2019s rapist, a registered sex offender, was made to confess as well\u2014but to adultery, not rape\u2014and he remained at the church for years. Phelps, who\u2019d gone on to be president of the fundamentalist Maranatha Baptist Bible College in Wisconsin, maintained close ties to Bob Jones, serving on its board of trustees as well as on its missionary and youth-camp boards.<\/span><\/div>\n
Students and alumni had already begun to agitate online against the school\u2019s lack of academic and student freedom, as well as its response to reports of sexual abuse. Anderson\u2019s story highlighted what these critics\u2014dismissed by the school as disaffected \u201cdetractors\u201d\u2014saw as a pattern in how Bob Jones stigmatized students who reported rape or sexual assault. A senior named Christopher Peterman started a Facebook group and website called Do Right BJU, which aimed to remove Phelps from the board and called for a range of reforms; he organized the first campus protest in the university\u2019s history to raise awareness of sexual abuse. Phelps resigned from the board of trustees in December 2011, just days before the rally. But then a few months later, on the eve of graduating, Peterman was expelled for watching\u00a0Glee<\/em>, among other violations.<\/span><\/div>\n
The story continued to grow. Peterman and alumni groups active on Facebook began to hear from more and more students who claimed they had been poorly treated when they reported sexual abuse to school staff. Over the following months, alumni pressured the university to update its policies and investigate the school\u2019s handling of abuse reports. They urged the university to hire GRACE, which had investigated allegations of sex abuse in two Christian missionary groups. To almost everyone\u2019s surprise, seven months after the\u00a020\/20<\/em>\u00a0report aired, Bob Jones announced that it had listened.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In November 2012, Bob Jones University, the longtime flagship institution of fundamentalism, announced it had hired GRACE (short for Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), an independent group of evangelical lawyers, pastors, and psychologists, to investigate the university\u2019s handling of sexual-abuse and -harassment reports. Bob Jones officials said they were taking the step […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBy Grace Alone<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In November 2012, Bob Jones University, the longtime flagship institution of fundamentalism, announced it had hired GRACE (short for Godly Response to\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/by-grace-alone.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"By 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