Rachael Denhollander’s college-aged abuser began grooming her when she was 7. Each week, as Denhollander left Sunday school at Westwood Baptist Church in Kalamazoo, Mich., he was there to walk her to her parents’ Bible-study classroom on the other side of the building. He brought Denhollander gifts and asked her parents for her clothing size so he could buy her dresses. He was always a little too eager with a hug. The Denhollanders led one of the church’s ministries out of their home, which meant the man would visit their house regularly, often encouraging Rachael to sit on his lap, they recalled.
The man’s behavior caught the attention of a fellow congregant, who informed Sandy Burdick, a licensed counselor who led the church’s sexual-abuse support group. Burdick says she warned Denhollander’s parents that the man was showing classic signs of grooming behavior.
.. And so when Larry Nassar used his prestige as a doctor for the USA Gymnastics program to sexually assault Denhollander, she held to her vow. She wouldn’t put her family through something like that again. Her church had made it clear: No one believes victims.
.. Tchividjian says sexual abuse in evangelicalism rivals the Catholic Church scandal of the early 2000s.
.. The sex advice columnist and LGBT rights advocate Dan Savage, tired of what he called the hypocrisy of conservatives who believe that gays molest children, compiled his own list that documents more than 100 instances of youth pastors around the country who, between 2008 and 2016, were accused of, arrested for or convicted of sexually abusing minors in a religious setting.
.. Over 2016 and 2017, Mullen found 192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography. (This data did not include sexual crimes against an adult or crimes committed by someone other than a leader.)
.. a 2014 GRACE report on Bob Jones University ..
56 percent of the 381 respondents who reported having knowledge of the school’s handling of abuse (a group that included current and former students, as well as employees) believed that BJU conveyed a “blaming and disparaging” attitude toward victims.
.. half said school officials had actively discouraged them from going to the police. According to one anonymous respondent, after he finally told the police about years of sexual abuse by his grandfather, a BJU official admonished him that “[you] tore your family apart, and that’s your fault,” and “you love yourself more than you love God.”
.. she was told that her husband “was not attracted to his 11-year-old daughter but rather to the ‘woman’ she ‘was becoming.’ ”
.. Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said President Trump’s “grab them by the p—y” comments and other crude language didn’t matter because “all of us are sinners.”
.. 39 percent of evangelicals were more likely to vote for Moore after multiple accusations that he’d initiated sexual contact with teenagers when he was in his 30s. “It comes down to a question [of] who is more credible in the eyes of the voters — the candidate or the accuser,” Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University, said at the time. “. . . And I believe [Moore] is telling the truth.”
.. It was the same message 7-year-old Denhollander heard: Stay silent, because the church won’t believe you.
.. Why are so many evangelicals (who also devote resources to fighting sex trafficking or funding shelters for battered women) so dismissive of the women in their own pews?
.. many worshipers he encountered felt persecuted by the secular culture around them — and disinclined to reach out to their persecutors for help in solving problems. This is the same dynamic that drove a cover-up culture among ultra-Orthodox communities in New York, where rabbis insisted on dealing with child abusers internally
.. 41 percent of Americans believe that the end times will occur before 2050.
.. In some evangelical teachings, a severe moral decay among unbelievers precedes the rapture of the faithful. Because of this, many evangelicals see the outside world as both a place in need of God’s love and a corrupt, fallen place at odds with the church.
.. “His interest was in protecting the church and its reputation more than protecting his daughter.”
.. forced to reconcile a cognitive dissonance: How can the church — often called “the hope of the world” in evangelical circles — also be an incubator for such evil?
.. SGC president C.J. Mahaney’s return to ministry. Mahaney had been asked to step down from his role in 2011 because of “various expressions of pride, unentreatability, deceit, sinful judgment and hypocrisy.” In 2012, a class-action lawsuit held that eight SGC pastors, including Mahaney, had covered up sexual abuse in the church. Mahaney and the SGC claimed vindication when a judge dismissed the lawsuit for eclipsing the statute of limitations.
.. Denhollander says she told her church’s leaders this was inappropriate, as Mahaney had never acknowledged a failure to properly handle allegations of sexual abuse under his leadership.
.. when Denhollander went public with accusations against Larry Nassar in the Indianapolis Star, a pastor accused her of projecting her story onto Mahaney’s. When she persisted, he told her she should consider finding a new church.
.. in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 1 in 4 women (women make upapproximately 55 percent of evangelicals) and 1 in 9 men have been sexually abused.
.. Denhollander was there; she spoke at length in the courtroom, reminding Nassar that the Christian concept of forgiveness comes from “repentance, which requires facing and acknowledging the truth about what you have done in all of its utter depravity and horror, without mitigation, without excuse, without acting as if good deeds can erase” it.
Evangelicals and abortion: chicken or egg?
Jonathan Dudley suggested in a recent CNN religion blog that as late as the 1960s the consensus among evangelical thinkers was that life begins not at conception but birth.
.. The author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics argued that televangelist Jerry Falwell spearheaded the reversal of opinion on abortion in the late 1970s in order to form a political alliance with Catholics and win voters for the Republican Party.
.. approval of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized most abortion by First Baptist of Dallas Pastor W.A. Criswell, president of the Southern Baptist Convention at the time.
“I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed,” Criswell said.
.. Wayne Dehoney, SBC president for two terms in the 1960s .. “Protestant theology generally takes Genesis 2:7 as a statement that the soul is formed at breath, not conception,” Dehoney said.
.. “I asked him about the biblical statement that God knows us even when we are in our mother’s womb,” Clinton wrote. “He replied that the verse simply refers to God being omniscient, and that it might as well have said God knew us even before we were in our mother’s womb, even before anyone in our direct line was born.”
.. The Southern Baptist Convention revisited abortion in resolutions every year from 1976 through 1980. By 1980 the exclusions had narrowed to saving the life of the mother.
.. Balmer described an “abortion myth” that the Religious Right movement began in direct response to the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Balmer instead called it “a political movement” actually sparked when the IRS attempted to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.
Everyone agrees that evangelicals, including Southern Baptists, were late to the pro-life cause, but not everyone agrees about the reason.
Ronald Reagan: Innocent mistakes
In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.
And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.
Episode 223: How Did We Get Here? A History of the Religious Right
What really birthed the religious right? Why have black and white Christians swapped political parties over the last 60 years? Based on a class he’s teaching, co-host Skye Jethani takes us deep into the surprising history of 20th-century Christian political involvement. It’s a fascinating journey you won’t want to miss!
In 1976 Ford Adminstration threatened to revoke Bob Jones’s University’s Non-profit status, which started the religious right.
Background: 22:55
Bob Jones: 40:55