Sunday, April 27, 2014

Not On Your Side, Debi


Michael & Debi Pearl
This week, embattled IBLP founder Bill Gothard received aid from an unexpected quarter--homeschool mom and popular author Debi Pearl.

In the past, self-confessed "old hillbilly" Michael Pearl has sometimes himself been critical of Bill Gothard for helping create the excesses of the homeschooling patriarchy movement--a highly ironic observation coming from the father of patriarchs! But this week, Debi came out swinging against IBLP victims who have gone public with their stories on "Recovering Grace" and other websites.

Beginning her post with the question, "Whose side are you on?" Debi attacks those who have dared to publish accounts of how Gothard lied to, molested, or otherwise mistreated them. According to Debi, these "critics" are "bitter" (that's the ultimate pejorative in IBLP circles, remember?), they are "foolish", and they have joined a "Satanic attack on God's people".

On the one hand, Debi describes Gothard as a "man who put his whole life into doing a work for God". On the other, she denies having any connection to IBLP's beleaguered "ministry" which, she claims, helped "set thousands of people free from bitterness".

Gothard and the Pearls have, in fact, had a symbiotic relationship for years. They attended a Basic Seminar in the late 1970's. IBLP promoted and distributed the Pearls' parenting book To Train Up a Child. The website for IBLP Australia still offers at least two of the Pearls' numerous books. At least one of the Pearl girls worked at Gothard's orphanage and training center (South Campus) in Indianapolis and the Pearls kept several Russian orphans at their home over the summer. Michael solicited donations for IBLP from his followers. Several of the Pearl children's spouses were raised in Gothard's ATI program. (I say "spouses", but Michael Pearl made it clear years ago that his children do not need any such thing as marriage licenses. A ceremony and their parents' blessing is apparently good enough.*)

Besides being given to racist and homophobic remarks, the Pearls are somewhat obsessed with sex. It gives Michael hope to envision homeschoolers "outbreeding" progressives. He counsels the wife of an angry man to "make love" to improve her husband's mood. Debi often suggests that being sexually available is a wife's primary responsibility. Michael even wrote a book on erotic pleasure for fundamentalist Christian couples.

And then there are the Pearls' highly controversial child training methods, which have now been linked to three child deaths. There is currently a petition circulating to ask Amazon.com to remove To Train Up a Child from its website in the interest of protecting children from parental abuse. According to a BBC report last year, To Train Up a Child has sold over 800,000 copies and boxes of the Pearls' books have been shipped for free to U.S. troops overseas. "No Greater Joy" pulls in over $1 million a year, with Debi functioning as "the financial brain of the company", according to her son Gabriel.

Michael is a renowned knife-thrower
Last year, Rachel Held Evans wrote a blunt piece about Michael and Debi Pearl and their abusive "ministry". First, she quoted Pearl himself describing how to handle a rebellious child:
"If you have to sit on him to spank him then do not hesitate. And hold him there until he is surrendered. Prove that you are bigger, tougher, more patiently enduring and are unmoved by his wailing. Defeat him totally."  -Michael Pearl
And Evans added her own warning:
But it’s not just children who suffer from No Greater Joy's ministries. When I was conducting research for A Year of Biblical Womanhood, I read Debi Pearl’s popular book, Created to Be His Helpmeet…which I threw across the room a total of seven times.

The writing is awful, the biblical exegesis deplorable, but what troubles me the most is that the book reads like a manual for developing abused wife syndrome.

In their story "The Real Michael Pearl" a few years ago, Religious Child Maltreatment pointed out the peculiar rush Pearl appears to derive from seeing small children spanked into silence, and his sense that he has "come upon the holy grail of childrearing".
To Pearl, and many parents who follow his teachings, the primary goal of parenting is not to support children by fulfilling their needs to feel safe and experience appropriate autonomy, but to control children.
In April 2011, Cindy Kunsman, a nurse explained the physical dangers of Pearl's teachings in a post on the No Longer Quivering blog. Homeschoolers Anonymous reposted the piece in September of last year:
Due to the severity of the spankings with [Michael Pearl's recommended] plumbing line, both Zariah and Lydia Schatz suffered renal failure because of rhabdomyolysis.

...[W]e may never learn the details about new cases of Pearl-related kidney disease unless it is reported by the families of the survivors.
Kunsman went into much more detail about rhabdomyolysis in another post at Under Much Grace. This article convinced me that the Pearls are not just cranks, they are dangerous.
If the children are aggressively spanked on a chronic basis, ...it is possible that chronic damage could occur in children that is not bad enough to cause kidney failure but bad enough to cause damage. Unless a child undergoes blood tests at some point, “renal insufficiency” (inefficient kidney function that is lower than a normal, healthy level) could be present and no one would be the wiser. It is conceivable that at least some children have experienced some damage, but not enough to produce symptoms of kidney failure.
In October 2011 Rachel Stone wrote about Pearl in for Christianity Today. Her article included sadistic passages from To Train Up a Child and described the Pearls' methods as "a program of calculated cruelty":
One child suffering under this training is too many; it's my hope that the Pearls will be widely discredited, and soon.
In a November 2011 post, a Chicago blogger pointed out that the popular Duggar family, who are still members of Gothard's homeschooling cult, not only endorse but actively promote the Pearls' materials on their own website:
www.NoGreaterJoy.org  Features some of the finest in family-friendly, value-based books, audios, videos, and articles on parenting, husband and wife relationships, ministry and more! Materials include, To Train Up A Child, Jumping Ship, Created To Be His Help Meet, Preparing To Be A Help Meet, Only Men, the Good and Evil graphic novel in over 20 languages and a FREE bi-monthly magazine.
Samantha at Defeating the Dragons and Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism have both written boldly about the dangerous and abusive teachings of Michael and Debi Pearl. Author and mother of five Elizabeth Esther, whom Anderson Cooper interviewed alongside Michael Pearl late in 2011, has been both outspoken and tearful about the horrors perpetrated against children when parents follow Pearl's advice. You can watch the interview for yourself here.

2011 New York Times article quotes Michael likening childrearing to training "stubborn mules" and explores links between child deaths and the teachings in Pearl's book.
Dr. Frances Chalmers, a pediatrician who examined Hana’s death for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, said of the Pearl methods: “My fear is that this book, while perhaps well intended, could easily be misinterpreted and could lead to what I consider significant abuse.”

This video shows Michael and Debi Pearl in action at a child training seminar, apparently at the Cane Creek church that meets on Pearl's property in a Tennessee hollow. Michael would much prefer to be known through his books than through these clips, but there he is on his own turf:



With his wife smiling and nodding beside him, Michael Pearl laughingly advocates cruelty against children. He encourages hitting children, even infants, with implements. He recommends luring young children with tempting objects and then swatting them to teach them obedience and self-denial. He teaches parents to instill fear in their children on purpose. Michael Pearl seems to get off on asserting his domination of a much younger, smaller human being:
" A proper spanking leaves children without breath to complain. If he should tell you that the spanking makes him madder, spank him again."
The Pearls have long pointed to the supposed happiness of their own trained and obedient children as evidence of the efficacy of their methods. However, Michael and Debi have not taken well to being called out by adults whose parents followed this couple's advice. Earlier this month, Michael became defensive against vocal homeschool graduates such as those of us who post at "Homeschoolers Anonymous" and posted his response at "No Greater Joy". But even as he blasts those who speak the truth about their experiences, Michael must admit that homeschooling is no panacea:
"Not every homeschool experience will be a great success. Some will be total failures; others will be good but not altogether good. In some cases, out of six children a family may lose one or two to the world, but they will have two or three that are exceptional human beings."
Alas for a child who turns out to be a less-than-exceptional human being! Pearl chalks such failures up to satan at work and recommends people buy more of his books, just to be safe.

I really should not be surprised to see Debi Pearl defending Bill Gothard and his ministry against what she considers defamation. But I look at her daughters, their body language, and I wonder what stories they could tell and what they would say about their famous parents if they felt completely safe.

It speaks volumes that the Pearls feel compelled to hitch their ministry to Gothard's falling star.


* * * * * * *


*Michael Pearl on marriage licenses:
"None of my daughters or their husbands asked the state of Tennessee for permission to marry. They did not yoke themselves to government. It was a personal, private covenant, binding them together forever—until death. So when the sodomites have come to share in the state marriage licenses, which will eventually be the law, James and Shoshanna will not be in league with those perverts. And, while I am on the subject, there will come a time when faithful Christians will either revoke their state marriage licenses and establish an exclusively one man-one woman covenant of marriage, or, they will forfeit the sanctity of their covenant by being unequally yoked together with perverts."

5 comments:

  1. What she is tryign to say is that these "bitter" people are also coming down against her, so she has to assume they are bitter and have no fonded truth. Also, did you notice they keep blaming the devil? Oh pleaz

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  2. This is truly horrible and frightening. I lived and worked in rural Tennessee for three years, and while there are many good people there, there seems to still be a some that fall into the Pearls' category. My impression was that they are clinging to the 1800's homesteader ways, or at least what they believe homestead life was like then, including treating children like this. Many girls marry very young, 15 or 16. I saw a lot of this because I worked for a state welfare agency. Education is not considered important. But, as I said, it is not the majority of people there, but I still saw a sizeable minority with this mindset, and usually they were the ones our agency had to deal with a lot. Scary thing is, they tended to be very politically active.

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  3. Think about what Michael Pearl is teaching with No Marriage License. In most states, there is no common law marriage. So no matter how long the couple resides together, they will never be husband and wife. She can't collect social security benefits in case of death because you have to be married legally with a marriage license. It makes the woman have nothing because she is nothing but a live in lover. God commands us to live under the laws of the land as long as they don't cause us to sin. It's a big deal to disobey them, and Michael Pearl is promoting that.
    What about what the Bible says in Titus 3:1 (ESV) Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, or in Romans 13:1-5 (ESV) Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience.
    Michael Pearl is neglecting to read the Bible and following it. He is not teaching the truth. He is also hurting a lot of women, children and men with this false doctrine. Think about what happens when someone dies, leaves the other spouse, etc. There is no commitment and no accountability with Michael Pearl's view of marriage.

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    Replies
    1. There is no governmental law that says people have to be married (as you can see by society). Marriage comes from God, not from the State.

      What false doctrine is he teaching?

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  4. It's strange that they don't believe in standard legal marriage but always scream "God hates divorce."

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