A *Real* Investigation into IBLP

Thoroughness:

  Knowing what factors will diminish the effectiveness of my work or words if neglected

--Bill Gothard

Bill Gothard's buddy David Gibbs, Jr. has now completed his "investigation" into allegations made against Gothard by former IBLP staff members. According to the IBLP board earlier this week,

"...the Board sought the facts through a confidential and thorough review process conducted by outside legal counsel. Many people were interviewed, including former Board members, current and past staff members, current and past administrators, parents, and family members.

"At this point, based upon those willing to be interviewed, no criminal activity has been discovered."

But according to the team at Recovering Grace,

"...not one of the women who have shared their stories on our site were personally contacted by Gibbs Jr. or his investigative team, including Charlotte, who alleged molestation."

Perhaps Gibbs Jr. needs to brush up on his Character Qualities.

It would seem that Gibbs' investigation focused narrowly on certain allegations of sexual impropriety (some of which Gothard has admitted to, resulting in his resignation). However, this is but the sensational tip of the iceberg and ignores the broad scope of hurtful, unethical, and even illegal activities that have damaged numerous lives associated with the Institute in Basic Life Principles.

Gothard promoted his organization as "Giving the world a new approach to life" and following God's "non-optional principles". A ministry that prides itself on being "under authority" should have nothing to fear from the truth. And yet, the testimonies of some former students and staff members paint a disturbing picture. Some of these stories of life under the auspices of the Institute have been published on Recovering Grace. Others have been shared more privately. Some victims are willing to have their names attached to their experiences while others prefer anonymity, or pseudonyms.

Each of the incidents outlined below could likely be explained away on its own. But taken together they suggest a pattern that I believe is worthy of deeper examination. The Board of IBLP can write, "We dedicate ourselves to help build up families and individuals," but if these situations actually took place, the Institute's so-called "ministry" is a farce, with or without Gothard, and IBLP should be shut down to prevent further abuse of power.


A real investigation of IBLP might look into allegations of the following:


OSHA and other code violations at all locations: Indianapolis and South Campus, IN; Oak Brook, IL; Oklahoma City and Eagle Springs (Skiatook), OK; Northwoods (Watersmeet) and Flint, MI; Big Sandy, TX;  Little Rock, Elms Plantation (Pine Bluff), and Eagle Mountain (Berryville), AR; Nashville (Madison) TN; and others

For example: 

• Lack of permits: illegal remodeling, dredging a lake without a permit, improper electrical wiring
• Poor fire safety: hiding fire extinguishers and fire pulls behind paintings or décor items; silencing a monitored fire alarm to avoid disrupting conferences, not reporting fires to fire department
• Improper supervision: letting teens work on upper-story building exterior or fire escapes without safety harness
• Injuries: electrical shocks from unsafe practices, minors injured while operating power tools, carbon monoxide poisoning of kitchen volunteers
• Faulty elevators
• Violations of residential occupancy limits

Prayer rooms (especially at 2820 N. Meridian, Indianapolis): 

• locking minors in solitary confinement without notifying parents
• locking minors in solitary without access to a restroom
• withholding food or medication
• spanking minors without parental consent

Failure to protect children by reporting abuse:

• failure to report sex acts with or molestation or attempted sexual molestation of minors in IBLP's care at the ITC (Rodger Gergeni)
• failure to report sexual abuse of minors in ATI families (Bill Gothard)
• pressure on homeschooled victims not to report physically abusive parents
• shaming victims of sexual assault and neglecting to counsel them to contact police
• pressuring ATI moms not to divorce abusive husbands who posed a danger to the children

Educational neglect: 

• failure to educate "homeschooled" minors who were sent to IBLP centers by their parents
• using A.C.E. curriculum for children sent by the courts
• violation of child labor laws
• children (9-10 years old) working in the kitchen or cleaning bathrooms, sometimes rising as early as 4 or 5 a.m. to work
• unpaid teenagers working 12-18 hour days in the hotels (cooking, industrial laundry, cleaning hotel rooms and public restrooms)
• selling teens unaccredited degrees (Telos.edu) without adequate explanation of their value

Forced fasting: 

• on weekends, designated prayer days, and other times when meal preparation was inconvenient
• though some children were sent there by the state and other students paid for room and board, only two meals were served on Saturday and only supper on Sunday
• sometimes only two meals a day were served for weeks in a row
• requiring students to turn in care packages
• also mandatory weight checks (Weigh Down) for staff women, involuntary diets, forced exercise
• failure to recognize eating disorders such as anorexia (even when girls were passing out)

Medical neglect: 

• withholding or confiscating prescription medication (including antidepressants, an asthma inhaler, post-surgery pain medication)
• refusal to get prompt medical treatment for severe burns, broken bones, concussions, pneumonia, collapsed lung, high fevers, torn ligaments, acute food poisoning--many former students trace chronic health problems to untreated conditions that arose at training centers
• treating injuries with alternative remedies such as sugar water injections (Dr. Hemwall)
• letting doctors or dentists with revoked licenses treat students at training centers

Campaign ethics: 

• sending youth to campaign for Indianapolis judicial and mayoral candidates
• providing private services to a public official (Lt. Gov. Mary Fallin) in Oklahoma

Employer issues: 

• pressuring employees not to record overtime on time sheets
• advising employees that submitted overtime hours would not be paid
• mandatory unpaid evening work teams for employees (washing dishes, cleaning carpets, scrubbing bathrooms)
• paying less than minimum wage, paying minimum wage minus "rent"
• firing employees without due process or notice
• refusal to pay workers’ compensation
• instructing employee to lie to hospital staff to protect the "ministry"
• praising employees who gave up their paycheck to become volunteers
• allowing children under 16 to work more than twenty hours a week
• sexual harassment of junior staff or students by adult staff

ALERT: 

• physical abuse, medical neglect, solitary confinement, unsafe equipment, psychological abuse
• refusal to contact parents regarding medical emergencies
• keeping four teens tied together by the feet for an entire day, resulting in injury
• a unit of under-dressed teen boys standing outdoors in sub-freezing temperatures at night until one confessed to a minor infraction
• disregard for basic safety precautions

Mistreating Russian orphans in Moscow and at Indianapolis South Campus:

• foster families spanking children and even teens
• children spanked for minor misdeeds
• English-speaker spanking Russian child without an interpreter present
• withholding meals from children for disciplinary purposes or feeding them only dry rolled oats and water
• child labor (reports of children required to clean toilets at 5 a.m.)
• using orphans to "encourage" financial donors

Restricted communication from training centers: 

• limited access to public phones, email, fax, or internet
• reading students' outgoing or incoming mail, confiscating mail or making students open mail in presence of a leader
• censoring outgoing email
• telling students what to tell (or not tell) their parents about situations at the training center
• limiting who a student or employee was allowed to correspond with outside
• restricting conversation or interaction between fellow students 

Psychological abuse: 

• lengthy, repetitive, or middle-of-the-night “counseling” sessions (berating and brainwashing)
• restricting sleep
• piping loud music into bedrooms
• assigning staff to night duties on consecutive nights (along with their day jobs)
• requiring student to wash clothing by hand until she had earned "privilege" of using the laundry facilities; requiring staff to recite extensive Bible passages before breaking a fast
• confiscating clocks
• hours of forced labor intended to "break will" or "conquer rebellion"

Violations of privacy: 

• not permitting students to take bathroom breaks or use the restroom alone, or with the door closed
• confiscating personal items such as clothing, music, photographs, medication, and cell phones

Miscellaneous: 

• sending unreported cash through customs on staff member's person
• exaggerating or misrepresenting facts in newsletters
• promotional video about ALERT describing a pilot “rescue” omitted the fact that it was ALERT’s own plane that crashed while taking aerial photos of the property)
• personal gifts of cash or clothing from Gothard to his favorites
• discrimination against males who appeared "too effeminate" and females who were overweight or not "feminine" enough
• photoshopping hair, clothing, and landscaping for newsletter photos
• selling overpriced plant kits to ATI families under fraudulent advertising
• serving old (long-expired) donated food or insect-infested grain
• transferring minors across state lines between "training opportunities" without parental permission or notification
• insisting that Character First was not affiliated with Gothard

With former ATI students and IBLP staff reporting incidents like these, is it any surprise that so few choose to use Gothard's materials with their own children?


Note:
IBLP has also had operations in Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Romania, Mongolia, and Mexico.

Guest Post: Memories of Knoxville

So happy to introduce a guest post from my husband! 

Chris devoted five years of his adult life,  from 1994 to 1999, to Bill Gothard's cult, working at IBLP training centers in Moscow, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, and Oak Brook, Illinois. 

We have been unpacking a lot of memories this month. This is one of many that was jarred loose. 

In 1997, I was living in a sort of lock-down facility for juvenile delinquents in Indianapolis, Indiana. I wasn't delinquent; I was supposed to be a mentor. But this was in no way a normal facility. It was an old hotel that a religious organization bought and remodeled with our slave labor. (We paid to be there!) Then they convinced some judges to assign a few young offenders to our facility. Each of these teens was paired with one of us. We lived together nearly 24/7 and we were supposed to teach them wisdom, character, etc. 

IBLP had a large home schooling program (ATI)  and every summer they had a week-long conference in Knoxville, Tennessee where families from all over the country would gather on the University of Tennessee campus to hear speakers drone on about how bad rock music was, or how great breasts were, er, I mean, breastfeeding was, or tell us how to avoid the "high places" of modern education by basically screwing over our teenagers. Apparently homeschool parents aren't supposed to educate their children about reality.

In June that year, I got to go to this conference, with the juvenile delinquents from the Indianapolis center. I really have no clue why leadership felt the need to send these kids to a conference for homeschool families, but it was what it was.

A few days before we went down we were "given the opportunity" to go out into the neighborhood around the center in inner-city Indianapolis and clean up litter in the streets and vacant lots. We worked at this for a few hours, and then we went to some church for lunch. I peed, washed my hands, and ate. Later, we loaded up the vans and drove down to Tennessee for the conference. 

On my first day in Knoxville I found out why you wash your hands before you pee if you suspect any contact with poison ivy. Because I washed my hands, they were not affected, and I had long pants and shirt sleeves on, so I had no poison ivy outbreak anywhere else--just my crotch!

We stayed in old dormitories on the university campus, without air conditioning. In the June sun, the rooms were stiflingly hot and we had to have the windows open. Outside the window, about three feet out, was a road, and on this road was constant traffic, car horns and fire trucks--big hook and ladder trucks--rumbling back and forth every fifteen minutes or so with their sirens wailing. If that wasn't enough, the car alarms in the parking garage would go off periodically.

I lay there in bed in the stifling still heat night after night,with my crotch burning and itching and the constant noise outside, just staring at the ceiling, hoping for . . . and then eventually exhaustion take over and I would startle awake an hour or two later to find everything had gone deathly quiet.

For some reason the street outside would just die sometime between midnight and 1 a.m. It was almost spooky. I'd get up and walk to the window and be amazed at how still it was. Where had everybody gone?

But then I had had just enough sleep for my brain to pay attention to the heat and the itching again. So I got to stare at the ceiling in quiet for hours drifting back to sleep only an hour or two before the sun came up and rallied us to our feet again.

The rooms were gross, by my standards. Someone had apparently come in with a power sprayer and painted white over everything, including the dust and dirt. The showers were small and moldy, and it was an unpleasant job to try to get oneself clean enough every morning to start sweating the day out in a dark suit.

One solace in all of this is that we sometimes got to eat at the cafeteria at the arena where the conferences were held. The food wasn't great, but it was cafeteria-style, so we could pick our poison.

One day I sat with a friend of mine. We got along well, but could only talk once or twice a month because our assigned delinquents were not allowed to talk to each other. So we treasured our rare moments together.

He told me once about his grandfather, who as a kid had gone out into the woods with some friends and they all cut off one of their toes, because it seemed like a cool idea at the time. That is the kind of stock some of us came from.

I remember both of us getting these ridiculously enormous strawberry-flavored milk shakes. We sat over them and talked about how many terrible chemicals must be in them, how they probably had nothing related to milk in them, how they were probably just big vats of artificial plastic something. I guess that conversation was as close as we could muster to cutting off our toes.

We spent much time walking up and down the hills of Knoxville in the sweltering heat, in suits and ties. Going to our rooms, staring at the ceiling at night, walking to meals. And then the purpose, the event, was to sit for hours in the back of a stadium watching some old man in another navy suit go on about... well, whatever. Maybe about how America was going to hell, but we were going to save it... or something.

Then one evening, some overweight blowhard was going on and on about God or something when he just fell over. He fell hard and even from the back we could hear his body hit the stage. Part of me thought maybe it was a stunt, and everyone kind of froze, but a guy that big couldn't pull off a stunt like that without hurting himself. Some guys on the front row jumped on stage to practice their CPR training on a real cadaver and the rest of us sat back kind of stunned, and hoping this meant we could leave early.

Mickey Bonner's last moments

One of the guys we had brought from Indianapolis was saying, "I knew that dude was going to have a heart attack. Did you see how his face was turning completely red and then blanching white, over and over while he was talking?" Wow, who knew this delinquent was paying so much attention to the speaker?

Eventually someone got to the podium and asked us all to kneel and pray. Everyone got up and turned around to pray at their seats. I'm sure I did, too, but I had to wonder, What do we pray for a dead man? Maybe I just prayed for my crotch to stop burning and itching so badly.

Eventually an ambulance arrived and they took the body away. He was quite dead, probably before he hit the floor. Honestly, he wasn't doing much better when he was speaking. What was the point? What was it all about? Why the hell?

So that was Knoxville '97: poison ivy, living in a noisy shit hole, while we watched people talk themselves to death on stage.

P.S. from Jeri: That night was the only time either of us have seen someone die. Something like that sticks with you. And, strangely, we were both in the auditorium that night, with no idea that we would be introduced a year later. But more on that in a post soon!

Homeschooling and College: My Experience

Leaders in the Homeschool Movement spend an exorbitant amount of time selling their rhetoric in words and in materials (books, videos, blog articles) sharing what they believe to be the ultimate role of women as homemaker: how to be respectful and submissive wives, how to cook, sew, how to raise children, etc.

If you are a young girl raised in this environment, your know your lot in life is: get married to your approved husband, have many children, teach your children at home, and hopefully, your children will do the same.

...The ultimate goal in the Homeschool Movement is to be fruitful and multiply and “take dominion” of the world. 

--"When Homeschooled Daughters are Trapped" by Julie Anne Smith, originally published on Spiritual Sounding Board. 

I remember the feeling of being trapped. I had been taught by Bill Gothard and Inge Cannon that college was both dangerous and unnecessary. I already knew it required a large investment of time and money, neither of which I believed I had. I had no job, and when I did get one much later, I was still dependent on my parents for transportation. In addition, I was always expected to help with both regular and irregular chores to keep the household and Dad's business running. Dad paid us to work for him, but the hours and the projects were subject to change according to what he needed. If he needed help, it wasn't presented as an optional job. Neither could I "turn down" a sewing project for Mom, even one she was offering to pay for.

Mary Pride, Vickie Farris, Elisabeth Elliot, and Nancy Campbell were certain my calling was to be a submissive wife and a full-time mother. Numerous writers were telling me that my dad should help select a future husband for me. But I was in my twenties now, and no young men were lining up for the privilege. I'd never even been asked out, never held hands with a boy, never talked to a guy my age on the phone. I was certainly raising babies, but they weren't mine.

At ATI conferences we would listen to "testimonies" of young adults who had left their college studies to return home and happily study the Bible with their younger siblings under the authority of their parents. We would expose ourselves to Satan's temptations if we left our parents' protection to live on a campus. We might even lose our faith. We would be corrupted by humanism and "vain philosophies". We might even succumb to "a dating spirit".

Besides, even without degrees we would have employers coming to us because of our excellent character, worth so much more than mere knowledge. Anything we needed to know, we could learn from masters through on-the-job apprenticeships. To a teenager whose primary outside contact was church on Sunday morning, it sounded so good in theory. I did some volunteer work, but no one came knocking in search of my great talents.

Years after I should have graduated from high school, Gothard's organization launched an alternative to college: a correspondence school by which one could study law from home. Loving the idea of having initials after my name, I was eager to apply to Oak Brook College of Law. But it turned out one had to have some college credits! Or, instead, they would accept a GED certificate and satisfactory CLEP scores in three subjects. So Dad got on the phone and made the arrangements. In January, I got my GED (at a facility for dropouts and delinquents) and sat for the necessary CLEP exams at the our community college.

In April 1995, the week before the Oklahoma City bombing, I spent a week at Gothard's Dallas Training Center doing "orientation". I remember being surprised that the young man picking me up at the airport was alone.(At nineteen years old, I'd never been alone in a vehicle with a single man before. Unspeakable things might happen!) The class was predominantly male, but there were a few other women. All the professors we met were male.

The dean, Roger Magnuson, kicked off the week by warning us of the spiritual perils of our course of study. He urged us to halt our studying if we sensed "our delight in spiritual things diminishing". I remember something about the school not being unaccredited "yet", but I had no idea what that meant. No one had ever explained regional accreditation to me, not even my dad who had a degree from Penn State. After all the introductions and preliminaries were over, I lugged my new books back to Michigan. For the next year and a half logged four hours of study a day, often falling asleep on my bed as I slogged through the heavy, sometimes bone-dry texts.

It was lonely as hell. I rarely got to converse with another student over the phone, and never talked to a professor. It would be two more years before we even got email access at home. I mailed in assignments, got grades back, and took my midterm and final exams at a proctor's house across town. Despite being a devout Catholic, she was an avid fan of Gothard ("He's the most Catholic man I know!") and did her best to spoil and encourage me when I came over. I was grateful to her, but it wasn't enough. All this time I continued to pull more than my weight helping around the house, tasked with keeping the bills paid, the dishes washed, diapers changed, the kitchen clean, and whatever else Mom needed me to do.

When my mother had a nervous breakdown two months after delivering her tenth baby, I was left in charge of the house, and meals, and seven younger siblings--for a week.  I kept assuring myself God would take care of everything, that he had things under control. But nothing was under control! And I was desperately trying to prepare for the state "Baby Bar" exam in San Francisco which would determine whether I could continue my studies or not.

When Mom returned home from a week discussing the Bible with a pastor in Indianapolis (the "counseling" she got at Gothard's training center), we all walked around on eggshells for weeks. There was The Knife incident. I was anxious and depressed and cried a lot in secret. I had trouble sleeping. I got sick. My appetite diminished. I felt like my whole life was in danger of crashing in pieces around me.

I feared Mom would fall apart again. I feared I would fail the exam and Dad's money, not to mention the last eighteen months of my life, would have been wasted. I feared turning into a steely woman lawyer in a boxy navy suit. I feared turning into a sexy female attorney in a fuchsia suit, wowing the judge with her perfume instead of her brains. I wished I had given up the notion of law school long ago!

I took the exam. Mom stabilized. While I waited for the test results, I sewed dresses for my little sisters and did a lot of thinking. My friends were starting to get married. In my terrible loneliness, rocking my infant sister, I longed for a man of my own, someone to embrace and love me. Was marriage in God's plan for me? Was I going to sew dresses for little girls of my own? Of what use would my studies be then?

I could not envision how a career in Constitutional Law could be compatible with marriage and homemaking. I had never actually met a female with a law degree. I had only observed them from a distance on visits to the county courthouse. It was understood in our circles that marriage meant choosing to be a homemaker.  Dad would never approve my marriage if he thought I intended to be a lousy wife!

By the time I heard that I'd passed the Baby Bar, I knew that I was done with Oak Brook College of Law. I did not have the emotional stamina to keep homeschooling myself through college for three more years! And even if I did finish, the school could not assure me that I would be qualified to practice law in any jurisdiction outside California. Since my home was in Michigan, and I had always lived with my parents, it was difficult to visualize a future forging a life for myself across the continent!

But I was soon sure I did not want to remain a stay-at-home daughter indefinitely. A year after taking the Baby Bar, I took the chance to work for Gothard's cult out-of-state. When that didn't work out and I found myself back home, I explored other options. I got an acceptable part-time job (I could wear modest skirts and the office manager agreed to keep the radio off on the days I worked) and started saving money--while still keeping up with chores and responsibilities at home. In a tentative act of independence, I applied for a temporary volunteer position with an evangelical missionary organization, telling them I was willing to go to Peru, Guatemala, or the Philippines.

And at age 24 I enrolled in a summer university linguistics program in North Dakota, taking real college courses for the very first time. Experiencing my first classroom (with real desks!) since first grade, I thrived! I reveled in the lectures, the labs, the camaraderie, the independent study, the collaboration with classmates, and the exams. Especially the exams. Like Anne of Green Gables, I loved the sweet taste of being at the head of a class instead of an isolated self-taught learner!

It would be another decade before I learned the difference between the ten "credits" I earned from Oak Brook College of Law and the ten credits I earned that summer from the University of North Dakota.

In the interim, a lot of life happened: marriage, babies, homeschooling. And eventually, enrolling in classes in community college. How strange to walk through those doors and sit elbow-to-elbow with kids nearly twenty years my junior. Every time I fill out a survey and select the "some college" option, I wonder, "What if I had spent my single adult years getting an education?"

As the oldest daughter, I was the guinea pig in many ways. Several of those now-grown baby sisters have sprinted past me in the race to an education. Yet, the last time I talked to my dad about the courses I was pursuing, his cool response was, "But I hope that being a wife and mother is still your main priority." It felt like a jab, a reminder that I was stepping outside the circle where I was supposed to stay and be happy. Perhaps he didn't mean it that way.

My children see Chris and I working on college assignments week after week and they can't help but see that we value learning. Because as it turns out, Gothard and his friends were wrong--outside their fantasy land, having or not having a traditional college degree can make a world of difference.

A Snake for a Fish: My life following Gothard's principles

There has been a lot of buzz this week about Bill Gothard. This article, which I wrote for Homeschoolers Anonymous, first appeared on the HA website on December 17, 2013. 

It describes my experience as a child enrolled in Gothard's homeschooling program, as a teen participating in his cult, and as a young adult rejected by the man I'd been taught to follow.

“So I tell you, ask, and God will give to you. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will open for you. Yes, everyone who asks will receive. The one who searches will find. And everyone who knocks will have the door opened. If your children ask for a fish, which of you would give them a snake instead? Or, if your children ask for an egg, would you give them a scorpion? Even though you are bad, you know how to give good things to your children.” 

Luke 11:9-13a (NCV)

*****

My parents had only been married five years when they attended their first Youth Conflicts seminar: 40 hours of lectures over six days. Living in a new city with three preschoolers but few friends, they were lonely, stressed, and probably sleep-deprived. They were eager to be “real” Christians, to differentiate from the mainstream Protestantism of their parents, to keep their marriage intact, and to raise the best family possible. They went searching for truth, and Bill Gothard and his Institute offered them an ideal, peppered with scripture references. Surely this was bread indeed!

They became avid Gothard fans, my parents. Not into sports or other strong alliances, their allegiance was to God and the Bible. Where an extreme sports fan might display the mascot or colors of their favorite team, we had an enormous sign over our garage proclaiming “Jesus is Lord” in hand-painted crimson letters on a white ground. And they were always eager to invite people to attend IBLP seminars.

It is difficult to tease apart the teachings my parents first heard from Gothard from those they picked up elsewhere.

Suffice it to say, Bill reinforced much that they had already accepted and added plenty more of his own. When they decided to enroll in the new Advanced Training Institute of America (ATIA) in 1987, I was not enthusiastic. I had had enough of Bill Gothard’s anecdotes and teachings, which Dad often reenacted with our Fisher-Price people, from his notes.

I knew Gothard was behind Dad throwing a rock through the face of our television. And making me wear dresses instead of jeans and my favorite pink shorts. And not letting us eat sausage anymore. And our sleepy pre-breakfast attempts to hunt for “nuggets of wisdom” while reading Psalms and Proverbs aloud to each other. And selling our big, new house with four bathrooms because having a mortgage was unbiblical. Instead, we moved to a rented farmhouse with its very own cattle lot and temperamental plumbing. The good things my parents wanted us to have were intangible: good character, the blessing of God, spiritual protection, true wisdom, eternal life. Everything else was worthless when compared with these.

I had already adapted to homeschooling, using workbooks we ordered from conservative religious publishers. Mom had her hands full with potty-training, breastfeeding, checking papers, feeding five kids, and teaching my little brothers to read. I was largely on my own. My subject assignments were written on cards for each day of the week, and once they were completed I had the rest of the day to do what I liked. It was far different from my two years in public school, but I didn’t mind.

Now, everything changed.

For at least an hour every morning, month after month for years, my poor mother tried to study the Sermon on the Mount with us via the Wisdom Booklets sent from ATI Headquarters. We reacted to the questions—which seemed designed to manipulate or to trip us up—and even more to the answers that made no sense. We knew the Bible well, and trusted it; this “material” coming from Gothard was something else entirely. Thus began endless debates and arguments. Mom identified personally with the ATI program and felt her authority was being challenged when we criticized Bill Gothard’s [mis]interpretation of scripture and the “educational” projects we were required to complete together: learning to judge other people based on appearances and reading sermons about what wretched sinners we were (Charles Finney), what a monster God was (Jonathan Edwards), and how puny our minds were compared to his (A.W. Tozer).

With the exception of grammar, school wasn’t a lot of fun after that.

It didn’t feel like “school”, with every aspect of my life (social life, entertainment, exposure to music & literature, transportation & shopping, academic grades, political bent, bedtime, menu & meal portions, time in the shower, chore list, sex education, and religious guidance) all in the hands of the same two people who had been entrusted with my soul by God himself. I argued with Mom a lot, and she called me a scorner and I got plenty of spankings and I blamed Bill Gothard for making all of us miserable. I hit puberty and had new questions, new interests, new desires, and new guilt. I was desperately lonely and looked forward to summer when I could spend more time with other girls my age.

After two years of protesting and challenging, I was tired of feeling like an outsider in my own home. I really did want to be on God’s side, whatever that was. My parents noticed that my resistance was crumbling. They decided it was time for me to attend my first Seminar. I sat beside my very pregnant mother and dutifully raced to fill in all the blanks in my workbook. When we closed our eyes and Gothard asked us to raise our hands for each of his Seventeen Basic Commitments, I was keenly aware of my mom’s presence. Would it be possible for her not to know if I had raised my hand or kept it in my lap?

I didn’t follow everything Gothard said—some of his euphemisms went over my head—but I made a lot of commitments. I gave God my right to have friends. And I was brought many degrees nearer to the inner circle of the Institute in Basic Life Principles cult.

I was looking for a fish, but had unknowingly grasped a snake.

Over the next two years, I was thoroughly assimilated. Pressured by guilt within and parents without, I gave up my own interests and desires and adopted the cult mentality. I accepted, until I truly believed, that my parents were God’s voice to me. I dressed in navy skirts and white blouses whenever I could (the dress code for Mr. Gothard’s staff), grew my hair according to the style Gothard recommended, and listened to cassettes from IBLP headquarters while I did my chores. I now tolerated the Wisdom Booklets, though the inconsistencies and poor writing still bothered me. And, to keep my Walkman, I even agreed to follow Gothard’s rules about avoiding rock music, though I still puzzled over how my favorite Christian tunes could be tools of Satan.

My dad led us through the "Financial Freedom" seminar, an IBLP program taught by Jim Sammons, a successful Texas real estate developer who served on Gothard's Board of Directors and was deeply involved in the ATI program. Dad also took groups to the Basic Seminar each year, and taught the "Follow-up Course" at our church to deepen the hold Gothard's principles had on our lives.

We attended several ATI conferences in Knoxville, TN—pep rallies where we dressed in navy suits despite the July heat and heard about the latest nations begging for instruction in good character. Knoxville conferences were exciting for teens because there were thousands of others who also did Wisdom Booklets and wore long dresses and had umpteen siblings and knew what their motivational gift was.

With a grueling schedule and impossible logistics, the week was an effective brainwashing tool.

There was a choir for students who wanted (or were forced) to participate, an orchestra, and special music performances on pianos, strings, handbells, and more. Families in matching clothes sang harmony together, dozens of “reversal babies” were put on display, and the ALERT team made emotional mothers cry by rappelling from the ceiling in their uniforms unfurling an enormous American flag.

One year we all clapped when a speaker announced that Clarence Thomas had been nominated to the Supreme Court. He was young and conservative, we were told, so we rejoiced. In another session, a pastor with three grown daughters (Gary Fraley) outlined a model daily breastfeeding schedule while we all took notes. A woman with no children of her own (Inge Pohl Cannon) offered a hypothetical schedule for homeschooling a brood of five. Jim Logan made us shiver with tales of his encounters with talking demons. David Barton fired rapid-fire historical quotes at us to convince us that we could take America back for God.

In the separate meetings for students (where 12- to 28 -year-olds sat segregated by gender), we listened to Gothard tell stories about his girlfriends in high school and college. We raised our hands to commit not to marry a divorced man, and to postpone dating so we could serve the Lord longer instead. Gorgeous young men and women gave “testimonies” about quitting college to come home and learn with their families, about submitting to parents and not keeping secrets from them, about getting along with their siblings, and about putting off marriage in favor of ministry. Gothard showed us film clips about England’s Civil War, warning the girls to close their eyes if the violence was too much. “Fellas, drink it in,” he said.

It wasn’t long until I was teaching Gothard’s materials myself–to children in Russia and in the United States. I memorized Bible passages by the chapter. I completed my Journal of Faith and started working on my Journal of Virtue, an introspective study of Gothard’s 49 character qualities, with examples of how I had demonstrated (or failed) each one. I read the ATI newsletters carefully and studied the photos of the girls held up as godly examples. I prayed and waited and wondered when I would be called upon to teach character to the nations, or assist government leaders with changing the world.

College was strongly discouraged as a place where youth rebelled against authority, yielded to lust, and lost their faith but I did spend a year and a half enrolled in ATI’s unaccredited and spanking new correspondence law school. The stress of three weeks at an IBLP training center landed me sick in bed for weeks with headaches that lingered for months. A few months later my mother had a postpartum mental health crisis. For a week, while studying for a state exam, I was left in charge of a house full of younger siblings so my parents could seek “counsel” from staff at an ATI training center in Indiana. Though my grades were good, I found solitary “homeschool college” to be incredibly stressful. I wearied of fighting anxiety and boredom simultaneously and eventually gave up on getting a degree.

At age twenty-two, I was finally invited to volunteer my services for IBLP.

I spent more than a year working at training centers in Oklahoma and Indiana. By the time I attained my dream and landed a job at Bill Gothard’s headquarters, I was jaded and disillusioned. Gothard was a salesman who was not strictly honest, and was a poor judge of character. He cared little about the credibility of his sources, which he rarely documented. He was quick to discharge staff who expressed alternative points of view. He overworked employees and made it difficult for them to participate in local churches. Gothard was embroiled in legal battles with partners in ministry as well as with the neighborhoods where the Institute operated. He disdained government authority, only following the rules (construction permits, building codes, employment regulations) when pressured. Employees were encouraged not to report overtime. Despite the “non-optional principles” that were supposed to ensure loving family relationships, Gothard was estranged from some of his siblings.

Gothard was controlling of his staff to the point of criticizing the hue of a female employee’s fingernails, (while coloring his own hair a noticeably unnatural shade of burgundy). Gothard surrounded himself with willowy, long-haired, very young women. Appearance mattered a lot to him. One young woman who had been invited to join the ATI staff in Russia got a fresh and cute haircut right before her trip. When she reached Chicago, she was pulled from the group and hidden away at a small campus in Indiana until her hair grew out to an acceptable length. I was appalled by her story, but she blamed herself for not considering her hairstyle more carefully.

I could look past many disheartening inconsistencies because I had been trained to believe that God himself spoke through men with power.

I was doing God’s work at IBLP, God had sent me there at last. And in spite of the overbearing rules and constant meetings and curfews and dress codes, in many ways I still had a lot more autonomy than I had ever tasted at home. So it was a blow when Gothard fired me late one night—by calling my parents hundreds of miles away instead of speaking to me, though I slept just yards from his office. Gothard found me the next day, after I’d packed up my belongings from my room and emptied my new desk. My parents wanted me to come home, he said, though they’d told me Gothard wanted me gone. I felt rejected and lied to.

Since “bitterness” was a great sin to be feared, I tried to absorb the blow and see God’s hand in it. But I cried myself to sleep for weeks afterward. It was years before my husband (whom I met while working for IBLP) and I could admit we had given years of our lives to a cult. Years of unlearning the guilt, of trying to push away the rubble of legalism to find out if our faith still survived, of accepting our humanity instead of trying to live as spiritual beings, of rejecting abuse in the name of love, of discovering that women have as much right to autonomy as do men and that children are not possessions, or extensions, of their parents.

The “Bread” we had asked for turned out to be nothing but rocks, dead weight we carried for too long. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned his followers to be “fruit inspectors”. And, more clearly as time passed, we could see that the fruit of Gothard’s teaching, even when followed with the best of intentions, was of terrible quality. Humbling as it was to realize, we had been raised in a religious cult that drew in our parents and then absorbed our youthful energy, feeding on our desires to please both God and our parents.

I no longer identify as a follower of Jesus, but I am still a fruit inspector.

*****

You will know these people by what they do. Grapes don’t come from thorn bushes, and figs don’t come from thorny weeds. In the same way, every good tree produces good fruit, but a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot produce good fruit. 

Matthew 7:16-18 (NCV)

On Feeling Betrayed, Validated, and Brave

And since your history of silence

Won’t do you any good,

Did you think it would?

Let your words be anything but empty

Why don’t you tell them the truth?

Say what you want to say

And let the words fall out

Honestly 

I want to see you be brave

Show me how big your brave is

--Sara Bareilles, "Brave"

Watching the Grammys was a last-minute decision. We'd kissed the kids goodnight but knew our congested sinuses wouldn't let us sleep yet. So we turned on the TV and I'm so glad we did!

I had never heard of Sara Bareilles--no, I really don't keep up with popular music--but I recognized Carole King right away. I sat absolutely enthralled with their amazing duet performance, only to be surpassed by their comments of mutual admiration afterward. Somehow the three minutes of interaction between those women affected me deeply. I have watched the segment again and again and replayed it in my head countless times.

Carole King's words, her music, the emotions she shared with Sara and all of us in the audience, along with Sara's passion and her song, felt like a gift with miraculous powers to repair some damage done to my heart long ago. I feel like a more complete person than I was before hearing them sing. The rest of the show was fun and amazing in its own way, but that one piece represented to me the magic of Art: sharing a gift with enriching powers of its own.

Perhaps "Brave" struck me the way it did because the last week has been so emotionally turbulent. Not in a bad way, but still...

Last week a shocking new series of revelations appeared on the Internet, exposing Bill Gothard, our cult leader of days long past, for the pathological fraud he was (and is). Reading the story as it dribbles out in serial form has been surreal. With each installment, I can picture my bedroom in Oak Brook, picture window facing Gothard's office across the driveway.

I learned while working on Gothard's staff that he was not what he appeared to be. Not what many of his followers took him for. Not who my parents thought he was. While we his brainwashed army of second-generation devotees mentally flogged ourselves for every potential breach of the cult protocol, Gothard did not adhere to his own "non-optional, universal life principles".

My husband and I each slipped away from IBLP quietly. I was sent away by Gothard in the summer of '99, Chris left on his own six months later. From that point, we set about freeing ourselves from the legalism and reprogramming our poisoned minds. We weren't aware of the poison at first, though. We were still nostalgic about our years at the Institute. It was where our relationship began, after all. We'd go back to visit friends occasionally, or just drive around the grounds reliving the good memories. Over time the locations lost their pull on us. We had dreams--sometimes nightmares--about going back to work there.

Judging Gothard's teaching by its "fruit", we concluded that many of his ideas were downright toxic. It was hard to speak out, though. So many of our friends, family members, and even new acquaintances were Gothard supporters, or had been exposed to his seminars in their youth and didn't see anything dangerous in them. We just sounded "bitter", the strongest pejorative in Gothardom.

When we felt safe we could sometimes talk about how "inconsistent" Gothard was in practice. Even this made some uncomfortable. People feel defensive when you question the authenticity of someone they trust, or trusted once upon a time. The more distance we put between ourselves and the past, the more clearly we could see that Gothard was just another manipulative cult leader. Sadly for us, he was a slick fellow who convinced our parents he had the answers.

I started this blog partly as a safe place to question the Gothard narrative and to recount my experiences and the "bad fruit" it produced. I tried to maintain an even, journalistic tone, even as I personally came to regard William Gothard as a fucking asshole, a sham and a predator hiding under a guise of exceptional holiness.

Reading the firsthand account of Gothard's former secretary over the last week, and watching others come out to corroborate her story, has been tremendously validating to me. While her tale might not seem all that offensive on the surface, it is damning when read in light of Gothard's own teaching and strict standards for others. He made generous allowances for himself, while tolerating nothing less than perfection and submission from his subordinates. He patently violated his own rules, which he marketed as the very wisdom of God. Nothing I have ever said about my former employer was as harsh as he deserves.

An IBLP seminar in Atlanta

As satisfying as it feels to be validated and to watch Gothard's house of cards collapse, it is exquisitely painful at the same time. I rejoice to see his empire fall, much as a former prisoner would applaud the demolition of the walls of his captivity. And yet, that empire was built of my blood, sweat, and tears. Thousands of us can point to pieces of our selves that we sacrificed to advance that sick man's vision. We lost much of irreplaceable value.

And that is why tears rolled down my face this week as I stood in my kitchen spreading cheese on lasagna noodles, listening to "Brave" and the rest of Sara Bareilles' album The Blessed Unrest. They were tears to memorialize the things I was encouraged to "yield" in favor of Gothard's ideal, for God's sake. These things died before drawing breath, miscarriages I never knew in an adolescence I never had: my first date, holding hands, a boyfriend, my first curious kiss in a quiet corner, even talking to male peers without feeling queasy, pulling on an old pair of jeans, experimenting with makeup, realizing I was a free adult in the eyes of the law, choosing a college major, getting a degree, a high school graduation for that matter, a prom dress, high school pictures, a wedding dance with my dad, my favorite artists in concert, feeling sexy as I became a woman, feeling the sun on my legs, getting tan lines before stretch marks, years when I could have been earning money or college credits...

And the pain of steeling myself to believe in "God's will"! Against my emotions. Against what my body was sensing. Of giving myself fortifying speeches in the corner every time I felt my heart would come out of my chest, reminding myself that my heart was deceitful and wicked and not to be trusted. The times I cried myself to sleep, or pounded out my frustration on the piano in the dining room because the rest of Christendom wouldn't see "the truth".

My friends and I made these sacrifices and others to serve our God by working for his "servant" Bill Gothard. Now, I want Gothard's empire to collapse, for the good of humanity. I am more than willing to help bring it down. At the same time, I recognize that each brick I tear out represents a child's education, a man's career, an abused child, a couple's budding relationship, all burned on the IBLP altar in the belief that God would be pleased.

But Bill was a fraud and his empire was built on lies. And we are all breaking the silence. So after I cried over my lasagna, I danced in my kitchen. Because bravery is a beautiful thing.

Jonathan Edwards & John Piper: Sour Stomach

We were all still recovering from a sermon by Charles Finney at the beginning of Wisdom Booklet #4, when we moved on to the subject of history. Where we were assaulted by another sermon.

"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is one of the most famous sermons in American history. But if there were such a sin as blasphemy, this sermon would be a fine example. From a Massachusetts pulpit in 1741, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards described the Almighty as an arbitrary monster and his creation as loathsome.

Here are some excerpts:

...Whatever some have imagined and pretended about promises made to natural men's earnest seeking and knocking, it is plain and manifest, that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers he makes, till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal destruction.

There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God, it would immediately burst forth upon you.

 The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep.

But when once the day of mercy is past, your most lamentable and dolorous cries and shrieks will be in vain; you will be wholly lost and thrown away of God, as to any regard to your welfare. God will have no other use to put you to, but to suffer misery; you shall be continued in being to no other end; for you will be a vessel of wrath fitted to destruction; and there will be no other use of this vessel, but to be filled full of wrath. God will be so far from pitying you when you cry to him, that it is said he will only "laugh and mock"…

Though horrified by Edwards' God, I was transfixed by the vivid imagery. Our family also had a dramatized biography of Jonathan Edwards ("Puritan Preacher and Philosopher") on cassette from Moody Bible Institute. Not only did the story cover the theological controversies of Edwards' time, it did not shy away from describing the aftermath of the Great Awakening--including a man in Edwards' congregation who committed suicide in despair after too many similar "revival" sermons. Between the audio version and the traumatizing Wisdom Booklet, spiders and hellfire became forever associated in my brain.

When Walt Disney needed lines for this over-the-top "hellfire & brimstone" sermon in the film Pollyanna (1960), writers tapped "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". In the movie, the preacher uses his pulpit to manipulate the town with fear and guilt. No one commits suicide (it's a children's movie, after all), but one character declares with passionate resentment, "Sundays around here give folks sour stomach for the whole rest of the week!" Though not delivered in Edwards' characteristic monotone, many of the lines are lifted directly from Jonathan Edwards famous message.

Jonathan Edwards has been John Piper's hero for decades, ever since Piper encountered Edwards' essays as a seminarian. Piper told a conference in 1988: "Alongside the Bible, Edwards became the compass of my theological studies." In 2006, Piper reprinted one of Edwards' books in a volume of his own: God's Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards. In the preface, Piper writes, "Jonathan Edwards is in a class by himself in American history, perhaps in the history of Christendom....I take my stand on his shoulders... It is an honor to be associated with an Institute devoted to exalting the God of Jonathan Edwards..." And so on.

This is the same John Piper who pastors a church in Minneapolis. The same Piper who posted these thoughts on the evening following the 2007 highway bridge collapse that killed thirteen people in his city and injured or traumatized hundreds of others:

The meaning of the collapse of this bridge is that John Piper is a sinner and should repent or forfeit his life forever. That means I should turn from the silly preoccupations of my life and focus my mind’s attention and my heart’s affection on God and embrace Jesus Christ as my only hope for the forgiveness of my sins and for the hope of eternal life. That is God’s message in the collapse of this bridge. That is his most merciful message: there is still time to turn from sin and unbelief and destruction for those of us who live. If we could see the eternal calamity from which he is offering escape we would hear this as the most precious message in the world.

...During our family devotions...Talitha prayed “Please don’t let anyone blame God for this but give thanks that they were saved.” When I sat on her bed and tucked her in and blessed her and sang over her a few minutes ago, I said, “You know, Talitha, that was a good prayer, because when people ‘blame’ God for something, they are angry with him, and they are saying that he has done something wrong. That’s what “blame” means: accuse somebody of wrongdoing. But you and I know that God did not do anything wrong. God always does what is wise. And you and I know that God could have held up that bridge with one hand.” Talitha said, “With his pinky.” “Yes,” I said, “with his pinky. Which means that God had a purpose for not holding up that bridge, knowing all that would happen, and he is infinitely wise in all that he wills.”

Talitha said, “Maybe he let it fall because he wanted all the people of Minneapolis to fear him.” “Yes, Talitha,” I said, “I am sure that is one of the reasons God let the bridge fall.”

I wonder how Jonathan Edwards would react to Piper's post today. I think it would give him "sour stomach". But I also like to think that the melancholic Edwards would preach quite differently if he could return to Northampton today.

Edwards was a thoughtful man, after all--trapped in the 18th-century, yet daring to test innovation. He was unafraid of change, of shaking up the status quo by implementing new ideas, of attempting to reconcile old ways of thinking with new understanding. He kept up with scientific advances, even submitting to smallpox inoculation as an example to the Princeton student body to risk the experimental new procedure. He died of complications, a sacrifice to the cause of science as well as to "the will of God".

The Jonathan Edwards of the 1700's would never make it as a preacher of the gospel today. For one thing, he purchased and owned Negro slaves, including a man and his wife who were sold by the executors of Edwards' will. I wonder what they thought of their master's god? But Edwards gave his sermon long before David Livingstone explored the African continent. Before William Wilberforce campaigned to bring down the slave trade. Before ex-slaver John Newton wrote "Amazing Grace". Before the Founding Fathers revolted against England. Even before the first performance of Handel's Messiah, which opened in Europe the following year (1742) with the words of a very different God:

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.

Little wonder I developed anxiety issues after growing up with Jonathan Edwards' voice in my ear. Little wonder I was so relieved to find other theological viewpoints and to discover that others, as uncomfortable as I was, were asking the same questions!

Somehow, in my combined fright and abhorrence of a god who holds people over hell and lets bridges collapse, I had never considered (though Mark Twain had) the possibility of humans choosing hell for humanity's sake, or of turning down the invitation of heaven (as Desmond Tutu suggests) in solidarity with the world God is said to have loved. If hell is a place of hate, but one can choose it out of a heart of love, then is fear truly vanquished. Sour stomach must surrender!

Learning Guilt: Charles Finney

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Matthew 5:4

A few months after becoming an Advanced Training Institute family, we began the Wisdom Booklet on the above verse. The major feature was a sermon by the lawyer-turned-revivalist Charles Finney. 

Charles Grandison Finney

I knew of Charles Finney as a dead preacher, but Gothard evidently admired him. Reflecting on the two men's controversial "ministries", one sees plenty of similarities of style and method. A PBS commentary on Finney quotes historian Sydney Ahlstrom, "In the Presbyterian church the tensions created by his kind of ministry contributed to a recurrence of schism."

Finney taught us to “mourn” over our sin and to pore over our wretchedness as with a microscope. In “Breaking Up the Fallow Ground”, he uses 19th-century psychobabble to instruct professing Christians in spiritual self-examination. We analyzed our souls carefully, searching for evidence of 26 different sins:

It is just as easy to make your minds feel on the subject of religion as it is on any other. God has put these states of mind under your control. If people were as unphilosophical about moving their limbs as they are about regulating their emotions, you would never have reached this meeting. 

If you mean to break up the fallow ground of your hearts, you must begin by looking at your hearts: examine and note the state of your minds, and see where you are. Many never seem to think about this. They pay no attention to their own hearts, and never know whether they are doing well in religion or not; whether they are gaining ground or going back; whether they are fruitful, or lying waste. Now you must draw off your attention from other things, and look into this. Make a business of it. Do not be in a hurry. Examine thoroughly the state of your hearts, and see where you are: whether you are walking with God every day, or with the devil; whether you are serving God or serving the devil most; whether you are under the dominion or the prince of darkness, or of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Self-examination consists in looking at your lives, in considering your actions, in calling up the past, and learning its true character. Look back over your past history. Take up your individual sins one by one, and look at them. I do not mean that you should just cast a glance at your past life, and see that it has been full of sins, and then go to God and make a sort of general confession, and ask for pardon. That is not the way. You must take them up one by one. Get a pen and paper and write them down as you remember them. Go over them as carefully as a merchant goes over his books and as often as a sin comes before your memory, add it the list. General confessions of sin will never do. Your sins were committed one by one; and as they come to you, review and repent of them one by one. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you your past sins...

1. Ingratitude. Take this sin and write down under that heading all the times you can remember where you have received favors from God and others for which you have never expressed gratitude or thankfulness. How many cases can you remember? Some remarkable change of events, that saved you from ruin. Write down the instances of God's goodness to you when you were in sin, before your conversion, for which you have never been half thankful enough; and the numerous mercies you have received since. How long the list of instances, where your ingratitude has been so black that you are forced to hide your face in confusion! Go on your knees and confess them one by one to God, and ask forgiveness. The very act of confession, by the laws of suggestion, will bring up others to your memory. Put these down. Go over them three or four times in this way, and see what an astonishing number of mercies there are for which you have never thanked God.

2. Lack of love to God. Think how grieved and alarmed you would be if you discovered any lack of affection for you in your wife, husband, or children; if you saw another absorbing their hearts, and thoughts, and time. Perhaps in such a case you would nearly die with a just and virtuous jealousy. Now, God calls Himself a jealous God; and have you not given your heart to other loves and infinitely offended Him?

3. Neglect of the Bible. Put down the cases when for perhaps weeks, or longer, God's Word was not a pleasure. Some people, indeed, read over whole chapters in such a way that they could not tell what they had been reading. If so, no wonder that your life is spent at random, and that your religion is such a miserable failure.

4. Unbelief. Recall the instances in which you have virtually charged the God of truth with lying, by your unbelief of His express promises and declarations. God has promised to give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. Now, have you believed this? Have you expected Him to answer? Have you not virtually said in your hearts, when you prayed for the Holy Spirit: "I do not believe that I shall receive"? If you have not believed nor expected to receive the blessing which God has expressly promised, you have charged Him with lying.

5. Neglect of prayer. Think of the times when you have neglected secret prayer, family prayer, and prayer meetings; or have prayed in such a way as more grievously to offend God than to have omitted it altogether.

6. Neglect of the means of grace. When you have made stupid and meaningless excuses to prevent your attending meetings, have neglected and poured contempt upon the methods of salvation, simply because you dislike spiritual duties?

 And so on, for pages. I wrote carefully in the margins of my Wisdom Booklet, marking which sins I was guilty of, and giving specific examples. The project was completed in two or three days, but for decades afterward, the words "but let a man examine himself" made me shiver inside every time a pastor read from Corinthians before the "Lord's Supper". Just a few months before, we had learned to judge others by their appearance. Now we turned the same gaze of judgment in on our very selves.

Even years later when I had broken free of the cult and no longer imagined that wearing trousers was morally wrong or using birth control was an act of selfish pride, I could still feel the burden of guilt placed on my tender pre-adolescent heart.

There were so many sins to be aware of: sins of omission, sins of commission, original sin, and the scariest phrase of all in a Baptist preacher's toolbox--"known and unknown sin"! The Psalmist wrote, "In sin did my mother conceive me." Isaiah said even my righteousness was as offensive to God as a menstruous rag. Assuming that God was disgusted by bloody trash with vaginal odors, being alive as a human was practically a sin in itself!

And another sermon the same month would hammer that point home.

"God, Thank You For This Beating"

The May 20, 1974 issue of Time ran an article about Bill Gothard entitled "Religion: Obey Thy Husband". I wasn't born when the article was published, but I know the scene all too well. These excerpts are particularly poignant.

Standing ramrod-straight in a business suit, Gothard lectures with few gestures, fewer jokes, no vocal theatrics and as props, only an easel for sketching and an overhead projector... Yet his hearers sit in rapt attention, jotting in thick red notebooks.

A few years later, my parents were "jotting in thick red notebooks", and a decade later, they brought me along. Gothard still stood "ramrod-straight" and despite years of working at his centers, I have never personally seen him in anything but a suit.

Gothard even advises a wife whose husband chastises her to say, "God, thank you for this beating." And Gothard adds to Christ's words from the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But you know what you are doing through them to build character in me."

This standard Gothard fare enabled many abusers. Sadly, tales of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse abound in groups of cult survivors raised under Gothard's influence.

...Gothard ... favors fasting, tithing and Bible memorization, while opposing liberal Bible criticism, much of higher education, highly rhythmic music, working wives, explicit sex education and any sexual arousal before marriage. As for homosexuality, Gothard says that when it is made "a normal way of life, then it's all over for a society, and we are right at that point."

Dating could get you shunned from the group, yet there have been a number of sex scandals at Gothard's IBLP headquarters. Gothard himself has been accused of sexually harassing young women on his staff. Others have carefully followed Gothard's "principles" only to find themselves married to abusive spouses, or spouses with whom they were sexually incompatible or to whom they did not even find themselves sexually attracted.

Gothard, cheerfully convinced that he teaches only what the Bible does, is less concerned with his critics than with administering a budget that should reach $8 million this year. The money goes into a 200-acre headquarters complex in Oak Brook, Ill., where a staff of 70 answers 200 spiritual "Dear Abby" letters per month, prepares advanced seminars and is developing a national training center for pastors and schoolteachers, as well as a "character curriculum" that he hopes many colleges will adopt. According to Gothard, they should scrap conventional subjects and rebuild courses around 49 virtues, including diligence, loyalty and tact.

The "character curriculum" eventually evolved into the Advanced Training Institute homeschool program (the Jim Bob Duggar and Congressman Dan Webster are two well-known ATI fathers), and later the Character First program which has continued to promote Gothard's vision of submission to authority to school children, orphans, prisoners, U.S. Air Force recruits, and Navy SEALs.

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 4

In Which I Return to the Beginning

We had exhausted the church options in our own community; now we crossed county lines heading east, south, and west. We piled into our 12-passenger van and rotated directions each week, laughingly calling ourselves a "circuit-riding congregation".

The Church of Christ had fired their ATI pastor, and he was now leading a small fellowship of mostly homeschooling families who met on Sunday mornings at a public school to the east, near the lake. The school would rent them the library for something like $10 a week, and we could drag in a piano from down the hall to accompany the pastor’s guitar. This band of believers sang a lot of praise songs I remembered from my childhood. The pastor would print out his sermon notes and pass out copies to everyone. Then he would put the same notes on the overhead projector, stand to the side, and proceed to read them to us. But the homemade cubes of communion bread were nearly as delicious as the charismatic kind, and they served it every single week. On Sunday nights, many in the church liked to have bonfires, s’mores, and guitar-led sing-alongs on the beach.

In the opposite direction, we knew an ATI family pastoring an old country church. Their theology was more covenantal than ours and the congregation more blue-collar, but their music was safely conservative and I borrowed interesting books from the minister. Having connections to the Methodist tradition, they took their monthly communion at the altar rail. Until I asked the pastor to officiate at my wedding, I did not realize that Bible Methodists do not endorse jewelry—including wedding rings.

Other weeks, we drove south to join an eclectic "plain" fellowship meeting in a township hall. Some families were ex-Amish, having been forced out of their communities when they were "born again". One couple had been raised Catholic and now vehemently objected to the celebration of Christ-mass. Another had been Episcopalian, turned Amish (exchanging their minivan for a horse and buggy), and were now neither. When they decided to have a baptismal immersion service at a farm pond, no one knew how to do it. The baptismal candidates didn't even get completely moistened, though, as a female observer, I didn't tell them so. 

Everyone homeschooled, the girls all wore dresses, there was little interaction between the sexes, and the women all wore scarves around their hair, with only an inch or two revealed above their foreheads. The a capella singing was painfully slow. The men took turns preaching. I doubt anyone in the group had a college degree; some of the adults had not even finished high school. I cannot recall the fine points of their theology because it was primarily discussed at men’s meetings. As non-members, we would not have been allowed to take communion.

I was annoyed with the extreme patriarchy and made a point of wearing lipstick (gasp!) and my boldest pale pink dress (short sleeves, print of scattered full-blown roses, dainty lace collar, decorative brooch-like button, and wide belt). Though I enjoyed hats, I did not wear one there. I was accustomed to being the most conservatively dressed in any social group, so feeling like the "harlot" was a new experience! I suddenly realized how most normal women must have felt when they visited our family. 

After months of riding our little circuit on Sunday mornings, we settled at the fellowship that met at the school. The pastor was soft-spoken and kind, there were lots of other children, and the families were the most like us. In many ways, that church was a spiritual rehab center or halfway house, attracting the hurt, the lonely, the ones who didn’t fit elsewhere. It was, for the most part, a safe and quiet place for us to park while our emotional wounds healed.

I moved to Oklahoma (to work for Bill Gothard's cult) and fell in love with a Christian & Missionary Alliance Church there. For the first time since childhood, I looked forward to going to church. The people were friendly and the service combined all the elements I most enjoyed. Even though I couldn't remember the CMA church of my infancy, I had a feeling of returning to the beginning, of coming home to where I belonged, and for a year I participated to the fullest extent my cult involvement would permit.

Theologically, I liked the CMA teaching on the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts; after all I'd seen, it felt centered. One week the pastor prayed for a sick man to be healed. The man was anointed with oil and we all prayed. I went home for a visit and when I got back, the man was dead. I tried to understand. I wrote a poem for his widow, imagining the man in heaven and trying to put a hopeful spin on his passing. Faith was so mysterious.

One of my coworkers at Gothard's training center was confident she heard God’s spirit communicating with her. We talked about faith and what we wanted it to mean. During the lunch hour one day, we went up to my room and she prayed for me to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That afternoon I spoke in tongues for the first time. After decades of stories, curiosity, contradictory advice, and yearning to "experience God" in a physical way, this strange and awkward exploratory event felt like losing my spiritual virginity. I basked in a sense of fulfillment for a while.

But my job moved out of Oklahoma and CMA church in my new city wasn’t as inviting. The charismatics weren't down-to-earth enough; the Lutherans were too old or too certain; the Baptists far too stuffy. I kept exploring, learning from each church I was part of, but never able to put down roots. I married, and we eventually settled at a Christian church in our neighborhood that both my husband and I could appreciate. The music leader played with skill and gusto, though some of the more suggestive songs about Jesus made me giggle now that I had sexual experience.

Since Christian churches share a common ancestor with the Church of Christ, communion was a weekly ritual. Unfortunately, this particular congregation used tasteless minuscule crackers that got stuck in my teeth. I tried to think reverent thoughts, picturing the tiny cup of grape juice "blood" as an oral vaccine, passing Christ's immunity on to me and strengthening my resistance to various temptations. It helped for a while, but eventually I started taking two crackers at a time, to get a morsel big enough to chew. Then I switched to selecting the darkest bit on the plate, because at least Burnt Bleached Flour is a flavor.

Once in a while, I would pray in tongues again, sometimes because I felt overwhelmed by life, other times just to see if it still worked. This went on for years until one week, sitting in the sound booth in the back of an evangelical church in the middle of Kansas, my husband and I knew we didn’t belong anymore.

In an attempt to preserve what faith we had left in the God of the Bible, we found a Methodist church with a beautiful pipe organ and a heart of compassion. But even singing anthems with the robed choir, attending the pastor’s Bible class, and dipping bread in grape juice in his study didn’t help. One Easter Sunday, we helped the children’s department with the resurrection-themed crafts, then quietly slipped away. Even as an atheist, I found I could still speak in tongues.

Friends sometimes suppose that if I had ever met their Christ, I would have to love him. But I was presented to the Lord at two weeks old and have seen more of the Body of Christ than most. I found that we simply weren't compatible. For thirty-odd years, I thought we had a relationship; I even thought we were close. But after years of thinking the problems were all mine, his behavior at last began to trouble me.  Could he be trusted? Could he be schizophrenic? Was he cruel? Was he real? And I finally had to conclude: eternity would be far too long to spend with anyone so enigmatic.

Character First and Bill Gothard

Truthfulness: Earning future trust by accurately reporting past facts

(billgothard.com, iblp.org, characterfirst.com)

The Character First program has silently glided into numerous places where Gothard's other materials would undoubtedly raise alarm: public school districts, city government, state government agencies, law enforcement, and prison systems. When journalists or concerned citizens have challenged adoption of the Character First materials--by their local schools, for example--Character First has been quick to deny association with religious extremist Bill Gothard or his Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP).

I believe the official statements are deceptive. Yes, Character First is no longer financially connected to the IBLP organization. However, its links to Gothard's Institute are undeniable. This post will describe Gothard's original character program and trace its evolution into what is now the Character First curriculum.

Gothard's Character Quality Chart

49 Character Qualities

According to one of his many websites, "Bill Gothard is the founder and president of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, which is a non-profit corporation established for the purpose of introducing people to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is dedicated to giving clear instruction and training on how to find success by following God’s principles found in Scripture." Theologically, the Institute promotes many Christian fundamentalist beliefs. IBLP posts its corporate statement of faith on its website, including assertions that "hell is a place of eternal conscious punishment for... all unbelievers" and that Adam "did not evolve from preexisting forms of life".

My parents attended Gothard's Basic Seminar in Houston in late 1979 or early 1980. They were enthusiastic about applying the content. After they attended an Advanced Seminar, I remember them showing us illustrations from the textbook giving us a quiz to help determine what our "motivational gifts" were. Gothard's teaching on spiritual gifts (influenced by Bob Mumford, John Rea, and Arnold Bittlinger, among others) amounted to a kind of personality test. There were seven possible labels, corresponding to descriptive terms used by St. Paul in the twelfth chapter of Romans.

Gothard has always loved the number seven (also God's favorite number, according to him--with twelve and forty following in order of divine preference). Seven is supposedly the number of completion, of perfection. So there are seven "gifts" or motivations, each with their own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. In a perfect world, everyone uses their gifts for the good of everyone else. So far so good.

But spiritual "gifts", which made up a large part of the vocabulary used by IBLP insiders, were only one of the towers of the IBLP edifice. They rested on the wider base of the 49 Character Qualities. Gothard wrote "operational definitions" for these qualities, and assigned seven to each motivational gift as its unique values or strengths. I am unable to determine which Gothard came up with first, the seven gift types or the forty-nine character qualities, but he combined them very early on, settling on the final definitions sometime after 1976. Each quality is contrasted with its opposite, a negative character trait which must be overcome.


The Gift of Teaching

• Dependability vs. Inconsistency
• Diligence vs. Slothfulness
• Patience vs. Restlessness
• Reverence vs. Disrespect
• Security vs. Anxiety
• Self-Control vs. Self-Indulgence
• Thoroughness vs. Incompleteness

The Gift of Exhorting (encouraging personal development)

• Creativity vs. Underachievement
• Discernment vs. Judgment
• Discretion vs. Simplemindedness
• Enthusiasm vs. Apathy
• Faith vs. Presumption
• Love vs. Selfishness
• Wisdom vs. Natural Inclinations

The Gift of Giving

• Cautiousness vs. Rashness
• Contentment vs. Covetousness
• Gratefulness vs. Unthankfulness
• Generosity vs. Stinginess
• Punctuality vs. Tardiness
• Resourcefulness vs. Wastefulness
• Thriftiness vs. Extravagance
• Tolerance vs. Prejudice

The Gift of Organizing (administration)

• Decisiveness vs. Double-Mindedness
• Determination vs. Faintheartedness
• Humility vs. Pride
• Initiative vs. Unresponsiveness
• Loyalty vs. Unfaithfulness
• Orderliness vs. Disorganization
• Responsibility vs. Unreliability

The Gift of Serving

• Alertness vs. Unawareness
• Availability vs. Self-Centeredness
• Endurance vs. Giving Up
• Flexibility vs. Resistance
• Generosity vs. Stinginess
• Hospitality vs. Loneliness
• Joyfulness vs. Self-Pity
• Endurance vs. Giving Up

The Gift of Prophecy (speaking warnings about sin)

• Boldness vs. Fearfulness
• Forgiveness vs. Rejection
• Obedience vs. Willfulness
• Persuasiveness vs. Contentiousness
• Thoroughness vs. Incompleteness
• Truthfulness vs. Deception
• Virtue vs. Impurity

The Gift of Mercy

• Attentiveness vs. Unconcern
• Compassion vs. Indifference
• Deference vs. Rudeness
• Gentleness vs. Harshness
• Justice vs. Fairness
• Meekness vs. Anger
• Sensitivity vs. Callousness

Along with the seven "universal, non-optional life principles", these forty-nine character qualities form the central core of Gothard's teaching because of his belief that "one of God’s primary goals for believers is to transform them into the image of His Son so that they may be a reflection of the character of Christ." Gothard teaches that these qualities express God's character and that we become more Christ-like as we train ourselves and each other to demonstrate these characteristics. "Life will take on a whole new meaning as you begin to understand the importance of character and see the lasting rewards of a life that exhibits the character of God." (IBLP website)

Character Clues

Character Clues Game

For decades, Gothard's Institute sold a game called Character Clues. It consisted of a stack of laminated cards, each with the name of a character quality in different decorative fonts. The other stack contained Gothard's definitions. Each card also had a code in the upper corner, to distinguish which "spiritual gift set" it belonged to, as shown in this chart.

Playing Character Clues was a two-step affair. For the first few minutes, we would frantically swap cards with other players, trying to collect one complete set of seven. The rest of the "game" was to memorize the definitions and be the first to call out the quality as the definition was read aloud. We used to play it at home, and later on Game Nights with the staff at the IBLP training center on Main St. in Oklahoma City. It was impossible to play with friends outside the Gothard cult, as we could spit out the definitions in seconds and anyone else would be lost trying to understand how we could jump to "Obedience!" from "Freedom to be creative...".

Character Sketches

Another of Gothard's character projects were the Character Sketches nature series. He originally envisioned seven volumes, but the project ran out of steam after only three (published in 1976, 1978, and 1985). Each handsomely-bound and beautifully-illustrated volume presented nature stories in which the featured species demonstrated an aspect of the highlighted character quality. The story was followed by a biological sketch of the animal habits, and then by an interpretation of a some Bible story in which the character demonstrated either the quality or its opposite. Gothard's younger brother Steve was heavily involved in the creation of these books in the 1970's.

ALERT, another of IBLP's spin-off programs, is a year-long character-building course for "Christian young men" that kicks off with military-style basic training in Big Sandy, Texas. ALERT also sells the Character Sketches series and lists their author as Larry Guthrie.

Dr. Larry Fields Guthrie earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1971. Before becoming an Associate Professor of Education at Indiana University Northwest, he taught high school science for seven years. After the university fired him in the late 1970's, he found employment at Gothard's Institute as a staff writer and research assistant for twenty years. A natural storyteller, Guthrie likes to spin the termination of his employment positively, saying that he had recently given his heart to Jesus and willingly gave up academia to serve Christ elsewhere.

Dr. Larry Guthrie

According to IBLP's Embassy Institute: "One day, while teaching at Indiana State University, Dr. Larry Guthrie was informed that his book publishing record was insufficient and they had to terminate his teaching. However, God had given Larry a keen understanding of the world of nature and a remarkable ability to capture the attention of audiences as he explains life principles from the world of nature. Larry wrote the nature sections of the Eagle Story, Character Sketches Series, and other books." However, since Guthrie's appointment at Indiana University continued until May of 1979, it is unlikely he authored any part of the first two Character Sketches. Other sources indicate he wrote for Volume III of the series, and also for Volume IV, which was never completed.

In addition to whatever nature studies he penned for Character Sketches, Guthrie "also wrote science and medical curriculum materials for the Institute's home education program, the Advanced Training Institute of America. Dr. Guthrie is the former director of the Children's Institute which offers character training and instruction in basic Biblical principles to children ages 6-12. Over the past 10 years, these week-long children's seminars have enrolled over 175,000 children in 50 cities and eight foreign countries. Dr. Guthrie also served as Director of Curriculum Development for Character First! Education, a national non-profit character training program for public schools with headquarters in Oklahoma City." Described in 2010 as a "vital part of the IBLP ministry for many years", Guthrie is still a popular keynote speaker for regional homeschool conferences, presenting lessons about obedience to parents, attentiveness to instructions, and escaping the temptations of Satan.

In 2009, Guthrie became the chairman of the board for IBLP's Verity Institute:

"Verity Institute exists to develop leaders who love Jesus Christ and the Word of God. Established in 2001, Verity Institute was founded to disciple college students to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ as they pursue higher education. Verity helps students avoid the pitfalls of traditional college campuses such as non-Christian professors, secular humanism, and loose campus morals. In our innovative, 21-month program, Verity students complete a Bachelor of Arts or Science degree through an outside, fully-accredited university at a fraction of traditional costs for higher education."

Character Booklets and Children's Institutes

In 1991, Bill Gothard made connections with the Russian government that resulted in a partnership with the Department of Education in Moscow. In 1992, the Institute hosted an official delegation from Russia, including a young Boris Yeltsin, grandson of the Russian president, at its headquarters outside Chicago and at Gothard's retreat center in northern Michigan. In 1993, I was one of the homeschooled Advanced Training Institute (ATI) students invited to represent the Institute in Moscow's public schools, private schools, and orphanages. I was seventeen and it was my first experience outside the U.S.

Strict IBLP rules applied within our group: there was to be nothing even resembling dating, no music with a rock beat, no foolishness or loitering, no chewing gum. Males wore ties for most activities; females had to wear dresses, skirts, or loose culottes. On Sundays, we fasted from food until supper. As a student enrolled in Gothard's homeschooling program, these rules were quite familiar to me and did not seem burdensome. In our training meetings at the outset of the trip, we were urged to "clear our consciences" for our own protection, not holding any secrets from our parents. I dutifully wrote a letter home confessing to my parents that I had masturbated when I was younger. Dad faxed back a reply: "We forgive you!"

Our team was directed by George Mattix, now Director of IBLP's International Department. On our way to board the Aeroflot jet, we were handed brand-new booklets defining the character qualities we were about to teach and offering suggestions for activities. Each week we presented lessons in "character" to Russian schoolchildren, using illustrations like the inner workings of an ear, or Abraham Lincoln's honesty, or even the seven days of creation from Genesis. We invited the teachers and older students to evangelistic meetings with hymns, skits, and personal testimonials about how well biblical principles work.

We also helped put on Gothard's Basic Seminar at a cavernous Moscow stadium. To make attendance as convenient as possible, we served sack lunches and improvised special activities for children. This very first "Children's Institute" was deemed such a success that Gothard announced a similar conference for children during the summer ATI training seminar in Knoxville that year.

Soon Children's Institutes, under the direction of Dr. Larry Guthrie as noted above, were being held in conjunction with IBLP Basic Seminars around the country and internationally. At the one I participated in with Dr. Guthrie in Detroit in 1994, we taught the children that Satan could gain access to plots of "ground" in their souls if they were not obedient. Clearly, the Children's Institutes taught more than just the character curriculum, but since many of us had already been trained to teach those first character qualities and the activities were already packaged, the children always got a heavy dose of Attentiveness, Gratefulness, and Obedience.

Gothard himself later attributed the Character First Education curriculum to the earlier program used in Moscow.

"I originally created the materials for the program in 1991, for Russia," explained Gothard. "After I presented a seminar on Basic Life Principles in Russia, President Boris Yeltsin contacted me and asked if I would create a character program for Russia's public schools. So I created a program for them, which they still use."**

"I revised the materials we did for Russia, and they tried them out in eight Oklahoma City schools," said Gothard. "By 1998, 33 Oklahoma City schools used the program and in 1999, 50 use it. Across the nation, over 700 schools in 40 states are using Character First!"

(Source: "Staying In Character: Program Helps Promote Admirable Qualities"
Chicago Tribune; April 23, 2000)

Gothard advertised his new "universal" character materials to pastors, homeschooling families, community leaders, international contacts, and anyone else who would listen. "Character explains why things happen to us," he taught. God is continually working to mold our character into perfection ("to conform us to Christ"). Recognizing people for their achievements only breeds competition and conflict. The better way to motivate people to do good is to praise them for displaying good character instead.


**After falling out of favor with Moscow's Dept. of Education, due in part to their abusive discipline of Russian orphans, IBLP was pressured to abandon the Russia ministry. But hundreds of IBLP followers, including Texas Republican kingmaker James Leininger and his wife and daughters, got to cut their teeth on character education there.

Character Training Institute

Character First would dispute Gothard's claim to have created the program. Six Character Booklets were eventually marketed to IBLP seminar attendees and ATI families, but before another set could be completed there was something new growing on the horizon.

Thomas Hill

Tom Hill, an Oklahoma City businessman who was not only a longtime supporter of the seminars and a personal friend of Gothard but was also serving as chairman of the Institute's Board of Directors, launched the Character Training Institute (CTI). In 1992, Hill took Gothard's 49 character quality definitions and sanitized them for secular use at his company. In most cases, removing the religious component from the definitions required only some deft excision. The result was simply an ambitious self-improvement program. Hill saw potential in selling this character training package to other corporations and non-profit organizations--including government offices.

What employer wouldn't want to emphasize to their employees the importance of Availability ("Making my schedule and priorities secondary to the wishes of those I serve") and Thriftiness ("Allowing myself and others to spend only what is necessary"), or want their staff to exercise Self-Control ("Rejecting wrong desires and doing what is right")? Subscribers to the Character Bulletins got a fresh character quality sheet each month with stories and motivational tips.

The CTI office was run  from the Oklahoma Training Center, owned by Hill's Kimray Inc. and provided to IBLP as a base for multiple programs. Character First Education was also stationed at the center and operated by IBLP/ATI staff families and students. Technically two separate offices, there was a lot of overlap between the two Character Firsts. Many Character First materials were prepared by homeschooled students selected from Gothard's Advanced Training Institute.

The center in Oklahoma City began offering week-long training for "Character Coaches". Teens and adults could become certified to pitch and/or teach the Character First program in their own communities, carrying it back to their local churches or school districts. In July of 1997, my dad took the whole family to Oklahoma City so four of us could take the course with him. I was in my early twenties and had zero interest in being there, but as a "stay-at-home daughter" I believed Dad was my "authority" and the trip was mandatory. As consolation, I tried to convince myself that God was somehow going to use the rather unpleasant week towards my perfection. 

Dr. Joseph Ahne is a certified CTI trainer. At a training center conference in 2005, he had this to say:

“They don’t tell you this here, but it’s all biblically based,” Dr. Ahne says. “They use the animals to illustrate the points that are all from the Bible. You see, it’s about becoming like Christ. Through teaching the character, we’re teaching people how to be like Christ. We could all use that.”

“We use this,” he says, pointing to the Character First binder in the middle of the table, “because we can’t take religion into schools and government. But it’s all based on the same thing.”

Character First Education

Character First Education launched its pilot project in February, 1997 in Oklahoma City. Teams of homeschooled teenagers (recruited from Gothard's ATI program) would be brought to the Oklahoma Training Center at 520 W. Main Street, provided to IBLP by Kimray Inc., to spend months at a time teaching the new Character First curriculum in the public schools under the direction of Kent Fahrenbruck. These "Character Coaches" paid for their training and for their room & board while they were at the center. For many of them, Character First was their first experience entering a public school. They were expected to be at morning Bible study before school and to help with chores around the training center after dinner (usually housekeeping or kitchen cleanup). And the strict IBLP dress code applied: no blue jeans, and women could not wear slacks of any kind.

Robert Greenlaw

Robert Greenlaw's family was enrolled in Gothard's ATI homeschooling program. Robert attended his first "life principles" seminar before he was 14, learned about the natural tendencies of his "spiritual gift" at the Advanced seminar, spent time at IBLP's Moscow Training Center, and led Children's Institutes at Gothard's seminars. In 1996, he helped develop the Character First Education program. Today, Greenlaw manages all Character First publications and training development.***

Many Character First Education materials and artwork were simply borrowed from other IBLP programs, especially from the Children's Institute curriculum developed by ATI students and staff to teach children the seven "life principles" Gothard claimed to discover in the Bible. For example, the Attentiveness song from the Character First Education program is identical to the Attentiveness song taught at Children's Institutes:

"When there's someone else who's saying something that I need to hear,
If I'm easily distracted, it will not be very clear.
I must listen very closely to the things they have to say;
I will choose to be attentive ev'ry hour, of ev'ry day!

"I'll be attentive, so very attentive!
I will show the worth of what they have to say!
And when I am tempted to not be attentive,
I will choose to be attentive anyway!"

The Oklahoma Training Center became a veritable labyrinth of different jurisdictions with varying expectations, codes of conduct, and dress codes. My roommate was an intern for the CTI, other friends were there as volunteer teachers for Character First Education, some teens were sent by their parents for character-building "life experience" training (usually kitchen or maintenance jobs), a team of young adults had an outreach project to at-risk kids in local shelters, and I was working (as a volunteer for six months, and then as a minimum-wage employee) for the IBLP Chicago office from my desk in Oklahoma City. Whether or not we personally endorsed Character First (I sometimes referred to it as Karachterfurst), we were all expected to support the character effort. I helped package many more Character Cards than I cared to count in the training center dining room after work. Despite my misgivings about the CTI, I enjoyed the bustle of helping with Character Bulletin mailing projects because the flurry and rhythm reminded me of my previous volunteer work for political campaigns.

During my year at the Oklahoma Training Center, no staff women were permitted to wear jeans or slacks, all families residing at the center homeschooled their children, student volunteers were expected to fast on Sunday, kitchen workers were harassed for using white flour, and playing "contemporary" worship songs like "As the Deer" on the grand piano was frowned upon. We had a group Bible study before breakfast, corporate prayer time before lunch, and Gothard's Basic Seminar was shown on video some evenings.


***Ken Pierpont, another personal friend of Bill Gothard, describes Robert Greenlaw as "an absolute poster-child for IBLP. Mr. Gothard should be proud of guys like this."

Character First for Law Enforcement, Prisons, and Cities

Ray Nash for Congress

The Character First program has infiltrated city governments and law enforcement across the country. By 2006, 160 cities had passed "character resolutions", adopting CTI programs or materials. Ray Nash, former sheriff of Dorchester County, South Carolina is also a Character Training Institute instructor:

Nash has conducted "Police Dynamics" training for numerous U.S. and international police departments. "Really, what Police Dynamics is, in a nutshell, is biblical wisdom that’s been packaged into a law enforcement message," Nash told Rev. Mark Creech in a November 2004 article for Alan Keyes’ RenewAmerica Web site.  (Cult of Character)

Through Police Dynamics, Nash says he has trained over 10,000 government and business leaders from dozens of countries. Nash retired from law enforcement following a scandal in 2008. He went on to serve as Criminal Justice Adviser for the US Embassy in Kabul. He has a private investigation company and ran for a seat in Congress earlier this year.

Character First's prison curriculum, which contains stories from the New Testament and numerous teachings from Gothard's Basic Seminar, was developed in cooperation with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. According to an investigative report by Silja Talvi in 2006, in Oklahoma City,

"...even the local county jail’s elevators feature Character First posters in Plexiglass displays, and juvenile detainees study character concepts with the jail chaplains. Each employee receives a Character Bulletin with his or her paycheck, explains Chaplain Argyle Dick. “We hire for character, and we fire, most of the time, for lack of character. … We are always looking for new ways to saturate even more of our employees with character.”

The Character Council of Central Oklahoma has even entered into a “covenant” with the regional career tech programs, covering 12 campuses. “That’s our plan for getting character qualities into the hearts and minds of all students,” explains Dr. Earlene Smith, the Education Committee chairman for the council.

The Arkansas Dept. of Corrections uses Character First with its employees. Inside Arkansas prisons, a revision of the Character First program has become the more religious "Principles and Applications for Life", also led by "character coaches". Ohio added Character First to their offender education curriculum. The city of Conway, South Carolina has Gothard's 49 Character Qualities posted on its municipal website.  A news article earlier this month featured a photograph of Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Doak speaking in front of a CharacterFirst poster.

Lisa Sorg reported in 2006 for the Texas Observer,

“Burleson heralded as city of character,” boasted the headline in the April 28, 1999, edition of the Burleson Star, the town’s newspaper. The City Council, school board, Chamber of Commerce, and Ministerial Alliance Auxiliary had signed a resolution making Burleson a City of Character. “I do think it’s a religious deal, and I’m not afraid to say it,” Jeff Turner, then-superintendent of the Burleson school district, was quoted as saying.

Sorg's article goes on to observe:

"Obedience figures largely in the Character materials. In the book, How to Build Character as a Family, obedience is mentioned no less than 10 times in a 68-page discussion of character traits, and is described as a protective force. Security: 'I will look to my authorities for protection.' Flexibility: 'I will respect the decisions of my authorities.' Honor: 'I will obey cheerfully.' Justice: 'I will respect the authority of the law.' Loyalty: 'I will not mock authorities.' Obedience: 'I will obey my authorities immediately.' Enthusiasm: 'Not only does enthusiasm brighten the face and give light to the eyes, but it also acts as a natural medicine that builds strong and thick bones.'

"Each character trait also has an opposite. The opposite of obedience is willfulness..."

Why Character?

According to Gothard's website:

1. Every quality personifies Christ. Jesus Christ is the full expression of every positive character quality. He is truth, love, forgiveness, gentleness, generosity, patience, kindness, and every other quality.
2. Character explains why things happen. God promises that all things work together for good to those who love God, because they conform us to the image of Christ. (See Romans 8:28–29) If we are lacking in a particular character quality, God will often allow circumstances and even tragedies to develop that quality in us. David said, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes” (Psalm 119:71.)
3. Qualities are needed to praise others. We are commanded to encourage and exhort one another on a regular basis. One of the most effective ways to do this is to recognize positive qualities exhibited in the life of another and praise him for it. In order to do this, we must be able to identify specific character qualities and give their definitions.

The emphasis on Gothard's 49 character qualities made the IBLP environment incredibly toxic. We were "saturated with character" and we could never live up to the impossible standard of perfection held in front of us. We were encouraged to overwork ourselves to please our authorities and win praise for diligence and endurance. We were constantly on guard against temptations to choose "foolishness", "extravagance", or "slothfulness". Not surprisingly, many former ATI students are now in therapy for deep anxiety issues and stress-induced health problems.

Additionally, as numerous former Gothard followers have discovered, developing character traits like meekness and obedience can set individuals up for abuse. Gothard has long been criticized for counseling victims to give up their personal rights, to remain in abusive relationships, and to look for how their own poor choices (lack of character) could have caused the abuse. He is also known for habitually blaming victims of sexual violence. The secularized Character First approach does little to correct that imbalance in favor of abusers.

FORGIVENESS: 

"Clearing the record of those who have wronged me and not holding a grudge."

FAITH: 

"Confidence that actions rooted in good character will yield the best outcome, even when I cannot see how"

TOLERANCE: 

"Accepting others at different levels of maturity"

Today, I still wince when I drive past a public school sign announcing the character quality of the month--unless it happens to be "RESPECT", a virtue Gothard failed to recognize. To its credit, Character First has replaced Gothard's subservient Reverence with Honor, which it now defines as "Respecting others because of their worth as human beings". The sentimental Love has become the more office-appropriate Benevolence, and the antithesis of Justice is now "Corruption" rather than "Fairness".

Though Gothard may believe perfect character is an exact representation of God, Character First, now owned by Strata Leadership LLC which counts the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, the Virginia Department of Social Services, and Hobby Lobby among its clients, is less committed to the original 49 qualities. Good character is not set in stone, after all, and society's values need room to evolve. The Character First website states: "We reserve the right to change qualities and definitions as needed..." 

I praise the CTI team for this display of a trait long demanded of Bill Gothard's supporters: the character quality of flexibility.



READ MORE about Bill Gothard's political connections, his educational philosophy, and about growing up as an ATI student.