On Giving Thanks

November means turkey, Pilgrims, and giving thanks. Most years I've kept my own tradition of listing the things I'm grateful for. But this year's list is going to have a new twist.

A few weeks ago, my neighbor invited me along to her yoga class. As we stretched and then rested our muscles, the instructor suggested meditative thoughts as well. "Thank your body for what it is doing for you. Thank yourself for taking this time..." I don't remember what came next because my eyes were already beginning to puddle.

For months, my heart had been flooded with a sense of gratefulness. This has been an epic year for me, and I am thankful for each person who has participated in my life: family, friends, neighbors, enemies, strangers. I feel a debt of gratitude to so many; even individuals I don't speak to anymore, or who don't speak to me, have given me gifts that I treasure daily.

But to be grateful to myself? That was a new thought!

It's been sixteen years since Bill Gothard terminated my employment at his cult headquarters and it often seems that I must have recovered from the brainwashing by now. But then something small, like a sentence in a yoga class, triggers a cascade of thoughts and associations and helps me identify and shed yet another layer of Gothard's influence.

My mother drilled the importance of Gratefulness into us as children, and when I was a little older, Gothard emphasized it to his followers. Gratefulness had been known to cure depression, he said. His oft-repeated definition still springs to mind:

Making known to God and others in what ways they have benefited my life.

We also learned Bill's definition of Humility:

Recognizing that it is actually God and others who are responsible for the achievements in my life.

Together with other parts of the Institute's cult program, these "character qualities" helped to stamp out a sense of volition or self-determination. We were to clay to be shaped, vessels to be used, sheep to be led.

And yet, this year I took the reins of my life in a new way. While there have been many supporting roles, the lead part is mine. My growth and happiness today are the result of my own choices.

I was bold.

I took risks.

I colored outside the lines and wrote my own rules.

I scared myself and held on anyway. I followed up. I put in the effort. I invested in my happiness and let go of what was choking it. I allowed myself to have fun. I said "yes"--though not as many times as I wish I had!

Looking back to my twenties, I walked away from the cult. I abandoned fundamentalism. I researched birth control, studied science, found a therapist, started college. I enrolled my kids in school. I made new friends. At some points I had a friend cheering me on, other times I felt alone. Each step forward was one I had to take for myself.

The changes I am now so proud of were watered with my own sweat and plenty of tears.

This November, I give thanks to my self. For being strong. For being resilient. For digging deep and discovering who I wanted to be. For doing what was necessary to heal old hurts and reclaim what was mine. For signing up for daring adventures and learning new things. For taking up space and spending time. For standing up for myself.


What can you thank yourself for today?

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!

John Stancil: Scripture, Sex, Success

John Stancil--IBLP Board Member

A little history

Curtis Hutson was a mailman who started preaching revivals in his free time. When he was just 22, he preached at Forest Hills Baptist Church near Decatur, GA.  The story goes that by the end of the week the pastor had resigned and the church had called the kid mailman with no formal training to replace him. Inspired by a message by Jack Hyles, Hutson eventually quit his post office job to focus on evangelism full-time.

Hutson pastored Forest Hills for twenty years, bringing the membership to nearly 8,000. (His lack of education did not prevent Hutson from serving as president of Baptist University of America from 1974-1980!)
  
John Stancil was 14 when he "trusted Christ as his personal savior" and joined Hutson's church. Young John worked his way up from janitor to director of the bus ministry, which brought in over 2,000 attendees on a given Sunday. He also married Brenda Cannon, with whom he had three children. The couple wrote a booklet on bus ministry (Busing--the Real Bring) which was published by Sword of the Lord in 1975.

1n 1978, Dr. John Rice invited Curtis Hutson to come to Murfreesboro, TN, to help edit "Sword of the Lord". Hutson edited the publication from 1980 until his death in 1995. Hutson also tapped his friend John Stancil to join him in Murfreesboro. The Stancils moved to Tennessee where John worked as Sword of the Lord's conference director and circulation manager for several years.

Scandal

In 1988, John and Brenda Stancil divorced. Five months later, Jack Hyles himself officiated at John's marriage to Yullie (Yuok) Chong, a Korean student at Hyles-Anderson College.

According to one source:

Brenda said she later learned that "he had been seeing Miss Chong in Indiana for quite a while before his divorce became final and that he had spent Christmas of 1987 with her and her family after telling our children he would be home alone. She was in Murfreesboro on at least four occasions . . . ." All this was while the Stancils were still married.

One of those visits calls attention to an even more unfortunate and unsavory matter. Since college regulations called for Miss Chong to stay with someone else while at Murfreesboro, arrangements were made for her to visit in the home of Mrs. Doris Roberts, a Sword employee of long standing and Stancil's secretary, business manager and close confidant. Conveniently, the latter was given a plane ticket to visit her son in Florida at that time, leaving Miss Chong without proper chaperone.

A lady who went to the house to meet her and get acquainted relates, "When I got to the door, I found she and John there alone making love on the sofa." (She defined "making love" as "lying fully prostrate, clothing in disarray, with movement, stroking, kissing, and bodies touching"; she said she could not "say for certain if sexual intercourse was occurring or had occurred," a matter that seems immaterial when considering the fact Stancil was still married to another woman.) The lady watched for a while, then left and went to a friend's house nearby and asked her to return as a witness, finding "the two were still on the sofa." The lady placed her business card on the window of Stancil's Mercedes-Benz and left.

The affair made waves in the wider Independent Fundamental Baptist community. John Stancil's career as a Baptist conference speaker was over.

Buses and Music

Months after their wedding, John and Yullie Stancil took stock of their their marketable skills. 
Buses. Religious publishing and marketing. Music. 

They bought their own bus and began conducting charters for schools and churches around Murfreesboro. They called their new company Anchor Trailways & Tours. By 1995, their fleet had grown to about ten buses and they were ready for the big-time. They moved their company to the Nashville area where it has grown to a fleet of more than sixty vehicles. 

Stancil is reported to have “a doctorate in transportation” and calls himself a “stickler for detail.”  Fort Campbell in Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division, is Anchor Trailway’s largest account.

On the side, John Stancil also runs his own IFB publishing/evangelism company--Anchor Bible Concepts. ABC sells King James Bibles (including the Scofield Bible) and soprano Yullie Stancil's three musical recordings.  One of these albums was produced by IBLP's offshoot Principle Music in Indianapolis, with orchestration composed by Loren Elms and Tracy Ann (Collins) Biddle. The album was released in 2002. According to the IBLP website, Yullie Stancil "has a beautiful singing voice and uses it to promote Godly music." John Stancil currently serves on Bill Gothard's Board of Directors at IBLP. 

Another of Yullie's albums was produced by The Crown College of the Bible in Powell, Tennesee. John Stancil is also chairman of the board of Crown College, which was founded by Temple Baptist Church's pastor Clarence Sexton.  Sexton, a speaker at Bob Jones University's Bible conference last year, has been criticized for praising Jack Schaap, who is now serving prison time for having sex with a minor.

On a happier note

John's ex-wife Brenda Cannon Stancil became a reporter for The Examiner in Beaumont, TX. As an award-winning journalist, she writes with compassion and grace. She has championed single parents, battered women, those treated unfairly by the justice system, and others--offering them hope. After years raising her three children alone, Brenda married Ted Henley in a shipboard ceremony.

Just for fun

I am personally amused by this photo of John Stancil donating a $10,000 check and bus services to a country music charity concert.  Apparently Anchor Trailways has a close relationship with the Nashville music scene, frequently shuttling artists to shows in Muscle Shoals, AL. This despite the strong stance taken by IBLP and Stancil's conservative church against music with a backbeat!

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)

Of Beef Stroganoff and Italian Subs

And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.

Scene from the film "Babette's Feast"

Funny how our senses are tuned differently. While my husband is so sensitive to musical detail even his dreams can have soundtracks, my brain assigns high priority to flavor.

So many of my memories revolve around food, transporting me to times and places far away.

Sitting here in my kitchen on a cloudy afternoon, I can recall the tang of Russian black bread, of calamansi juice squeezed over sweet ripe papaya, of the Vitamin C lozenges Mom used let us suck on when we had sore throats. I can compare the tastes of three different bread recipes Mom used during my childhood. I can travel back in time to taste her favorite chocolate cake with coconut sprinkled over the icing, her homemade turkey stuffing, the broccoli casserole she used to make with blue cheese in the sauce and Ritz cracker crumbs on the top.

Mom taught herself to cook after she was married, and then she taught me. From the time we were able to crawl, we were allowed in the kitchen (there was always a drawer or cabinet the babies were allowed to play in) and she got us involved in food preparation quite early. We helped plant and weed the garden, snap the beans, husk the corn, pit cherries, and turn the handle on the food mill when Mom made gallons of applesauce or tomato sauce. Of course, she had us help with the clean-up afterward, too.

Food became part of my childhood identity.

Mom was zealous about serving her family nutritious food, so while my classmates brought sugary snacks and brightly-colored fruit leather to school, I brought a Tupperware bowl of Mom's strawberry-rhubarb sauce. She made sure even our desserts had "redeeming value" most of the time: all-natural ice cream, peanut butter cookies, peach cobbler, pumpkin pie. I eventually learned that some other children's mothers were "health nuts" and that put me at ease. There was still a place for treats: Mom enjoyed Pepsi on occasion, and pizza was a craving we were all happy to indulge. We ordered it from a place in town or made our own, with mushrooms from a can labeled "Pennsylvania Dutchman". Since my parents and I were born Pennsylvanians, I felt a kinship with the brand every time I opened a can.

But when I was seven or eight, our lives--and menu--changed dramatically.

My parents had attended Bill Gothard's Basic Seminar, but about this time they must have attended the Advanced Seminar. Mom quit wearing jeans, and got rid of all my pants. It was jumpers, dresses, and skirts for us females from then on. There were no more bathing suits, and my parents informed my grandmother that she could make the boys pajamas, but the girls needed nightgowns. Dad put a rock through the front of our television so there were no more evenings of "Little House of the Prairie".

And just like that, we developed our own Talmud.

Mom stopped wearing her prettiest cardigan vest--a lacy blue garment I loved but whose scalloped pattern was knit of cotton & ramie yarn. In those days before Google none of us were quite certain what "ramie" was, but it sounded suspicious. God had instructed Moses not to let the Israelites wear clothing of mixed fibers: the American colonists' "linsey-woolsey" was a direct violation of God's Law. Cotton and polyester, we decided, was not a problem since polyester wasn't actually a fiber but a petroleum product.

Leviticus prohibited hybrid animals (mules, for example) and planting two kinds of seed in the same field. So Mom stopped buying tangelos. Oranges, yes; tangerines, yes. But not tangelos. I remember trying to reconcile my confusion over the Burpee catalog, which was bursting with hybrids.

Genesis said God gave us "every seed-bearing plant" for food. Well, what of mushrooms then? They may be sold in the produce aisle, but seed-bearing plants they are not. No more little Pennsylvania Dutchman cans. No more of Mom's favorite omelettes at the best breakfast place in town. No more steaming cream of mushroom soup with a winter lunch. No more of Mom's rich and creamy beef stroganoff. How I missed them all.

The stroganoff was out on two counts--because it also mixed meat with milk, which was banned under one strict interpretation of an obscure rule repeated three times in the Torah. Mom adapted her meatloaf recipe accordingly, omitting the mushrooms and substituting water for the milk. For a while, her caution against fungi extended to blue cheese, resulting in the demise of her flavorful and creamy broccoli casserole. (I rebelliously continued to choose blue cheese dressing at salad bars and to argue that the yeast that made our bread rise was essentially another fungus.)

And then there were the unclean meats. Seafood wasn't a big deal for us--living so far from the coasts, we weren't used to crab cakes, shrimp, or lobster. But our German ancestors loved sausage. It was a sacrifice to lose bacon with pancakes, ham sandwiches, Mom's baked orange pork chops, and pepperoni pizza*--not to mention hot dogs!

Thus began a new era in our family history. Eating out became an exercise in selection by elimination. If six of out of eight entree choices contained pork, shrimp, or mushrooms, and one had something else you hated, you knew what you were ordering. When we were invited to other people's homes, which became a rarer event the larger the family became, Dad was sure to mention to them that we followed certain dietary restrictions. Church folks volunteering to bring us meals after Mom had another baby got the same information (resulting in three variations of chicken and potato salad in one week).

There were exceptions, of course. When our new neighbors invited us across the street for hot dogs the day we moved in, Mom was glad enough not to cook and we were permitted to receive with thanksgiving what was set before us, without inquiries as to the ingredients. When we were visiting family out-of-state and a sweet elderly relation baked a ham, there was a whispered discussion behind the scenes. Dad told us that it would be okay for us to eat it. Seeing that she had prepared it out of generosity and ignorance, it would be gracious of us not to turn it down. I stepped up to that table in her blue dining room with mouth watering, endeavoring to mask my anticipation. It was the last ham I would taste for over a decade.

Our hot dogs were all-beef. (Soy weiners were nasty.) We cheered when turkey pepperoni hit the market, and when we could serve turkey bacon planks as a salty side to a breakfast of waffles. By then our parents had relaxed on combining meat and dairy, so we could enjoy cheeseburgers again, and browned hamburger on our pizza. We found the stores that sold beef sausage links and became adept at rapidly scanning labels for offensive ingredients. Jiffy cornbread mix and some refried beans contained lard, which was "unclean". Mom once came home with frozen Salisbury steaks. When I found them in the freezer, I dutifully read her the ingredients. When she realized they contained pork, she threw the boxes in the garbage in exasperation.

When Dad accompanied me to San Francisco where I sat for a law exam in 1996 (required for students of Gothard's unaccredited correspondence law school), we were served breakfast sandwiches aboard the jet. I remember being annoyed that the diced ham was cooked into the egg, so it was nearly impossible to separate the two. I would have happily eaten the sandwich all together, but dared not appear to do so with my dad watching from the seat next to me. I remember looking sideways at him to see how he would handle the awkward situation, but I think he felt the same way. Sightseeing later on Pier 39 in the Fisherman's Wharf district, we carefully avoided the clam chowder that smelled so delicious in sourdough bread bowls. Shellfish, having neither fins nor scales, are an abomination, no matter how beguilingly disguised.

Ironically, the only times I was served pork during that long period was when I was volunteering for IBLP and they ordered pizza for the staff! (IBLP training center kitchens did not ordinarily serve pork products.)

I knew from my own reading of the New Testament that I had never shared my parents' interpretation of the Old Testament code. When I left home for the first time at age 22, I lost no time shedding the "standard" I had resented for so many years. My first day as an IBLP staff member was spent traveling from Chicago to Oklahoma City. When we stopped for lunch at a Subway, I ordered the Italian sub, chock full of forbidden salami, pepperoni, and ham. Two years later, I savored every morsel of the first real breakfast bacon I'd tasted since childhood. Each first made an impression: crab Rangoon, New Orleans shrimp, Maryland crab cakes, scallops in a pasta dish, calamari, lechon, pulled pork, BBQ ribs.

When I tell my kids about the way I grew up, they are aghast. They know religious kids in their classes who are vegetarian, or don't eat pork, or don't get candy at Halloween. But it always jars them to imagine their mother swimming in a dress, or kept from eating bacon, because of what an ancient scroll said that God told an old man on a mountain in a middle eastern desert.




*The famed Duggar family--equally zealous followers of Gothard--also stay away from pork. One episode of their "Nineteen Kids & Counting" showed them visiting a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. and enjoying pepperoni pizza. Curious viewers looked up the pizzeria's website and discovered that Jumbo Pizza uses all-beef pepperoni.

"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.

Hobby Lobby: Deep Pockets

Since we're talking about Hobby Lobby's values, here is more about the family behind the company.

David Green, founder of Hobby Lobby, is a pastor's son from Emporia, KS. The Greens are Pentecostal and have a long history of supporting charismatic ministries and organizations. In 2003, David Green received the Assemblies of God Superintendent's Medal of Honor. The next year, he donated $10.5 million to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

In 2007, the Green family came to the rescue of charismatic Oral Roberts University, paying off debts to the tune of $70 million. In return, Mart Green, son of David Green and CEO of Christian book store chain Mardel, became chairman of the new ORU board of trustees. The same year, David Green donated a Massachusetts campus to Zion Bible College, which was renamed Northpoint Bible College to avoid being mistaken for a Jewish organization. "Northpoint Bible College exists to teach and train students for excellent Pentecostal ministry."

In 2009, AG News reported that a gift of $10 million from Hobby Lobby to Southeast University, an interdenominational school in Lakeland, FL with a long Pentecostal tradition. Mart Green was quoted as saying, "We appreciate your commitment to Christian higher education and all that Southeastern is doing to raise up students with a Christian world view."  In 2010, Hobby Lobby donated $1.5 million to Northwest University, a private college in Kirkland, WA, operated by the Assemblies of God.

The Green Family Trust supports numerous churches and parachurch organizations, purchasing dozens of properties and donating them to evangelical causes, such as Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. The Greens also own the "Passages" exhibit, a collection of rare biblical texts and artifacts assembled by Steven Green, now Hobby Lobby's president. Hobby Lobby partners with the controversial right-wing group Wallbuilders to run full-page newspaper ads around the country.

Mart Green is also the founder of Every Tribe Entertainment, which produced "End of the Spear", a 2005 film about five male missionaries killed by a tribe in Ecuador while attempting to evangelize them in 1956. One of the missionaries is played by actor Chad Allen, a gay Christian. Green has stated that he was unaware of Allen's sexual orientation when he offered him the contract. "We found out Chad was gay after we offered him the parts. We felt like when we offered him the contract, we were obligated to honor it." Green told Christianity Today, "To be honest, I would not have hired Chad had I known everything about him. But God had to work around me to get Chad on this project. He wanted Chad on this project. I wish I were able to articulate all the things that led me to understand that. It is very hard to share the ways the Lord leads, especially when you can't fully grasp why he is doing things that don't make sense to the natural man."

The Green family has a friendly relationship with cult leader Bill Gothard, whose seminars they have attended. They bought him a decrepit VA hospital in Little Rock in 2000 and another hospital building in Nashville in 2003. (Gothard lacked the resources to see either project completed.) Hobby Lobby also purchased the Ambassador University campus in Big Sandy, Texas from the Worldwide Church of God and turned it over to Gothard's IBLP for an ALERT training campus.

Steve Green, Hobby Lobby's president, has spoken alongside Gothard at an ATI conference (attended by the Duggars) at the Big Sandy center. Last year, he was a keynote speaker at a businessmen's seminar held at Gothard's headquarters in Oak Brook, IL (and also advertised on the very strange website of the "World Trade Center of Illinois", of which Gothard claims to be president). Steve Green is a featured speaker for Gothard's Embassy Institute.

And David Green has allowed Gothard to speak to employees and distribute IBLP materials at a Hobby Lobby store near Oak Brook, IL. According to an IBLP staff member:

"Friday evening, a small group of us had the amazing opportunity to go with Mr. Gothard to the local Hobby Lobby store. We had been invited by CEO and Founder David Green to present the message of God’s freedom and power to their staff. Each employee who attended the meeting was given the opportunity to receive one of Mr. Gothard’s latest books: How to Resolve 7 Deadly Stresses. During this meeting, three of us had the privilege to give our testimonies of how we transformed the “stresses” from our past experiences by applying the commands of Christ to our situation and life. The staff seemed intrigued seeing the renewed joy, peace, and blessing that came as a result."

Bill Gothard, who has never been married but has been accused of sexually harassing young women on his staff, shares the Greens' opposition to contraceptives. He tells attendees of his Advanced seminar, "There is no question that many birth control methods and devices simply kill the conceived child. Chief among these is the IUD. It comes as a shock to many couples, however, that taking the pill also results in aborting a conceived child." Gothard cites a 1979 report from Britain to convince couples that taking the pill is more dangerous than pregnancy. He assures his followers that overpopulation is a myth, that God intends couples to "multiply exceedingly", and that reducing family size is "the hidden agenda of secular humanism".

"Humanists have carried on a persistent propaganda campaign to convince nations that the world is overpopulated and has dwindling natural resources."  

(Bill Gothard, Advanced Seminar textbook)

In July, Hobby Lobby won a temporary exemption from the law requiring it to offer its employees insurance coverage for birth control. The Green family says some contraceptives, including the morning-after pill, violate its religious beliefs. The Denver appeals court observed that the company had "drawn a line at providing coverage for drugs or devices they consider to induce abortions, and it is not for us to question whether the line is reasonable."

Last month, David Green explained his position:

Hobby Lobby merchandise

A new government healthcare mandate says that our family business MUST provide what I believe are abortion-causing drugs as part of our health insurance. Being Christians, we don’t pay for drugs that might cause abortions, which means that we don’t cover emergency contraception, the morning-after pill or the week-after pill. We believe doing so might end a life after the moment of conception, something that is contrary to our most important beliefs.

Since emergency contraception violates Hobby Lobby's conscience, I can only hope that in the future Hobby Lobby will be redirecting some of its evangelistic budget into programs such as women's self-defense classes, violence prevention, equal rights for women, abuse intervention, and sex education for teen girls.




Update 7/5/14 -- For more information, check out Micah Murray's post at Hobby Lobby, The Duggars, and Bill Gothard

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.