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On March 18 in Taunte town, Arkansas, Joseph Duggar was arrested for the molestation of a nine year old girl. He posted a $600,000 bond on Tuesday, flew home to Arkansas after making his first appearance in Florida on the molestation charges. Duggar, who of course you've seen in his parent and siblings TLC show 19 kids and counting, was arrested and now is out on bond. The girl's father told police in Arkansas that when he confronted Duggar about the abuse after his daughter told him what had happened, Duggar admitted to it. Police officers in Taunte Town said the father called Duggar with a detective on the line and he again admitted to his actions. Robert Morris just got out of a six month prison sentence for molesting a 12 year old girl. Today we're going to talk about why is it that so much abuse happens and is covered up by the church? Why is it that people like Russell Brand, when those allegations of sexual misconduct, sexual assault run to conservatism, run to the church and the church welcomes them with with open arms? We're going to pull back the curtain on a pattern that keeps repeating itself, one that hides behind stained glass and scripture and the language of redemption. But what happens when institutions built on moral authority become safe havens for rebu for abuse? We've seen both in the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, evangelical churches, quiet reshuffling of predators within church leadership, to families who protect their image over the victims, and to entire systems that teach forgiveness before accountability. Forgiveness does not negate the consequences of your actions. We're stepping into a really uncomfortable but very relevant conversation, not just because of the history of systemic abuse within the church, but also because of things like the Epstein files and the lack of accountability within the United States. We're going to look at movements that call families to have as many kids as possible, the women to just submit, God damn it. While quietly hiding the abuse of the children they claim to care so much for. It's not just about Josh Duggar or Joseph Duggar or Russell Brand or Robert Morris. It's about the system that allows for them to exist in the first place. We're going to zoom out a little bit and ask the harder question. How many times has this happened before? How many times is it still happening now? We're also going to look at what is the system that creates this pattern over and over and over? Why is it that when allegations surface, when reputations crack, some men don't disappear, they convert. They convert publicly, loudly, suddenly, and they get away with it? Is it, is it just a public rebranding? Is it transformation? Is it protection? Or is it something else entirely? Because in a system that preaches instant forgiveness, spiritual warfare, persecution narratives that often blame the victim, not the grown adult man who was the perpetrator, claiming faith can sometimes function as a shield. And it plays very well in court. Today's episode isn't about tearing down a belief system. It's about confronting power, confronting the systems that would shield the abuser and not protect the abused. It's about asking why victims are so often silenced in the name of grace, told that they need to forgive, and why accountability is treated like an attack on God himself. This is where faith, control and consequences all collide. We are not going to look away on today's episode of Flipping Tables. All right everyone, we are back. Welcome back to Flipping Tables. As of this recording, it's the day before Easter, so hopefully everyone had a great Easter celebration. For those who do celebrate, a lot of craziness going on in the world with Pete Hegseth banning Catholic Mass as part of the Pentagon worship services as well as Israel preventing Catholic Mass until the Pope intervened, it's been a very interesting change of pace. I don't have really any announcements, just again, a special thank you to the Patreon supporters who make the show possible. We're going to continue doing those live drop ins that are happening at Patreon exclusive lives with me that will be there forever. We have more Bible studies coming up this month and those replays will be available on Patreon and especially now that I have bought a house. I put an offer on a house. It was accepted in 24 hours. There's a lot happening. I will get into the lore of that here in a minute. But because I will have a home studio, it will be so much easier for me to create a lot more content for Patreon users, especially around I'm doing a very, a very daunting series going over each book of the Bible and giving historical context in like short videos that people can take and digest and learn about how we got each of those books. But that is going to be a lot easier to do having a studio. I've been doing everything I do in a 600 square foot apartment condo that I own as well as the studio here with Seeger. So I will be having a lot more space to create more content for you. So if you've not subscribed, please do. There's a ton of tiers just to make sure that it's Affordable and accessible for everyone. Today especially. I really wanted to do this episode today after the arrest of Joseph Duggar. And you've probably already listened to my episode with Cousin Amy and actually her and I were texting back and forth when it happened. And we just see this so often. Robert Morris just got out of a six month prison sentence for molesting a 12 year old, which is insane that all he served was six months. But we see the Epstein files and we see so many perpetrators that are involved in the files hiding behind the Christian faith. And these systems have become a system of abuse. And so what we're going to do is we're going to walk through a lot of the systems today, a lot of the teaching that create this abusive system, both from the perspective of trapping people, particularly women and children, as well as how the system itself functions to shield and protect the men that are called out on that abuse. There will not be like soft trigger warning for anyone who has been abused in the church, because that's what we're talking about. But there's nothing especially graphic or anything like that in this episode. And I'm just going to jump in. I think it's really important that we understand that especially for people of faith, forgiveness does not mean no accountability. Forgiveness does not mean you don't suffer the consequences. Forgiveness does not mean, especially for men, because this is, this is particularly gifted to men, does not mean that you get to walk away from committing heinous acts without any form of accountability. And if the church is going to get really honest about faith and about Christ and about making sure that people are protected, then they have to get honest about accountability and consequences. We're going to start with the quiverful movement and really just work through the history of how this system has developed into what we see around us today. First, I'm going to start with Psalms 127:3. 5 from the New Revised Standard Version. Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them. This is the verse that is the backbone of the quiverful movement. It's a beautiful image of Father standing at the gate, strong and blessed. His quiver is full of arrows, each one a child, each one a gift from God. The Psalm does not mention the mother who bore those arrows into being. It does not describe the labor or the cost. As a reminder, psalms or poetry, they're not meant to be taken literally. It speaks Only of the man and his weapons. His children are represented as weapons and the blessing that they confer. This is the passage that launched a movement. And if you trace it back far enough, you arrive at a place the psalmist could never have imagined. A courtroom in Texas. A documentary on Amazon. A man who never married and never fathered a child of his own, but who taught 2 million people that the Father is the final authority in every household, answerable to no one but God, and that questioning him is the same as questioning the Almighty. And we're going to follow this thread. I mean, it obviously begins in the ancient text where God commands humanity to be fruitful and multiply. A text written thousands of years before the United States ever came into being. A text not written in English, not written for America in 2026. America is not a central character here, but it's been used to promote this movement. We're going to move through centuries of theological interpretation and changes that built the architecture of a patriarchal authority gifted by God. That male authority is God ordained. It arrives in the late 20th century when a specific cluster of American evangelicals took these ancient commands and created in a new social movement that placed men at the center of a divine hierarchy, women beneath them, and children at the bottom. The movement that isn't just in Christian nationalism, but we see it in the red pill manosphere. So much of their language is copied from this. It follows this thread through the institute and basic life principles that we've talked before. The man who founded it, through the families who lived inside his system, and through the survivors who tried to tell the truth and then were silenced until he himself was forced to step down for the abuse of young women and teens. And this is again, not an attack on faith. I get a lot of criticism online that, oh, you're just anti Christianity. I am. So, like the teachings of Christ are a central component to my life. They are one of the most important things to me. And that is why the hypocrisy bothers me so much. That is why the hypocrisy enrages me. I hate Jesus in. In his. His kindness and his love for the outcast, for those who are ostracized. Loving your neighbor, take care of the poor, to be hijacked for cruelty and as a cover for abuse. This is the reason. The reason this podcast is called Flipping Tables is because the story of Jesus flipping tables when he was so outraged about evil and Explo is my favorite story about him. That's why this is called that. So this is not an argument against Scripture or an assault on the church, although we're going to talk about how ancient text has been manipulated and used. But it was ancient text written by ancient people, ancient men trying to process and understand what they believed about God and culture and society based on their understanding. We can read these texts and learn from them, glean from them, and also say, do we know better now? Is there a better way? This is a careful accounting of what happens when theological authority operates without accountability, when we start to blur the line between the separation of church and state, when hierarchy becomes its own justification, and when the people entrusted with the most intimate forms of spiritual power use that power to harm the most vulnerable in their care. The question we're asking here is not whether God intends fathers to love their children. Of course, of course you're supposed to love your kids. It's what happens when theology, built around filling a quiver also builds. Builds an unchecked archer, an unchecked person wielding that quiver that has unbridled authority that we claim was given by God. So be fruitful and multiply. Let's start there. This command appears before anything goes wrong, before the serpent, before exile, before Cain raises his hand against Abel. God speaks the world into being. He sets humanity inside it. And in Genesis 1:28 says, Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. This is really where the origin of these movements come. This is. This is a basis for dominion theology, which Dominion theology takes this verse and says, see Christians. Christians are supposed to fill and subdue the earth. As a reminder, Christianity didn't exist yet. Christianity didn't exist in Genesis. In fact, the Abrahamic religion at all didn't exist yet because Abraham didn't exist, Judaism didn't exist yet. And also we did fill the earth. We were fruitful and multiplied, and we filled it. Mission accomplished. We don't have to keep. We don't have to keep filling the earth when we've already accomplished it. That's like saying, paint the house. And when you're done painting the house, you keep painting the house in perpetuity. Not the point. But this is taken to justify trying to assert authority over the entire world. This is one of the. This is the first instruction given to the first humans after the flood. God says it again to Noah, Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. In Genesis 9, 7, two commands separated by catastrophe, both carrying the same weight. Procreation is woven into the architecture of creation. And remember that the. The creat story very much mirrors ancient creation myths from the Middle east, from, excuse me, Southwest Asia. I'm really trying to correct using Middle east, but reflects this God struggling with water. We see this in the Enuma Elish, which is around, started around 1400 BCE or maybe a little bit earlier, which talks about this conflict between Tiamat and Marduk, Marduk being the God of Babylon who overcomes the sea God, the sea God of chaos. Tiamat becomes the creator of the world, becomes the authority, and is the reason that Babylon becomes this great, great empire. All of these stories are very similar and it's, it's the way of ancient people trying to make sense of their society, trying to justify their society, trying to say, where did the world come from and why are we important in it? What's our purpose, what's our role? Where's our calling? That's where all this come from. But this is a foundational command. And what that command means and who it empowers is never been a settled question. Again, the United States didn't exist, yet it's not a command to us. It was well before Christianity would ever exist. The early church wrestled fiercely with the relationship between sexuality, procreation and holiness. Paul writes, writing to the church in Corinth, expressed a clear preference for celibacy because they considered sexuality to be a base urge. He said in First Corinthians 7, 8, to the unmarried and the widows, I say it is well for them to remain unmarried, as I am. For Paul, marriage was simply a concession to human weakness, a reflection of the Greek influenced culture that he grew up in. The highest expression of faithfulness was to abstain. He commands in first Corinthians that if you are able, abstain from marriage. Don't get married, don't have children, don't get distracted from your service of the Lord. Don't give in. He tells widows to remain unmarried, unheard of in the ancient world. But this was Paul's stance. Jesus never married. Jesus never had children. And then the pastoral epistles, likely written by later followers of Paul, Timothy and Titus, were written in the second century after Paul's death. But in First Timothy 2, 15, whoever this author was who claimed to be Paul, declares that women will, quote, be saved through childbearing, a passage that became tied to female salvation directly to their reproductive function. Your access to salvation as a woman now is tied to what you can do giving birth and establish a theological link between women's spiritual worth and her willingness to bear children. This verse, this, this tying of a woman's salvation to if she gives birth and how often she does. And her submissiveness has become such a. A theological pin in the foundation of conservative evangelicalism, when this wasn't even written by Paul. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the 4th and 5th century, formalized much of what the Western church would believe about sex for the next millennium. On his treatise on the Good of Marriage, Augustine argued that sexual intercourse was permissible only within marriage and only for the purpose of procreation, meaning husbands. You don't even get to have sex with your wife for fun. It's only to make babies. Any sexual act undertaken for pleasure alone carried the taint of concupiscence, which was the disordered desire that Augustine believed was the lasting consequence of the Fall. Desiring sex for sex itself a sin, even if it's your spouse. Sex was not sinful if it served God's purpose of creating new life, but it was shadowed by the possibility of sin if you were doing it for the desire of pleasure and intimacy. This framework positioned procreation is the only moral justification for sexual intimacy and embedded reproduction deeply within the structure of Christian obligation. This became the foundation as well for the Catholic Church to be so opposed to birth control that it violates this. This sex only for procreation ideal. And it allows for you to have sex for the sake of pleasure without getting pregnant. The Protestant reformation of the 16th century altered this in ways that would reverberate all the way until now. Martin Luther rejected Catholic valorization of priestly celibacy, arguing that marriage and family life were themselves holy vocations. Prior to Martin Luther, the highest calling of a woman who wanted to serve God would be a vow of celibacy to dedicate her life to God. Martin Luther changed that, that the highest call for women was to get married, submit to a husband and have children. And Martin Luther was extremely sexist. In fact, he said, if they die in childbirth, let them. That is what they're here for. A very negative view of women. He believed that women shouldn't be able to inherit money. They shouldn't have any access in the system, in society. And his wife died penniless because of his choices. John Calvin also insisted that the household, not the monastery, was the primary site where Christians would live out their faithfulness. The Reformers did not invent patriarchal authority, but they used theology to relocate it and redefine it. In Catholic tradition, of course, the priest held spiritual authority by virtue of his ordination and his celibacy. In Protestant tradition, the authority was transferred to the Father, who became the spiritual Head of the household, responsible for its religious instruction, moral formation, and spiritual discipline. As historian Beth Allison Barr, who we did an early episode with, we're going to have her back on the show soon. She argued in the Making of Biblical Womanhood, what mar. What modern evangelicals call, quote biblical patriarchy is not an ancient constant, but a historically constructed arrangement built in stages, shaped by culture as much as by scripture. And we're going to see that now how. What. What people consider now to be traditional family values is not traditional. Even if we look at the. The stay at home 50s housewife was a relatively new concept. Poor women have always worked outside the home, whether they were seamstresses or maids or worked in different ways, worked for a wealthy family, they always worked. And a lot of times prior to World War I and World War II, families lived with family. It was too expensive to build a new home each time someone got married. And so you lived with your family, you lived with your mom and dad. You took care of them as they got elderly. But there was also always help. There was never this situation where the woman was responsible for the home and children and any work she had outside the home by herself. We didn't create that until after World War II. The government had to find a way to push women back out of the workforce. Women were thriving. Women had resources, now pushed them back out and released a wave of propaganda and societal norms and rules to push women back into the household. And we paint this picture of they were so happy. They were. They were so drugged up to get through the day, amphetamines, barbiturates, so much to the point, so that they were called Mommy's Little Helpers because it was the only way women could get through it. Women were not happy. The suicide rate was extremely high because people are individuals and we're all. We all have different callings, different things that work for us. But to say that this was the norm isn't true. It wasn't the norm. It didn't become a forced norm until after World War II. By the time the 20th century even arrived, centuries of theological development had produced this quiet and powerful assumption that ran through large portions of Protestant Christianity in America. And we see this now. We see the resurgence of this. A family that honored God was a large family. Family. And a family that honored God was led by the Father, whose authority was spiritually ordained, practically unchecked, and theologically defended, and that the Father's authority only submitted to God, or maybe the pastor, depending on the type of church. The seeds were in the ground. This has been there for a long time. What changed in the 20th century was not the theology itself, but the emergence of leaders and movements that organized these seeds, watered it, grew into a garden of coherent ideology, gave it a name and built institutions powerful enough to infiltrate colleges and teach this and grow this garden. Let's talk about the modern quiver. The modern quiverful movement did not emerge of course from a single source, but from a convergence of voices across two decades that transformed a cherry picked handful of biblical passages into a comprehensive social philosophy. Nancy Campbell, a New Zealand born writer and speaker, began publishing her magazine above rubies in 1977, advocating for what she called called radical motherhood and urging women to see childbearing as a divine calling that transcended any earthly consideration of health, finances or personal desire. We just saw this at CPAC with Isabel Brown. Isabel Brown got on that stage and said if she said that you need to be encouraging your children at the dinner table to have children before they're ready and more children than they can afford. She's parroting this belief. And I want to say to you that it is exceptionally reckless and irresponsible to bring in children. You are not ready for that. You are not sure you can feed. Feed. That is insane. I am all for people having as many children as they want to have families, big families if that's what they want, stay at home, parent, if that's what they want to be. Absolutely. I love that for you. Do not be bringing children into this world that you cannot feed. That is irresponsible and it is selfish. But Isabelle Brown was just parroting this. But Nancy Campbell described the womb as a weapon against the enemy. Again, we now have children described as arrows. And now the womb itself is a weapon. I grew up in a church that said we need to outbreed non Christians. My body became a weapon in service to the Christian nationalist movement. My calling was to have as many kids as possible to submit to this husband, to become a weapon as a soldier of the Lord. That's insane language. Insane language. And that is why we hear so much rhetoric from Christian nationalists that hate women like me so much. Because we do not and will not have children. And I have recently decided that I don't think I'm on the marriage train either. Either. And that's okay. Long term partnership. Great. I don't. I think I've. I've come to this, this recognizing the last couple years I was like, wait, do I want to get married? Or is that something I was told that I wanted And I've come to the conclusion, I think it was something I was told I want again. Campbell described the womb as a weapon against the enemy, telling NPR in 2009 that the more children I have, the more ability I have to impact the world for God. As if that's the only way a woman could do that. Done. But it was Mary's Pride, a 1985 book, the way Home Beyond Feminism back to reality. You're going to hear so much this and be like, wait, this is what's being said in the trad wife movement on social media right now. Because it's all regurgitated. Mary Pride's book the Way Home, where that crystallized the movement into something recognizable and reproducible. Pride, a self described former feminist who converted to evangelical Christianity in 1977, argued that contraception was a manifest manifestation of of feminist rebellion against God's design. Eek. That large families were biblically mandated norm. And that any deliberate limitation of fertility was an act of disobedience. This is why we are seeing so much anti birth control propaganda right now. All this stuff about it's propping up the IVF industry, it's doing this, it's doing this. It's all these hormones. Birth control does not have more side effects than basically any other medication we take. And as long as people are informed of the medication, women are smart enough and capable enough because they are adults and they are not children to make a decision to take a medication that may have side effects. As someone with pcos, birth control has absolutely saved my life and made it more functional. But this whole, all of this propaganda is around this ideology because they believe that contraception. I'll read it again. Was a manifestation of feminist rebellion against God design. They're going to use health, they're going to use protecting women as the excuse, but it's really because they think it's wrong. Because it's the great equalizer. Because it doesn't force women to have a ton of babies, because it allows women to choose, have sex and not have babies if they so want. Any deliberate limitation of fertility was an act of disobedience. Pride writes, God commanded that sex be at least potentially fruitful. That is not deliberately unfruitful. God never said that Bible doesn't talk about birth control because it didn't exist yet. Her book sold tens of thousands of copy and became the foundation of the movement that did not yet have a name. Oh, but it would. The name came four years later. Rick and Jan Hess published a full Quiver Family Planning and lordship of Christ in 1989, explicitly drawing on Psalm 127 that I read to you earlier to argue that Christian couples should surrender all reproductive decisions to divine providence because apparently God didn't give you a brain to budget and consider how many kids you can feed. I'm sorry, it makes me so mad because kids born into families like this that drive themselves into poverty by having more children than they can afford, these children are more likely to experience food instability. They're more likely to experience neglect, abuse and displacement because of these decisions. And then the church says, well, I don't know why you had so many kids. Well, you told us to. The same year Charles Proven published the Bible in Birth Control, providing what adherence regarded as the definitive theological scaffolding for the rejection rejection of all forms of contraception. Proven's work surveyed the historical Christian consensus against birth control and argued that modern acceptance of family planning represented a catastrophic departure from biblical teaching. Again, as a reminder of the be fruitful and multiply verse, We've already done it. It. We did it. I don't know if you noticed, there's billions of people on the earth. By the late 1990s, the quiverful philosophy had found an institutional home. Doug Phil Doug Phillips founded Vision forum Ministries in 1998, merging quiverful pronatalism with a doctrine that he called Biblical patriarchy. Oh, here we go. Now we're warming up. Vision Forum distributed its message through homeschool conferences, curriculum packages and an extensive network of like minded organizations. This is another reason they push breaking down the Department of Education, defunding public schools, forcing homeschooling, because it's more accessible to movements like this. Phillips articulated a vision in which the Christian family was a self contained unit of faithfulness, led by the father, of course, whose authority was absolute, supported by a wife whose role was submission and childbearing, and populated by children who existed in the movement's own language as arrows in their father's quiver. They are simply an extension and a weapon of him, not their own unique individuals. The internal logic of the Quiverful movement was elegant and totalizing. They did package this very well. If children are arrows, then the father is the warrior who ate. If the family is a battlefield and the war between righteousness and secularism, then the wife is under the warrior's command. If God alone opens and closes the womb, then any attempt to limit children is a rebellion against the sovereign will of the Creator. And if the man who leads the largest family is the most faithful soldier in this cosmic war, then there's no natural ceiling on how many children a couple should have and no legitimate basis for anyone outside the family to question the father's decisions about anything thing. And I would argue that they also built it that anyone inside the family can't question the father's decisions. Estimates of the movement size have always been imprecise. It's hard to track. But journalist Katherine Joyce, who wrote the most comprehensive study of the movement in her 2009 book Quiverful Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, cited a 2006 estimate that placed the number of self identifying Quiverful families in the thousands to the low tens of thousands. But the movement's influence, of course, has bled far beyond these official boundaries. Like we we hear these ideologies in the Trump administration, we see it online, we see it in the trad wife movement, the incel manosphere movement. But the ideas, especially about male headship, like we have Christians, Christian nationalists openly teaching that the 19th Amendment should be repealed and women should not have the right to vote. We see that this that comes from this movement, this male headship, female submission, large families and homeschooling circulate through evangelical churches, Christian political organizations, and they never explicitly have adopted the Quiverful movement, but they've borrowed its doctrine. And before we talk about the architect behind what would become this, this umbrella of authority, which we've mentioned him before, Bill Gothard. Before we do that, we're going to take Our 1st of 2 Mid Show Sponsor breaks. If you want ad free episodes, please subscribe to patreon@patreon.com Monty Mater Perception is often very different than fact. And in a world of conflicting, sometimes outrageous opinions, screamed very loudly, confidently. The only way to know the truth of the matter is to be able to actually look at the data. Most working women in the US Believe they are disadvantaged when it comes to earning competitive wages. But many men have a different view. Most employed women, about six in 10 say men have more opportunities when it comes to earning competitive wages, while about one third think neither gender has an advantage. And about 3 in 10 employed women say they have had personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender. Now, employed men very, very divided. About 4 in 10 believe men have an advantage when it comes to wages. About half think both genders have about the same opportunities. And 1 in 10 say that women actually have more opportunities. Just about 1 in 10 men say that they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender. Well, what's really true, as it turns out, especially last year with the rollback of dei, many investigations actually investigating Claims that white men were discriminated against, against. We actually have the numbers. Last year, men's wages for the same careers with the Same credentials increased 3.7%, while women's did not. Women on average earn about 80.9% of what a man earns, even if she has the same level of credentials, experience and time served on the job. It's really important that as these claims come out to us from all different social media platforms, different news sources, different talking heads, that we're able to find the actual data, that we're able to look a little bit deeper and find what is the real answer to this question. As these type of claims, these type of conflicts, these type of cultural wars come to a head right before the midterms, is more important than ever to be able to have reliable information that you can fact check and understand the truth behind the claims. And that's what ground news is for. Ground news takes hundreds and hundreds and thousands of articles every day, consolidates them into themes so that you can look at all of the coverage on a single story that you're following, that you can look at all of the coverage and also see who owns that media source, how factual do they tend to be, who's reporting on this and who's not, so that we can have more informed conversations, more informed decision making, and more informed voting come November. To use this resource that I use every single day, multiple times a day, you can get 40% off their vantage plan, which comes to about $5 a month, by subscribing@groundnews.com tables if the quiverful movement provided the theology, then Bill Gothard provided infrastructure. William W. Got Jr. Was born on November 2, 1934. He graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois, and in 1961, he founded an organization he initially called Campus Teams, which would eventually become the Institute in Basic Life Principles. So many of you were like, oh, no, I remember this. If you had anything to do with the iblp, you know where I'm going now. Gothard never got married. Oh, the horror. He never had children. He spent plenty of time molesting teens and girls in their early 20s, though. But over the course of six decades, he built one of the most influential institutions in American evangelical life, an organization that claimed more than 2 million seminar attendees, operated facilities in multiple states, and at its peak, held millions of dollars in real estate assets, because they always do. Also, I apologize if it sounds like I'm a little bit lispy today. I like, I don't know how I hit my face But I hit my bottom lip and it's swollen and I find myself tripping over my words a lot more. Gothard's primary vehicle, of course, was his Basic Youth Conflict Seminar, later renamed the Basic Seminar. This regularly filled auditoriums with tens of thousands or more. Throughout the 70s and 80s, the seminars distilled Gothard's theology into seven basic life principles that he presented as universal law governing every aspect of human existence. Also during the 70s is the time that dominion theology is being formed and the seven mountains mandate. So this is all, this architecture is all happening at the same time time. At the center of his teaching was what he called the umbrella of authority doctrine, a rigid hierarchical framework that places God at the top, the husband directly beneath God, the wife beneath the husband, and the children beneath both parents. Gothard illustrated this hierarchy with diagrams showing literal umbrellas because apparently he doesn't understand how umbrellas work, that if you have a big umbrella, you don't need a little umbrella underneath the big umbrella. But that's. I'm being nitpicky there. Each one, of course, sheltering the person beneath it from spiritual harm. The implication, of course, was deliberately stated. To step outside one's designated umbrella was to step outside God's protection and God's divine order. A wife who questioned her husband, a child who questioned a parent was not simply exercising independence. She was inviting spiritual destruction and sin. Now, I will say I grew up. I grew up in this. Like, I grew up in kind of a hybrid of all of these movements, but very much remember being taught the umbrella of authority. I remember hearing my first wife submit to your husband sermon at nine. And even at nine, I knew, this is messed up. Like, I don't. I don't want to be someone's slave. I don't want to be someone's servant. And I. I was smart enough, even at 9, to understand that when you're in a relationship where you get no power in decision making, you get no resources, you're stuck at home, you don't get a job, you have no choice in anything. You have no final say in anything, including your own body, you couldn't convince me that was fair. And my solution at 9, which is hilarious considering how my life turned out, my solution at nine was, okay, okay, well, I don't want to sin. Like, I don't want to disobey God, So I'm just going to stay celibate and not get married. And that was. I really. I didn't realize how serious I was about that commitment until my twenties and Now I'm like, you know what, I don't, I don't like if I were to ever get married, I don't want a marriage like that. I want a partnership and. But it's funny how that commitment at 9, still operating within the framework, I was like, okay, I'm just not gonna have sex and I'm not gonna get married, because that sounds terrible, but I also don't wanna make God mad head. And that was how I got around the umbrella, if you will. In 1984, Gothard launched the Advanced Training Institute, which was a homeschooling program that used curriculum materials he personally developed. Of course, drawing heavily from scripture, but specifically the Sermon on the Mount. ATI was not merely an educational program, it was a system for organizing your family. Families who enrolled in ATI were expected to adopt Gothard standards for how you dressed. Courtship, right? And then we had court, this courtship movement happens. And then we get into Joshua Harris's I Kiss dating Goodbye. Discipline, discipline, what music you could listen to and spiritual formation. Daughters wore modest clothing selected according to Gothard's published guidelines. Some random dude outside of your family is publishing guidelines about what your daughters can wear. And we want to say that this isn't cult like behavior. Courtship replaced dating with fathers serving as the gatekeepers for every romantic relationship. Education happened at home, of course, using Gothard's booklets. And the content of that education was filtered through one man's theological interpretation, enforced by fathers who were taught that they held God given authority over every single person and every choice in their household. And they were ansible, answerable to no one but Gothard's system above them, and in theory to God himself. ATI transformed the quiverful theology from an abstract idea into a lived structure. Within this ecosystem, families became self contained and self policing units. There was no lateral accountability. There's no external check on the father's authority. Right, because that would be challenging God. There's no mechanism for dissent that was not itself theologically defined as rebellion and sin. If a daughter unhappy, the problem was her heart and her purity and her sin, not her father's decisions. If a wife was suffering, the solution was to submit more, not systemic change or protection. The theology was the structure and the structure was the theology. And both pointed towards the man who had never been a husband or a father, but who claimed on the basis of his reading of Scripture. And this is Gothard to know exactly how every household should orbit. Gothard's influence extended, of course, well beyond the families. In his programs, he cultivated relationships With Republican figures like Mike Huck, Sonny Perdue, and Sarah Palin. His organizations facilitated Generation Joshua, which funneled homeschooled teenagers into conservative political campaigns. The scale of this operation is enormous. Like we need. We have to start learning and understanding the scope and scale of what these conservative evangelical movements have been able to do to manipulate politics. This is why we're here. The IBLP claimed over 2 million seminar attendees. The organization's net assets were reported at $92 million in 2010, though they had dropped to 81 million by 2012. The political entanglements were not peripheral to Gothard's mission. They were central to it. Very simply, very similar to the family and Abraham Verde. Katherine Stewart, who you've heard me mention before. If you have not read the Power Worshipers, please read it. It's so good. But it documents how organizations like the IBLP served as connective tissue between the homeschool movement and the broader project of religious nationalism in America. Gothard seminars for legislatures, his conferences for pastors, his cultivation of elect elected served in a vision in which the patriarchal family was not merely a private arrangement, but the fundamental building, fundamental building block of the entire country and eventually the theocratic state that they want to implement. This is not incidental. This is institutional architecture designed to ensure that the theology of male authority and female submission would be encoded not only in families, but into law. And let me say something. If female submission were natural, if this was the natural state of things, women would have done it already. First of all, whatever's natural does not require violence, force, laws, and manipulation and indoctrination to enforce what happens naturally happens naturally. I don't have to think about breathing. It's very natural. I don't have to think about sleeping. It's a natural thing to do. But also women would have fucking done it already if this was natural. Women, women in our women would not keep getting back up and fighting again and again and again and and again to get out of these systems. If anything, that these patriarchal systems have showed us that men are more naturally submissive, that men. Men have a lot easier time. Please, just give me a checklist, tell me what to do. I want to make sure I can eat and have some relaxation time and have sex, and I'm good. The men thrive in the military. Why? Because they're really good at following orders. And there's no one more submissive than a conservative man who wants a manly or conservative man to tell him what do. If women were naturally submissive, we would have done it Already. But like, like the. Like Wolverine, we keep regenerating and getting back up. Drives me crazy. Crazy. Anyways. One of the striking manifestations of this vision was the International Alert Academy, which is a paramilitary training program for young men that operated under the iblp. Alert, which stood for Arrow Land Emergency Resource Team. Trains boys and young men in military style discipline. Again with the military. That's why this is. You'll see the pattern. Physical endurance and emergency response, all within the framework of theological obedience. The academy was not merely a summer camp or a vocational program. It was, in the words of one of the researchers, designed to cultivate theological manliness, a form of masculinity defined by physical strength, spiritual authority, and absolute loyalty to the chain of command. That Gothard's system established the bridge between spiritual authority and physical power was not accidental. This is engineering engineered. The organization also operated Indianapolis training centers and other residential facilities where young people lived and worked under Gothard's direct oversight. Think of how many children this man had control of. The seminars. Seminars held in these facilities, which reached their peak number over 500 per year, drew families from across the country into Gothard's orbit and control. Between 2009 and 2012, the number of seminars dropped from over 500 to fewer than 50. And the organization lost $8.6 million. And a lot of was due to the scandal and the public collapse in credibility that would happen in 2012. A website in 2012 called Recovering Grace began publishing firsthand accounts from women who had been sexually harassed by Bill Gothard. Because of course, again, when you create a system where a man has no accountability and you claim that God has given him that authority, who's going to challenge him? Who's going to challenge him? And then when, when there is any allegation, oh, he's under, he's under spiritual warfare. They're trying to come after this man of God. No, he's creep. The site was created by a former IBLP members as a space for survivors to share their experiences. The story that emerged, of course, followed the same consistent, devastating pattern we have seen over and over and over and over. By the time the IBLP board of directors placed Gothard on administrative leave of February 27, 2014, 34 women had come forward with credible allegations. The pattern the women described was methodical. Gothard would handpick young women to serve as his personal secretaries. Could he control their appearance, their schedule, their access to the outside world, and engaged in unwanted sexual touching. He would counsel this council. These women, who had previously been victims of sexual abuse, pressuring them for explicit details of their assaults and then telling them that it was their clothing or their failure to scream loud enough that made them complicit in their own rapes. I if. If this microphone was freestanding and it didn't belong to Seeger, I would throw it across the room. It makes me so mad. The institutional response is a master class in what we see in Christian nationalism. In February of 2014, the IBLP hired the Christian Law Associated headed association headed by David Gibbs Jr. A longtime IBLP follower. Because of course they have to protect ranks to conduct what it called an internal investigation. And guess what happened? There was never a report shared about the alleged victims. No meetings were granted to the women who had come forward. The investigation concluded that no criminal activity had occurred because of course, but that Gothard had acted in an in appropriate manner. Gothard, of course resigns. He denies the allegation and in July 2015 relaunched his personal website declaring that the women that accused him were not telling the truth. Because of course all 34 of them across decades just made it up with the same pattern, the same habit. Yeah, they all. Yep, sure, sure. In 2016, 10 women filed a lawsuit against Gothard and IBLP alleging sexual harassment, sexual assault and institutional coverup. The case was ultimately dismiss on statute of limitation grounds, not because they didn't have evidence the stat. How is their statute of limitations on sexual assault? Is it because we're run by a bunch of creeps in the government and in law? I think so, because there should not be statute of limitations on sexual assault or pedophilia. The plaintiffs issued a statement explaining that they were withdrawing due to the emotional toll of the litigation. Of course there was the statute of limitations, but they had also been threatened with a countersuit from the organization. And of course the organization was continuing to re victimize everyone that they could gain access to and threatening them. The system that had harmed them also made justice functionally inaccessible. Of course, the story doesn't end there. In 2025, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that a separate lawsuit brought by Phoebe Merritt and Abigail Doty could proceed against gothard and the IBLP. Merritt and Doty alleged that from approximately 1996 through 2011 they were subjected to sexual abuse by family members members. Their lawsuit claimed that the IBLP constituted a system that taught distorted doctrines, groomed girls to be available to sexual assault because it does, and indoctrinated boys and young men into Gothard IBLP sex abuse cults, teaching them to abuse and overlook abuse because it does. Chief Justice Blacklock, writing in dissent, argued that ruling on the case would require the court to decide whether Gothard's teachings were biblical, effectively proposing that theology itself should function as a legal should shield for the organization. The majority, thank God, disagreed, holding that the allegations focused on conduct, not doctrine. Thank God. And then, of course, the Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People. The Duggar Family Secrets brought the full scope of the IBLP to the mainstream audience for the first time. The four part series featured Jill Duggar, Dillard, the former IBLP members and experts tracing the direct line from Gothard's theology to the consequences in the lives of reality families. These are real people and nobody, I don't care if you're, if you're male, female, where you were born, how much money you have, you do not have God given authority over another human being. Period. End of sentence. Enough of this. Sorry, I'm getting so wound up. One former member described the system in a line that has become its most enduring epitaph. Gothard quote, turned every father into a cult leader and every home into an island. And that is the most accurate description of these high control groups. The Guardian described the documentary as a show that begins with the Duggar family and expands into something far more disturbing, tracing the inroads that fundamentalist, authoritarian Christianity has made into American schools, government and civic life. And again, I know I get a lot of flack because I the re and the reason I address Christian nationalism so much is because I grew up in it. I know and understand the movement. I know how harmful it is. And it is my personal mission to rip it out from the root of a country I want to see be better. My goal, my life calling, is to get rid of this. I will outlive it. I will outlive it. And Christ followers who truly follow Christ, who worship in spirit and truth will be able to thrive. And we will not have the control of an abusive theology that's used to manipulate power and money and abuse women and children. Enough of that. So let's briefly pivot to the Duggars who are kind of this really clear demonstration of this, this movement and this ideology. And I'm going to keep this part brief just because we did talk about it before in my episode with Cousin Amy. So Jim Bob of course, and Michelle Duggar, of course, parents of 19 children became household names through their TLC reality series, 19 Kids and Counting, which aired from 2008 to 2015. The family used ATI curriculum. They attended IBLP conferences. Their children's lives were organized according to Gothard's principles of courtship, modesty and spiritual authority. Authority. And notice how all of these organizations, all of these, quote, theologies, there's so much control of women from the time they're born, but not on men. It's very interesting the show presented. This, of course, is wholesome and it's charming and it's aspirational. Yeah. When you're making reality TV money, you can pay for 19 kids. TLC never, never named the theology. It simply broadcast it to millions of Americans in their living rooms, wrapped in the language, language of, quote, family values. Again, family values that allows for abuse and creates systems where people who don't have that reality TV money to have kids, they can't feed. In 2015, tabloid reporters, of course, revealed that Josh Duggar, the eldest son, had molested four of his sisters when he was a teenager. And the family had, quote, handled the matter internally through counseling that reported included, reportedly included sessions with IBLP affiliated advisers who covered it up. Josh later resigned from his position as the executive director of the Family Research Council's lobbying arm. And in 2021, he was convicted on federal charges for receiving and possessing child sexual abuse material and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Good. Good. But that's how rampant this is. He got away with it for so long. His family knew. It's not like it was discovered. And his family didn't know about it. They knew. Jinger Duggar, one of Josh's sisters, published a memoir in 2023 titled Becoming Free Indeed, in which she drew direct comparison between Gothard's influence on her family and her brother's behavior. The connection she articulated is not incidental. Again, this is a structure. It is intentional. The same system that taught her to submit to men without question taught her brother that authority was his birthright and accountability was somebody else's responsibility. The Duggars are important in the story not because it's unique, but because of their visibility, because they are a blueprint of what happens in families across the country, across the world, that are influenced by these doctrines. And we know their names because of that show. They were friendly faces of a theology that, behind closed doors, was producing exactly the kind of harm that the theology's own logic made impossible to address. Man, it frustrates me so much how many people have been hurt by this. Let's talk a little bit about fertility fraud. What? Yeah, we're going to dive in. Donald Klein was a fertility specialist in Indianapolis who operated his clinic from 1979 until his retirement in 2009. During those decades, Klein Secretly used his own sperm to inseminate patients who believe they were receiving donations from anonymous medical students. The scope of his deception, you've probably heard of this story became clear in 2014. A woman named Jacob A. Ballard took an at home DNA test and discovered biological connections to multiple unknown half siblings. The more people were tested, the number grew. As of 2025, Klein has been confirmed as the biological father of 94 children conceived without their mother's knowledge or consent. Klein, an elder in his local church, pled guilty in 2017 to two counts of obstruction of justice for lying to investigators, received a one year suspended sentence and a $500 fine. At the time of his crimes, Indiana had no loss specifically prohibiting a fertility doctor from using his own sperm. Klein's not alone. Cecil Jacobson, a fertility doctor practicing in Virginia in the 1980s, is believed to have fathered as many as 75 children by doing the exact same thing. He was convicted in 1992 on 52 counts of perjury and fraud. Sentenced to five year in prison. The donor deceived database maintained by advocate Tracy Portugal has tracked at least 39 doctors in the United States, spanning nearly 350 cases of suspected fertility fraud. The Netflix documentary Our father, released in 2022, brought Klein story to a massive audience and raised the question that haunts every case in the database. How did a man in a position of absolute authority over a woman's reproductive productive life operate for decades without oversight, without detection, and didn't receive any meaningful legal consequences? This is a parallel to the quiverful and IBLP world that's not metaphorical against it's again, it's structural. And we see this happening now. We're creating systems of authority where men, legislature, legislators and lawyers have control of a woman's reproduction. Recently in Georgia, a black woman not experiencing a medical crisis crisis was forced to have a C section. They rolled in an iPad and held a online court trial meeting where she was forced by a judge to have a C section she did not need. She was denied legal representation. She was also not allowed to meet with an African American doctor as she requested. And apparently it wasn't an emergency because they had time to hold a hearing. But she was her, her, her medical choice was taken and that's where we are now. These theological structures that create men's ultimate authority over women includes her reproduction. But we're now seeing it start to happen legally. This fertility th fraud and the lack of accountability mirrors these movements. And now we're seeing it systemically and men and women in Christian nationalism are pushing for it. In both contexts, a man controls a woman's reproductive reality. The woman is told to trust the system, and the man who remains runs it. In both, the violations are discovered years or decades later, often through external means. DNA testing in the case of fertility fraud, whistleblower websites like Recovering Grace in the case of iblp. In both, the legal system struggles to name the harm because the system is built to protect the abuser. Klein pl. Pled guilty only to obstruction of justice. Gothard's first lawsuit was dismissed on statute of limitation grounds. In both, the woman who was violated is effectively told the system worked as intended and her suffering is just a procedural cultural problem rather than a crime. The fertility fraud cases are not about the church, but they illuminate the same foundational architecture. And we see this happening again with our laws right now. Authority without accountability, reproduction as the domain controlled by men, and a legal and cultural framework that treats violations of women's bodily autonomy as administrative errors rather than acts of violence. Recent legal developments have begun to shift this framing. Indiana passed a fertility fraud law, thankfully, in 2019. Federal legislation includes the Protecting Families from Fertility Fraud act, has been introduced to Congress. Legal scholars, of course, have increasingly argued that fertility fraud should be classified not as medical malpractice, but sexual assault by deception. And I agree. It's a reclassification that would bypass traditional statutes of limitations and recognize the bodily nature of the violence. Like this is violence in violation. The same legal imagination that is beginning to see fertility fraud as a form of assault is the same legal imagination that survivors of religious institutional abuse have been begging the courts to apply to their cases. Every version of this story revolves the same way. Not because the individuals involved are identical or the families are identical, but because the machinery of the institution that responds to the accusations of abuse follows a pattern that is so consistent, it's like they gave each other a playbook. The steps repeat across traditions, across decades, across the boundaries that separate one denomination from another. And that's why it's really under. It's really important that we understand, understand this pattern. The first step, of course, is, quote, internal investigation. When allegations surface, the institution appoints its own leaders or affiliated attorneys to conduct the inquiry. In the case of the iblp, the board hired the Christian Law association, headed by David Gibbs Jr. Who is a follower of Gothard's teaching. And the investigation was conducted by people who had a spiritual, financial and reputational stake in the outcome. No report was ever shared with victims, of course. No meetings were granted with the women who came forward. The second step is redefinition. Abuse is spun and reframed as a quote, moral failing, spiritual warfare that requires that the victims forgive rather than a crime. That requires law enforcement, that requires accountability. This redefinition accomplishes two things at once. It keeps the matter within the institution's authority. And it mobilizes the theology of forgiveness as a tool of silencing victims. It once again puts the onus on victims to well, you have to obey God. Just like submitting to this person who was abusing you was obeying God. Well, now you have to forgive them. Victims are told that true Christians forgive. They are told that vengeance belongs to the Lord. They are told that public exposure of the wrongdoer would harm the body of Christ and bring shame upon the gospel. The the theological language of grace becomes weaponized to protect the powerful, to protect the abuser, and again put the onus of sin and rebellion on the victim. The third step is to pressure the victims to reconcile. In high control religious environments, community is not optional. It is the totality of a person's social, spiritual and often economic existence. Especially if you're a woman. When a victim is told that she must forgive her abuser as a condition of remaining in the church, the community, the choice she is being offered is not between forgiveness and bitterness. It is between you either submit or we will exile you again, not the predator, the victim. The institutions make this demand, understand the power it holds. And I want to say that especially to those of you who are deconstructing or you are new to walking away from this, it is people don't. If you've never been in a high control group, you don't understand that when you make this choice, you, you know, you're going to lose your family, you're going to lose your church, you're going to lose your friends, you're going to be ostracized, you're going to be shamed, you're going to be exiled. And when I made the decision to challenge my worldview and to walk away if that was what was right, to find the truth no matter what it was, I knew that I was going to be kicked out of the church and I knew I was going to be disowned by my dad. And I had to accept that as part of the choice. And that's what I did. The fourth step of this is theological framing of silence as submission to God's design. You also hear this especially in rape cases, when a, even a young child comes pregnant through the rape. Well, God works in mysterious ways. God has a plan for any, any, everything. That child's going to be a blessing from God. They reframe the violence and silence as submission to God's design. In patriarchal theological systems, of course, obedience flows upward. The wife obeys her husband. He doesn't have to obey her for anything. A member obeys her pastor. A child obeys her fathers. To break the silence is to break rank. And to break rank is not to merely rebel against human authority, but against div order. This framing turns every act of disclosure into an act of sin, which means that the victim who tells the truth about what was done to her is made to feel as though she's the one doing something wrong. You're just attacking the church. You're attacking a good Christian family and this young man. The fifth and final step is the institutional self preservation that's presented as faithfulness. When the institution circles its wagons right, when they close ranks, it does not describe what it's doing as protecting its brand or its assets. It's protecting the mission, protecting the gospel. The church must survive so that the Gospel can be preached. And if you embarrass the organization, you're damaging the gospel of Christ. Christ would be flipping that table so fast. The organization must endure so that families can be served. The leader has to be given grace so that his work can continue. In every case, the survival of the institution is positioned as a higher good than the safety of the in of the individual that the institution was to supposed supposed to protect. Again, this is not unique to iblp. The Roman Catholic Church spent decades reassigning priests who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse rather than reporting them. We saw when Washington passed the mandated reporting of child sex abuse. The Catholic Church fought tooth and nail against that. The Southern Baptist Convention's own documented reckoning in the 2022 Guidepost Solutions Report revealed that denominational leaders had maintained a secret internal list container containing over 700 names of individuals credibly accused of sexual misconduct, while simultaneously arguing that SBC's congregational policy made it impossible to take action against the churches that harbored abuses. The Guidepost report, which ran to nearly 300 pages, found that survivors who contacted the SBC executive committee were, quote, ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refine that the SBC could take note action. The common thread against, of course, all these cases is that the hierarchy enables abuse is the same hierarchy that's responsible for investigating the abuse. And they care more about their reputation than they care about you the institution cannot expose the abuser without exposing the system that credentialed him. And those cases piled up to the point where in Nashville the SBC had to sell their headquarters to pay off these cases because of all the sexual abuse they covered up. And before I get more into how institutions turn themselves into the victim, I'm going to take my second of two mid show sponsor break again. Please subscribe on Patreon to get these ad free@patreon.com Monty Mater on March 17th of 2026, Cross Politics Studios released a documentary titled how the SBC Got Played. The film represents the latest and most polished expression of a very old institutional reflex when confronted with substantial evidence of systemic abuse that the institution cannot deny the evidence they can reframe who the real victim was. The documentary central thesis draws from economist Gary North's 1996 book Crossed Fingers which outlined what north described as a five phase strategy for ideological capture within religious institutions. The film asserts that the SBC's abuse crisis was not a genuine reckoning with systemic harm, but rather the product of outside manipulation by progressive forces of of course it's the liberal white ladies with cats who exploited the denomination's moral vulnerability. According to the documentary, the forces used public pressure to compel the SBC executive committee to wave attorney client privilege, therefore exposing the organization to legal liability and financial ruin. The film frames Guidepost solutions investigation is Compromised, highlights what it calls massive conflict of interest and focuses particular attention on attorney and abuse survivor Rachel Rachel Den Hollander who the filmmaker accuses of occupying multiple conflicting roles throughout the process. The documentary the documentary notes that the Department of Justice conducted a 31 month investigation into the SBC that concluded in 2025 with a single charge unrelated to abuse or the COVID up. I wonder why because who became president at the beginning beginning of 2025 and it emphasizes that the SBC spent more than $13 million on abuse reform process and ultimately sold its Nashville headquarters, which I mentioned earlier. The closing assertion of the film is contained in a single sentence that deserves to be stated precisely because this this shows what the documentary is actually really about. The quote is according to the film the SBC said quote was vulnerable to the manipulative accusations of women. I'll say it again, the SPC was vulnerable to the manipulative accusations of women hundreds of abuse victims. The response was swift of course. Baptist News Global published a detailed rebuttal describing the film as a propaganda film of abuse denialism that cast the denomination as the victim while offering no compassion for the Survivors whose stories precipitated the crisis. The Baptist News response noted that the documentary's characterization of survivors as manipulative was not merely insistent sensitive, but functionally identical to the tactics, tactics that the Guidepost Report had documented to the SBC executive committee using for years. Dismissing accusers as opportunistic, ascribing hidden agendas, treating survivors demand for accountability as attacks on the institution. This, I mean, we have seen this playbook over and over. And if you're like, wait a minute, Baptist News, remember that the, the Baptist Church is separate from the Southern Baptist Church. The Southern Baptist Church broke from the Baptist Church when the Baptism Baptist denomination decided that you couldn't be a slave owner and be a missionary. And then a bunch of Baptists that own slaves were like, fuck you, we're doing our own thing. And that is how the SBC was formed, because they thought that missionaries should be able to have slaves. So real strong moral theological foundation on that one. What the Cross Politic documentary represents, of course, is that final step in the institutional playbook described in previous sec. In the section before this. When an institution is confronted with evidence there was was so much evidence of systemic abuse, it had two choices. It can reform, which requires it to dismantle the structures that enable the harm and accept the cost of that dismantling and at the cost of that reform, or it can reframe, which requires it to accept that harm occurred, but redefine it as we're the real victims here in the reframing. The institution itself, of course, becomes the victim. The survivors become the aggressor. Right? Accountability becomes capture, transparency becomes surrender. And the system that failed to protect the most vulnerable people, especially children, recast itself as the entity that was under attack. Again, not a new move. This is such an old move. It works precisely because the people most likely to watch the documentary defending the SBC are the same people that are already inclined to believe that secular forces are at war with the church. And they're also likely to believe that sexual assault doesn't happen that much, that women are lying. Again, all research indicates that 9 to 9.5 times out of of 10 when a victim comes forward about sexual abuse, they're telling the truth. That's again, that's not to say that that false allegations don't happen. They do. They happen at the same rate of any other violent crime. False accusation. But nine times out of ten they're telling the truth. The documentary does what it does not need to prove that no abuse occurred. It just needs to Shift the emotional center of gravity. And that's what it does. Once you can shift that, the abuse becomes a backdrop, a regrettable detail in this larger story of the re real victim who's doing so much good. And of course, this denomination spent $13 million because it was listening to the wrong people. The theological mechanism that enables this shift deserves careful attention because this is not a rhetorical trick. This, this particular five step program, if you will, is the reason that people like Russell Brand run to the church when those sexual allegations pop up, because they use the same thing. Think about it. And sometimes it's a conversion, sometimes it's a rededication of faith. But what do they do? They always end up reframing man who fell prey to spiritual warfare and that manipulative women are attacking a man of God, are attacking him, coming after him, the world's out to get him. It's the same thing for the institution as it is for the individual. But the institution, especially for wealthy, powerful, famous men, works like a charm. And when there are court cases, this conversion to Christianity not only provides that the umbrella of protection for from the church, but it also plays really well in court. So again, this mechanism that enables the shift deserves careful attention. Again, this rhetorical trick, and it will, I think it'll resonate especially with women. This is rooted in a very specific reading and interpretation of the fall narrative in Genesis. In this reading, Eve was the original agent of deception, the one who listened to the serpent and led Adam astray. Don't miss the fact that a woman's quote first sin was eating and gaining knowledge. When the cross politic documentary frames the SBC's abuse crisis as the denomination being, quote, played by manipulative accusations of women, it is drawing on that theological tradition that for centuries has positioned women as inherently suspect in their testimony, inherently capable of deception and inherently dangerous. This is the root of the witch trials. It is the same reading of the Genesis myth, because it is a myth. That is the genre of literature. Literature that story is. That's why it mirrors Babylonian creation stories that are much older than it, Egyptian creation stories. The documentary is not merely defending the sbc. It's recapitulating the theology that created the conditions for the abuse in the first place. A theology that says that women have to submit, that they have to be silent because a woman sinned first, and she's the original deception. It says authority belongs to men and that any challenge to that authority is a form of sin. The Department of Justice's 31 month investigation into the AB SBC concluded in 2025 without federal charges related to abuse or cover up the only charge that was filed against a seminary professor for making false statements to investigators. The Cross Politic documentary presents this outcome as vindication proof that the abuse crisis was overblown. But the absence again of federal charges does not mean the absence of harm. It means that harm occurred in ways that existing federal statutes do not easily reach. And many of these statutes were also limited by statutes of limitation. Patients. It wasn't that a crime didn't happen. We have a statute of limitation on sexual violence. This is precisely again, the structural problem mirrored in our legal system that survivors and their advocates have been identifying for years. The legal framework was not designed to hold religious institutions accountable for creating systems and enabling and hiding abuse. The absence of charges, again is not evidence that the system worked. It's evidence that the system wasn't built to address this kind of harm. And again, every version of this story revolves the same way. It's not because of conspiracy. It's not because every institution is populated by people who consciously choose to protect abusers. It resolves this way because of the architecture of the system. The structure that elevates leaders in these systems are the same structures that would have to again break all of that down in order to be able to hold those leaders accountable. The structures don't dismantle themselves themselves. In quiverful theology, the Father answers only to God. So if he's molesting his daughter, how do you hold him accountable? Remember, he owns his family. He's the warrior and his children are his arrows. There's no lateral accountability. There's no external review. There's no mechanism within the family unit itself for the wife or the child to challenge his authority without being told that the challenge is sin. If they go to the church, the church is incentivized to protect their rights. Reputation. Submit more. If your husband's cheating on you or abusing you, we'll just make him happier. He won't do that. Theology does not merely tolerate the absence of accountability. It sanctifies it. And it needs it to protect that forward facing white picket fence. Reputation. In the iblp, the leader answered only to a board composed of his own followers. The people responsible for evaluating Gothard's conduct were the people formed by Gothard's teaching, employed in his organization and embedded in his authority structure for for years. When the board hired the Christian Law association to investigate, it hired an organization led by a man who himself was a disciple of Gothard of the very institution he's supposed to investigate. That's not accountability, that's protection. In the Southern Baptist Convention, of course, autonomous local churches resist external oversight as a matter of deeply held theological convictions. They consider accountability to be an attack on the the church. The doctrine of congregational polity. By the way, I think I said policy earlier. It's polity which holds that each local church is a self governing and only answerable to Christ. Organization means that denomination has historically claimed it cannot compel a member of the church to remove an abusive pastor. What do you mean? It cannot maintain a binding database of credibly accused ministers, youth pastors, leaders, and it cannot impose disciplinary standards on churches that choose to harbor predators. Why? Because they don't have no interest in that. The same structural logic that applies to the Quiverful Family, the IPL headquarters scaled upward to the level of national denominations that contain tens of thousands of congregations. The architecture is again not incidental to the abuse. It's the mechanism that allows the abuse to happen, to conceal it and perpetuate it. And Kristen Cobb Dumez, the Jesus and John Wayne, which again, another great book to like, really study the culture of this argued that the culture of militant masculinity with an American equ Evangelicalism is not a bug in the system, but a feature, a deliberate construction that serves a specific ideological purpose and protects specific distributions of power. The architecture that produces isolated families, unchecked authority, theologically enforced silence, and a forgiveness economy that always benefits the person with more power is not a failure of the theology that is the theology's intended product. The concept of institutional betrayal developed by psychologist Jennifer Frade, illuminates why this architecture is so devastating. Institutional betrayal occurs when an institution that an individual depends on for safety or for identity causes harm and fails to prevent it. The harm is compounded by dependence. They're dependent on this institution. A person who is abused by a stranger has been violated, but a person who is abused by an institution they trust with their spiritual formation. Maybe her education, her community, her understanding of who God is, has been violated at a level that reaches into the foundations of her identity, reaches into the foundations of what she considers her salvation. That's not just a portrayal of her body, but of her soul and her spirituality. And the architecture again enables this and says that she doesn't have the right to question it. There's also the financial dimension of it that deserves attention. Like in the iblp, which held tens of millions of dollars in real estate across multiple states, possesses resources that far out exceed those available to an individual. Survivor. They can outlaw suit you. There's no way to hold them financially accountable. They can delay. They can file motion after motion. They can threaten countersuits. The threat of a countersuit, which of course is. Is explicitly cited by the plaintiffs in the 2016 Gothard case as a reason for withdrawing, is not merely a legal tactic, it's a weapon. They know they have more money than you. Molly Waran in 2013 in the Apostles of Reason documented how evangelical leaders built parallel educational and legal systems specifically designed to maintain internal internal control and insulate their institutions from external scrutiny. Homeschool curriculum, Christian law firms, arbitration clauses requiring disputes to be resolved through religious mediation, the cultivation of sympathetic legislatures that all serve the same structural purpose. To ensure that when harm occurs within the system, the system itself retains authority to define, investigate and adjudicate the harm. It like, exempts them and it's written into many contracts. The architecture of protection is not a single wall. Again, this is a series. This is a. This is a city built to maintain this protection. And there is a cost and it's measured in human lives that were broken and in specific mechanisms by which those lives were broken. There is spiritual wreckage of being told that your abuse was part of God's plan and that your suffering had a purpose, you were too sinful or too small all to see. It is being counseled by a man who tells you that your clothing invited the assault and that because you didn't scream loud enough, you were a participant in your own violation. It is carrying that theology on your body and in your body for years, unable to separate what was done to you from what you were taught to believe about God's sovereignty and your own worthlessness. It is the re victimization of being asked to forgive your abuse abuser, without accountability, as a condition of remaining in the only community you have ever known, the community that you believe determines your position in the afterlife. In high control of religious environments, the family and the church are the totality of a person's social world. To leave it is to lose everything. Relationships, support systems, spiritual identify, identity, and sometimes housing and employment. The demand for forgiveness framed as a spiritual request requirement is in practice an ultimatum. You either accept what was done to you and remain and shut up, or you tell the truth and we throw you out. There's the financial and legal barriers that make justice a privilege of the wealthy and the persistent statutes of limitations which in many states begin to run when the victim reaches the age of majority. Regardless of when the abuse is disclosed or its effects have functioned as the single most effective legal mechanism to protect religious institutions institutions from accountability. Statutes of limitations have got to go. The ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, which holds that court should not intervene in matters of religious governance, has been invoked by organizations like the IBLP as a constitutional shield against litigation. The cost of pursuing civil action against organization that hold millions of dollars in assets employ teams of lawyers is prohibitive for most normal people, most survivors. It is this specific documented toll on the women especially who tried to hold Bill Gothard and IBLP accountable. The plaintiffs who filed the 2016 lawsuit of course later withdrew due to threats of violence, threats of counter lawsuits, emotional devastation, they themselves being put on the sand the stand. It is the SBC survivors who watched $13 million spent on an investigation that documented their suffering and then watched a nationally distributed document say they were the manipulators and the aggressors. But it's it's not just the abuse to survivors that causes the damage. It's it's what happens afterward. These institutions claim to represent a God of justice and mercy and do the opposite. Religious trauma in psychological literature has expanded significantly in recent years and it should and it's going to keep expanding, especially after all of this. Linda K. Klein, in the book Pure Again, a great book about purity culture, documented the long term effects of purity culture and spirit abuse on women who were raised in high control environments. This includes chronic anxiety, depression, dissociation, sexual dysfunction and a pervasive sense of shame that attaches to any specific behavior, not to any specific behavior, but to their fundamental sense of self. Who I am at my core is shameful. I carry so much of this with me. I have struggled with dissociation since I was a little girl and I didn't know what it was when I was little. I would just remember telling my dad, dad, sometimes I feel like I'm dreaming. And I was. I was dissociating from abuse, from chronic trauma. I still struggle in my romantic and sexual life to find a way to do it without feeling shame and guilt and illness. Sometimes it's just easier to not date and not interact because I just don't want to face it. What a young woman is taught that her body is dangerous, that her desires are sinful, and that her worth is contingent on her purity and that any violations of these principles is her fault. The resulting psychological damage doesn't fade when she leaves the community and it doesn't fade when she gets married. There are so many religious women that have such sexually dysfunctional marriages because they were told their whole lives, their Body isn't theirs. Sexual pleasure is evil. It makes them worthless. Their virginity is their only value. They can never say no. They were never taught about their bodies and they're supposed to flip a switch when they get married and everything's supposed to be fine. It doesn't work that way. It follows a woman who has taught this into every relationship, every attempt at intimacy, every moment she tries to trust another human being with her body or her emotional vul vulnerability. This phenomenon is what researchers have termed religious trauma syndrome. Describes describes a cluster of symptoms that parallel those of post traumatic stress disorder, but arise specifically from the experience of leaving or being expelled from a high control group. Survivors report intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting authority figures, a profound sense of grief for the community and the identity, identity and the worldview they lost. For people that were raised inside systems like IBLP from birth, this is changing your whole life. This is changing the very foundation of what you were taught to believe about yourself, about God, the nature of reality and the afterlife. SARAH Stan Corba has documented how digital communities, particularly social media platforms and blogs like Recovering Grace, have become lifelines for survivors of these groups. These spaces allow people who of course are maybe isolated geographically, to find other ways to share their experience, to find other ways to have community. That's the purpose of my my Patreon in, in its true form is to give people community. The irony is devastating that the same technology that Gothard system tried to control and limit has become the tool that survivors have exposed the system. They're using it as a way to survive the system that was built to harm them. It was the same system that Gothard tried to control. And the thing is that survivors aren't asking for revenge. They're not asking for the destruction of faith. Many of them are still, still Christ followers, are still believers in the faith they grew up in. They're asking not they don't want the church to be dismantled or for God to be taken off the throne. They're asking for accountability. They're asking for transparency. They want to know that their institutions, what their institutions knew about people being harmed and what they did about it. They want external accountability for predators. They want mandatory reporting laws that do not exempt clergy because the soul of a child matters more than the confidentiality of, of a confession. They want ecclesiastical abstention doctrine to be applied in its proper scope, meaning it's supposed to protect theological disputes from interference from the law, not sexual assault. They're asking for separation of spiritual authority from the legal process when A crime is committed, it doesn't matter if you're a preacher. The response is not a prayer meeting, it's a court case. It's charges. They're asking for a willingness of institutions to prioritize safety of the vulnerable over the recognition reputation of the powerful. And we're not seeing that yet. And it's getting even worse. Under the Trump administration, some things have changed, right? The Recovering Grace website created a digital archive that broke the silence around the IBLP. The Guidepost Solutions report documented the SBC's failure. The Texas Supreme Court's 2025 ruling established that theology does not automatically shield an organization from civil liability, which is wonderful. State legislators are slowly passing mandatory reporting laws and fertility fraud statutes. Documentaries like Shiny Happy People are really helpful, but some things hasn't haven't changed. As of 2026, Bill Gothard is 91 years old and has never faced criminal charges. IBLP is still operating. Cross Politic documentary is being distributed to an audience that is being invited to view the SBC as the victim. Statutes of limitations are continuing to expire. What would have to change isn't complicated. It's extreme, expensive. And it requires that men don't get authority from God unbridled by any form of accountability. It would require institutions to value honesty over image, safety over reputation, and the voices of the powerless over the comfort of the powerful. And we're watching in the US Our whole system isn't built that way, both secular and religious. It would require the men who hold these quote quivers to look at the arrows and see for the first time that they're not weapons in a culture, culture war. They're children. They're little human beings with unique dreams and unique goals and unique destinies. They are not just extensions of you, and they are not a weapon. They are people made in the image of God, whose name has been used to silence them. The psalm says that children are a heritage from the Lord. It doesn't say that they're disposable. And these systems have to change, change. And one of the things I think is happening, one of the things I'm so grateful for, is Christian nationalism being so open right now, because it is showing who it really is, what it really is, the poison that it is. I'm thankful for the manosphere and the Trump administration because they are showing us who we are and they will not win. We will dismantle it and take another huge leap forward in real equality instead of using God as an excuse to justify relentless greed and power and abuse. And I will see you next week on Flipping Tables.