Ten more women have stepped forward to allege sexual abuse by Bill Gothard.
Ten women on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Bill Gothard, who for decades was a major force in the conservative Christian homeschooling movement, charging him and leaders in his ministry with sexual abuse, harassment and cover-up.
Gothard, who urged Christians to shun things like short skirts and rock music, is accused of raping a woman. The same woman says she was raped by one of the ministry’s “biblical counselors.”
It will all be sorted-out at the courthouse, I suppose, but the sheer number of women alleging mistreatment is arresting; Gothard is on his way to becoming the Bill Cosby of the evangelical right.
As Jeri Massi remarks on her Facebook page: “I hope these courageous women can withstand the firestorm that is going to hit them.”
Yup. It is a fact that you can ask any journalist, any social worker, any police officer, any doctor, any lawyer — anybody with first-hand professional knowledge of sexual abuse in the church environment — and every last one of them will tell you the exact same thing: Congregations all-but-invariably rally to the defense of the pastor, and drive-off his victims; you won’t see so many as half-a-dozen exceptions to that rule in an entire lifetime. We are not talking about freak events; we are talking about the ontology of Christianity, about what the Christian church … is.
Which is a predatory cult that exploits the weak and insecure.