Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Count the Parallels with WELS/LCMS - But the Leaders Will Wig Out That This Comes From Gawker

The red nun army - this will ward off sin, right?
Rigid conformity and legalistic rules haunt the cults,
and the result is horrible - but "we never knew."

Bill Gothard posed with the Duggar daughters?
Why was he allowed around them?
Why was Stephan allowed around Walther's young niece?


http://gawker.com/the-creepy-fundamentalist-homeschool-cult-that-trained-1706969994

You know about the Duggars, the evangelical Christian family whose 19 children catapulted them to fame through Discovery Health specials and TLC show, 19 Kids and Counting, and you know about Josh Duggar, the eldest son, who admitted last week to molesting several underage girls as a teen—including his own sisters.
You’ve seen some examinations of the dangerous, backwards logic that helped fuel that systematic and highly preventable sexual abuse, and some explorations of the culture of authority and fear promulgated by the Duggars’ uniquely patriarchal brand of Christianity.
But we’ve still just barely scratched the surface of the insane, terrifying homeschool cult that the Duggars and millions more across the country subscribe to. The bizarre horrors of the Advanced Training Institute, its founder Bill Gothard, and its many overpopulated families would take days to work through. Here’s what we’re dealing with...

Who is Bill Gothard?

As the single, 80-year-old founder of of IBLP, Bill Gothard is the center of any ATI devotee’s universe. He’s currently on “indefinite administrative leave”after it got out that at least 34 women had come forward with claims of sexual harassment, for which he has remained unincarcerated and unpunished.
Gothard’s biggest days are behind him—in the 70s and 80s, the evangelical masses would pour into auditoriums by the tens of thousands to hear him speak. This despite the fact that, in 1980, his brother Steve Gothard was charged with a major sex scandal (in addition to money laundering) and was ultimately forced to step down. Gothard supposedly knew about the illicit activity and turned a blind eye, which led to him resigning as head for a grand total of three weeks.
Read the rest here - a very good summary of their training methods and materials.

Just what WELS needs - approval from Scott Barefoot.