The Emperor’s New Clothes

There are pieces of threadbare fabric that are being held up to us as whole cloth lately in the news. There is something titillating about reading these articles or listening to these podcasts, trotted before our eyes day after day as truth. Like the Emperor’s New Clothes, they seem the richest velvet and the most intricate brocade. They entertain us. They make us look up, like the Pharisee, and sigh, “Thank God I am not like one of these.” But when we look closely we see it for what it is: a pack of lies. Like Alice in Wonderland, I want to throw this particular pack up in the air, and say, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards.”

John Tenniel, Illustration from Alice in Wonderland

However, when you really know one of these stories, you wonder if it’s worth it to dissect the bits of flimsy that are being sewn together. Like breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel, we are being led down a path to a witch’s house. But getting out of the forest is very difficult, for one main reason: men of integrity do not out the lies being spoken of them. They suffer in silence out of deference for wounded and thrashing victims as their own names are dragged through the mud.

Alexander Zick, Illustration from Hansel and Gretel

In two of the articles shared on The Roys Report lately I happen to know more of the inside story, and I can see through these holes. I have experienced this same phenomenon in reporting on other church abuse sites, but I will only reflect on these two articles in this essay as they are more timely. Many of the stories on this site and others like it have a thread-bare quality to them of seeming facts sewn together in such a way as to appear whole cloth. In the interest of protecting victims, I will not say more on the inaccuracies I see, but I would like to highlight two instances where seeming factual nuggets are sewn together to imply something misleading.

The first instance is in the article on Bill Gothard by Daniel Silliman. Before I dissect the example I want to highlight, I will say what I believe about the subject matter. I believe that Bill Gothard teaching has harmed many people. A lack of awareness of the centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ who died on the cross for our sins to give us new life in Him is at the core of this teaching. A mixture of legalistic principles that seem to promise blessing but all too often obscure the gospel have been allowed to keep some people in bondage, and have created problems for many. At the same time, this system of thought coincided with the building of an institution that caused harm to young people. 

Quite frequently in the church the actions that harm people flow out of systems of thought or false teaching: abusive behavior is allowed to flourish because of bad theology. The Bible talks about this, warning against false teachers starting with the words of Christ, warning us that false teachers would come. Such false teachers will be known by their bad fruit. They will creep in and corrupt the body. Jude says it succinctly: “For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.” The markers of false teachers are a denial of the cross of Christ coupled with bad behavior. But, you will notice, the central core of the Bible’s condemnation of false teachers is to highlight the teaching, and to promise God’s judgement. 

I think this is the correct way to write about such things: focus on the false teaching, because abuse comes out of false teaching. Because of the popularity of Gothard’s teaching, an institution developed, and because of the institution, Mr. Gothard’s sin nature was allowed to harm young women in his orbit. He wasn’t challenged as he should have been. His own teaching led his sin to become more problematic as people were trained to not question authority and girls were harmed. 

Now I wish to describe an instance where seemingly random facts are threaded together in Siliman’s article on Gothard. Here is one way this article talks about Gothard’s headquarters: 

Gothard, who never married, built a compound near Chicago for his ministry. The staff, including his unmarried brother and the many young women from Christian families who were occasionally referred to as Gothard’s “harem,” all lived on the same property.

These sentences make it sound as though Gothard’s unmarried status, his building of a “compound,” and his unmarried brother and the young women as a “harem” living there are all connected. In fact, Gothard built a theology based on legalistic principles in response to the unrest of the 1960s. His speaking seminars became quite popular, and increased funding enabled his organization to build a “training center” where young people who had no obvious career path from the ATI brand of homeschooling to adulthood could come and work. There were both young men and young women and whole families there. That Gothard used the situation to groom young women and take advantage of them in an abusive way is indisputable. But the article insinuates much more. 

This same writer weaves together seemingly random facts in a misleading way in an article about Wheaton College’s president Phil Ryken, who also happens to be my brother. An example of this kind of misleading breadcrumb trail is in a comment about 10th Presbyterian’s head pastor of many years, Jim Boice. The article describes Dr. Boice as “a popular Reformed theologian and prominent defender of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.” This tags labels for a certain type of reader for whom the use of the term “biblical inerrancy” is a red flag, people for whom Boice’s Reformed theology will be a point of contention. Dr. Boice could also be described as a prominent writer on the centrality of the gospel to Christian faith, or a defender of justification by faith and the Sovereignty of a good God. These things would be true. It’s the way bits of truth are threaded together to make a wispy cloth that doesn’t hold up in the light of the day that concerns me.

Because I happen to know inaccuracies in both these articles, perhaps I am more able to discern the harm of the combination of seemingly random facts. But I want to say this to the church: wake up. Quit allowing yourselves to be led by these breadcrumb trails. They aren’t leading to Christ. The articles that contain innuendos may also be dotted with plot holes: inaccuracies woven together in such a way. We must quit allowing ourselves to be entertained by these things.

The real story? The church has been lulled into a false gospel, and it takes time to let it go. When we do, we can clearly see to take the speck out of our brother’s eye. Sexual sin, like other sin, was paid for on the cross of Jesus Christ. The harm caused by sex addicts and abusers was also paid for on the cross of Christ. We can readily admit and deal with this sin in others when we grasp the wideness and completeness of Christ’s cross for our sin. The church is getting this opportunity now, and we can grasp this whole-heartedly. We can love the sinner and hate the sin. We can wrap the victims in the love of Christ and care for their wounds. And victims, we (yes, I am one of them) can admit we allowed ourselves to be harmed and drawn into sin and ask Jesus to also forgive us for this. Christ died for me in my sin, that is the gospel. But these articles? We need to stop allowing ourselves to be passively entertained by these. The Emperor’s clothes aren’t there. There is a story here! But this isn’t it. 

Rex Whistler, Illustration from the Emperor’s New Clothes