“This kind of behavior is so bizarre — no matter which version of the story you believe, even if you take Doug’s own version of the story — it’s so bizarre and inappropriate that he needs to get his life in order and not be thinking about how quickly he can come back into leadership.”
– Michael Farris, Home School Legal Defense Association
I hate it when this happens because it (obviously) reflects very badly on religion in general and Christianity in particular in these instances. It is giving the enemy (militant atheists and lately, secular leftists/Democrats) a big stick (hypocrisy) with which to beat us with.
I begin with my own personal experiences. You can skip to the bottom if you like. That's where the real dirt is.
When I was in my late teens my parents decided to switch churches. I stayed at the one we had always gone to because I had peer relationships that I was loathe to lose. They were looking for something closer to home...this was because when we had moved to town some five years earlier there wasn't a church that we liked nearby but then, later, there was. So...they left and I stayed.
It was interesting what happened at both churches after that. The first story revolved around the old church that I stayed at. I was old enough to drive myself there and I did so on Sunday mornings but I also went to a youth group meeting on Wednesday evenings. Those meetings were led by the church's youth minister. He was a very high profile guy. In addition to leading the youth ministry he also ran the music ministry. He was extremely talented in that area...he could play several instruments very competently and had a very exceptional singing voice. He was also involved in the city's Christian radio station where he co-hosted a morning drive time show. Heck of a guy.
But he had a double life and no one knew it. Not until everything came crashing down one day. I don't recall how he was found out but he was and it was pretty bad. It's one of those things where you look back (and this involved the times...the 1970's...and the naiveté of youth) and you find yourself thinking, "Wow, it never occurred to me that it was maybe unusual that this young and handsome guy wasn't married or otherwise involved with a female and that maybe there was a problem with that." It turned out that he was a pretty well-closeted homo and that he been doing what closeted homos did in the seventies...visiting male prostitutes in the seedy part of town and dragging them back to his swinging bachelor pad. I don't think (thank goodness) that he ever got involved with any of the young people that he was charged with shepherding in the church youth group. But...someone found him out and that was it, everything came crashing down and I never did find out what became of him.
I eventually left for college, as did my friends, and that was the end of my connection with that church. But that was my first ever encounter with a church sex scandal. Unfortunately, it was not to be my last.
Several years later, at the church that my parents adopted something else happened. In that situation the church's pastor was pursued by and eventually seduced by a woman who came to him for counseling. The pastor was a brilliant and gifted teacher and preacher. The story goes, as I have been told, that this woman came to him for counseling and he (foolishly) agreed to conduct it one-on-one in private. It went downhill from there. He eventually left his wife and family and his position at the church to go off with this woman who left him shortly thereafter so that she could go off somewhere else and repeat the process all over again. It was later discovered that this pastor was not her first victim, that she had pretty much done the same thing on three or four previous occasions...it was apparently a sexual fetish for her to seduce men of the cloth. But, the damage had been done and the pastor was almost completely lost. He could not come back to the church and spent many years selling cars before he did reconcile (involving admitting blame and asking for forgiveness...something his pride and shame would not allow him to do at the time) with his family and the church over the situation.
Which leads me to the real topic of this post.My family homeschooled my son and we are still homeschooling our daughter. If you have never homeschooled or never known anyone who did then you may not know that it is, like a lot of things, a culture. There is a whole network of support systems out there for homeschooling families. There are all sorts of resources and there are annual conferences and confabs that showcase those resources. We don't go to the big state meetings like we used to. After all, my daughter doesn't have too many years left before she is done with that phase of her life. But we used to go to these conferences...
...and there was this guy. As bad as the previous personal examples were that I pulled from my own life experiences this guy has them beat. His name is Doug Phillips and he runs (ran) a pretty big homeschool affiliated organization called
Vision Forums. You can click on that link but what was once a website where you could purchase any number of resources that mostly revolved around proper, biblically based, family skills...primarily what it means to be a father, a leader of a family, a good son and/or daughter, etc. is now a single page announcing the end of that ministry by Doug Phillips and the board of Vision Forums. There is a fairly comprehensive and unequivocal confession of wrongdoing and statement of apology.
How bad was this? Pretty damned bad. Except for the noted absence of the money, fame and wretched excess it was of the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker level of badness.
Our family bought quite a few of Vision Forum's audio and published materials over the years. mrs. trapeze came back from a state homeschool conference where Doug Phillips had been the keynote speaker and remarked on how impressive a speaker he had been and what a wonderful family he had. His kid's names are (if you can believe it) Joshua, Justice, Liberty, Jubilee, Faith Evangeline, Honor, Providence and Virginia.
I am posting this because it is interesting (interesting in the same way that a multi care pileup with severed limbs is) and also because, like those stories from my own experience, it is a cautionary tale. None of us, myself included, are immune from these things. We can and should learn from others' horrible and tragic mistakes and pray continuously that God protects us from ever succumbing to temptation and, in this case, very obviously, the pride in one's self that it is possible to continue wallowing in such behavior and actually get away with it unscathed.
I will excerpt only a bit of
the post by Robert Stacy McCain. The rest you will have to read at the link. It is breathtaking and also depressing in its depravity and staggering display of moral corruption. I do hope that he can recover but, given his now revealed history, it is probably unlikely. These sorts of persons have a very high rate of recidivism. Do remember when you read this that he
has confessed and that his side of the story varies from hers in only a few inconsequential details...
Douglas Phillips used Ms. Torres — against her wishes and over her objections — as a personal sex object. Douglas Phillips repeatedly groped, rubbed, and touched Ms. Torres’s crotch, breasts, and other areas of her body; rubbed his penis on her; masturbated on her; forced her to watch him masturbate on her; and ejaculated upon her. This perverse and offensive conduct repeatedly took place over the course of several years. . . .
...This grooming began when Ms. Torres was a fifteen-year-old child. . . .
Phillips promised Ms. Torres that he would marry her and that she would be the person who would have the great privilege of being his wife. . . . Phillips repeatedly told Torres that this was possible because his wife, Beall Phillips, was going to die soon. . . .
Phillips then began to masturbate and ejaculated on her. Ms. Torres asked Phillips to stop and broke down crying. Despite Ms. Torres’s repeated requests for Phillips to stop masturbating and ejaculating on her, Phillips proceeded to return and repeat this perverse and offensive conduct. Each night that Phillips returned, Ms. Torres requested that he stop.
And, yeah, she is suing him and you can condemn her for going after the big lawsuit payday but...he groomed her into the person she is now.
