UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
I highly recommend T.F. Charlton’s essay right now at Religion Dispatches, re: the culture of abuse being exposed by lawsuits filed against Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM). Chariton grew up in an SGM church. He describes the group as “a U.S.-based church-planting network (they say ‘family’) of predominantly white, suburban, reformed evangelical congregations.” This church-planting network sprang from Covenant Life Church (CLC) of Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is named in the lawsuits filed against SGM.
As Charlton notes, Lou Engle, the influential dominionist pastor who founded The Call and who has been in the thick of the movement to export American-style homophobia to Africa, got his start with CLC. Chariton also maintains that it’s no accident that SGM and CLC have ended up facing lawsuits alleging that this movement has fostered a serious culture of abuse of women and children: as he maintains, that culture of abuse is “the result of the group’s toxic teachings on parenting, gender, and sexuality.”
Charlton notes that briefs filed by plaintiffs in the suits against SGM and CLC “describe a church culture where pastors’ sympathies routinely lay with male perpetrators of sexual abuse, particulary married fathers, who were allowed continued access to victims and other children in the church.” Women plaintiffs allege that they have been bullied and ostracized when they have tried to make their abuse known, and have been told that their obligation is not in any way to undermine the “leadership” position of their husbands in their families. One woman who discovered that her husband was sexually abusing their 10-year-old daughter was informed by church officials that this happened because she was not meeting her husband’s sexual needs, and she was encouraged to enhance their sexual relationship to prevent his molestation of their daughter.
All of this is rooted, Charlton maintains, in a “perfect storm of doctrine.” As he observes,
It’s no accident that so many allegations of serious abuse have arisen across SGM’s churches. The combination of patriarchal gender roles, purity culture, and authoritarian clergy that characterizes Sovereign Grace’s teachings on parenting, marriage, and sexuality creates an environment where women and children—especially girls—are uniquely vulnerable to abuse.
Charlton cites E.J. Graff, who maintains that purity cultures which envisage women’s bodies as primarily for procreation and male pleasure also generate rape cultures: rape culture is the obverse side of purity culture, which by its very nature sexualizes the female body in order to subject it to male control. The demand within SGM doctrine that children submit absolutely to parents and wives to husbands also issues in a culture of abuse, in which both women and children are enjoined to endure even violent expressions of male control as God’s will.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.