Each year the church I pastor hosts "The Christmas Store," a place for financially-struggling families to shop for gifts worth $25 or more for only $5 each. This gives parents/guardians the dignity of picking out/purchasing gifts at a highly discounted price. 🧵 This store is a deeply central part of my story. When my family lost all our income during COVID a church's Christmas Store enabled us to provide presents for our kids. It's one of the moments I started re-believing in the local church. It's part of why I became a pastor again.

I was recently watching a comedian who grew up around Xianity and has since left. And she was talking about the level of "bad sins" & how doubting is one of the worst.

And while the comedian was talented, and the bit was funny, I felt deeply sad that's what she was taught.🧵 Doubt shows up everywhere in the Bible. And it often isn't demonized the way you'd think. I'd argue that if we read the Bible well, our assumption should be that doubt will be baked into our experience with God, and that is okay.

Quite a few of you who follow me on here first knew me as that guy from the Amazon documentary, but my reporting on Gothard & that world started years prior, when I first connected with a woman named Charis, who was my Dante guiding my into the layers of that hell. Short 🧵 Charis was one of the women who sued Gothard, & she not only trusted me with her own story, but vouched
for me (practically a stranger) w/ an understandably wounded community of survivors, skeptical of strangers. The article’s existence was largely due to her.

During COVID my family lost our entire income stream almost overnight. It was Christmas & we couldn't afford gifts for our kids. Then we discovered something a local church was doing called the Christmas Store.

What we experienced made me believe in the local church again. 🧵 The most powerful part of the Christmas Store was how intentionally it protected the dignity of people like me who were shopping at the store. We were able to pick out gifts our kids would love and pay for them, except these $25 or more gifts cost only $5.

It’s been obvious for awhile now that large swaths of Christianity have a massive sexual abuse problem. The question is why?

Here are some of the common causes, as well as some of the solutions, I’ve seen in my time as a journalist & a pastor 🧵 First, it’s worth remembering that around 1 in 4 women & 1 in 6-9 men will experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18. Those stats aren’t about religious cultures: that’s the CDC’s survey of the US as a whole. Point being: the problem is EVERYWHERE.

Over the past few years I’ve found myself increasingly at odds w/ the religious world I came from. I’ve been accused of hurting the church, being a heretic, or worst of all, liberal.

What’s genuinely sad about this is I feel like I’m being who they raised me to be🧵 I was taught that the Bible was the word of God, & thinking deeply about it was vitally important.

I still believe that! I have never been more awed by and passionate about the Bible than I am now.

It’s just that as I read it, I found it challenging what I saw.

A thing I worry about w/ #ShinyHappyPeople (& other similar docs) is that we Christians will think “oh wow, look at those weird people over there can you believe it?!” Because let’s be honest, some of that toxic theology was in the churches we grew up in. And often still is.🧵 I’ve been guilty of treating IBLP as separate from my upbringing, calling them the weird cousins at the family reunion. But my own metaphor sells me out: there IS a family resemblance:

Like, we didn’t use an umbrella, but we learned to submit to all authority (except democrats)

Below is the just-released trailer for a new documentary about Gothard & IBLP. Except, it's not really about them. It's about the survivors of that world. It's about the long road of healing. It's about the cost of speaking out.
vimeo.com/832338128 In 2018, when I was first reporting on Gothard & IBLP, some of the women in this film not only entrusted me w/ their stories, but helped me understand that world, connected me to others in the Recovering Grace community. The New Republic story existed b/c of them.

So in one of my recent threads I mentioned that though I'm a pastor now, I once told God the church was a bad idea & doesn't work. Some people did not like this.

Here's why I think that is, & how it's connected to Gothard's umbrella of authority [thread] The feedback I got was "who are you to question the plan of God?!" The implication being that God is in charge (true!), and I am not (also true!), so questioning God's plan isn't okay (EXTREMELY NOT TRUE!).

"Shiny Happy People" did a great job linking the Duggar family to the Industrial Gothard Complex, but you can't unpack everything about that world in 4 eps. I'm still haunted by one specific aspect of IBLP I covered in my reporting that got briefly mentioned in the doc [thread]: The damage done at IBLP campuses is unlike anything I've personally encountered. Working at a campus was an honor, & many well-meaning parents shipped their kids off to these training centers thinking it was an amazing opportunity. The carnage was catastrophic.

Since the Shiny Happy People doc came out quite a few of you started following me here. Hi there! You seem nice. Here’s a bit about me, a current pastor who not so long ago told God the church was a terrible idea, and how I ended up in the doc. This is a long one: [thread] I started writing about sexual abuse in evangelical/fundamentalist settings while trying to process my own story. I was sexually abused by a Christian camp counselor when I was in 6th grade, but didn’t have words for what happened (or understand it as abuse) until my early 30s.