I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  In his letter, Jason said, “Regarding my personal indiscretions, I was inappropriate on several occasions and would not refute the instances you recall.… I remember feeling extremely guilty about these. I remember that when these incidents would occur that I would often apologize soon after because the guilt was great. To my knowledge, I have apologized for these actions. I have not endeavored to remember those days, but rather to forget them. If, after looking back twenty years, you feel these apologies were insufficient or you do not recall them, I once again admit to my wrongdoing and ask for your forgiveness.”

  No, Jason had never apologized before now. He was always the favored child and did exactly what I would expect a man of little character to do. He tried to weasel out of any responsibility. Even though his abuse wasn’t as extreme as Jeremy’s, his lack of remorse makes it much harder for me to accept what he did.

  Witnesses: The Truth Surfaces

  Melissa wrote an extensive affidavit that she prepared for the court on my behalf, validating being molested and being severely abused physically in our home, not only by my father but by our brothers. A number of other witnesses came forward to testify against Bart too, validating other forms of emotional and spiritual abuse. We were told that in the previous five years, my father had excommunicated close to forty people from his tiny church in Denver and many were ready to stand up on our behalf. Several childhood friends had e-mailed me to tell me that they too had been beaten by my father with his one-inch-thick wooden dowel when they were kids. A single mom who had been a member of the church he pastored came forward to confirm (and was prepared to testify) that as of 2010 he was still promoting beating children with one-inch-thick wooden dowels in his church. The night before our depositions, this woman received a call from Social Services saying that an anonymous report had just been filed against her for abusing her own children, which was a preposterous claim. We were sure it was an attempt by the IFB leaders to discredit and intimidate us and our witness although we could never prove it. I called Social Services and told them what we were all up against with this cult and, thankfully, no action was ever taken against her.

  Bart, incidentally, had filed for a restraining order against this woman and was suing her too for defending me to his church members. Ours was actually one of three lawsuits Bart had initiated almost simultaneously. The third was on behalf of his church against a woman who had sold property to his congregation. My father had found a new power toy called the legal system, which he could use to punish people who wouldn’t submit to his wishes.

  As we prepared for trial, we desperately wanted the CARES Northwest report about our daughters’ claims of sexual abuse to be submitted as evidence to the court. In it, the CARES evaluators asserted that, in their professional opinion, our daughters’ claims were credible even though there was no DNA evidence. Unfortunately, CARES prohibited us from releasing a copy unless the judge ordered it—and then, only per request from Bart’s attorney. Of course Bart declined to do so and the report could not be used.

  My Father Gives Himself Away

  In preparing for trial, we obtained a stack of CDs of Bart’s sermons from the previous few years, several of which we submitted as evidence against him. Bart made a motion for the judge to rule them inadmissible, but his motion was denied. Among his quotations from 2005 and 2006, we found the following:

  “Do you understand what sickness [sexual molestation] is out there today? And it— Listen folks, it’s walking right around you. You think it’s over there in Florida. I’m going to tell you something. It’s right outside the door of this church. Let me tell you something scarier, it’s in the church. It’s in here. You say, who you talking about, pastor? I ain’t telling.”

  “You spank your child and you put a bruise on them and I’ll show you just how much power you have. I’m going to tell you something, the state is taking away your power a long time ago [sic] and I’m going to tell you, in the church we better get back on track! I told you before, you spank your child and I’ll go stand alongside of you in prison.… Our kids don’t need to be registered as sex offenders, they need to be whupped!”

  “Finally I told my son in-law [in April of 2006], well, I don’t care if you want me to come up there [to Northland] or not, I’m coming anyway.… Now you know me, when I’m coming, I’m coming [laughter from congregation]. And I got a phone call from a Deputy Lincoln the next day saying, ‘Don’t come up here. There’s a restraining order against you.’ And I said, ‘When is it in effect?’ And he said, ‘Well, it gets served out of Marinette County and it will be served in Denver. And when you sign for it, at that instant it becomes effective.’ Well, I hadn’t signed anything yet [laughter from congregation]. You know, I don’t like trouble—I like to avoid trouble [louder laughter from congregation], so I went. And uh, when I got up there, uh, they were very dismayed that I was there. But I had tried to get them to go to the faculty and talk to them. They refused and refused and refused. So finally, I just said, ‘I’m going to the faculty’ and there was the rub.… And I have the power to destroy them. I really do.”

  In these public sermons, not only was Bart admitting that he had intentionally tried to dodge the restraining order and forced my husband to defend himself in a public confrontation, but he was also publicly advocating beating children. What’s more, he was acknowledging the existence of sexual abusers in his own church, whose identity he was unwilling to disclose. Our attorney was elated.

  The week of the trial in April 2010, my husband and I flew to Denver, booked a hotel room and rental car, and met for an entire day with our attorney to prepare. Bart had listed “Dr.” Matt Olson and “Dr.” Les Ollila on his “will call” list, which our attorney said meant that he was asserting to the judge that they had agreed to testify at the trial. “Dr.” Marty Von was also on Bart’s “may call” list, so Northland’s top three administrators appeared to be lined up against me. Our attorney called all three men repeatedly to confirm whether or not they would be testifying, but they refused to answer. Either way, Bart would be able to use them as leverage to pressure us to sign a statement of silence. If the case ended in a settlement, this strategy would enable the IFB leaders to tell their own people that Bart had written their names down without their knowledge, so they had not actually participated in any “unbiblical lawsuit.” It was the perfect plan.

  The Abuse of the Legal System

  The day before we were set to go to trial, my father dropped his claims against my husband and me. We had to make a spur-of-the-moment decision whether to move forward with my counterclaims. Ultimately, we decided the costs and the risks were too great, after our attorney explained that the judge would likely rule much of the evidence we hoped to bring out inadmissible because my father’s claims of slander and libel against me had been withdrawn. We could end up having to pay another $20,000 in legal fees without achieving our goal of fully exposing and prosecuting Bart. Ultimately, I refused my father’s request that I sign a statement saying I would never speak about the allegations again and my counterclaims (of sexual assault and battery) were dismissed pursuant to a confidential settlement agreement. All told, the process had stretched out over twenty months and many sleepless nights, and our legal fees cost us more than $50,000. In that time, I gained fifty pounds from all the stress and felt as if I had lost a part of myself. Joseph and I had both experienced extended and profound mental trauma all over again. The end result? Bart was free to keep pastoring. I had to hope the truth would come out eventually.

  Had my father and his IFB cronies succeeded in proving that I was exhibiting attention-seeking behavior and had faked a brain tumor, they would have argued that it made me an unfit mother, and I believe they would have filed motions to take our children from us. Even though the IFB didn’t believe in most mental illnesses, its members had no moral problem using the concept as a legal argument to get what they wanted. If the judge had believed their side of the story, my children might have been ripped out
of my arms and thrown into those of their abuser. On his initial list of witnesses to the court, Bart had even included the names of Northland administrator Wynne Kimbrough, the man who taught us to use glue sticks on our young children in the classroom at Northland, and his wife, Vicky, and claimed that they could provide testimony that there were criminal records on file in Wisconsin showing that we had neglected our children. The claim about criminal records was patently false. The hypocrisy was astounding, not to mention the fact that the claims were patently untrue. It was simply another veiled threat from Bart that he would try to wrest our children from us. The Northland faculty member who had spanked one of our daughters without our knowledge was also listed as a witness against us. And “Dr.” Marty Von, who had heard firsthand from my brother that he had molested me, was also on the list. We never learned what these witnesses would actually have testified, but it was evident that their role would be to in some fashion support my father’s efforts to deny his history of abuse and to attempt to place the blame for our family’s problems on me.

  One of the most heartbreaking examples of the cult’s collective attacks against abuse victims is the case of Zach Scadden, which coincided with my own legal battle against the IFB power brokers. Scadden was a young teenager who had grown up in my father’s church in Brighton, but attended Silver State Baptist High School, my alma mater. When he and another minor came forward to accuse principal Daniel Brock, a graduate of BJU, of sexual abuse, the IFB members in Colorado closed ranks against the boys. Prosecutor Dave Lynn knew my sister Melissa had fled the IFB and called her to Colorado for a forensic interview to get a better handle on the school Scadden had attended as well as the man who had pastored him, my father. Lynn was astonished at the size and intricacy of the IFB network Melissa and other IFB members described during their interviews, which connected Christian colleges all across the country. In the center of it all was Bob Jones University.

  During the trial, the courtroom was packed with Brock’s defenders, almost all of whom were in suits and ties and Sunday best dresses. Scadden, on the other hand, left after testifying with only his fiancée’s family to offer moral support. Even his own relatives turned against him. Perhaps not surprisingly, Brock was acquitted. A few weeks later, Scadden woke up to find the word “Bitch” scrawled on the side of his car. Later that night he committed suicide.

  Unsatisfied, the media obtained court documents after the trial, and the local CBS station reported revealing that prosecutors had seized Brock’s school-issued laptop. According to those reports a forensic search uncovered viewed images, movies, videos, and Internet searches of homosexual male pornographic Web sites, all conducted from Brock’s user accounts during the time he had the IFB schools computer. The judge had squashed this information at trial, so the jury never heard it.

  After Scadden’s death, thousands of survivors had contacted me privately to talk about my audio file and to confess that they had endured similar abuse. But they were all petrified to go public because they didn’t want to end up like Zach Scadden. I had to find a way to get our stories out to the world. It was the only way to shatter the culture of fear and set the stage for positive change in a system that allowed every one of us to be victimized.

  15

  THE SURVIVORS’ NETWORK

  So you want to know where a man stands with God? You have only to ask him one question: What do you think of this university [BJU]?

  —“Dr.” Bob Jones Sr.

  I knew abuse was epidemic in the IFB. But members had been brainwashed to believe that the Bible compelled them to be “forgiving.” How could I get through to people that speaking out was the right thing to do? IFB leaders are only afraid of two things: publicity and the police exposing their misdeeds with respect to sex and money. Otherwise, they are more than able to control their followers through political spin. I knew pedophilia and its cover-up was rampant in the IFB, so I started inviting my fellow survivors to share their stories through Facebook, hoping that an online dialogue would be a relatively nonthreatening forum for discussion.

  A mentor of mine who was experienced in working with cults advised me that to get IFB survivors and members talking, I would have to speak the language of the cult. She said that social workers assisting in polygamist compounds were trained to use the more formal speech and expressions children of plural marriage were accustomed to hearing to help build trust and convince the children to open up to them.

  “What is the IFB language like?” she asked me.

  “They pride themselves on being like warriors,” I told her. “They call themselves ‘militant fundamentalists’ and, boy, do they love to fight. They are trained to ‘do battle royal for the truth.’ We were told we were soldiers in God’s army and we needed to be willing to take up arms to protect our religious practices. The preachers always screamed and were know-it-alls.”

  “Then get out there on those blogs and start fighting,” she advised. “Use capital letters. Your voice has to be louder than the cult leaders’ voices or they won’t listen to you.”

  So every day, Melissa and I, along with a few other survivors, would talk among ourselves on Facebook, about the abuses in the IFB. Neva Anasovich started a group called Independent Fundamental Baptist Survivors, but since she wanted to stay out of the center of things, she asked me to take it and run with it. I asked her if we could add the word “cult” to the title to make it more accurate and she liked the idea. That day it became Independent Fundamental Baptist Cult Survivors, and when the name hit Facebook the IFB threw a fit. We whittled the group down from eighty survivors to thirty-five. Not a stellar beginning. I started receiving outraged e-mails. “How dare you call us a cult? Mormons are a cult. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult. We believe the word of God. You are an apostate, leading people to Hell!” A few survivors had left the IFB in the 1960s and 1970s and they didn’t understand how the group had evolved over time to become increasingly abusive, so they struggled with the term. They contested the use of the word “cult” and downplayed the IFB by referring to it as “cult-like” instead. Somehow that made them feel better. Finally, we posted a Cult Quiz we found on the Internet and that put it all in perspective. If those who took the quiz said “yes” to three or more questions, the answer key warned that they could be in a dangerous group (i.e., a cult). Our survivors were saying “yes” to almost all forty questions on the quiz.

  We also continued our education about the sociological definition of a cult. I started to share everything I was learning in my college courses about mental illness, brainwashing, hierarchical organizations, and more through the group. The advice of my mentor was working like a charm and we became more persistent, peppering our dialogue with capital letters—the online equivalent of shouting. We also continually used the words “evil” and “good” to define behavior, since that was IFB members’ only paradigm.

  We talked about two movies that fit our “cult” world: The Village and Population 436. Bobby Wood Jr., son of the former vice president of BJU, had told us in whispered tones about The Village in 2005 when Joseph was on the faculty with him at Northland. He said it accurately depicted what life was like growing up at BJU in so many ways, and we found this to be true for thousands of survivors who had grown up in other IFB ministries.

  Traffic was slow for the first few months, but my theory was, “If we keep talking, they will come.” Eventually, our numbers grew. We had our share of saboteurs, posing as cult survivors but claiming they still felt speaking out on accreditation fraud and sexual abuse cover-ups was “un-Christlike.” It threw our legitimate members off balance because they read the posts and started to doubt themselves. “It is unbiblical to appeal to a lost and godless world and secular authorities to rectify conflicts among believers in Jesus,” the faux survivors said. They argued, “We should bring the details of these grievances to the IFB leaders so they can investigate and determine the validity of our claims. And even if a genuine victim did not get justice in this lif
e, he or she should leave it in the hands of God. After all, airing these complaints on the Internet is hurting the reputation of the church and the alleged abusers’ innocent family members. It is much better to keep everything in-house.” Fortunately, I could sniff out the phonies fast and block them. They always slipped in bits of cult lingo, calling us “bitter” and chastising us for not going about our healing in “the right way.”

  When a victim finally started opening up, dissenters would condemn any foul language they used as a “sin” and that would often shut them up. But, because I had gone through counseling, I understood the importance of the Seven Stages of Grief codified by pioneering psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. I knew that anger was a fundamental part of the grieving process and that there was no timeline for grief—we all go through trauma differently. So I encouraged the survivors to “rant away.” After all, if anyone deserves a “Fuck you!” it’s a bunch of child abusers. I didn’t care what their titles were: pastor, college president, or Bible professor. If they abused children, they deserved no respect from us. Besides, I wanted our group to be a safe haven for survivors, a place where they never had to stifle their negative emotions. I was determined not to put them in a refurbished IFB box, as the others were trying to do. Our group was going to be a safe place for all victims, at any stage in their journey, to heal—they were our priority. Anybody who didn’t like it didn’t have to participate in the discussion.

  When we stanched that flow of negativity, our detractors took a new tack. They launched attacks against us by creating their own blogs and YouTube videos casting doubt on our credibility. They called me everything from “mentally ill” to “Jezebel.” The hardest accusation to hear was that I was being “too harsh” and “not loving enough” when dealing with abusers. I spent a lot of time grappling with this before I finally realized that a person’s maturity level is often unrelated to his chronological age and that we need to treat people in a manner appropriate to their maturity level. For instance, we can’t sit back and allow a playground bully to kick little girls in the stomach. Recess monitors need to say, “No! That is not acceptable behavior!” The monitors can’t walk over to the little guy and gently, slowly, and kindly remove him from the situation. They need to rush in and grab him before he kicks the next little girl so hard that she falls and ends up with a concussion. The same is true when dealing with the IFB. They are schoolyard bullies, running wild and metaphorically kicking the littlest and most vulnerable kids on the playground. They are not spiritually evolved enough to understand gentle, loving language. They need to be told, “No! You cannot act that way!” When we don’t do so, they end up running roughshod over everyone. Emotionally battered wives, gay and lesbian teenagers tormented by cruel rhetoric, even young children beaten with wooden rods end up losing their lives or killing themselves as a result.