The four pillars examined on this site are largely about control — who you can sleep with and who you can marry. This fifth pillar is about what happens to people who are harmed by aggressively following that system. And what those institutions do when confronted with that damage.
These are not fringe concerns or edge cases. They are predictable, documented outcomes of the theology itself. And they deserve honest, transparent answers from anyone still willing to defend that theology.
What follows are bare minimums — acknowledgments so well documented and basic that they should be uncontroversial. If your institution will not talk about them, that tells us something important about what your institution is actually protecting.
The Marital Duty Weapon
There are two textual traditions behind 1 Corinthians 7:3, and the readings they produce pull in different directions. One reading is sometimes used to justify sexual coercion within marriage; the other guards against it. It is my position that this verse should carry a footnote reflecting the difference, to protect the vulnerable.
Doug Wilson — Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho — July 21, 2026 — In an interview published today by Uncloseted Media, Doug Wilson — lead pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and spiritual adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — was asked what happens when a husband forces himself on a wife who has withheld sex. His answer: it is not a crime. The wife is sinning. Law enforcement should not be involved. The prescribed response is mandatory couples counseling with the goal of restoring sexual relations. The husband who coerced her and the wife who refused are placed in the same moral category — both sinning against each other. The wife's body, in Wilson's framework, is not fully hers to refuse.
Wilson estimates that between 10 and 20 people in the current federal government share his theological views. This is not a fringe position. It has access to power. Source: Uncloseted Media, July 21, 2026.
ESV (English Standard Version) — 1 Corinthians 7:3 — "The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband." The Greek word behind this rendering is opheilen (from opheilē, Strong's G3782) — a word meaning debt, obligation, or what is owed. This is the language of the ledger. In the New Testament it is used for a jailable loan (Matthew 18:32) and taxes owed to Rome (Romans 13:7). It is collectible. It implies one party can demand payment from the other.
KJV (King James Version) — 1 Corinthians 7:3 — "Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband." The Greek word behind this rendering is eunoia (Strong's G2133) — a word meaning goodwill, kindness, or affectionate regard. This is the language of freely given care. Goodwill cannot be demanded or collected. It is extended, not extracted.
The difference between opheilen and eunoia is not a minor translation quibble — it is the difference between an obligation one party can press and an affection one party freely offers. The same verse, rendered one way, has been used to tell a spouse they cannot refuse. Rendered the other way, that use is simply not the case.
The difference comes down to a single word, and the two candidates behave very differently once they leave the page. One tradition reads the verse as a debt — opheilē, "what is owed." This is where "conjugal rights" and "marital duty" come from, the wording in most modern Bibles, and a debt is a collectible thing: something one party can demand from the other.
The other tradition reads it as goodwill — eunoia, "benevolence." This is the wording behind the Textus Receptus and the King James Version ("render… due benevolence"), and goodwill is something to be shared, not demanded. There is no leverage to force the matter. It frames the obligation as affection freely given rather than a payment extracted.
I'll be straight about the scholarship: modern textual criticism favors the "debt" reading. It sits in the earliest surviving manuscripts and is the text printed in today's critical editions. I take the minority position anyway — not by pretending the manuscripts fall my way, but because the two readings do not carry equal risk. On a verse this easily turned into a weapon, the reading that cannot be turned into one has a value the scholarship doesn't measure, and that value should not be brushed aside.
The manuscript case for the "debt" reading — The Greek word opheilen (from opheilē, Strong's G3782) sits in the oldest surviving Greek manuscripts and in the Latin Vulgate. Modern critical editions — Nestle-Aland, UBS — print it as the received text. The argument for it rests on two standard text-critical principles: prefer the shorter reading (scribes tend to add, not subtract) and prefer the harder reading (scribes tend to smooth, not sharpen). Both favor opheilen. It is not a corrupt reading or a late invention. It is the scholarly consensus and should be acknowledged as such.
The legal history — spousal rape in the United States — Until 1976 every U.S. state had a "marital exemption" that effectively gave a husband license to rape his wife without legal consequence. Nebraska was the first state to criminalize marital rape, in 1976. Marital rape became a crime in at least one section of the sexual offense codes in all 50 states on July 5, 1993. However, as of that date 30 states still retained partial exemptions — in most of them, a husband was exempt when he did not have to use force because his wife was unconscious, asleep, or mentally incapacitated. The legal doctrine driving those exemptions was the common-law principle that marriage constitutes perpetual consent — a principle with deep roots in religious teaching about marital duty. The "debt" reading of 1 Corinthians 7:3 did not create marital rape law, but it supplied the theological infrastructure that made the exemption feel coherent to generations of legislators, judges, and pastors. The same verse that could free a spouse also, in some hands, was used to trap one.
The pastoral record — documented harm — GotQuestions.org — one of the most widely used conservative evangelical reference sites — acknowledges that "some misuse 1 Corinthians 7:3–5 to support the erroneous view that a wife can never tell her husband that she would like to defer having sex," and states plainly that "sex should be more than a 'duty,' and 'submission' in the bedroom cannot be seen as the complement of compulsion." Further, the same site states they "have no problem recommending the KJV or NKJV." The KJV renders 1 Corinthians 7:3 as "due benevolence" — the "goodwill" reading. Recognizing the validity of the alternative tradition is not a progressive argument. It is a basic pastoral responsibility that even the most traditional voices already affirm.
The documented impact — Research documents the scale of the problem: the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence reports that between 10% and 14% of married women are raped by their husbands in the United States, a figure researchers consider an undercount due to chronic underreporting. Even today, 50% of male college students do not believe that a man can rape his wife. Teaching that frames marital sex as a collectible debt — rather than freely given affection — is not the only cause of that reality, but it is not helpful to the problem either.
Consider, too, the company this verse keeps. In the very same letter, Paul has just spent a chapter condemning sexual exploitation and the wronging of others — violations, at root, of another person's consent. A reading built on consent freely given sits in the grain of that argument. A reading built on a debt that can be demanded cuts across it.
I'm not saying the scholars intend harm, but that harm is not hypothetical or even restricted to the fringe of society. The person most exposed to a bad reading of this verse is rarely in the room when the text is settled, and a choice that costs a scholar nothing can cost a vulnerable person a great deal. For a translator or publisher, a footnote is a small thing to add — and here it could protect someone.
None of this settles which word Paul wrote, and I don't claim it does. It means only this: the gentler reading has more going for it than the "minority" label suggests, and the difference between the two is heavy enough to belong in the margin of every Bible that favors the majority.
The two readings don't compete on the same ground. One is more compelling to scholars trying to determine what Paul most likely wrote; the other wins nearly everything else. Here is the honest case for each.
The case for "debt" — what the scholarship rests on
It's the shorter, harder reading. Scribes more often smooth and soften a text than sharpen it, so the blunter word is usually judged original — though the "prefer the shorter reading" rule is itself debated. It has the earliest surviving witnesses — it stands in the oldest Greek manuscripts and the Latin Vulgate, though those early copies survive disproportionately from Egypt's dry climate, so "oldest surviving" is not quite "original meaning." It is the reading printed in today's standard critical editions.
The case for "goodwill"
It's no fringe reading. It carried the Textus Receptus, the King James Version, and the printed Bible of Protestant Europe for more than three centuries. It cannot be weaponized — goodwill is not a collectible thing. There is no due to demand and no leverage to apply. It fits how Paul resolves the passage: he settles it by mutual consent (v.5) — the native language of goodwill freely exchanged, and an awkward fit for a debt owed on demand. It matches Paul's wider argument: across these chapters he repeatedly tells believers to yield to each other rather than press demands (6:7, "why not rather be wronged?"; his own renounced rights in ch. 9). A debt to be collected cuts against that grain; goodwill runs with it. Its register is human, not fiscal — everywhere else in the New Testament, the "debt" word names a jailable loan (Matt 18:32) and taxes owed to Rome (Rom 13:7), the language of the ledger, not companionship.
Debt wins the academic consensus. Goodwill wins coherence, safety, and fidelity to Paul's own ethic.
On the record — Nemeth vs. Pastor Gene Cook Jr., 2009 — In a recorded debate on The Narrow Mind apologetics podcast, Pastor Cook argued directly from 1 Corinthians 7:3 that a married man is entitled to sex from his wife on demand and that she has no standing to refuse. That is the "debt" reading deployed as a weapon in real time. The episode was never published by the host. It is available at this link — viewer discretion advised.
1 Corinthians 9:27 and the Self-Harm Reading
Another verse that deserves a footnote to reduce harm is 1 Corinthians 9:27 — "I discipline my body and keep it under control." This verse, when taken literally, appears to advocate physical self-mortification and even deliberate self-harm as a form of spiritual practice. The implicit message: your physical body is the enemy — a common theme of Gnostic and ascetic manipulation. Punish it into submission if you know what's good for you.
1 Corinthians 9:27 — Context — It is beyond the scope of this site to unravel the complexities of Gnostic and other influences on early Christianity or the full history behind interpretations of this verse, but body-as-enemy and forms of extreme self-denial are common themes that have been at war with apostolic teaching from the very beginning. Harsh interpretations of this verse may be a holdover from that time. What is clear is that primary Christian tradition — including the creeds, the Incarnation, the bodily resurrection — consistently affirmed the goodness of the physical body.
The gospels proclaim testimony to a God who took on human flesh, who ate and drank with sinners, who rose bodily from the dead; not a God who considers the body an enemy to be viscerally punished into submission. Previously in chapter 6, Paul proclaimed that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19) — why would he advocate self-harm three chapters later? The theological tradition that produced the self-mortification reading of this verse appears to have more in common with the Gnostic teachers the early church condemned than with the apostolic faith; yet it is shocking that this toxic reading so rarely gets attention.
The word in question is hupōpiazō — Strong's G5299. The primary definition per Blue Letter Bible: "to beat black and blue, to smite so as to cause bruises and livid spots — like a boxer one buffets his body, handle it roughly, discipline by hardships."
This word appears twice in the entire New Testament. The other occurrence is Luke 18:5 — Jesus's parable of the persistent widow, where the judge says he will grant her justice so she won't hupōpiazō him with her continual coming. The judge isn't afraid she's going to beat him up. He knows in the end the widow is just going to wear him down to exhaustion by her relentless persistence. In practice, the word means to wear someone out — not to inflict physical violence.
Now step back to 1 Corinthians 9:27. Paul has spent the preceding three verses in an extended athletic metaphor — runners training for a race, a boxer in the ring. To powerfully land the metaphor, Paul is describing vigorous physical training that keeps mind and body sharp and focused. He is not describing a penitent self-flagellating himself in a monastery, or other forms of self-harm. He is describing a competitive athlete who trains intentionally, with skill and precise control, and stays to finish the race.
The apparent self-harm rendering is too often the way this verse manifests — in translation, in some dictionaries, and sometimes in the spoken word. In my experience this verse is rarely preached; some lean into the self-flagellation interpretation when they do, fortunately others do not. Regardless, the potential for an unfortunate misapplication is not zero.
The various translations range from measured to alarming:
- NIV: "I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave"
- Good News Translation: "I harden my body with blows and bring it under complete control"
- RSV: "I pommel my body and subdue it"
- ISV: "I keep on beating my body and making it my slave"
- Weymouth NT: "I hit hard and straight at my own body and lead it off into slavery"
1 Corinthians 9:24-27 (ESV) — "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified." Paul is in the boxing ring and on the running track for four consecutive verses. The discipline he describes is athletic training — rigorous, focused, purposeful. It is the discipline of a competitor who intends to win, not a penitent who intends to suffer.
Luke 18:2-5 (ESV) — "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, 'Give me justice against my adversary.' For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, 'Though I do not fear God or respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.'" The word translated "beat me down" is hupōpiazō — the identical word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 9:27. The judge is not afraid of physical assault. He is worn down by relentless persistence. That is what the word means. Both uses of this word in the entire New Testament point in the same direction — and neither of them toward self-harm.
Adam Clarke's Commentary — one of the most widely distributed Protestant commentaries in history, still in print and freely online — reads the verse as bodily mortification. Clarke calls the body "an enemy with which he must contend," to be mortified "by self-denial, abstinence, and severe labour," until it becomes "the slave of his soul." Yet Clarke reaches that only after recognizing the word as athletic — he traces it to boxers and wrestlers in the games. Even the mortification reading has to begin at the sport before moralizing past it.
And Clarke is not the last word — which is exactly the problem. In the very same reference libraries, John Gill rejects the self-harm reading outright: the verse is "not to be understood… of whipping and scourging," he writes, but of subduing "the body of sin." Wesley and Barnes read it figuratively as well. The commentators are split. But a person reading "I beat my body and make it my slave" in a modern translation has no way to know that Gill exists, or that Clarke is contested, or that the Greek is a boxing metaphor whose only parallel — Luke 18 — points to wearing-down rather than injury. The correction is out there; it is simply kept where an ordinary reader will never look.
That is the gap a footnote closes — one acknowledging the athletic metaphor, the Luke 18 parallel, and the genuine range of interpretation. It costs a translator nothing, and it can protect an emotionally vulnerable reader from a harmful understanding.
Conversion Therapy
Conversion therapy is the practice of attempting to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity through psychological, behavioral, or spiritual interventions. It has been practiced under various names — reparative therapy, sexual reorientation ministry, ex-gay ministry — and has been promoted and endorsed by significant segments of institutional Christianity for decades.
The documented psychological harm is not disputed by any major medical or psychiatric body. The American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychiatric Association have all formally concluded that conversion therapy does not work and causes measurable harm — including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and elevated suicide risk. Dozens of states and municipalities have banned the practice for minors. The evidence is not ambiguous.
The Theological Pretense
The theological case for conversion therapy rests on the same clobber passages examined in Pillar 3 — Leviticus 18 and 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1. If those passages don't establish what the institution claims they establish — and this site has demonstrated that they don't — then the theological foundation for conversion therapy collapses entirely. You cannot justify a practice demanding the need to fix someone who is not broken.
Beyond the exegetical problems, conversion therapy operates on a theological premise that is itself suspect: that God's redemptive work in a person's life is primarily expressed through the suppression of their orientation rather than the transformation of their character. That a gay Christian's sanctification is measured by how successfully they stop being gay — not by whether they are becoming more loving, more just, more faithful. That premise is not only psychologically destructive. It is theologically thin.
Institutional Endorsement and the Subsequent Distancing
The institutional church did not stumble into conversion therapy. It built it, funded it, promoted it from pulpits, and in many cases referred vulnerable young people directly into it. Organizations like Exodus International operated for decades with broad evangelical support before shutting down in 2013, with its president Alan Chambers publicly apologizing for the harm caused. The Southern Baptist Convention and numerous evangelical denominations either formally endorsed or tacitly supported conversion therapy practices for years.
Exodus International — "I Am Sorry" (2013) — After 37 years of operation and over 260 affiliated ministries across North America promoting sexual orientation change, Exodus International shut down in June 2013. President Alan Chambers issued a public apology stating: "I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn't change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. More than anything, I am sorry that so many have interpreted this religious rejection from Christians as God's rejection — and that some have chosen to end their lives." Chambers had previously admitted that 99.9% of people he had met who endured such programs experienced no meaningful change in their sexual orientation. The organization that built the infrastructure of evangelical conversion therapy admitted its own catastrophic failure — and the broader evangelical community largely absorbed the news and moved on without formal reckoning.
The Catholic Church, to its partial credit, has moved further than most. A May 2026 Vatican Synod report acknowledged the church's own role in the harm caused and named the devastating effects of conversion therapy directly — the first time such language had appeared in an official Vatican document. It is incomplete accountability. But it is more than most evangelical institutions have managed.
Vatican Synod Report, May 2026 — A report from the Vatican Synod Secretariat, released May 5, 2026, included testimony from two married gay Catholics describing wounds inflicted by "reparative therapies," and formally acknowledged the church's role in "the solitude, anguish, and stigma that accompany persons with same-sex attractions." It described what it called "the devastating effects of reparative therapies aimed at recovering heterosexuality." Fr. James Martin of Outreach called it the first time conversion therapy had been "critiqued that strongly" in any official Vatican document. The report does not change Catholic doctrine on homosexuality. But it puts the harm on the record — which is more than most institutions have done.
The evangelical distancing has been even more reluctant, more carefully worded, and in many cases simply absent. Institutions that promoted these practices rarely name what they did, rarely apologize to the people they harmed, and rarely acknowledge that their doctrinaire theological positions created the conditions that made the practice seem justified. Some go quiet and hope it gets forgotten, others double-down and even blame the victims.
The LDS Church — going quiet — In 2019 a church spokesperson issued a single sentence: "We are opposed to conversion therapy and our therapists do not practice it." No apology. No acknowledgment of what the church's previous position had cost people. No reckoning with the years of tacit endorsement. Just a policy reversal delivered in twenty words and filed away.
The Evangelical Alliance UK — doubling down — Representing approximately 3,500 churches, the Alliance has spent years actively lobbying against a UK conversion therapy ban, arguing that legislation would criminalize pastoral conversations, prayer, and parental guidance. Their director Peter Lynas acknowledged the church's role in "perpetuating stigma, discrimination and harm towards people because of their sexuality" — while simultaneously writing to the Prime Minister to protect the institutional conditions that produced that harm. As of December 2025, seven years after the UK government first promised a ban and £2 million in lobbying later, no ban exists. The Alliance's position directly contradicts the Association of Christian Counsellors, which signed a Memorandum of Understanding with 19 other health and counselling organizations recognizing that conversion therapy "is unethical and potentially harmful." They admit the harm with one hand and lobby to preserve the machinery that causes it with the other.
The Gaslighting Indictment
When people come forward with documented harm from purity culture — shame spirals, sexual dysfunction within marriage, self-harm, shattered faith, even suicide — the institutional response has followed a remarkably consistent pattern. It is not a pastoral response. It is an institutional social and legal defense protocol, and it escalates in a predictable sequence:
- Stage 1 — Denial "That's not what we taught." The harm is declared a misunderstanding. The institution's teaching is characterized as loving, balanced, and clearly communicated. The person's experience is implicitly reframed as a misreading.
- Stage 2 — Deflection "You must have done it wrong." The theology is sound. The application was flawed. The failure belongs to the individual, not the institution. If you were harmed, you weren't doing it correctly.
- Stage 3 — Victim Blaming "Your struggle is evidence of sin, not evidence that the teaching caused harm." The damage is reinterpreted as spiritual failure. The person who was harmed is now the problem. Their pain becomes proof of their own inadequacy rather than evidence of the institution's negligence.
- Stage 4 — Institutional Closure The conversation ends. Pastoral care is withdrawn or conditioned on the person's willingness to accept the institution's framing. The building goes quiet. The person is left alone with the damage.
This is gaslighting in a clinical sense — not as an insult, but as a precise description of what is happening. The person's lived experience of harm is being systematically invalidated by the institution that caused it, in order to protect the institution's self-image and doctrinal investment.
The harm is real. It is documented. Researchers like Darrel Ray (Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality) and others have measured it. The data exists. The institutions know the data exists. Their continued posture of denial is not ignorance. It is a decision.
The peer-reviewed literature — The harm is not anecdotal. Coates & Meston (2026, Journal of Sex Research) found that adulthood acceptance of purity culture beliefs independently predicts sexual shame in both men and women, controlling for general religiosity — and that the effect was measurable even among survivors of sexual violence. A 2026 literature review published in Sexuality & Culture (Springer Nature) synthesizing research across PsycINFO, PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Scholar found that religion-based sexual shame is "not merely an individual experience but one reinforced by broader cultural and institutional structures," manifesting as hypersexuality, hyposexuality, relational distress, and elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. The American Psychological Association has published continuing education material specifically examining the impact of evangelical purity culture on sexual and gender minority people. The data is not ambiguous. It is peer-reviewed, multi-institutional, and accumulating.
The gaslighting pattern — documented — Wade Mullen, whose work on institutional gaslighting in religious contexts is published through GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), documents the pattern precisely: "Harm is reframed as divine discipline. You're told, 'God is using this to grow you,' or 'You need to forgive and move on.' Those who expose harm are portrayed as the problem. Victims are cast as divisive. Leaders don't name wrongdoing; they deliver sermons on unity. They don't confess; they call for prayer." This is not a fringe critique. It is documented, named, and recognized by Christian organizations working specifically on abuse accountability within the church.
Recent Case Studies
SBC Annual Meeting, Orlando — June 2026 — Since 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention has accumulated approximately 380 credible complaints, 220 convicted or plea-dealing leaders, and more than 700 documented victims. A Guidepost Solutions investigation — commissioned by the SBC itself — confirmed a systematic cover-up at the convention level. The list of abusive pastors promised as part of the resulting reforms has been largely abandoned.
At his first press conference following his election as SBC president at the 2026 annual meeting in Orlando, Willy Rice called the denomination's abuse reform advocacy "politicized and weaponized," comparing it to the Me Too movement going too far. He said survivors "are going to realize one day there were people that used them. They used their pain and used their movement for their own political agenda." This is what institutional closure looks like in real time. Hey, Willy: You're right. The victims you just blamed were used; by you and others in the SBC.
If SBC leaders won't investigate wrongdoing that is clearly against their strongly stated values, and is perpetrated by their own clergy, it seems unreasonable to expect them to ever re-examine harmful interpretations of their own theology. That is worth weighing carefully before investing your spiritual life in an SBC-affiliated congregation.
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits." — Matthew 7:15-16a (ESV)
Chi Alpha Campus Ministries — Assemblies of God — Chi Alpha is the college ministry of the Assemblies of God, with chapters on more than 300 campuses. For decades, Chi Alpha pastors promoted a lay minister named Daniel Savala as "the holiest man alive" and "Papa Daniel," and kept sending students — and minors — to his Houston home for "spiritual guidance," even after his 2012 conviction for child sexual abuse in Alaska. In 2016, a former Sam Houston State student filed a Title IX complaint over Savala's access to students; the university closed it after finding no evidence he was abusing current students, but recommended that Chi Alpha warn its small-group leaders about his criminal record. The visits continued anyway. Survivors went public in 2023. Eleven years passed between his Alaska conviction and his Texas arrest — seven of them after a university flagged him. At least six Chi Alpha pastors, leaders, and students who studied under Savala were charged with sexual abuse. In 2026, Savala pleaded guilty to continuous trafficking of persons and was sentenced to 30 years without the possibility of parole.
The Assemblies of God's legal defense rests on ecclesiastical abstention — the argument that its structure of autonomous local congregations, together with the First Amendment, bars a court from judging how it handled abuse allegations. In practice, the autonomous-congregation defense lets the denomination enjoy the benefits of a national brand and national credentialing while disclaiming accountability for the predictable consequences of a man its own circles called "the holiest man alive" — one who carried a criminal conviction from 2012, was the subject of a university Title IX complaint in 2016, and retained access to students throughout. On May 4, 2026, Scott Briggs — section presbyter and pastor of Oak Grove Harvest Assemblies of God in Spurger, Texas — publicly prayed against the victims' lawsuit at a regional conference, calling it "the work of the devil." District director Tim Barker ruled the prayer "in order" and asked all ministers present to stand. In December 2025, a Harris County judge sanctioned the denomination's South Texas district $186,000 ($86,000 in attorneys' fees plus $100,000 in penalties) for repeatedly failing to produce documents in discovery, and the plaintiffs are pressing for the most severe sanctions available. The former national director of Chi Alpha resigned as the scandal unfolded and was later commissioned as a missionary to Iceland.
This is not an isolated failure but an institutional pattern: protect the structure (the autonomous-congregation defense, discovery obstruction), discredit the accusers (Briggs calling the lawsuit "the work of the devil" in 2026; and, back in 2012, Chi Alpha pastors Eli Stewart and Eli Gautreaux circulating leniency letters that called Savala's indictment "an absolute attack of the devil on his life" and dismissed his Alaska accusers as "angry and bitter" men), double down in defense of the accused, and wait for public attention to move on. Sources: MinistryWatch; Roys Report; Julie Roys; NBC News.
The above cases are scandalous enough on their own — but consider that these are among the institutions most aggressively promoting "purity culture" theology. Willing to shame and even shun unmarried members for having premarital sex, and openly calling our gay, lesbian, and LGBTQ friends and family abominations. Some will invoke the genetic fallacy — dismissing this critique because the critics are imperfect too, rather than engaging the argument itself — but one must seriously question the confidence of a theology whose staunchest advocates are among its most egregious violators. If they are willing to perpetrate this kind of harm, how much of a stretch is it for them to brazenly lie about the Bible itself?
Five pillars. One system. Here is what a better theology actually looks like.