Landry acted out her freshman year, which in the context of Bob Jones meant she left campus without permission to get pizza with a few friends. She says she was suspended for a semester and came back to intensive disciplinary counseling. When she finally told her counselor what had happened, she was taken to see Jim Berg, a powerful campus figure who was Bob Jones’s dean of students for nearly three decades, from 1981 to 2010. Landry says she told Berg how she’d struggled since the rape to understand where God had been and why He hadn’t intervened.
“I was hoping he’d say that he’d help me get help, help me tell my parents, maybe even help me call the police,” Landry says. “And I was hoping that he’d tell me it wasn’t my fault.” Instead, she says Berg’s first response was to ask whether she’d been drinking or smoking pot the day she was raped. He then suggested, she says, that her rape had a spiritual root. “He said that under every sin is another sin; that there is a sin in your life that caused your rape, and we have to find out what that sin was,” Landry says.
Longtime Dean of Students Jim Berg has been accused of silencing and shaming abuse victims at the school.
A teenage Tamara Rice on a train in Bangladesh, where she alleges she was abused by missionary doctor Donn Ketcham.
In a section for frequently asked questions on its website, ABWE promises that in its “desire for transparency,” it “intends to publicly release the unedited report, when it is completed.” The Bangladesh missionary kids are dubious. When Pii contacted Tamara Rice, an MK, for an interview last November, she says the investigators refused to say how her answers would be used or whether her identity would be kept confidential. She, like other MKs, has refused to speak with the new investigators under those conditions.
“ABWE accused GRACE of building a case against them in their investigation,” Rice says. “I feel there’s a good chance that what ABWE is doing now is building a defense case against future lawsuits—that really these interviews are lining the walls of their lawyers’ office.”
III. The Fortress
By 2013, a decade after Tchividjian felt called to spread the word, sex abuse had become a topic that Protestants could no longer ignore. Since 2004, GRACE had trained more than 150 churches and ministries, consulted with dozens more on prevention policies, and helped implement abuse-awareness programs at six Christian colleges. Despite the disappointments, the New Tribes and ABWE investigations had shed new light on the problem. So had a fast-growing network of survivor websites publishing accounts of abuse.
Two major evangelical foundations, children’s mission ministry OneHope and relief organization Samaritan’s Purse (run by Tchividjian’s controversial uncle, Franklin Graham), had asked GRACE to help them develop and implement abuse-prevention and response policies. Tchividjian, Langberg, and others on the GRACE board were regulars on Christian media. The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant body, had passed a resolution calling on member churches to report suspicions or allegations of sexual abuse to law enforcement. Then as the ABWE investigation was unraveling, Bob Jones University turned to GRACE.
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