Who is Boz Tchividjian and why is he so important? First, his credentials include his genealogy (his grandfather is Billy Graham). Second, he is the one battling pedophilia within organized religion.
For some strange reason, the religious right doesn’t want to face up to the fact that there are pedophiles in the world. Some are in churches, just like they are in schools, and other businesses. The right likes to look down on the Catholic Church because of their pedophile priest problem, but we’re just now starting to get into the pedophile problems in other churches. HINT: The Catholics are at least facing the fact that they have a pedophile problem. According to Boz Tchividjian, Evangelicals are behind Catholics when it comes to dealing with sexual abuse.
One thing we need to understand is just what is abuse, and what is just creepy, and could be an indicator of abuse. Let’s start with the purity movement in the patriarchal world. This is one of those posts in three parts. The first is about the rather perverted purity movement. The second is forcing young women to marry, very young. The third is about pedophiles in the movement.
We talk about how creepy the idea of child brides are in the third world, ignoring the fact that, in the Patriarchal world of the soon to be defunct Vision Forum, Bill Gothard, Godly Purity, and such cult like behaviors, we have a very real problem in this country. Girls as young as 13 are being groomed to be married, at the age of 15 or so, to men ten years their elder.
No, it isn’t quite pedophilia, but it is sick.
There is something sick, perverted, and creepy about a so-called Christian father who helps groom his 13-year-old daughter to be betrothed to a 26-year-old man. If I am to be consistent about my battle against pedophiles and the manipulation of the innocent, then I am required to threat stories like this, like the tale of Matthew Chapman the way I would the Kate Hunt Saga. I don’t see much difference, other than the fact that the young woman was married before she had sex with a man a good ten years her senior. There is a growing movement within the homeschooling world to marry off pure little daughters when they are legally under-age. When this was going on with the FLDS cult, the perverted, pedophile leader, Warren Jeffs was imprisoned. Why isn’t someone stepping in, to declare that what is going on here is not much different?
This is sick. In 1986, Matthew Chapman, recently ‘saved’ told Stan Owen that he was attracted to his 13-year-old daughter. She had been taught to keep her heart pure, so that she would be a virgin when she was married off to a man much older than she was. Over the next few years, she was literally groomed, the way a pedophile would groom a victim, to be Chapman’s good little helpmeet. They were married when she was 15 and he was 27. Chapman, who later married off his 16-year-old daughter to a 26-year-old man wrote:
“… The way many Christian homeschooling parents raise their daughters, they mature rather quickly and develop significant capacities by a relatively young age. By their middle-teens, many daughters (but by no means all) possess the maturity and skills to run their own home. My point is to encourage you to be open to the Lord and take to heart that some of your daughters may be ready to marry sooner than your preconceived ideas have allowed for. And why not, if they are truly ready? What is the purpose of holding out for a predetermined numeric age if they are legitimately prepared and the Lord has brought His choice of a young man along for her? Don’t be surprised if this is some of the fruit of your good parenting in bringing forth mature, well-equipped, Godly young daughters. …”
Is it right for a father to go to war for his daughter’s purity? What about a father-daughter purity ball?
“...Seated at a table with four couples, I watch as the gray-haired man next to me reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a small satin box and flips it open to check out a gold ring he’s about to place on the finger of the woman sitting to his right. Her eyes well up with tears as she is overcome by emotion.
The man’s date? His 25-year-old daughter. Welcome to Colorado Springs’ Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball, held at the five-star Broadmoor Hotel. The event’s purpose is, in part, to celebrate dad-daughter bonding, but the main agenda is for fathers to vow to protect the girls’ chastity until they marry and for the daughters to promise to stay pure. …”
As one writer remarked, a purity ball minimizes a young woman’s very humanity. Her sexuality belongs not to her, but to her father. What bothers me is that we’re on a slippery slope to emotional incest, if not physical incest. Why would a group of men, fathers, men of the church, be so concerned about the fact that the little girls around them are virgins? We know from the Warren Jeffs FLDS Chruch, that such demands are a front fro pedophilia.
Then there is this from Michael Pearl:
“…“But if your husband has sexually molested the children, you should approach him with it. If he is truly repentant (not just exposed) and is willing to seek counseling, you may feel comfortable giving him an opportunity to prove himself, as long as you know the children are safe. If there is any thought that they are not safe, or if he is not repentant and willing to seek help, then go to the law and have him arrested. Stick by him, but testify against him in court. Have him do about 10 to 20 years, and by the time he gets out, you will have raised the kids, and you can be waiting for him with open arms of forgiveness and restitution. Will this glorify God? Forever. You ask, “What if he doesn’t repent even then?” Then you will be rewarded in heaven equal to the martyrs, and God will have something to rub in the Devil’s face. God hates divorce — always, forever, regardless, without exception.”…”
As far as the purity and home schooling movement is concerned, too often the families are isolated, alone, and have no recourse if abused. They call it covert incest:
“...Often, I am asked about how people who identify with the concept of covert incest can best find help and how to get counseling, even if they are not necessarily involved in a religious group. Though I craft my message to meet the needs of the “Quivering Daughter,” I believe that all individuals who see themselves in the description of covert incest and enmeshment will be able to get a lot of value from these ideas about where to begin in their recovery. And likewise, I believe that the Quivering Daughter will also gain great benefit from the secular resources, too. The dynamics and effects of the process look the same in both secular and in religious families, and the same dysfunction follows adult children, affecting them both groups in the same ways.
The concept of covert incest was originally coined within the literature concerning the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction. Addiction becomes a disease of an entire family because those who live with the addict and their ineffective means of resolving their shame become ill-affected as they change to accommodate their loved one. Children who are parented within such a family develop covert incest (also called enmeshment) as parents siphon off love and support from their children (read a short synopsis of the process HERE). Just as an alcoholic drinks to numb their pain and escape into a fantasy as their ineffective means of coping with the despair of shame, those who suffer from covert incest use various behaviors as their coping strategy. They avoid, suppress, and unload unbearable emotions whilst trying to use other people for affirmation, borrowing from them an illusion of self worth through behaviors of control, helplessness, or care taking to fill the void that shame creates in their own hearts….”
Daddy’s Little Girls, or emotional incest. Jonathan Lindvall has been at the forefront in promoting arranged marriages for young people. In doing so, he has crushed and destroyed many lives. He also almost delves into a form of emotional incest.
“…At age twelve, I took Bethany out to dinner one evening and presented her with a golden necklace with a heart-shaped pendant formed like a padlock. There was a small keyhole and an accompanying key. I presented the pendant and necklace to her and asked her to “Give me your heart” (Prov. 23:26). 1 explained that I wanted to keep the gold key as a symbol of her trusting me with her emotions. I specifically asked her to not entertain romantic thoughts toward any young man until she and her mother and I together conclude that he is God’s choice to be her husband. (There is scriptural precedent for the young people involved to be consulted and consent to a marriage arrangement.) I explained that at the beginning of her marital engagement I would give the gold key to her betrothed, and that although she might not yet love him, she would then be free to aim her heart toward him. Bethany unreservedly entrusted the symbolic gold key into my care, and with it, her heart….”
As usual, it all goes back to R. J. Rushdoony.
“…Some Christians see family as the focal point of Christianity, relying on the teachings of leaders such as R. J. Rushdoony. Considered the father of Christian ReconstructionismR. J. Rushdoony, Rushdoony has stated, “All the basic governmental powers in society, save one, the death penalty, have been given [by God] to the family, not to the state nor to the church.…A mark of anti-Christianity is the move to strip the family of these powers.” In response to this idea, voices such as Patriarch magazine promote “home education, home business, home church, home birth, family ministry, family health, family worship…courtship and betrothal, family-based welfare.” This view of the family may also include rejection of organized sports, church youth and singles’ groups, and neighborhood playmates.
Proponents portray this view as “balanced” and acknowledge that the home is under the authority of the church. In this paradigm, however, the church is a “home church” made up of like-minded families who isolate themselves from non-family-focused activities and from other Christians who do not share their particular view of family life and child-rearing values.
From within this structure, church leaders who let their wives work outside the home, use credit, limit family size, send their children to public schools, and so on, are viewed in a negative light. Concerning such leaders, Patriarch asks, “Can I remain under the authority of someone who so denies the Bible by his life? Can my family continue to maintain fellowship in a church whose leaders so disregard the clear teachings of God’s Word?” Patriarch further suggests that youth groups and Sunday school programs demonstrate a “failure of the church to teach the principles of parental responsibility for child training and to reinforce it in the church’s programs,” and that the use of these programs in a church “may well be a reason to leave.”…”
It’s creepy. It’s sick. It is about degrading women. There are a myriad of reasons for this. It is all about the hatred of women by manly men. Makes you wonder about just how manly those men really are. Seriously, though, we’re talking about the same thing pedophiles do. These so-called ‘Godly’ men are basically allowing their daughters from the age of 13 up, to be groomed to be married off to men ten years their senior, if not older. Kept literally cloistered, these girls have had no real life. They are put into a world where some parents even advocate the destruction of their birth certificates so that they will not even be allowed to vote, let alone drive, or have a real life. In destroying their birth certificates, they are literally advocating the elimination of their identity. If they have no identity, then they aren’t being abused or molested, right?
