For years, Protestants have assumed they were immune to the abuses perpetrated by celibate Catholic priests. But Tchividjian believes that Protestant churches, groups, and schools have been worse than Catholics in their response. Mission fields, he says, are “magnets” for would-be molesters; ministries and schools do not understand the dynamics of abuse; and “good ol’ boy” networks routinely cover up victims’ stories to protect their reputations. He fears it is only a matter of time before it all blows up in their faces and threatens the survival of powerful Protestant institutions. 

In November 2012, Bob Jones University, the longtime flagship institution of fundamentalism, announced it had hired GRACE (short for Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), an independent group of evangelical lawyers, pastors, and psychologists, to investigate the university’s handling of sexual-abuse and -harassment reports. Bob Jones officials said they were taking the step after watching the pedophilia scandal unfold at Pennsylvania State University the previous year. They vowed to ask forgiveness of any students they may have “underserved.”

In truth, the origins of the investigation were closer to home. In 2011, an abuse scandal from years before had become national news with a 20/20report. Tina Anderson, a 15-year-old who lived in New Hampshire, was raped and impregnated in 1997 by one of her church’s deacons, then in his late thirties, while she was a babysitter for his family. When Anderson and her mother told their pastor, Bob Jones graduate Chuck Phelps, what had happened, Phelps had Anderson stand before the congregation while he read a confession of her pregnancy. She was then sent to a family in Colorado until the baby was born and given up for adoption. Anderson’s rapist, a registered sex offender, was made to confess as well—but to adultery, not rape—and he remained at the church for years. Phelps, who’d gone on to be president of the fundamentalist Maranatha Baptist Bible College in Wisconsin, maintained close ties to Bob Jones, serving on its board of trustees as well as on its missionary and youth-camp boards.

Students and alumni had already begun to agitate online against the school’s lack of academic and student freedom, as well as its response to reports of sexual abuse. Anderson’s story highlighted what these critics—dismissed by the school as disaffected “detractors”—saw as a pattern in how Bob Jones stigmatized students who reported rape or sexual assault. A senior named Christopher Peterman started a Facebook group and website called Do Right BJU, which aimed to remove Phelps from the board and called for a range of reforms; he organized the first campus protest in the university’s history to raise awareness of sexual abuse. Phelps resigned from the board of trustees in December 2011, just days before the rally. But then a few months later, on the eve of graduating, Peterman was expelled for watching Glee, among other violations.

The story continued to grow. Peterman and alumni groups active on Facebook began to hear from more and more students who claimed they had been poorly treated when they reported sexual abuse to school staff. Over the following months, alumni pressured the university to update its policies and investigate the school’s handling of abuse reports. They urged the university to hire GRACE, which had investigated allegations of sex abuse in two Christian missionary groups. To almost everyone’s surprise, seven months after the 20/20 report aired, Bob Jones announced that it had listened.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of the hire. Bob Jones, founded in 1927, isn’t just any conservative Christian college; it’s the de facto center of the national Independent Fundamental Baptist network, which functions almost as a denomination unto itself, with thousands of affiliated churches, feeder schools, and businesses including Bob Jones’s textbook company, radio station, and music publisher. Outsiders call the school the “mother ship” of fundamentalism; the university prefers another moniker, “the fortress of faith.”

To call Bob Jones insular doesn’t quite cover it. On its compound in Greenville, South Carolina, once surrounded in part by barbed wire, faculty children were, until recently, born at the on-campus hospital, raised in the K-12 Bob Jones Academy, educated at the university, then sent out into the world armed with a list of approved churches (mostly those that send the school students or money and that are often pastored by Bob Jones “preacher boys” like Phelps). Until the early 2000s, faculty were paid minuscule wages—hovering around $15,000 a year for a full-time professor—in exchange for subsidized living and the commitment that the school would care for them into old age (a retirement plan called “The Promise”). Rules for students are infamously strict—no TV, no holding hands, no Christian contemporary music, and, until 2000, no interracial dating.

By 2012, though, the fortress no longer seemed inviolable. While Bob Jones was for decades the choice destination for conservative Christian students, enrollment at the school was dropping: down about 10 percent in the last decade and nearly 25 percent since its heyday in the early 1980s. Alumni blogs published pictures of what used to be an overflowing chapel, now left with hundreds of empty seats; two dorms are scheduled to be demolished this summer. Leaked minutes from a recent faculty meeting noted that Christian colleges are closing across the U.S. but that Bob Jones might find salvation in China and South Korea, where “the opportunity for Christian education” is still “unbelievable.” The school has begun selling off assets: the radio station, the music publisher, the hospital. “The Promise” to support retiring faculty has been rescinded.

Even so, the idea that Bob Jones would reach outside itself for help was stunning—especially considering to whom it was reaching out. GRACE was founded by a member of evangelical royalty: Boz Tchividjian (“rhymes with religion,” he likes to say), a former prosecutor who teaches law at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Jerry Falwell’s legacy school, and who is the grandson of “America’s pastor,” Billy Graham. Before he came to fame, Graham was a Bob Jones University dropout who Bob Jones Sr. said would never amount to more than a “poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.” Though the two later became friends, they split again in 1957 over Graham’s revival crusades—in particular, a crusade at Madison Square Garden that Jones, who’d warned Graham to avoid cities and politicians, condemned as too ecumenical and accommodating to modern society. The quarrel between the two men led to a rift between fundamentalists and evangelicals that persists today, as evangelicals seek to win souls by engaging mainstream culture and fundamentalists retreat from it. When Jones’s great-grandson Stephen Jones, now president of the university, appealed to Graham’s heir, it seemed like a transformative moment. Perhaps the fortress was raising its gates at last.

It was momentous for Tchividjian and GRACE as well. Tchividjian had become convinced that the Protestant world is teetering on the edge of a sex-abuse scandal similar to the one that had rocked the Catholic Church. He is careful to say that there’s not enough data to compare the prevalence of child sex abuse in Protestant and Catholic institutions, but he’s convinced the problem has reached a crisis point. He’s not alone in that belief. In 2012, Christian radio host Janet Mefferd declared, “This is an epidemic going on in churches. … When are evangelicals going to wake up and say we have a massive problem in our own churches?”

For years, Protestants have assumed they were immune to the abuses perpetrated by celibate Catholic priests. But Tchividjian believes that Protestant churches, groups, and schools have been worse than Catholics in their response. Mission fields, he says, are “magnets” for would-be molesters; ministries and schools do not understand the dynamics of abuse; and “good ol’ boy” networks routinely cover up victims’ stories to protect their reputations. He fears it is only a matter of time before it all blows up in their faces and threatens the survival of powerful Protestant institutions.

In the past couple of years, Tchividjian has begun to look prophetic. Reports and allegations of sex abuse, rape, and harassment—and a culture that has badly mishandled them—have become more and more frequent. In fall 2012, former members of Sovereign Grace Ministries, a “family” of about 80 conservative churches from various theological traditions, filed a class-action lawsuit against the ministry for failing to report allegations of sex abuse in the 1980s and 1990s—including abuse perpetrated by church leaders’ immediate family members—and discouraging victims and their families from going to law enforcement. (The lawsuit was dismissed last year because of expired statutes of limitations and jurisdictional questions, but an appeal and criminal investigations are under way.) This spring, an exposé in The New Republic revealed that Patrick Henry, the college of choice for evangelical homeschoolers, has covered up alleged campus rape and sexual assault, thanks largely to its victim-blaming emphasis on women’s purity. Allegations of similar practices soon surfaced against other Christian colleges, including Pensacola Christian College in Florida and Cedarville University in Ohio. A documentary released in February, No Place to Call Home, recounts the systematic sexual abuse of children in the 1980s at Jesus People USA, an evangelical commune in Chicago. The empire of Bill Gothard, founder of the fundamentalist Institute in Basic Life Principles, crumbled earlier this year after bloggers revealed dozens of sexual-harassment and molestation claims against him.

Common threads run through the stories: authoritarian settings where rule-following and obedience reign supreme; counseling techniques that emphasize victims’ own culpability; male leaders with few checks on their power; and, in the eyes of many Christians including Tchividjian, a perversion of the Bible to justify all three. “When you have this motley group of many denominations, this independent environment, and then this distortion of scripture, that’s an environment where abuse can flourish,” Tchividjian says. “But we’ve never been forced to deal with it on a Protestant-wide basis.”

This will be a challenge. The Protestant world includes tens of thousands of denominations, plus thousands more nondenominational churches, ministries, mission boards, and subcultures. Unlike the Catholic Church, there is no Vatican, no shared leadership connecting, say, Calvary Chapel’s 1,600 churches with the Southern Baptist Convention’s 46,000. No common standards apply but the authority of scripture, which is interpreted differently from church to church, school to school, mission to mission.

Even with its tightly controlled hierarchy, the Catholic Church has responded abysmally to sex abuse. “The Catholics have been forced through three decades of lawsuits to address this issue,” Tchividjian says. “The first decade, they gave it lip service, but after three decades, hundreds of millions of dollars lost, and publicity that devastated the Church, they were forced to begin addressing it. It’s my prayer that we’ll deal with it without being forced to.”

GRACE’s mission grew out of a phone call that Tchividjian received from a reporter in the summer of 2003. Now in private practice, Tchividjian for eight years had prosecuted child sex-abuse cases as a district attorney in northeastern Florida. The reporter was looking for perspective on a story. In a Pentecostal church in Wisconsin, a convicted sex offender who’d been allowed to volunteer in Sunday school had allegedly abused two sisters, ages 8 and 12. When the girls told their parents, their father went to the pastor, who advised a sit-down with the volunteer. During this meeting, Tchividjian says, “the perp did what perps usually do: cry and ask for forgiveness, so happy he was caught.” The pastor said it sounded like repentance to him and that the accused could prove it by staying active in church life. Would that be enough to allow the father to forgive him, the pastor asked, and to forgo reporting the accused to “man’s authority”? The father said OK, if that’s what God wanted them to do. By the time the journalist called Tchividjian, six years later, the victims’ family had been asked to leave the church and the Sunday school volunteer was about to go on trial.

The pastor’s mishandling of the case touched a nerve with Tchividjian, who had seen similar dynamics play out many times. When he’d started working in the district attorney’s office, criminal cases had been distributed to prosecutors “like a deck of cards,” each prosecutor getting a mix from grand theft to molestation. Tchividjian saw how his colleagues shuddered at the sex-abuse cases and tended to plea them out quickly, as though the facts were too awful to bring to court. “It was almost too painful for them to grasp,” he says. When Tchividjian requested to take on all the district’s child sex-abuse cases, the other prosecutors happily obliged. In time, he established a sex-crimes unit that handled hundreds of cases over eight years.

All too often, he says, a pastor would come to court in a supportive role, almost always sitting on the perpetrator’s side of the aisle, not the victim’s. The Wisconsin case made Tchividjian think back on those pastors. He began to realize that he had a calling of his own: to teach the Protestant church to be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. “I was encountering survivors who were absolutely eviscerated as a result of disclosing abuse in the Protestant church,” Tchividjian says, “and the long-term damage is sometimes more from how the church responded, or failed to respond, than the abuse itself.”

He contacted people he’d met over the years, advocates for abuse survivors he suspected were Christian, like Victor Vieth, former head of the Gundersen National Child Protection Training Center, and Diane Langberg, a Pennsylvania psychologist who specializes in trauma, including child abuse. Together, in 2004, they pulled together a board of lawyers, pastors, and therapists and formed GRACE. To their knowledge, this was the first group dedicated to educating Protestant churches about sex abuse and the ways in which religion can be used to sweep abuse under the rug.

They started speaking at conferences, urging Protestants to take child sex abuse seriously and support survivors rather than blame them. Tchividjian wrote a booklet for the World Reformed Fellowship, a cross-denominational network, on “Protecting Children from Abuse in the Church.” Today GRACE, which still has no full-time staffers, offers prevention seminars for churches, along with consultations when abuse allegations arise.

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