A clarification on Bill Gothard
Last Sunday, I referred to my brush with Bill Gothard. I don’t think I’ve ever adequately and dispassionately described that experience.
- “Brush” is maybe too dismissive. It was prolonged. Gothard did not totally dominate my spiritual life, but these six decades later it feels as if he virtually lived on campus for the full 1966-67 school year. He even packed us all off for a “Retreat” at an off-season summer camp facility.
- His presence made at least one of our teachers uncomfortable, but he was very, very junior, and I’m not sure his opinion would have been welcome among the deciders.
- It was like alpha- or beta-testing. Gothard didn’t really have any slick, integrated program yet. I describe it as “nascent” (or maybe even “pupal”).
- “Brush” is right inasmuch as I do not feel scarred by the experience. If I wanted to juice up readership I could probably fake some trauma, but that would be … well, fake.
- I’m unaware of whether any of my schoolmates feel scarred.
- I never got the feeling that we were there at the beginning of something huge — something that would be made universally famous/notorious through the Duggar family portrayed in Shiny Happy People.
- What his “ministry” became, according to the descriptions I’ve read (from dissenting Evangelicals and from muck-raking secular journalists), seems consistent with the direction of Gothard’s thought as I experienced it. I don’t think I could have predicted the later developments, but they don’t surprise me. (I wonder if they loosely fit Cass Sunstein’s internet-era theory of echo chambers radicalizing the participants by mutual escalation. Maybe adulation can do the same thing.)
I think that about covers it.
In retrospective theorizing, and especially after reading David French’s report of his brush with Gothard, the Gothard enterprise stands out starkly as a manifestation of Iain McGilchrist’s “left brain” quest for certainty — that quest being what motivates the parents who trust him for parenting advice and probably Gothard himself.
Nothing I’ve seen or read about this weird little bachelor makes me think he is or was insincere. Even his denials of fetishistic dirty-old-man behavior with young women could be sincere because dirty old men may think they’re just giving grandfatherly encouragement and praise especially in a mindset that is literalistic, with bright lines.
Gothard vehemently denies ever kissing young women or touching them in a sexually arousing way, so how could he have sexually harassed them? That general fawning creepiness might weird out a young woman is the sort of blurry and subjective line he contemns.
Search for certainty in all the wrong places
Insofar as the Gothard movement is a quest for certainty, it stands in a long Protestant line:
The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that “everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’” In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
Sexual weirdness
The title of this blog cam after I realized that I had randomly (providentially?) picked excerpts with a theme. Above, I suggested a plausible exoneration of Gothard for his denials of sexual misbehavior (basically, cluelessness or lack of empathy). But were he in a more ancient tradition, he’d have better tools available.
The prayer of penitence leads us to reflect critically on our own lives. If it is uttered sincerely, it leads us to repent in humility, not just of particular wrongs we have done, but of our whole shameful and degraded state of being. The paradox is that, far from leading to lethargy or despair, such penitence brings a new kind of strength. Sexual sin is never merely sexual, but always has motives that are rooted in the passions—whether the need to be loved, or the lust for domination, or the desire to prove oneself attractive, or any of a dozen other motives that come readily to mind.
Frederica Matthewes-Green et al., Healing Humanity.
This could be read profitably along with my thoughts on the Orthodox Trisagion prayers a few weeks back.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 