Billy Graham's Grandson Says Protestants Abuse Kids Just Like Catholics - VICE

As I have questioned before in 2013 and 2015,  I am trying to figure out how he is able to rectify this view in light of where he teaches law? Criminality is suppressed and restoration of the "guilty" party back into leadership is the typical modus operandi of the evangelical crowd.

That criticism aside, I do like the fact that Tchividjian is showcasing the abuses within the Protestant church.  As this blog has highlighted, it is not just a Catholic problem.  And as Tchividjian notes the prevalence is the same in society as a whole compared to the religious community.

Basyle "Boz" Tchividjian walks a fine line. On one side, he's the ultimate evangelical insider. His grandfather was the famed evangelical preacher Billy Graham, who exerted immense influence over American politics, culture, and theology. Tchividjian has followed in the family business, teaching law at Liberty University, the Christian college of famed Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell. On the other side, he's one of the most articulate critics of evangelical institutions, at times sounding like a new atheist prophet alongside Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher. He says that churches can be ideal environments for sexual predators who target children. And that traditions of shame, male power structures, and public relations myopia help keep abusers in positions of power and the abused silent.

Tchividjian sees it as his Christian duty to root out abuse in the church, and to build defenses against it. His organization, GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), has been hired to investigate high-profile Christian institutions like Bob Jones University and New Tribes Mission. GRACE revealed frightening levels of sexual abuse and, as he told me during our interview, "the common thread of institutional protection at the expense of the individual."

Tchividjian has even had to deal with sex scandals in his own family. In 2015, it was revealed that Boz's brother, Tullian Tchividjian, had committed what the GRACE board described as a "gross misuse of power" in his extramarital relations with adult members of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Over the years, Boz has come to recognize that many churches do not have policies in place to deal with accusations of abuse. And too often they blame the victims for seducing their abuser. In an attempt to combat this, Tchividjian recently co-authored The Child Safeguarding Policy Guide for Churches and Ministries, attempting to help church leaders address difficult questions about predators in their communities and how to avoid further harming someone who has already been traumatized.

We recently spoke with the grandson of "America's pastor" about why some churches protect predators, how sexual ignorance leads to abuse, and where Jesus stood on child abuse.

Billy Graham's Grandson Says Protestants Abuse Kids Just Like Catholics - VICE

How Oral Roberts Changed Religion - Mitch Horowitz - POLITICO Magazine

Televangelist Oral Roberts is often remembered as the founding father of the “prosperity gospel,” the doctrine that prayers and affirmations can deliver wealth. He is also remembered as a religious pitchman and gung-ho fundamentalist, tainted with greed and ignorance. But his full story is both more complicated and positive than that, and it’s worth recalling on the five-year anniversary of his death this month.

At the dawn of the modern media age, Roberts expanded the evangelical message from saving souls to helping seekers find happiness in the here and now. In a revolutionary departure, the minister encouraged people who grew up in punitive brands of faith, where disobedience led to hellfire, to instead see God as a powerful—and practical—force for good in their earthly lives.

Roberts’s transformation from small-town pastor to media eminence began in 1947, when he was a 29-year-old minister in Enid, Oklahoma. The young Pentecostal was torn between a “feeling of destiny” and the grim outer reality of living near the poverty line, a situation faced by many Southern preachers in the first half of the century.

During a period of personal depression, Roberts spent days and nights poring over Scripture—which he randomly opened one morning to 3 John 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” For the young Roberts, the verse cast Christianity in a fresh light, challenging the emphasis on guilt and repentance in which he and many of his ministerial contemporaries had been raised. “We have been wrong,” he told his wife. “I haven’t been preaching that God is good.”

Roberts’s new message of “positive faith,” in which religion could help with personal needs—from addictions to job searches—took him to a larger congregation in Tulsa and eventually around the world and on television. In 1963, he founded Oral Roberts University. He eschewed the sin-and-salvation sermonizing of Billy Graham, whose decades-long dominance of American evangelism was rivaled only by Roberts’s. “I don’t believe in the judgmental gospel that Billy preaches,” Roberts said in 1972. “I ran away from it as a boy. Billy meets the needs of a lot of people…I reach other needs.”


How Oral Roberts Changed Religion - Mitch Horowitz - POLITICO Magazine

Fallen Televangelist Jim Bakker Now Hawking Apocalyptic Survivalist Gear On The Web

What kind of gift can you get for the budding survivalist in your life? How about a great big Jim Bakker food bucket.

The disgraced televangelist is now hawking survivalist gear and books about the apocalypse on his website almost 20 years after he was released from prison on a conviction of bilking followers out of millions of dollars.

Back from the evangelical wilderness, Bakker now tapes a daily TV show from the rolling Ozarks of Missouri and uses his website to pitch what he calls "love gifts," essentially a variety of odd products including "Tiffany style" jewelery, fuel-less generators and buckets of dried food.

For just $500, you can get "Jim's All American 4 Star Vegetable" buckets. A cool two grand will get you the "Jerry Jones Special," which promises "over 3,300 servings of food and enough fuel to cook 480 meals."

Fallen Televangelist Jim Bakker Now Hawking Apocalyptic Survivalist Gear On The Web

Billy Graham’s Grandson: On Chid Sex Abuse, Evangelicals Worse Than Catholics | The New Civil Rights Movement

Trying to figure out how he is able to rectify this view in light of where he teaches law? Criminality is suppressed and restoration of the "guilty" party back into leadership is the typical modus operandi of the evangelical crowd as recent headlines have shown (ie. Dino Rizzo and Sam Hinn),,,

The name Billy Graham is synonymous with America’s evangelical movement, “televangelism,” and the infamous Moral Majority. The Billy Graham Crusades were legendary, and Graham, today, 94-years old, is seen as being the most popular televangelist of all time.

At the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA) conference last week in Austin, Texas, Billy Graham’s grandson dropped a bombshell that should have made a huge impact in the national media, but — perhaps for obvious reasons — was barely reported.

Evangelical Basyle “Boz” Tchividjian (image, left, with Rev. Billy Graham,) is a Liberty University law professor focused on sexual abuse in the church — and a man who just happens to be Billy Graham’s grandson. On Thursday, he told the RNA audience that when comparing sexual abuse in the church, “I think we are worse” than Catholics.

Tchividjian, who is also the executive director of GRACE, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, says that the culture of Protestant Evangelical churches makes it harder to report sexual abuse of minors, and makes it harder for those who report the abuse to be believed.

Billy Graham’s Grandson: On Chid Sex Abuse, Evangelicals Worse Than Catholics | The New Civil Rights Movement