The one thing which is most likely to make me violently angry is watching someone oppress someone weaker.
I am old enough, and perhaps it signals wisdom, to avoid getting involved in something over which I have no calling from God. That’s separate from what I may feel from time to time. Having experienced nightmarish emotional oppression, it doesn’t matter what the oppressor intended for good or ill, it was evil and I still get angry about it. I have forgiven as well as any spiritual human can, but I can’t forget what pointless sorrow is like. Jesus cracked a whip at least once, and warned, “Be angry, but sin not.” Human anger accomplishes no good thing, but the wrath of God changes everything.
The strongest memories in my life seem to revolve around all those times I didn’t submit to properly appointed authorities giving me sage advice. Not in the sense of rebellion and gross stupidity on a consistent basis, but giving far more credence to that voice from deep within. There was a powerful internal conflict because there were plenty of times it was simply my petty whining pushing me, and I couldn’t discern those instances from the times when it was really God moving in my soul, calling me to a different path. Like so many younger folks, I really did try to buy into the authoritarian system, but I always knew something was not right.
I’m not sure how much credit I should give him, because I think it’s a fundamental flaw of Western Civilization itself, but Bill Gothard seems to have his fingerprints in just about every part of the American evangelical religious culture. His big thing can be reduced to little more than the Hitler Youth philosophy. During my college years I was invited, almost to the point of manipulation, to attend some of his big conferences in Central Oklahoma. As my spiritual development was just taking off at that time, I am so glad I felt compelled to avoid it. All I can remember of those days was how it affected one of his biggest supporters on my campus. This fellow was a complete idiot loaded with incredible confidence. We call it “arrogance.” I wanted no part of that, but unfortunately, a vast number of Oklahoma evangelicals swallowed it whole. Now we have this hideous beast rooted in the OKC area which is firmly built on the Gothard foundation. Don’t forget how much the Russians loved Gothard.
Given all the flaws of Western Civilization, you would have to understand the only way it can work at all is if everyone can be regimented to reflexively obey the voice of authority. This is why I castigate libertarian thinkers who claim it’s possible to build a good and stable society on complete liberty within the Western framework. It’s not possible. Every time someone starts off that way, regardless whether the group is tiny or international in scale, it always, without fail devolves into tyranny. The basic libertarian assumptions don’t just ignore the Fall, but militantly argue against it, despite their lip service to the idea. Much as I’d like to see folks all free to pursue their own dreams and government restrained, it won’t ever happen under Western Civilization.
Gothard and his ilk all have one primary perversion. They understand fallen humanity requires governing, and God did command it to be. The earliest record of His revelation to that end shows up in the Covenant of Noah. But that assumes a particular form of government based on a forgotten social order: the extended family. Any social order which contributes to breaking up the extended family household is inherently evil. Modern Western society does that. Modern Western governments demand it. The fundamental assumption of Western “democratic” government is every human individually is an asset or resource for government use. Of course, we have the fiction that it is society which demands this, which is why “rule by the people” is simply a matter of manipulating mass opinion. The result is uniformly the same: psychopaths rule. So Gothard takes something God intended for mercy and turns it into an excuse to unleash the hounds of Hell. His little red book, supposedly kept from the prying eyes of non-initiates to his cult, presumes you will not build an extended family social structure, because that would interfere with the secular state, and of course, whatever secular government exists is what God wants us to obey without question.
For many years I was internally torn by the conflicts raised by all these false expectations. Indeed, I was torn by the apparent conflicts in God’s Word. It was there at that same college I happened to catch a few lines from several different sources which God burned into my soul. The combined effect of those lines of truth sent me on a lifelong search to understand the Bible as God wrote it, by seeking and embracing the intellectual culture of those who put pen on paper, so to speak. When I began to read it through their eyes, all those conflicts dissolved. Not just those apparent conflicts between one passage of Scripture and another, but the very basic conflicts Gothard proposed to resolve by his use of the title, “Basic Youth Conflicts.”
When a father models himself after the Ancient Near Eastern potentate, he’s pursuing the image God used to reveal Himself. This is not the place to compare the differences between a Western father of Gothard’s model versus that of the ANE nomadic sheik, but you get the point. When your assumptions are all wrong about fatherhood, calling God your Heavenly Father can approach blasphemy.
Granted, it’s not as if I’m going to agitate for destroying Western Civilization and rebuilding the ANE culture. The people of Western Civilization are taking care of the destruction just fine. So I focus more of my attention on what should take its place. And again, I know it won’t happen on a grand scale, because God has already warned about that. He has announced no plans to fix this fallen world, but to let it run its fatal course until there’s nothing left but to finish it off and replace it with something better. For now, it’s enough we each in our own small ways reject Gothard’s model in whatever incarnation it takes, and embrace what could be, at least on the scale of what is in our hands.
Dr. Scott Peck (of The Road Less Traveled fame) did a wonderful job of describing the steps in human moral development from a clinical approach. On his scale, Gothard would have us all frozen at about age six. I believe I have far more trust in my God. I’m not afraid of people questioning authority by any means; instead, I encourage it. I encourage people questioning my own authority. I say things like, “Don’t follow me; I might be lost. Cut your own path.” That means I trust God to guide you. If you aren’t listening to Him, you surely won’t hear my voice any better. If you are listening to Him, you’ll know how to take what I say with a grain of salt. I’ll exert whatever authority God puts in my hands, but that leaves you an awful lot of room to choose your own path without forcing me to protect my calling. Stay close as long as you need my authority, but I’ll never pretend to own you. The whole idea is to get you out flapping your own wings as soon as possible, navigating by your own reckoning of God’s calling for you. Or not; that’s between you and God. The final level of moral development is you deciding for yourself what really matters, and whether you want to include a concept of God.
Getting there requires you pass safely through rebellion and rejection of the world system. Gothard wants to drag you back to the previous step. His god is too small. The pitiful god of Western social order is an awful master and destroyer, sucking the life out of everyone for the sake of some precious few psychopaths’ comfort.
