Your body is a battleground by Barbara Kruger

It’s been a while since we gave you a round up of religion and media news stories, but boy-oh-boy is this summer chock-full of ’em. To start, here are some fantastic pieces out there by some recent contributors to The Revealer.

Ann Neumann in the New York Law School Law Review, “The Limits of Autonomy: Force-Feeding in Catholic Hospitals and in Prisons.”

For perhaps the first time in human history, the definition of death changed in the 1970s with the advent of new medical technologies. At one time, death meant the cessation of heartbeat, breathing, and brain function. But with the proliferation of defibrillators and respirators in hospital wards, able to sustain heartbeat and breathing indefinitely, brain function became the means by which death is now defined, “with appropriate blurriness.”

For more on prisons, check out Maurice Chammah‘s insightful review of the new season of “Orange is the New Black” in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “The Prison Show’s Dilemma.”

Like good fiction, long-form television can draw out empathy, mix it with the urge to judge, stir in disarming humor, and produce subtle cocktails of self-questioning. What it can’t do is fix our criminal justice system.

Brook Wilensky-Lanford has two great new pieces in Religion Dispatches. In the first, “The Dangerous Lies We Tell About America’s Founding,” she writes:

To conclude that America is a “Christian nation,” as numerous Christian conservatives insist, underestimates both the radicalness of the ideas on which the republic was founded and, more crucially, the source of our continuing national strength. 

And, in the second, “Your Pseudoscience Beach Read: Creationist Infighting Edition” she asks:

For how long will it be possible for young-earth creationism to hold on to a shred of unanimity, with all the creative contortions necessary to get billions of years of geologic history shoehorned into 6,000 years?

Kathryn Joyce asks “Why is the Mormon Church Getting Out of the Adoption Business?” in The Daily Beast.

The LDS-owned adoption agency that exerted powerful influence on national adoption policy is closing its doors, highlighting hard times for the adoption industry nationwide.

Elizabeth Castelli recently published the first English translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s unfinished screenplay about the apostle Paul, called St. Paul.  You can read a review of the book in The New Statesman here and, if you’ll be in New York City this August 2nd, see a live reading of the screenplay at Light Industry in Brooklyn.

And Mary Valle has a fantastic interview with Luc Novocitch, the director of a new documentary about Roman Catholic Womanpriests, over at Killing the Buddah.

Luc Novocitch: I’d like to point out that I am not Catholic. I am not even Christian. But I do believe in what these women stand for.

***

As for that 800 pound SCOTUS in the room, here’s a collection of some of the best articles we’ve read about June’s Supreme Court Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision:

Ann Neumann in the December issue of The Revealer provided important context and analysis of what was at stake in her column, “The Patient Body: A Closely Held Business.”

The real question before the US Supreme Court then, despite the other many arguments for and against the “contraception mandate,” is this: whose beliefs are more important, an employer’s or an employee’s?

For a clear analysis of what happened and what could happened next, read Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West’s “Quick Change Justice” in Slate.

At the end of this term, many people sighed a breath of relief that the outcome of Hobby Lobby was not as bad as we’d feared. It will be.

Jasmine Shea via feministing.com

Asking some very tough questions about what the ruling means and how to respond, we recommend reading:

Ann Pelligrini‘s fierce analysis of the Hobby Lobby ruling and its implications for the future in her article “”Corporations Won, Women Nothing: Hobby Lobby’s ‘Special Rights‘” written for States of Devotion.

Is there an inherent conflict between religious liberty and women’s equal access to healthcare, which is a core component of gender equity?  On June 30th, a sharply divided US Supreme Court essentially said, yes.

And Winnifred Fallers Sullivan asking Liberals the hard questions in her piece “The Impossibility of Religious Freedom” written for University of Chicago Press’ Blog, The Chicago Blog.

 I believe that it is time for some serious self-reflection on the part of liberals. To the extent that these decisions are about religion (and there are certainly other reasons to criticize the reasoning in these opinions), they reveal the rotten core at the heart of all religious freedom laws. The positions of both liberals and conservatives are affected by this rottenness but I speak here to liberals.

As well as Asawin Suebsaeng in Mother Jones with a story about further uses of the ruling in “Gitmo Detainees Cite Hobby Lobby in New Court Filing”

If you’re interested in more about where the fallout from this case could be going, The Daily Beast has a list of the 82 Corporations that have filed lawsuits similar to Hobby Lobby’s and could soon join them in refusing to cover certain forms of birth control for their employees.

Lastly, if reading all of this leaves you in want of a bit of humor, we present a vintage Hobby Lobby piece from last August’s Onion  “Washington’s Hobby Lobby Lobbies to Strengthen Hobbies” and a more contemporary piece from last week’s issue of The Atlanta Banana, “Supreme Court Upholds Little Caesar’s Right to Feed Christian Employees to Lions” [warning: includes language some might find objectionable].

Or maybe you’d rather just commodify The Dissent and start sporting one of these SCOTUS ’14 commemorative t-shirts.

via: www.lookhuman.com

***

– Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In the News: Prisons Churches, Museums, and, of course, Hobby Lobby appeared first on The Revealer.

Secularism, Identity, and Echantment by Akeel Bilgrami

By Anand Venkatkrishnan

In this insightful collection of essays, written over the span of twenty-five years, Akeel Bilgrami, the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, presents his wide-ranging and connected work in political philosophy, moral psychology, and modern concepts of secularism. As he indicates in the introduction, his essays have been markedly revised and expanded since their original publication. Though the ground covered by these essays is significant, I want to focus on a few representative ones, especially as they bear on religion.

Bilgrami begins the first section on “Secularism” like most philosophers would: by offering a stipulative definition of the term and relating that definition to academic and political debates on the subject. He defines secularism as: A) a stance regarding religion that is B) restricted to the polity, and C) appeals to values that promote certain moral and political goods over corresponding harms. First, this means that secularism is a political doctrine and not a personal attitude. Not only should a secular state promote neutrality toward and equidistance from all religions in a religiously plural society, it should be able to defend the shared values of a polity (such as freedom of speech) that are formed independently of religion when those values conflict with particular religious laws (such as blasphemy). This does not mean that the state enforces the secularization of society by removing religion from the public sphere entirely, such as by banning religious dress. Instead, it seeks to build a secular polity by appealing to modes of reasoning that are internal to each community in that society.

By and large, this reconstruction builds on the insights of classical liberal thinkers in the Western tradition of political philosophy, from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls. However, Bilgrami departs radically from this tradition when he goes on to claim that secularism may be an unnecessary policy to adopt, not because it is insufficient to deal with the contemporary “resurgence” of religion, but because it is the product of particular historical circumstances. Unlike many philosophers, Bilgrami understands that philosophy does not take place in a historical vacuum. He insists that historical understanding and conceptual analysis are inseparable enterprises, and thus proceeds to discuss the concept of secularism within the context of its development in early modern European societies. These societies were wracked by religious warfare and political strife, culminating in the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War. Moreover, the Westphalian Peace only gave rise to the nation-state, that infamous and lasting form of political sovereignty predicated on the discovery and extermination of an enemy within–minorities of religion, language, ethnicity, and so forth. Secularism as a political doctrine was formulated as a necessary counterbalance to the violent wreckage that internecine religious conflict, majoritarian politics, and nationalist sentiment had left on the continent.

It is this historical trajectory, Bilgrami argues, that is embedded in present definitions of secularism. But is such a trajectory inevitable for all societies at all times? According to anti-colonial thinkers like M.K. Gandhi, the answer was no. Bilgrami is keen to recover Gandhi’s philosophical acumen (see his essay “Gandhi the Philosopher”) as well as his prescient political thought. At the time Gandhi was writing, Indians were struggling to liberate themselves from British imperial rule, and achieve political self-determination on their own terms. Although a clearly modernist thinker inspired by Western ideals of freedom and equality, Gandhi rejected European political models for an independent India. He believed that, unlike Europe, India possessed a long legacy of religious pluralism and a corresponding absence of political absolutism. For him, secular citizenship was not a precondition of democratic society, since it was a remedy specifically for the horrors of European nationalism (and its logical eventuation in twentieth-century fascism), a method of politics most closely represented in the Indian context by the thoroughly modern ideology of Hindutva, or “Hindu nationalism.” Gandhi resisted the idea of an autochthonous, majoritarian Hinduism, as well as the indiscriminate universalization of secularist governance, both of which he considered illegitimate imports of European modernity. That India after Gandhi has undergone precisely the changes he sought to forestall, and may require the secularist ideals previously enunciated, does not detract from Bilgrami’s theoretical point about a society in which secularism as a political ideal may be circumvented entirely.

In the two centerpieces–indeed, masterpieces–of the volume, “Gandhi (and Marx)” and “The Political Possibilities of the Long Romantic Period”, Bilgrami weaves together the moral philosopher’s concern with conceptual clarity, the intellectual historian’s sensitivity to context, and the critical theorist’s interest in the subjunctive modality of genealogical accounts–that is, the translation of “what is?” into “what if?” The first essay performs the ingenious if non-intuitive intellectual task of putting Gandhi and Marx in conversation as political philosophers. Bilgrami suggests that each found his own way to deal with the constitutive tension between two staple Enlightenment concepts, equality and liberty, a tension that has continued to define the theory and practice of modern politics. They did so by centering the fundamental goal of politics on the question of the “unalienated life.” While Marx diagnosed the alienation that afflicted modern capitalist societies by focusing on the particular economic apparatus that created its conditions, Gandhi addressed alienation at a more general level, to which he frequently gave religious language. Namely, Gandhi identified as the source of European modernity’s civilizational malaise the scientific attitude of detachment (of the wrong kind) in one’s relation to the world and its inhabitants: desacralized, objectified, manipulable. What Gandhi opposed, Bilgrami clarifies, was not science itself; rather it was the “dominant status” that modern science, under the purview of powerful and worldly interests, had come to possess in a culture predicated on unbridled profit. While Gandhi and Marx differed considerably as to where they located the source of alienation, they shared the belief that it could be overcome by reordering the relations between a) humans and nature, and b) humans and other humans, so as to invite moral engagement with the other as an agentive subject. This unalienated life requires that we view both nature and its inhabitants as making normative demands on us, which need not take a specifically religious quality. Instead it may be understood as a kind of secular re-enchantment that makes reference to value properties rather than the sacred.

By focusing on the ways Gandhi and Marx dealt with disenchantment of this sort, Bilgrami situates them within what he calls the “long” Romantic tradition. Comprised of a loosely connected group of philosophers, social theorists, and artists, the Romanticist movement in late eighteenth-century Europe frequently looked to the natural world for a primordial innocence destroyed by a disenchanted modernity. The Romantic search for the sublime and the transcendent has been frequently dismissed as unhelpful, or even inconsequential, to political struggle. Bilgrami demurs. Following the literary critic M.H. Abrams, Bilgrami characterizes Romantic metaphysics as one of “natural supernaturalism”: in other words, the notion that there is value and meaning in nature that is irreducible to the properties available for study by the natural sciences. This metaphysical outlook, Bilgrami claims, possesses political significance when we understand its origins in resistance to the large-scale social and intellectual transformations wrought by capitalist economies from the late seventeenth century onward.

Beginning in England and the Netherlands, and later spreading elsewhere in Europe, the integration of an exploitative political economy with a Newtonian metaphysics that excluded all value properties from nature was propped up by worldly alliances between scientific organizations, commercial interests, and religious elites. An entire apparatus of political theory and law emerged from these alliances that bestowed institutional legitimacy upon a metaphysics that had exiled God from the world, an act that had devastating ecological and economic consequences. In Bilgrami’s genealogical account of the modern sources of alienation, of which he credits Gandhi with having a deep understanding, it is this intellectual orthodoxy which began to transform the concepts of a) nature into natural resources, b) human beings into citizens, c) people into populations, and d) knowledges to live by into expertise to rule by. Resistance to these unholy alliances in the early modern period came from a range of radical dissenters, from popular Christian sects to natural philosophers such as John Toland and Anthony Collins. Bilgrami includes Marx and Gandhi within this genealogy of resistance, since they exemplify the way in which the long Romantic tradition centered the pressing political problems of modernity on alienation and disenchantment. That the Romantic political, aesthetic, and often spiritual response to alienated relations shares a close affinity with indigenous experiences of the world should make us pay attention to those forms of local, collective, public understanding that resist the imperialism of a disenchanted, rapacious modernity.

For an enshrined academic philosopher, Bilgrami is remarkably attuned both to history and to the politics of the everyday. The concluding essays on Muslim identity and on anti-colonial critiques of the West continue Bilgrami’s democratic commitment to understanding, with conceptual and historical rigor, how various peoples have sought and might seek “solidarities and community” in a disenchanted world. Far from being a philosopher with passing interests in political theory, Bilgrami proves his credentials as a public intellectual in the mold of his late friend and colleague Edward Said, whom he eulogizes at the end of the volume. The book itself represents a fitting tribute to Said’s own colossal legacy.

 ***

Anand Venkatkrishnan is a PhD student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His dissertation, titled “Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, and the Bhakti Movement”, studies the impact of the “bhakti” traditions of religious devotion on orthodox systems of Sanskrit scriptural hermeneutics in medieval and early modern India. His research interests include the intersection between popular religious movements and scholarly pedagogy, the history of Sanskrit knowledge-systems, and Indian intellectual history more broadly.

The post Review: Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment by Akeel Bilgrami appeared first on The Revealer.

Image from “Hospice, Inc.” by Ben Hallman in the HuffPost.

By Ann Neumann

And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise. Luke 10:35-37 KJV

Facts are facts but they are seldom the whole story. It’s easy for a journalist to get caught up in numbers and anecdotes but to miss the broader context. On my death and dying beat (I’m a hospice volunteer writing a book about how Americans die), there’s hardly a better example of a journalist losing his way than Ben Hallman’s recent “exposé” of hospices for Huffington Post, “Hospice, Inc.” Hallman, a senior finance reporter at the news aggregator, comes to the story of hospice from a financial perspective. He highlights the pain and suffering of several families who protest the quality and nature of their family members’ care, but proof of fraud against the US government is Hallman’s objective and to make it he focuses on hospice revenue growth across the country.

“Hospice, Inc.” has a flashy production value, with interactive maps and graphs and full-screen photos like we’re accustomed to seeing at other publications that specialize in longform journalism. Beyond the flash, though, it’s obvious from the first few paragraphs that Hallman has little familiarity with end of life care, the cultural or medical history of hospice, or standard medical practice. While Hallman may ultimately have a valid point — that hospice programs should be better regulated by the US government — he uses all the wrong reasons to explain why. “Hospice, Inc.” plays on existing misconceptions and fears about hospice–and dying in general–to argue that hospice is a flawed social service. Hallman uses several heart-wrenching but troublesome personal cases that are better examples of family grief and miscommunication, or independent cases of negligence, than they are of systemic misconduct.

It’s a critique of hospice that smacks of anti-”socialized” health care ideology: “Since Medicare is government-funded, and pays nearly 90 percent of all hospice claims, taxpayers ultimately foot the bill for this kind of fraud.” This concern for “taxpayer money” is reminiscent of the “entitlement” fights that claim basic programs and services should be paid for by charity or personal resources. This position is not only anti-poor but it removes government from responsibility for citizens’ welfare. (In fact, charity doesn’t eliminate poverty. As it turns out, even non-profit health care providers utilize the charity model when it serves their bottom line.)

Infographic from “Hospice Inc.” by Ben Hallman.

The villain of Hallman’s story is Hugh Westbrook, a Methodist minister who founded a small non-profit hospice in South Florida, later named Vitas Healthcare. Westbrook lobbied the state to legalize for-profit hospice, and later sold out for roughly $200 million in cash. Westbrook’s story falls neatly into the familiar narrative of a charitable minister turned bad by riches and many of Hallman’s examples of negligent care come from Vitas facilities, but he’s reaching for more than just the fall of a man of the cloth. Hallman’s criticism of for-profit hospices isn’t that health care shouldn’t be an enterprise for profit (it shouldn’t) but that such hospices are predominantly paid by Medicare and, thus, are making loads of money at taxpayers’ expense.

As hospice is currently structured, patients may enroll when they are diagnosed with six months or less to live. A doctor must certify their entry and at that time patients must end all curative treatments. Rationally, this makes perfect sense (and financially, it was done as a means of keeping costs down), but emotionally, it can be an especially great challenge to patients who come from religious or ethnic cultures where death is not discussed or acceptance of death is a lack of faith in God’s healing power. Sometimes the arbitrary structure of hospices causes problems for families who aren’t ready to acknowledge that death is coming.

“Hospice, Inc.” is framed around one of those families. Evelyn Maples, an 83 year-old Florida resident, suffered from diabetes and other health issues. When Maples was hospitalized for a recurring urinary tract infection, the staff suggested that her daughter, Kathleen Spry, who was overwhelmed by Maples’s care needs at home, enroll her in hospice. Most of the ensuing complaint comes from what seems like miscommunication between Maples, Spry, and her son, David Dunn. Spry and Dunn didn’t understand what hospice was. They claim that they never signed a “do not resuscitate” order, a request that Maples not receive extraordinary measures to keep her alive, and that a form stating the stipulations of hospice was not in their files. If the family was not informed of what hospice does, indeed Vitas was negligent.

But the circumstances surrounding Maples’s death are not so clear. When Spry found her mother unresponsive at the hospice facility, she called Dunn who called an ambulance. This is seldom done for hospice patients; hospitals are for crisis situations and saving lives. If a patient is dying, hospitals are a place to avoid. According to the family, Maples died at a hospital one month later. They claim that hospice precipitated her death.

“Once she was on hospice, they did whatever the hell they wanted to do. It’s like she was a prisoner in their system,” Dunn told Hallman. Dunn’s anger, his call for an ambulance, his and his mother’s complaints about Maple’s medications, and Dunn’s exclamation when they found that Maples had a blood infection, “Were they just going to let her die?,” all sound like examples of a grieving family unwilling or unable to accept Maples’s condition.

Infographic from “Hospice, Inc.” by Ben Hallman.

Telling a patient that they’re going to die is hard. Doctors are seldom trained how to do so. If doctors haven’t helped patients to face their terminal diagnoses, neither has our broader culture which continues to treat impending death as a taboo subject. Patients and families are often left in the dark about how to plan for a death, how to assess their options, even to know what their options are. Ending curative treatment is a horrifying sacrifice for those who are still hoping for a cure.

Hallman tries to blame hospices, particularly non-profit ones, for taking advantage of our fear and lack of information by enrolling the ill-informed, by pressuring the hesitant or even the healthy. And while I grant that financial incentives certainly lead hospices to aggressively seek enrollments (this isn’t all bad!), the issue is much more nuanced. As a hospice volunteer, I’ve encountered patients and families (both in in-hospital facilities and at home) who are still hoping for recovery, still receiving get-well cards from friends, still bargaining with their bodies and their gods for the gift of extra, miraculous years.

Medicine may be a science but it’s not exact. When a doctor determines that a patient will likely die within six months, it’s an approximation. What enrollment really means is that there is no longer any chance that a patient’s illness can be cured. Hospice currently puts a limit on the time a patient can be cared for in the way they want, outside a “do everything” hospital setting. It’s a false and inexact way to mete out one’s health care needs and a symptom of our inadequate and deeply flawed health care system.

Hallman criticizes increasing lengths of stay in hospice and poor pain management, but here too he shows a lack an understanding of how unpredictable the human body (and the human will) can be. It’s hard to trust his examples of egregious behavior when he knows so little about what medicine can and can’t predict. He assumes that the growth of hospice is the result of nefarious behavior on the part of hospice directors, rather than a positive development or even one driven by the growing elder population. Hallman also misses the opportunity to discuss the broad changes in how health care is delivered in the US, as independent hospitals are gobbled up by large health management organizations (HMOs).

Hallman rightly notes that part of the increase in hospice enrollment has to do with admittance of non-cancer patients, those with long-term diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and kidney disease. As hospice has grown, patients have learned that hospice isn’t just for those dying of cancer. But from a care perspective, this is a good thing. For patients who don’t have the money for assisted living but aren’t critical enough for a hospital (or are being pushed to leave one) hospice provides professional care when they wouldn’t otherwise get it. Instead of attributing this increase of hospice patients to a problem with hospice enrollment, we should view hospice as imperfectly meeting the needs of those who’ve fallen between the cracks in our care system.

Hallman also targets perceived drug abuses in order to show that hospices are incompetent, but he has little understanding of how such drugs are used, how unpredictable bodies can be, and what grief can do to families watching the process of dying. Hallman writes:

“In one example described in court filings prosecutors allege a Vitas patient was given crushed morphine, even though she wasn’t in pain. The morphine treatment continued even after the patient showed signs of having a toxic reaction to it–even seizures, prosecutors claim. Vitas then elevated the patient to its crisis care service to deal with the reaction it had caused, according to the lawsuit, at a cost of four times the standard rate.”

Morphine has various uses. It can alleviate pain, yes, but it is widely used in a hospice setting to make breathing easier. (Maples suffered from a disease that afflicts former smokers.) Unless a patient has prior experience with morphine, it’s hard to know whether a reaction will occur. He continues:

“In lawsuits and complaints with state law enforcement officials, hospice families claim their directives were ignored and that loved ones received too many medications, or not enough.”

Of course, once signs of a negative reaction are evident, increasing a patient’s care service is justified. The needs of a dying body can change by the hour. To families who don’t understand what death and dying look like, how it can happen, these adjustments and changes can look like incompetence. Families are disoriented by grief and uncertain of what to do. To a journalist writing about such things, lack of understanding can lead to false conclusions.

Most disturbing is the fact that Hallman never considers Evelyn Maples’s wishes, if she gave consent for hospice care, if she asked for a DNR. Her wishes could have been different from those of her daughter or grandson, something only her doctors could know. According to records, she did tell a nurse that she no longer had any good days. Could she have been shielding her family? Hallman never considers medical confidentiality. Maples’s story is tragic, but as Hallman tells it, it doesn’t prove that Vitas did anything wrong.

By framing the story around Maples as an example of fraud, Hallman fails to make his case. Hospice programs provide a service that is desired by most patients, that is wildly popular, and that is frankly, in my experience, more caring than other institutional alternatives. Because hospice fits under the Medicare payment structure, it’s available to many low-income patients. And, as recent studies have shown, enrollment in hospice (or more specifically, ending curative treatment) helps patients to live longer. Two more months of life at home, surrounded by friends, with good pain management? I’d say yes.

To many, hospice is the model for the future of health care, a more holistic approach to treating patient illness, pain and grief. And for supporting care-taking and grieving families. Many experts have long said that US health care is in crisis and that the Affordable Care Act is only a short term fix; that our aging population and the exponentially increasing costs of health care will force us toward single-payer, national coverage.

From the hospice trenches, it’s hard to see increased enrollment, even if it extends beyond the arbitrary and impossible six month limit, as clear fraud. Yes, companies that are dishonest, that over-bill, that don’t provide good care should be more closely regulated. And yes, medical malpractice is a tragedy that must be addressed. But Hallman never examines why patients are staying longer and he never contextualizes the claim. In 2013, more than one-third of hospice patients either died or were discharged after a mere seven days. Across the hospice world, the short length of patient stays is a dire concern, not their increasing length.

There’s a reason I’m being so critical of Huffington Post and Hallman. They’ve invested incredible amounts of time and labor into a hit piece that doesn’t make its case effectively (read the comments). More importantly, there are ethical ramifications to publishing a story like this. While I agree that better oversight is important and that, if confirmed, the experiences Hallman notes are tragic and should not be ignored, it’s stories like “Hospice, Inc.,” that perpetuate a fear that is already too prevalent. They prevent patients and families from facing the facts of dying, from being better-informed decision makers. “Hospice, Inc.” fails to prove that there’s a great systemic problem in how hospice patients are treated and it fails to present readers with a greater understanding of how best to care for patients as we die. It’s a shame that Huffington Post didn’t take the time to do this right.

***

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about the intersection of religion and medicine. Prior columns can be read here:

The End of Eating

Wakeful Unawareness

Faith, a Chronic Condition

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

***

Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. Neumann‘s book about a good death, SITTING VIGIL, will be published by Beacon Press in 2015.

The post Reading HuffPo’s “Hospice, Inc.” appeared first on The Revealer.

Photograph by Asmaa Waguih via Reuters

By Natasja Sheriff 

On June 23, Al Jazeera journalists Peter Greste and Mohamad Fahmy were sentenced by an Egyptian court to seven years in prison; their colleague, Baher Mohamad, to ten. Greste, an Australian citizen, was charged with “collaborating with terrorists”, Fahmy and Mohamad with membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, a now outlawed group. All had been detained since December 29, 2013, when they were arrested in Al Jazeera’s makeshift office in a Cairo hotel.

The sentence has prompted international outrage and condemnation. Not least because of the farcical nature of the trial, in which Greste’s holiday photos and footage of a news conference in Kenya were used as evidence against the trio. But also because these journalists, unlike so many of the 211 journalists currently jailed worldwide in their home countries, belong to a foreign media organization.

“The massive indictment of these journalists working with an international media outlet is unprecedented,” said Sherif Mansour, Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP).  “There have been several smaller cases in Ethiopia and even in Turkey in which terrorism charges have been used, but never against international journalists or against this number of international journalists.”

By targeting foreign media workers, and anyone who associates with them, the Egyptian authorities are not only demonstrating their willingness to antagonize key international foreign aid donors, but also creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation that will ensure extreme self-censorship amongst its own journalists; working with international media will no longer afford local journalists and civil society groups any degree of protection, instead it could lead to harsher sentences.

The sentencing and incarceration of the three journalists represents the latest case in a growing global trend: an increasing number of journalists silenced or imprisoned under anti-state and counterterrorism laws. According to a 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, while 50 countries already had counterterrorism laws in place on September 11, 2001, more than 140 governments have revised or enacted counterterrorism laws since then.

By the end of 2013, more than half of all incarcerated journalists worldwide were being held on anti-state charges. Much of the legislation used to prosecute them is overly vague and broad, easily tailored to apply to any voice of dissent among a country’s citizenry. It is dissent that the Egyptian Government is trying so hard to suppress, with national and regional consequences.

“Egypt could fall into an information black hole and this sense of impunity could become the norm in Egyptian media and also can benefit other governments,” said CPJ’s Mansour. “Neighbors in the region could take note about how to get away with criminalizing journalists. We are seeing regional trends starting in Egypt, including new terrorism related laws, after what happened in Egypt. We see it as kind of a broader trend globally but also regionally.”

The regional implications of the case are bound up in a decades-long struggle between secular and Islamist factions that has played out in Egypt since the first half of the 20^th century; a struggle that reverberates around the region.

While the reality of daily life is more nuanced than this simple dichotomy suggests—as Maurice Chammah explained in his September 2013 article for The Revealer, “On Piety: Egypt, Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood”—politically, the tension between secular and Islamist interests manifest themselves in Egypt’s secular military rule and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Founded in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest Islamist movement, inspiring affiliates and branches throughout the world, according to Mohamad Bazzi, Associate Professor at NYU and former Middle East Bureau Chief for Newsday. While initially focused on religious outreach, they joined the struggle against British colonial powers and were briefly allied with Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers Movement, who overthrew the British in 1952. But when a member of the movement attempted to assassinate Nasser in 1954, thousands of members of the Brotherhood were arrested, jailed and tortured, marking the start of a decades long strife that continued through the Sadat and Mubarak regimes. The election of Mohamed Morsi in 2012 marked the start of a new, but short-lived, era of political engagement and leadership for the Brotherhood.

Given the country’s history, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood is not new. Nor is the repression he’s meting out to civil society organizations and human rights lawyers, as well as the press. But there had been great hopes for change in the wake of the 2011 uprising.

“Over the course of Mubarak’s rule, both Egyptian and foreign journalists became accustomed to unwritten red lines about what they could report,” Chammah, a regular contributor to The Revealer, told me by email.  “On Jan 25th, 2011, suddenly it felt like a free-for-all, especially because it took place against the backdrop of social media, which everyone associated with unfettered freedom of information.”

That freedom was short-lived, and Egyptian press and civil society is now dealing with a government apparently bent on eliminating the Brotherhood from Egyptian life.

“I can’t think of a case where the Mubarak regime went to these extents to go after foreign media,” Bazzi told me. “They would close down Al Jazeera offices and expel journalists, but this is a new unprecedented level of repression… It’s really a signal that the Muslim Brotherhood and anything associated with it, that anyone at all, perceived as being sympathetic, or perceived as conveying their messages, will be targeted and will be severely repressed.”

In addition, the journalists are at the center of a regional power play, pitting Saudi Arabia against its smaller but increasingly influential rival, Qatar, Al Jazeera’s home base and benefactor.

During Nasser’s crackdown on the brotherhood in the 1960’s, many of its members fled to Saudi Arabia, where they found refuge and slowly began to establish themselves within the country’s institutions, as teachers and professors. Fearing their influence, the House of Saud began to see them as a threat.

“Qatar has been one of the main supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, and on that it’s stood against some of the other Gulf Arab countries,” said Bazzi. “This particular verdict against Al Jazeera is also a slap by the Egyptian regime at Qatar… So this all gets wrapped into a mini regional conflict. At the heart of that is the Saudi-Qatari competition.”

While Egypt benefits from Saudi Arabia’s fear of an Egyptian Islamist government—in July 2013, Saudi Arabia offered Egypt a $12 billion rescue package—western donors are left with very little leverage to influence the sentencing of the journalists and Egypt is free to act with relative impunity.

“There is very little that can be done right now until political violence and political divisions subside, and we don’t see that happening in the near future,” says Mansour. “Unfortunately, we are coming up to the anniversary of the ousting President Morsi and also the killing of thousands of his demonstrators on August 14, and this is going to be an opportunity for opposition to mobilize. There will also be a lot of political tension, so the international community has very little opportunity for engagement under this kind of atmosphere.

However, despite the continued promise of aid from the United States just the day before sentencing took place, and Saudi largesse, a massive budget deficit means the Egyptian government is not in a position to dismiss international opinion entirely.

“Right now President el-Sisi is running the highest deficit in Egypt’s history, more than $30 billion in the annual budget and that’s three times all the aid that was promised from Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia,” says Mansour.

Egypt needs foreign investment, and the political money offered by the Gulf States isn’t going to encourage the reforms that are needed to attract those investments. “Only money from international donors, including the U.S., E.U. and the World Bank gives credibility to recipient governments because it comes with those reforms embedded in it,” Mansour said.

There were twenty other people in the dock alongside Mohamad, Fahmy and Grest, including a group of students charged with collaborating with the journalists. We should keep these co-defendants in mind, says Nicholas Lemann at the New Yorker. “Their presence in the dock demonstrates how deeply press freedom is nested inside political freedom.”

In this case, press freedom and the fate of the three journalists are nested not only inside the question of political freedom but also in an ever-widening geopolitical gyre of regional and international power and influence. Let’s hope that some of that influence will be brought to bear to secure the freedom of the journalists and the students incarcerated alongside them.

The post Religion and Press Freedom in the Digital Age – Part Two: Al Jazeera on Trial appeared first on The Revealer.

666 by Salem Kirban

By Don Jolly

Salem Kirban, the author of 666, was forty-two when he flew to Vietnam. It was 1967. His son, Dennis, had enlisted the previous fall, and within six-months he’d been posted to the coastal city of Nha Trang. Back home, the war was everywhere: on television, in the paper, shaped in rough paint on picket signs. Again and again, Salem saw the human cost of war reduced to numbers: “body counts.” He was worried that Dennis might be killed, but he was equally worried that Dennis might be forced to kill someone else.

The Kirbans were a “fundamentalist” family. Salem, his wife Mary and their five children attended services at the evangelical Church of the Open Door, in a suburb of Philadelphia. Salem sang in the choir. He wasn’t sure why the United States was in Vietnam: the official story didn’t make sense to him and he wasn’t sure if the domino theory was true or just propaganda. It seemed grotesque to murder someone for no reason at all when the word of God in Exodus 20:13 was clear: “Thou shalt not kill.” In a letter to Dennis, his mother wrote: “shoot to wound.” It became a family issue. They talked it over at the dinner table.

About a week ago, I spoke to the oldest of Kirban’s daughters, Doreen, by telephone. She was around fifteen when Dennis shipped out, but now she’s near retirement age. Her voice was bright and boisterous. Even though they went to Church, she said, her family didn’t have much of a religious identity while she was growing up. Church was just what you did, a part of the routine. “Dad was into advertising, making money,” she continued. Things began to change in 1966. “Dad served in World War Two,” Doreen explained. “So he wasn’t big into war. Vietnam bothered him. It became personal when Dennis went over. That’s when he took out the ad.”

On July 12th, 1967, a fourteen-inch advertisement appeared on an interior page in the Washington Post. Its title, “GOODBYE MR. PRESIDENT,” was printed at the top of the box in bold letters. Below it, in eight-point font, Salem Kirban explained that his son was in Vietnam and he didn’t know why, exactly. He’d asked for a private meeting with Lyndon Johnson, a chance to explain things, but had been turned down. “So I decided to do the next best thing,” Salem wrote. “Fly to Viet Nam, Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Russia and prepare a Citizen’s Report on the Search for Peace.”  He invited Johnson to see him off at Philadelphia International Airport in four days. The President never appeared.

Kirban visited Japan, Vietnam, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel on his tour, returning in mid-August. He met with a Japanese progressive journalist with ties to the Vietnamese communist party, attended a briefing from General Westmoreland and traveled all around war-torn Vietnam, talking to soldiers and priests and mortuary attendants. His happiest days, however, were spent in Nha Trang, with Dennis.

Upon his return, he wrote a book on the subject. Goodbye Mr. President was published before the end of the year, by a private press. In it, Kirban argued that the official stories about Vietnam were lies; conditions there were worse than anybody let on. Responses to the war were also a problem. “It’s easy to be a protest marcher or a mere flag waver spouting patriotism,” he wrote. Neither addressed the fundamental issue. “Many people seem to forget first that America was a nation founded under God,” continued Kirban. “This neglect may be at the root of all our rapidly multiplying problems.”

In 1968, Kirban wrote his second book: Guide To Survival (which you can read about here in last month’s column). In it, he repurposed many of the photographs and first-hand reports employed in Goodbye Mr. President. This time, however, he saw a pattern running through them all. The children ravaged by napalm, the refugees in rags, the wall of aluminum caskets sitting matter-of-factly on a Saigon airfield — all had been foretold in the book of Revelation. It was evidence that the current age, or dispensation, of biblical time was ending. Soon, Kirban predicted, the last few faithful Christians would disappear in the Rapture. After that, the faithless churches that remained would join together into a one-world religion. There would be global government, too: a dictatorship, with the Anti-Christ at its head.

“Dad didn’t get into God until he saw those caskets,” said Doreen. “But once he got going with the whole thing, he thought he needed to wake people up.” Salem started traveling to speak about biblical prophecy in churches and rented conference rooms. His books, which he sold by mail-order, did respectable business.

“When he wrote the novel, I was shocked,” Doreen told me, a note of amazement intruding on her tone. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”

The novel, 666, was released in 1970. In it, Salem rendered his interpretation of current events and biblical prophecy through a globe-spanning adventure story, set in the not-too-distant future. Initially, the protagonist, a journalist named George Omega, has little use for Kirban’s brand of “fundamentalism.” After his wife vanishes in the Rapture, though, he begins to reconsider. As the reign of the Anti-Christ wears on, and conditions grow more dangerous and bizarre, Omega, along with two of his children, is born again.

“This book — 666 — is a novel. Therefor, much of it is fiction,” Kirban wrote. “However, it is important to note that very much of it is also FACT.”

He continued: “Using the scripture as our basis… it is a fact that there will be Rapture… It is a fact that after this occurrence there will be at least a seven year period of great trials and tribulation.” The science-fictional technology of 666 was also based on truth, he said. “Such items as the picturephone, the ruby laser and the flying belt … already exist, although they have not always been perfected to the point we relate them in our novel”

The book begins with eleven pages of newspaper clippings that support its author’s claims. A selection of those headlines:

Army Orders Witnesses Not to Discuss Massacre

Newsmen Receive Vatican Warning

Monkey Brains Kept Alive Outside Skull

“Picturephone” image from 666 by Salem Kirban.

Kirban’s youngest daughter, Dawn, was around eleven when 666 was issued. Like Doreen I caught her on the phone. In some ways, she remembered her father differently from her sister. Faith was a bigger part of her life. After dinner, she said, Salem would read to the family from the Bible and talk about current events. He spent a lot of time working, putting together projects about the end-times. “Dad wrote the words to a cantata,” she recalled. “A big, hour-long show called ‘The Day of Judgment.’ There was an album and everything, and we put it on with the choir at church.” She remembered having to be quiet when he was doing research for his Reference Bible, a new edition of the text with full commentary by Kirban and his friend Gary G. Cohen. The Rapture was taken for granted in their household. “I never expected to grow up,” she said.

Image from 666 by Salem Kirban

“I remember, I used to have a recurring nightmare,” Dawn continued. “I had to choose if I would take the mark of the Anti-Christ, 666, or get my head cut off. I’d be lead over the guillotine and there were all these men, pushing me around, and they’d shove my head in the little hole and I was so scared — but I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t take the mark, and so they’d get ready to kill me. Then I’d wake up.” She paused. “It was all right out of dad’s book.”

In 666, the Anti-Christ reinstates the guillotine as a punishment for those who refuse to be tattooed with his number, a literary construct built out of Kirban’s interpretation of Revelation 13, in which it is stated that the Beast “causeth all, both great and small … to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads,” allowing them to “buy and sell.” Bill Sanders, one of the novel’s main characters, refuses to take the mark, and is executed in public. As Bill walks up the steps to the guillotine, looking out at the mob of Americans calling for his head, he reflects about the state of the world. “It seemed like bad dream … a nightmare,” Kirban wrote. “Down there, wherever he looked … upturned faces, sneering, scoffing, all bearing the brilliant red 666 on their foreheads. ‘What happened to humanity?’ [Bill] thought. ‘Have they all turned into a pack of wild animals?’”

The logic of Kirban’s story is, deliberately, the logic of a dream. Its reality is fluid: a whorl of surprise remembrances and snap alternations of setting and character. At one point, Kirban’s protagonist suddenly remembers, sixty-six pages into the story, that he has an adult daughter living in New York City. At another, he travels to the moon for the span of a few sentences. The effect is disorienting.

As in any fitful sleep, 666 is suffused with elements from more conventional reality, presented in disguise or in random order. The newspaper clippings at the start of the book are all accounted for: even the monkey brains make sense, once the Anti-Christ is shot and his scientists have to remove his brain to keep him alive.

The biggest influence on 666, however, is Kirban’s interpretation of biblical prophecy. Almost every element of the novel’s plot can be traced to a specific reading of a passage from Ezekiel or Revelation. Kirban’s interpretation of Revelation 6, for instance, was fairly literal. To him, the four horsemen of the apocalypse must, naturally, ride horses. So, in 666, the author has to explain why a modern army would do the same thing, forgoing tanks and jeeps and helicopters. Kirban solves this problem with the character of Alexi Bazenoff, the Soviet Premier.  Bazenoff, Kirban explains, was the grandson of a biblical scholar named Pop Pop Koschenov, and Koschenov raised him on passages from Ezekiel and Job about the power of the horse as a weapon of war. So, when the grown-up Bazenoff invades Israel, he does it on a red horse, just like in Revelation. It fits Kirban’s prophetic scheme, of course, but it does something else, too: by giving so much thought to Alexi’s motivation, the author makes this little corner of his apocalypse more about a boy trying to live up to his grandfather’s expectations than any kind of divine machinery. It’s surreal — but sweet, too.

Salem Kirban

Kirban’s approach to interpreting prophecy wasn’t original. He picked it up, like most American evangelicals, from more than century of writing and preaching about dispensational premillennialism, a theology of history that contained the Rapture and the idea of apocalypse arriving at time of God’s choosing, no matter what humankind got up to. He wasn’t the first one to write a novel about these ideas, either, although 666 easily outsold its predecessors. Evangelicals were breaking into American pop-culture in a major way at the beginning of the seventies. In the same year as Kirban published 666, the authors Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson put out The Late, Great Planet Earth: an accessible book of end-times prophecy that would go on to sell more copies than any other non-fiction book of its decade. “Kirban’s 666 sold half a million copies in its first three years, and, for a time, its sales must have been almost as impressive as those of Lindsey’s market-defining text,” wrote the historian Crawford Gribben in his 2009 survey Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America. “The large sales of 666 — unprecedented in the genre [of prophecy fiction],” he continued, “indicated the extent to which the prophecy novel was becoming a key component of fundamentalism’s [pop-culture.]”

Later books would be even more successful. The sixteen-volume Left Behind series by evangelical minister Tim LaHaye and popular author Jerry B. Jenkins has sold more than 63 million copies since its first book was released in 1995. A new film adaptation is due this October, starring Nicholas Cage. A lot has been written about Left Behind, and scholars seem to agree that it’s one of the most significant cultural products to come out of American evangelicalism in the twentieth century.  Could it have happened without Kirban? Who knows.

At the end of 666, the main characters have to go into hiding from the Anti-Christ, so they fly to Vietnam, and hole up in an old V.C. bunker south of Saigon, at Xuan-Loc. There, Kirban writes, “besides the small supply of man-made provisions they’d managed to collect, they had brought only one thing with them… their Bible.” Until Satan discovers them, his characters spend their days singing. To me, the sequence seems to be the closing of some strange, and personal, circuit. Whatever meaning 666 might have in evangelical pop-culture is just a shadow of the meaning that it held for its author, and his family, in one of the strangest times of America’s last century.

After 666, Kirban kept writing.

“Dad had a listening heart,” Dawn told me. “He related to people, had a lot of hobbies. He was always doing something, always trying something out. He was a gardener, he played baseball in the street. He was interested.”

I asked Doreen about her father’s later life. “He was gung-ho for years,” she said. “He was speaking at churches, writing newsletters. In 2003, he took a trip around the country.” She paused. Then, somberly: “That same year, mom started to go downhill. The year she broke she her hip. The more she lost her memory, the worse he got. He was very attentive to her. He died in 2010, when he was in his eighties.” He’d written more than fifty books. His children are married now, with children of their own.

When I open my paper in the morning, I see American soldiers overseas for reasons I’ve given up understanding. I see messianic predictions about new technologies, and the ways in which they will cure and strengthen and extend us. Over coffee, I read about famine and war.

The world persists, regardless.

***

This article would have been impossible without the participation of Dennis Kirban, Dawn Adkins, and Doreen Frick. Many thanks to everyone in the Kirban family.

***

“The Last Twentieth Century Book Club” is a monthly column about religious ephemera. Prior columns can be read here:

Guide to Survival (Salem Kirban, Part 1)

Monster in My Pocket

The Power of Source 

Carman, Part 2

Carman

Speak Out!

Fear of Death Removed

Good Ol’ Job

***

Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City. 

The post Salem Kirban, Part 2 appeared first on The Revealer.

The Baptist preacher Lester Roloff founded the Anchor Home for Boys to help troubled teenagers get their lives back on track. Nearly fifty years and three states later, the school that bears his name has transformed dramatically and escaped the allegations of abuse that once plagued its reputation. But many of its alumni are still haunted by questions.

TheFarm :: Inside the Anchor Home for Boys from blue cabin studios on
Vimeo.

Aaron Anderson’s dad had said they were going to the beach. Along with Aaron’s mother and younger brother, they were packed into the family car, careening past the sand and scrub of the Texas Gulf Coast on a spur of the moment vacation that so far had included an amusement park in San Antonio and the Corpus Christi aquarium.

It was 1998, and 16 year-old Aaron was still coming out of a rebellious stage. He had been taking drugs and sneaking around with his girlfriend. His parents tried to home-school him. He tried to run away. His parents relented, allowing him to attend high school in Burleson, their rural town south of Fort Worth. That seemed to improve things. The family was getting along better and better. This vacation was the proof.

Which was why things didn’t add up when his father started driving away from the beach.

Before he thought to ask where they were going, they had arrived. It was a small set of buildings surrounded by farmland, just outside of Corpus Christi. “This is where you’re going to stay for the next year,” Aaron remembers his father saying. He remembers his brother crying and his mother staying silent. He remembers an older man walking up and telling him to step out of the car.

When Aaron refused, the man left and returned with three more men. They yanked open the door and began pulling him out by force. “I was screaming at the top of my lungs,” Aaron told me. “You put up a fight. You want somebody to hear.”

Aaron learned that he had been taken to the Anchor Home for Boys, which offered a year-long residential treatment program for teenage boys with various behavioral issues. His parents had heard about it from their pastor. At Anchor, Aaron would read his Bible every day and be kept under close watch. Hundreds of boys had gone through the school and spoken glowingly of having their path corrected in a safe, warm community.

As his parents and little brother drove away, Aaron was taken inside. “The rest of that day,” he told me, “was pretty much non-stop beating.” The violence, he said, continued for weeks, until eventually he was put in charge of other boys and in turn oversaw harsh physical discipline.

When Aaron arrived at the Anchor Home, the institution had already been through a long and winding history of battles with the State of Texas over allegations of abuse and a lack of oversight. After he left, the home would move to Montana and again to Missouri, where it currently operates.

Throughout that history, one finds allegations of abuse from some former students. One also finds denials from other students and from staff, who say those allegations are exaggerated and that for the most part the school provided an encouraging, positively transformative experience.

Aaron Anderson in Burleson, Texas.

Eventually this back-and-forth gives way to something more complex. Many alumni describe conditions and practices that fall into a grey area between discipline and abuse and simply not feeling right. They can’t always decide whether what they experienced was wrong or illegal or valuable or just inexplicably strange. One said to me, “I’m glad somebody can hear me, because it’s bananas.” Another said, “It was crazy. It’s hard to explain or to tell anybody.” Aaron Anderson said, “They have their own culture there. You never leave it.”

Hundreds of residential programs around the country — some religious, some not — promise to improve the behavior of teenagers through strict discipline or ‘tough love.’ For the most part, these programs face little to no regulation from state and federal authorities, and that creates the conditions for abuse, which has been well-documented by journalists throughout the years.

But the lack of regulation also creates the conditions for all manner of practices, punishments, and activities that are not abusive, not illegal, and not ‘wrong’ by any sort of official measurement but still may make some observers queasy and may have had negative psychological consequences on the teenagers who went through them. There’s no scoop here; just an endless stream of knotty questions. For many of the boys who went through Anchor, these questions — What really happened? Should it have happened? —  are still unresolved.

+++

By the time Lester Roloff founded the Anchor Home for Boys, he had already built a national reputation for helping men and women cast off their self-destructive habits through faith and prayer. Born on a family farm in rural East Texas in 1914, Roloff was raised in a strict Baptist tradition and decided from age 18 to spend his life preaching. He picked cotton to pay his college entrance fees at Baylor University and brought Marie, his Jersey cow, to the campus, selling milk to pay for room and board. “I had to guarantee three gallons a day,” he later wrote. “That was a step of faith!”

By his senior year, Roloff was already preaching part time at the country churches, and after a few years at a seminary in Fort Worth, he became a regular on the revival circuit. His style was fierce and uncompromising. This was old time preaching, full of whispered pleas and shouted commands. In the middle of sermons, he would spontaneously burst into gospel songs.

After setting up Roloff Evangelistic Enterprises in Corpus Christi in 1951, Roloff’s ministry grew to include a daily radio program and — once he obtained a pilot’s license to fly his own small plane — regular engagements around Texas. He broke away from the Southern Baptist Convention in 1956, but his church was expanding, and that year he opened the City of Refuge, a residential treatment facility for men who had trouble with drugs, alcohol, and crime. “Some have suggested that we appeal to the state for funds, but [this] is a work of faith and there must be no strings attached that would keep us from preaching a full gospel and ministering to the spiritual needs of people,” Roloff said at the time.

In 1958, Roloff built a houseboat off the gulf coast near Corpus Christi, which became known as the Lighthouse, where men with drug and alcohol problems were sent either by judges or by their own choice, and where isolation from society was stressed as an effective means of breaking old habits. A similar home for women followed several years later. When a pregnant 15 year-old girl came for help, Roloff founded the Rebekah Home, which would take girls under 18.

The Anchor Home for Boys followed in 1967. Like the Lighthouse, it was isolated, set up on an old Air Force base in Zapata, Texas, a tiny town along the Mexican border. Where the men of Lighthouse had chosen to go there, now Roloff was accepting boys brought by their parents, often against their will.

Expanding to youth meant, among other issues, that the state had a more immediate interest in the home’s activities. The Texas Department of Public Welfare demanded that Roloff obtain licenses for the Rebekah and Anchor homes. He refused, arguing it would be a violation of the separation between church and state.

A long, protracted battle ensued. Roloff would spend several short stints in the Corpus Christi jail. The Anchor and Rebekah homes would be closed down and reopened throughout the 1970s, occasionally dispersing its students to other homes in Georgia and Mississippi and then returning them to Texas as the state’s supreme court, legislature, Department of Human Services, and Attorney General all took differing stances in the debate over whether Roloff needed licenses in order to care for the well-being of adolescents.

Through his radio sermons, Roloff gained widespread support, at one point attracting over 10,000 people to a rally in Dallas called “Save Our Nation.” He started calling his battle the “Christian Alamo.” He directed hundreds of followers to link arms in a circle around his People’s Baptist Church in Corpus Christi to keep state investigators out. Those investigators were bolstered by increasingly urgent reports that the children in these homes were facing horrific forms of physical and even sexual abuse.

+++

One of the boys in that circle of arms around the church was Jeffrey Barnes. Brought at age 13 after his mother had died and his father remarried, Jeffrey never really understood why he was taken to Anchor. On his first night, another boy tried to fondle him. “I hit him, “ Jeffrey recalled. “Another kid came at me. I picked up a wooden chair and put it across his head.”

Jeffrey Barnes at home in Universal City, Texas.

The staff discovered what had happened and beat Jeffrey. From that day forward, the punishments never ceased. He’d be paddled with ten to fifteen licks for all manner of major and minor infractions. “They beat you for any little thing,” including mentioning any hint of the abuse to your parents over phone calls home, which were monitored by the staff.

In the 1970s, paddling was not far outside the norm of what parents around the country might do to kids who misbehaved. But things went further. Jeffrey said he was locked in a room and handcuffed to a bed-frame for hours on end, as a Roloff sermon was played through speakers.  Staff members, Jeffrey said, would shoot BB guns at the boys, forcing them to run around to escape the little metal pellets. “Some of the men made a game of torturing us.”

In between the punishments, Jeffrey got used to the daily routines. The boys woke up at 4am to milk the cows, just as Roloff had done in his youth. They picked watermelons, and in the winter they burned tires to keep the field from freezing over. They learned from Christian educational workbooks, which Jeffrey learned how to cheat his way through, and memorized large portions of the King James Bible, which Jeffrey couldn’t get around and can still recite to this day.

He got used to the feeling that escape was impossible, since the school was surrounded by Mexican desert on one side and American desert on the other, but he also knew that if he could get word out to his family about he extent of the abuse, maybe he’d get to go home. He realized that the only boys who were allowed off school grounds were those in the choir, which toured to churches in nearby cities. He joined up. At a concert in San Antonio, he finally saw his stepmother and told her about the abuse. Shortly after, she pulled him out of the home.

Now in his 50s, Jeffrey reserves far more hatred for these staff members than for Roloff himself, whose knowledge of Anchor’s worst punitive excesses remains a mystery. “I think Brother Roloff’s intentions were good,” he said. Still, he knew that Roloff, in defending himself in a state hearing, had said, “Better a pink bottom than a black soul.” Attorney General John Hill had famously responded that he was more concerned about bottoms “that were blue, black, and bloody.”

+++

Lester Roloff died in 1982 when his private plane went down. “The month after Roloff died stuff really descended into chaos,” recalled Robert Nicholson, who attended Anchor shortly after Jeffrey. Anchor moved from Zapata to join the other Roloff homes near Corpus Christi. According to Robert, the numbers grew, and the school began accepting boys with more severe psychological problems.

Like Jeffrey, Robert remembers older boys “taking great joy in having attention put on new ones.” They’d watch as boys were beaten with “paddles, belts, whatever object could be made into a hard surface and used for beating somebody on the ass.” One time, Robert had to “chew up and swallow soap because I looked at a girl too long in church.” On another occasion, “Somebody stole a Snickers bar from a charity basket. The whole home was on their knees in the hallway being paddled and passing out from pain.”

At one point, Robert escaped and made it to Corpus Christi. “The cops found me and saw my ass was black and blue and bleeding,” he recalled. “The Corpus Christi jail had the best chili. I was so happy to be in jail.”

As the State of Texas continued to put pressure on the home to get a license or close down, Roloff’s successor Wiley Cameron defended his practices, telling the state that they had never abused the boys, and that harsh discipline was necessary to help them divert from a sinful path. “Our homes,” Cameron said in an official statement, “have dealt with the most desperate cases imaginable of truly ‘terminal’ young people” (Roloff too liked to use the word “terminal” to describe his wards). “We have tried to help them with love, with understanding and with the discipline which will help them get their lives in order and to cease being a prey upon others.”

After more negative press and allegations of abuse, the Anchor Home eventually shut down. Wiley Cameron continued to lobby the Texas Legislature to create an alternative method of accreditation that would allow him to reopen in Texas without regulation from the Department of Human Services. In 1997, he got his wish.

+++

When Aaron Anderson was dropped off by his parents in 1998, he became a member of the inaugural class of the revitalized Anchor Home in Corpus Christi. The year before, the Texas Legislature had passed a bill allowing faith-based children’s homes to be overseen by the newly founded Texas Association of Child Care Agencies. Wiley Cameron, the head of the Roloff homes, served on the association’s board of directors.

After Cameron reopened the Anchor Home, it took almost no time before journalists and liberal activists, familiar with the Roloff homes’ earlier history, started looking for signs of abuse. Then-Governor George W. Bush had pushed the faith-based initiatives legislation in Texas as a prelude to his run for President, hoping to lure evangelical voters. With the Roloff homes, liberal activists had found a sensational cautionary tale about what happens when the state gives too much leeway to religious institutions. Where Roloff had once been cast in the role of antagonist to a secular state government, now his homes were entrenched in the culture wars, battling for the heart of that government. Responsibility for the abuse at these homes could now be pegged not only on a handful of religious eccentrics, but also on the most powerful politicians in the state, and perhaps, if Bush became president, the country.

Of course, Aaron had no idea about any of this as he settled into life at Anchor. He’d tried to escape on his second day and fell into a mud pit before he got too far away, which led to more beatings. “My ribs hurt for a couple months after that,” he said. “Who knows if I cracked or bruised one— They never took me to a hospital.”

Over time, he learned to avoid getting hurt. The main way to do that was to stay totally silent. When he arrived at Anchor, Aaron told me he was placed on “verbal probation.” He was barred from speaking to anyone except for staff and a single “keeper,” and could only speak to them when instructed. Later students would use the term “guide student,” and the practice has lasted until today, defended by staff as a good way to break old self-destructive habits that the boys bring to Anchor.

Aaron told me that the punishments — for looking at others, for speaking to anyone outside of the approved structure — included hits and kicks from staff or from men at the Lighthouse home next door. He described being forced to kneel on rice for hours while weights — usually heavy books — were added to his outstretched arms. If he was put on “Red Shirt,” a special punishment designation whose numbers ranged from a few to as many as 20 other boys, he would have to run for hours on end, and be kicked if he fell down. He would have to spend hours digging holes and filling them back up again.

Roloff, though he had died 17 years earlier, was a constant, ghostly presence. “They had his picture everywhere,” Aaron recalled “They talked about him all the time.” Every few months, the boys would be woken up late on Saturday night. They’d walk to the chapel and kneel while Roloff’s sermons were played over speakers. “I felt like I was a prisoner in a cult, to be honest,” Aaron told me. Over time he learned how to talk the talk. “If you pretend with a group of people long enough it feels real.”

Personal Photo by Aaron Anderson of Anchor boys doing push-ups, 1999-2000.

Nearly every one of the alumni I spoke to described a moment when the line between pretending to believe in the Anchor system and actually believing in it started to blur. A student from around 2008, going by the name “Drake” on an online discussion forum wrote:

“My peers who were there for reasons usually far worse than mine scowled at me. Treated me like I was the scum of the earth and showed no sympathy even though however long ago they were in the same position as I. Then without my realizing it had happened, I had become what had bewildered me. I had become the one slamming kids into the ground and forcing their noses onto surfaces. At the time I thought I was doing what was right and wanted nothing more than to please my superiors. I was helping to uphold the very system I thought so unjust.”

Less than a month after Aaron was allowed to talk to other students, he was put in charge of punishments. Instead of sitting in the classroom, where other kids had self-paced Christian workbooks, Aaron was out on the track, watching kids run endless laps and kicking them if they fell down from exhaustion.

His sole education was Bible memorization. If he succeeded in his memorizations, he might be treated to a John Wayne movie in the lunchroom or a short trip to a carnival with other “crew leaders.”

Fifteen years later, Aaron regretted how he had used his authority. “I get emotional, shaky when we talk about this,” he told me. “I’m constantly questioning how I felt back then. Did part of me enjoy it?”

***

As Aaron left in 2000, pressure was mounting on the school to open itself to scrutiny. News stories had been coming out about Anchor’s sister school, the Rebekah Home, where girls were telling stories of being whipped, beaten, bound with duct tape and locked in isolation cells with Roloff’s sermons blaring over speakers. In June 1999, Texas Child Protective Services issued findings of physical abuse and medical neglect at the Rebekah Home and banned Wiley Cameron’s wife Fay Cameron, the head of the home, from working with juveniles in Texas ever again.

Not long after, scandal hit the Lighthouse, the Roloff home that housed young men too old for Anchor. Aaron Cavallin and Justin Simons were 16 and 17, young enough to attend Anchor, but placed at the Lighthouse, for men 18 to 25, due to their size. Cavallin and Simons were overheard talking about running away and a staff member named Allen Smith punished them by tying their wrists to the back of a pickup truck and forcing them to run through brush and thorns barefoot. Then he forced them to dig at the bottom of a pit 15 feet deep. Simons told investigators he was there for more than 16 hours, and that he asked to take a break and was told he would have to jump across the pit. When he tried to do so, he fell in, spraining both ankles. Other students told investigators that the boys were instructed to throw food and compost into the pit, and that a pipe spewed sewage at their feet. Cavallin told me that a boy had urinated into the pit.

Allen Smith was found guilty of “unlawful restraint” a year later at trial, and ordered to complete a year of probation and 150 hours of community service. Soon after, Wiley Cameron resigned from the Texas Association of Christian Child Care Agencies. The national press swarmed to the story in order to discredit presidential candidate George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative program.

The Corpus Christi Caller Times, the city’s paper of record, showed ample sympathy to Cameron’s cause. “Youths find structure at church homes,” was the headline of a Sunday feature story several weeks after the pit incident, which described how “residents of the homes and others” had “defended the ministry’s work following recent abuse allegations made by two young men.” Anchor was barely mentioned, except to provide a vivid image. “About 20 boys clad in white shirts, red ties and khaki pants finished up their school work for the day, stood in a line and sang a religious song,” wrote reporter Dan Parker. ‘Run if you want to, run if you will,’ the boys sang, in part. ‘But I came here to stay.’”

Day to day leadership of the Anchor Home was handed over to a 25 year-old named Dennis McElwrath, who decided to move the facility out of Texas.  He reestablished the school as Anchor Academy and set up on two different sites in Montana before financial problems led him to relocate to Vanduser, a tiny cotton-ginning town in southern Missouri, where he operates it to this day.

Dennis McElwrath at Anchor Academy in Vanduser, Missouri.

+++

Here are some of the punishments and general policies described by graduates of Anchor Academy during its years in Montana: spankings with a wooden paddle, hours of physical exercise in freezing weather with improper clothing, being prohibited from speaking to anyone other than a direct superior, spending eight hours on a Saturday scrubbing a single spot on the floor, eating peanut butter sandwiches for weeks at a time and having to carry them around in plastic sacks if you failed to eat them, having to hold a broom above your head while your feet were tied together, so that any movement required hopping around. Graduates described having to write hundreds and even thousands of repetitive lines of text by hand until their hands cramped. If you got behind, they said, you would be forced awake for thirty minutes every hour of the night to stand and write lines, which amounted to sleep deprivation.

“That place brainwashed, whether they intended to or not, an ideology, a dogma, and a fear of physical and eternal punishment if you didn’t comply,” said Michael Quinn, who attended from 2002 to 2004 in Havre, Montana. On the lingering effects of verbal probation, he said, “I ran out of things to talk to myself in my head about. I couldn’t remember words. There was nothing up there in my head.” On the system of authority, he said, “I always to this day have trouble looking at people. I look at the ground.”

“Put your back against the wall and put your leg at a ninety degree angle and raise your arms,” he told me of one punishment. “If you drop your leg I’d punch you. If you drop your arms I’d punch you. If you say no I’d punch you. I’d say that’s torture. As a 16 year-old kid viewing this stuff, all I know is that it felt wrong.” When he described kids whose parents seemed like they might never come back, he broke down crying. “Nothing too terrible happened to me,” he said. “I played the game as much as I needed to.”

Michael’s memories were echoed by those of his friend, Samuel Speights, who attended from 2001 until 2003. Sam’s father had attended Anchor in the 1980s. Sam had been skipping school and doing drugs. “My mom took me there because she wanted me to graduate high school,” he said. “She had pretty good intentions for me. She didn’t want me to fail in life.”

As an older student, Sam said, he rose quickly to become a leader. Even still, he wasn’t immune from punishment. One time, a student directly under his supervision had to go the bathroom in the middle of the night. The doors of the dorm-style room were locked, so Sam woke up a staff member. The next morning, Sam learned that he had lines to write.

As with his predecessors, Sam described occasional rewards, like screenings of action films. The food was filling and tasty. The system didn’t guarantee you would have a miserable experience.

In fact, other Anchor alumni say these punishments were wildly exaggerated by boys who were so undisciplined that getting up before noon could be spun into an act of torture. Sam and Michael’s memories of Anchor, as well as those of Aaron Anderson, contrasted irreconcilably with those of Daniel Minnick, who started in Corpus Christi in 1999 and then returned as a staff member in Montana intermittently until 2003.

Daniel described Anchor as a “watered-down” version of the military, which he later joined. Getting up early, exercising intensively, and staying silent around other students were all reasonable methods to help kids get on a straight path. “We had it easy,” Daniel said. “I almost think that some of the folks that see it in a bad light never woke up to adult responsibilities.”

Was there violence? Daniel said, “Obviously you put those kind of youth in an environment with each other, there’s going to be tension. One student is going to punch another student. Was that tolerated or perpetuated by staff members? No. But were there times I recall somebody got punched in the face? Sure. Boys will be boys.”

Many recent alumni of Anchor Academy in Montana and Missouri have described their experiences in online discussion forums, offering advice to parents of prospective students. Most of these alumni either vigorously denounce the school’s practices as abuse or write in glowing terms of its ability to save troubled kids.

A few, however, lie somewhere in the middle. Jordan Harrell was at Anchor for two years and four months between 2003 and 2005. “What I do know is that they do love their students,” he wrote on one online forum in 2009. “Just do your research before sending your children there.” He credited Dennis McElwrath with incremental positive change. “If you choose to follow the rules as your told, you can escape with a very positive experience.”

But as his posts multiplied (“Wow this brings back so many memories”), Jordan’s anecdotes slowly grew more extreme. He described a boy tied to a five-foot rope and dragged around, a boy beat up nearly every day for a year, a boy on peanut butter sandwiches for months who on one occasion watched the staff feed his sandwich to a dog.

Less than a year later, Jordan posted on a different forum, going into more detail. He described the systems of verbal probation and guide students, and said that on occasion his guide gave him conflicting instructions, and then punished him for following one instruction instead of another. “After that, he told me to bend over and put my nose on the bunk. In this position, you must keep your legs straight, and bend over to put your nose on something. Try it with a table for instance. After standing in that position for long enough, it will bring tears to even the strongest of people.”

Where less than a year before, Jordan had been measured in his criticism of the punishments, he now revealed a deeper level of trauma, as if the memories were a scab he had picked raw. “I saw things that would make parents cry. Still to this day I feel terribly guilty about not trying to do more.”

“Some people will read this and try to say that I am lying, try to say that I don’t know what I am talking about,” he continued. “I dare someone to say that to my nightmares, tell it to the hundreds of boys who have gone through there and now have some sort of anxiety problems.”

One theme that pervaded every interview about Anchor, particularly after its rebirth in the late 1990s, was the idea that the program fostered a very particular subculture that outsiders would find perplexing. Sitting in a tiny coffee shop in Modesto, California, Samuel was anxious to describe the abuse, letting story after story spill out. But he seemed even more anxious to say how strange it all was, interrupting himself constantly to say, “It’s so crazy, It’s so crazy,” as if he had once convinced himself that none of it had happened, and was still wondering what exactly was wrong about the situation, if anything at all.

And to illustrate that point, Sam told me that Dennis McElwrath, or Brother Dennis as they call him — the current head of Anchor Academy, who I would soon meet — had a select group of boys come to his room each night. Those boys would rub his feet and serve as informants on what was happening outside of his gaze. Michael corroborated this story. “They tried to get me to rub feet,” he told me. “They woke me up in the middle of the night.” He was sleepy and confused. “Then the kid came back and said ‘nevermind go to bed.’”

Michael paused and then spoke, as if responding to this late-night silhouette of a boy from a decade before: “You’re damn right! That’s the weirdest thing ever!”

+++

Anchor Academy and Anchor Baptist Church sit on one corner of the main intersection in Vanduser, Missouri, by far the nicest buildings in a town of decaying wooden houses and vast cotton fields. Dennis McElwrath was standing on the front porch, chatting with a group of young men when I drove up on a recent Tuesday. We’d spoken on the phone. “How did you target us?” he had asked me. I said I was interested in the legacy of Lester Roloff’s homes. “I can’t speak for the Roloff homes of the 80s since I was barely born,” he said, but he agreed to let me come visit, adding, “I’m not looking for publicity to get more students. We are full, turning people away…We’re overwhelmed with calls.”

Anchor Academy Front Entrance.

McElwrath has a boyish, ruddy face and a bald spot he likes to point to when describing some of the more stressful moments working with boys. He stressed that the new Anchor Academy had no contact with Roloff’s church, and said he tried to increase community involvement. He introduced financial literacy classes and set up accounts so the boys — he calls them “the fellas” — could get paid for work at the cotton gin and other projects, taking their savings when they left the home.

Over a dinner of goulash, string beans, and garlic bread, McElwrath said that the two major issues facing young men today are the fracturing of families and the emphasis on status — physical, social, financial — which makes them feel inadequate. He mentioned the high rate of teen suicide. “They get to a place where they don’t want to face it anymore. We want a young man to come here and be safe, to know that they’re not going to be made fun of or ridiculed.” He said that assigning guide students to newcomers and strictly managing whom new students can talk to is part of the process of “putting the past in the past.” The guide students are supposed to exert “positive peer pressure” and the enforced silence keeps the new boys from “reinforcing old addictions.”

McElwrath often resorts to analogies that call to mind the moment in a sermon when a pastor uses a real-life example to illuminate a biblical verse. When we finally got to disciplinary policies, he was not defensive about the accusations of abuse we had both read on the Internet. He chose the analogy of traffic tickets, which if unpaid may lead to higher fines and then jail time. Small disciplinary infractions had minor penalties, he said, and the vast majority of the time that was enough.

He said that the practices Michael, Samuel, Aaron, and Jordan described were consequences given to only a tiny percentage of students who simply would not follow the rules, and that many of the most intransigent boys made a game of taunting staff members. He pointed to his bald spot and described an instance where one student had to run a single lap on the track as punishment and instead stood in place, ridiculing McElwrath as he was bitten by mosquitoes. “There are kids with unbelievable amounts of stubbornness,” McElwrath said. “There are times where you’re worn to a complete frazzle. To them it’s a game, to us it’s like, ‘Will anything get through to them?’”

He said the practice of making the kids sleep in intervals and write lines through the night was short-lived because it exhausted the staff and was only ever used for a few of the most obstinate boys. “None of it was unreasonable. It would just come down to a battle of the wills.” He said nobody had to eat peanut butter sandwiches for more than five days, and that they were also given carrot sticks and an apple. Even still, some of the kids “wouldn’t eat the peanut butter and would say ‘I don’t care. I’ll just starve to death.'” Usually, he said, they’d give in pretty quickly and go back to eating food.

“A lot of the fellas that would be very complaining, I think you’ll find, are not willing to take responsibility for their lives,” McElwrath said. “There were a select few who were always the victim, whose problems were always the result of somebody else.” In order to reduce the number of boys like this, he increased the minimum age and started turning away kids whose problems were so severe that he felt the program could not help them.

“I’m not going to tell you there haven’t been mistakes made,” he said, giving credence to the criticism that he does not have extensive training in counseling. He mentioned Anchor Academy’s only brush with the law, in 2004, when an employee named Justin Peterson was charged with fondling a 15 year-old student and was promptly fired. “There is no substitute for experience,” McElwrath said. “If you do things the wrong way a few times you’re apt to learn the best way to do it, and we’re always open to change in the program overall…I’m not going to have doctor’s degrees on the wall, but after 15 years we’ve been around the block enough times and know the heart of young people.”

After dinner, McElwrath gave me a tour of Anchor Academy, and I saw the perfectly-made cots, the cozy living spaces, the schoolroom with its individual desks and a school store with snacks you pay for with good grades and behavior, the clean and unadorned chapel, the vast stores of food, much of it fresh. All around me, boys were doing their evening chores: sweeping, cleaning plates from dinner, loading laundry by the armful. A few boys were on the phone with their parents. They nodded and smiled at McElwrath and I as we passed by. We walked outside, where a boy who had bought a car with money he had personally earned working at the cotton gin was cleaning the vehicle with a sponge and soapy water. McElwrath had helped him pick out the car, and he beamed with a father’s pride.

We climbed into a truck and McElwrath drove me several blocks to the cotton gin and the pond where the boys go swimming up to five times a week. McElwrath described the boys and the staff as a family with their own particular habits and quirks. “You may certainly see things that appear as strange, and you can ask me anything,” he said. As an example, he said I might see one boy having a friend work the knots in his back, since he had been to the doctor for these knots and that was the prescribed treatment.

Then, without prompting, McElwrath told me that he has a similar problem. “I have a lot of trouble with my feet; my feet will get so knotted up,” he said. “Sometimes guys will be a blessing and work on some of the knots in my foot.” The activities might seem strange to an outsider, he said, but “it’s not uncommon when you live together…you’re with them all the time, it’s like a family.”

+++

I started reporting on Lester Roloff’s Anchor Home and Dennis McElwrath’s Anchor Academy expecting to find accusations of abuse and denials of abuse and expecting the accusations, even the sensational ones, to appear to be more credible than the denials.  This would be one more story about injustice, in which places designed to help young people ended up hurting them. Bearing that out, several of the men I talked to seemed truly haunted by their experiences. One broke down in tears. Another said he got “shaky” when talking about his memories.

The pervasiveness of abuse at residential homes for troubled teens has been well documented. In 2007, a series of deaths at residential programs for teens led to an investigation of teen deaths and “thousands of allegations of abuse” by the Government Accountability Office and a series of proposals for reforming the regulation of teen homes that since then have failed in Congress. In 2009, House Resolution 911, which would have created a national database of programs and increased access to abuse hotlines for teens, passed the House but did not make it through a Senate committee. In the years since, bills have not fared better. The Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Acts of 2011 and 2013 failed. The same bill was reintroduced this past February and has stalled in committee.

There are advocacy organizations trying to increase awareness of the issue. Two of the men I interviewed found one another through a group called HEAL, which aims, in the words of its coordinator Angela Smith, to “improve laws so children and families are better informed and protected from fraud and abuse.” A group called Survivors of Institutional Abuse recently held their annual conference in New York City, where alumni and parents of schools like the Roloff homes traded stories.

Anchor predictably fell into this trend, and like the other Roloff homes it was covered it two different ways by reporters. There were short, celebratory stories in local newspapers over the years about what the homes said they were doing: helping kids. At the same time, thorough investigations by skeptical journalists have produced shocking stories of abuse at Roloff-founded or Roloff-inspired homes in Louisiana, Florida, and Missouri.

But the more I read and reread my notes, the more I kept coming back to the stories like the one about boys rubbing McElwrath’s feet or the one in which Aaron was woken up in the eerie dead of night, sent to the chapel, and forced to listen to Roloff sermons. These stories do not demand a word as dramatic as “abuse.” A better description might be “unsettling.”

To some of the boys at the school, and certainly to the staff, these sorts of stories are normal and unremarkable. Just as there were men who still appear traumatized by what they witnessed and experienced, others remember a kind, peaceful environment. Feelings of where a line has been crossed — and where the law should get involved — are inconsistent, and might even change over time for a single person. Many of the boys simply accepted their experiences, but then years later as adults came to see what happened to them as wrong. Often it took finding someone else who had the same experience to validate the idea that what happened truly was wrong. If it was illegal, there is little recourse: in many cases around the country, staff at abusive residential programs have not been prosecuted due to the passing of statutes of limitations.

Still, just acknowledging what occurred can sometimes feel like its own small victory. About a decade after they left Anchor, in 2012, Sam found Michael living in Houston. They hadn’t spoken in years, but Sam drove down from his home in Dallas and they spent the day together. They found themselves coloring in each other’s sketchy memories of Anchor. “For a long time I started to believe I dreamed it,” Michael told me. Sam “showed up and said, ‘Hey, this stuff really did happen.’…He made it real.”

***

This story was produced for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

***

Maurice Chammah is a writer and musician in Austin, Texas who studied journalism in Egypt as a Fulbright student, 2011-2012. More about him at http://www.mauricechammah.com. He writes regularly for The Revealer.

The post The Anchor Boys appeared first on The Revealer.