This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Episode 017 – Chad Harris from “Shiny Happy People” and Bill Gothard’s IBLP Cult

August 2, 2023

T: Hi, I’m Tracey.

S: And I’m Sharon, and we are Feet of Clay…

T: Confessions of the Cult Sisters! We’ve heard from listeners who have been amazed, and inspired and outraged…

S: Yes! Yes, outraged – much outrage…

T: By the story of Abigail Witthauer, who was our recent guest. Abigail shared her experience growing up in the IBLP church – that’s the Institute of Basic Life Principles, if you have been living under a rock and not hearing that. Founded by none other than Bill Gothard …

S: Wait, wait. I have re-christened him.

T: Oh, yes.

S: Bill GotHard. You’re welcome.

T: Bill GotHard in all the wrong ways. IBLP was recently exposed on the Prime video docuseries Shiny Happy People.

S: Yes, and Abigail told us about her childhood, her teens and her early adulthood, and how she survived all sorts of shit and abuse and trauma, and has come out really thriving on the other side. In between some of our recording sessions Abigail also told us about her good friend Chad, a young man who – if you’ve watched Shiny Happy People – you are already familiar with him. The dude with the black shirt and the red tie who just was amazing in his descriptions and insights. And Abigail suggested that we might want to chat with Chad, to which I said can we say that three times fast – chat with Chad chat with Chad chat with Chad.

T: Ooh, new podcast series; Chats with Chad.

[laughter]

S: To which we of course said, hell yes! So today we are delighted to be joined by both these amazing people.

T: Woohoohoo. But, before we dive in, we did want to give a trigger warning here. Our discussions today will likely include topics of spiritual abuse, childhood and teen trauma, ritualized spankings, arranged marriages, sexual assault, etc – all that shit that comes along with Bill Gothard and the IBLP. So please use discretion. Keep in mind that this material is absolutely not appropriate for children, and make sure to take care of yourself.

S: Thank you very much for that wise word of caution, Tracey. Okay, let’s get started. Abigail, welcome back to Feet of Clay – Confessions of the Cult Sisters.

A: Hey y’all, I’m so happy to be back.

T: Mmm, I haven’t heard a y’all in a long time!

A: We know. Atlanta and now Alabama – it’s very sticky in the window.

T: Yeah. For those who don’t know, our commune was in Texas, where we all did say y’all, a lot.

S: We did. There’s a whole bunch of Texisms – Texisms – is that the right word? Texas-isms? We’ll have to go into some day.

A: It’s like exorcisms, but from Texas.

T: Exactly! That’s what I was thinking.

S: And of course Abigail, thank you, thank you for bringing in your very good friend, Chad. You are actually the first cult brother we have had on our show and we are so thrilled to meet you and hear your story so, welcome!

Chad: Well, thank you! It’s an honor to be the first cult brother you’ve ever had, and I would just like to second that y’all – you know, being from Alabama I just have to represent, so yeah. Y’all to you y’all as well.

T: Great, Brother Chad!

S: And Brother Chad is fixing to share some stuff with us?

T: Brother Chad is fixing to share some stuff with us. We used to call people brother and sister in our cult commune in Texas, and Brother Chad, we feel like we kind of know you a little bit already after watching Shiny Happy People. I can’t express how proud we both have been of you, and I know so many people that we’ve been hearing from – with your bravery; impressed with how well spoken you were; your insights; and of course we were delighted when Abigail told us of her friendship with you. As we get started here I guess the big question that we all have is what was it like for you to participate in that documentary, because I assume it was done way before it aired. What sort of response have you been getting?

Chad: Oh, it was a great privilege. I actually started working with the creators long before Amazon came into the picture. Everyone involved in this project that I’ve worked with; the entire creative team, have just been so empathetic, and they’ve worked to center the stories of the victims themselves. That was a priority for them from the start, and I want to give a special shout out to Olivia Crist and Lauren Andrade who were the original people I worked with on the project, and worked with them throughout. That’s the directors; they’ve done a really amazing job. And yeah, I was able to get started with them about three years ago, in the middle of covid.

T: Wow.

Chad: The bulk of what you saw in the documentary I recorded back in January of 2022, and it was wonderful to see it all come together. The editing team did a really amazing job; the directors, the executive producers – everyone was very transparent, kept in touch, and the response has been amazing. I really liked what you said at the beginning, where you said if you haven’t heard of IBLP at this point you’ve probably been living under a rock. And that’s exactly what I wanted to see come from this documentary, because IBLP operated on such a large scale for so long, and no one seemed to care. And now they do. And the fact that they’re out there, they’re famous, people can actually detect more of what they put into the world – it’s amazing to me, because I feel like that exposure is ultimately what’s going to bring them down.

T: Yes! Yes.  That one cut where everybody they showed was IBLP, IBLP was brilliant to help that get lodged in our heads so we can definitely recognize that now.

S: The other thing that’s interesting to me Tracey, is that looking back on our years (all those decades ago) we were highly influenced by Gothard’s teachings, but IBLP as a systematic cult was not a thing even we were aware of.

T: Mmhmm.

Chad: Absolutely, and one of the most encouraging responses I’ve gotten from this documentary and all the feedback I’ve seen from people online is that people are starting to connect the dots from Gothard and however they were influenced in their version of Christianity – Gothard touched on a lot of things that unfortunately we see in a lot of mainstream Christian nationalism today.

S: Yes.

Chad: Some of the very extreme things in politics, for example, have been very much influenced by the circles that Gothard ran in, and the fact that people are starting to apply it to their own experiences, and say hey wait a minute, I’ve seen that umbrella diagram before; or I’ve heard that critique of rock music before. The fact that people are starting to see just how pervasive it was is really fascinating, and quite frankly it’s very validating. The sooner we can suss it out, the sooner we can get it out.

S: Yeah. Totally. You know, one of the things Tracey and I – we’ve scratched our heads a couple of decades now, coming out of the mindset that we were locked into, and the thing that has been frustrating for us is the way in which so many Christians/evangelicals/society in general can just kind of go oh isn’t that quaint, isn’t that cute, when they hear certain things from the bible or certain teachings of Christianity. The problem is, in a way, these kind of Christian-lite versions or what we used to call the do-gooder quasi Christians that aren’t living it to the full extreme, like IBLP – it makes it seem innocuous. The truth is, it’s just not consistent. IBLP is being consistent. They are actually living what they’re claiming to believe, whereas many will give lip service to the belief, but not go full in, in the lifestyle. So it’s a bit of a mind twist for me.

Chad: Oh, absolutely. One thing I would like to clarify on the teachings of IBLP as it was practiced by each family – one thing they didn’t really go into in the documentary that I’ve tried to clarify for folks on my channel and what have you, is that the rules were very strict and they were very much across the board, and Gothard had an opinion on literally everything.  You know – it was his opinion, and you were welcome to it. But the thing is, no family that I know of – and there may have been one or two hard-cores that I never met personally – but I don’t know any family that followed the rules 100% of the time. So even in the strictest application of IBLP – for example, my family technically was not supposed to have a TV that could be a TV; it would mostly function as a VCR receptacle, but we would watch broadcast over the air TV from time to time; we just didn’t let anybody in IBLP know about it. I knew of another family whose daughters all wore pants, because they worked on a farm and there were no real farm hands to speak of; all the kids had to pitch in, and it’s real hard to go out there and wrestle goats and horses and cows in a dress.

S: Right.

Chad: So they would go out and wear pants from time to time; they just wouldn’t do it at the conferences. And I believe that this was by design, because if IBLP was aware that their members weren’t always following all of the rules all of the time, if they ever had a problem in their family or something happened in their lives that didn’t fit the narrative of the wealth and success that you were promised, then they could always go back and say oh well, the problem clearly is that you let a TV into your house; therefore you’re not measuring up; therefore this is all your fault.

T: Right.

Chad: Or, if unfortunately one of the abuses we saw with Josh Duggar happens in the family, IBLP can say oh, well your daughters clearly defrauded their brother, because they were wearing pants. Things like that. They would always find something where you wouldn’t measure up, and therefore any horrible thing that happened to you, or anything that didn’t fit the entire narrative, was your fault. It was a very victim making process.

T: You’re so right. That is so well stated. We came out of something very similar, so when we were struggling with things in our own life, we were also conditioned. I must have … – not followed the instructions of the bible as clearly, that would have given me this guaranteed success. We’re seeing that even now; we’re involved in an alumni site with people that used to be in our commune with us, and it’s a lot of that same thinking. These are the outliers, because it’s exactly what you said. They didn’t follow the letter of the law, exactly as laid out, that guarantees that success. Wow.

Chad: And that’s one thing that I’ve seen happen quite a few times in the comments about the documentary. There have been people who will leave a one- or two-star review and say well, you know, okay, so they talked about some of the horrible things that happened in IBLP and sure, they happened, but they didn’t talk about all the people that Bill Gothard blessed, or how many people found value in IBLP. It just makes me laugh, because even the people were “#blessed” and everything – they suffered just as much of the abuses as we did. I guarantee you if you take out that microscope and look harder, you will find where there is some horrible family dynamics that came about because of it.

S: Yes, there can’t not be. It’s denial of basic human connection, and emotion, and humanity. You’re not going to have good stuff happen when you do that. In the end, you’re just not. Hey Chad, I’d really like to learn a few more details, if you’re willing, about your personal story. Could you describe for us a little bit about your childhood. When did your parents get involved in IBLP? How many siblings did you have? What was life like growing up?

Chad: I was born into an Independent Fundamental Baptist preacher’s home who also happened to be a missionary at one point. My family is originally from the backwoods of a little county called Walker County Alabama. It’s not very big, and it’s mostly a coal mining area. As I said in the documentary, you either worked in the coal mine or steel mill, or in my dad’s case, at one point he worked at a cast iron pipe shop. Very industrial, very hard manual labor jobs around there. They all came from there. My dad, when he worked at a cast iron pipe shop, rededicated his life to Jesus. He had already been a Christian in his teen years but he kind of fell away. He rededicated his life, and decided to become a preacher – which as I said, is a lot better than working in a steel mill. I can see the appeal of that, frankly. He decided to become a preacher, and eventually became a preacher for a few small congregations in Alabama and what have you, until he felt the call to go to the Netherlands and Belgium as a missionary. Being a missionary to two of the most Christian, affluent countries in the world probably doesn’t hurt. But some time there he started losing his hearing, and decided he would better be served as a pastor for military work in England. That’s where I was born. By that point he had three children; I have two older sisters born right after each other and then an older brother. The older brother was born 10 years before I was, so I very clearly was not planned, and my folks took great pains to remind me of that, a lot. When I was 10 months old we moved back to Alabama, so that’s how I lost my accent, really. We moved back at 10 months old and I grew up in the Walker County area. When I was about six or seven years old, my folks started home schooling me, as they had experimented doing with my older siblings while they were overseas. My older brother went to a Christian school for a while, but my folks decided well, let’s try to home school this one and see what happens. They had trouble finding a curriculum that really worked for me, and eventually my older brother, when they brought him back into home schooling. Around this time my mom was approaching her 40s, and she started going to an Ob Gyn in Birmingham Alabama, who was a Christian because they refused to go to non-Christian doctors, or anyone who wasn’t the right kind of Christian. If it was Catholic, right out. So she started going to this Ob Gyn talking about essentially how to plan and handle the possibility of getting pregnant while menopause was going to happen, and this doctor told her well, I know how you believe and everything, and I know you’ve been dedicated ministers, and you’ve turned everything else in your life over to God; why don’t you turn over to God the amount of children you’re going to have?

T: Wow.

S: This was a doctor?

Chad: This was a practising Ob Gyn who told her this.

T: Was he connected? You may get to that but… – I’m familiar with Dr Wheat because I read his fucking book before I got married. Was he a doctor connected to anything like the IBLP or the Baptists?

Chad: Well, he gave her a book called A Full Quiver.

T: Oh god.

Chad: That was an introductory book to the Quiverfull movement, which for people who are unfamiliar, the Quiverfull movement is this idea that children are these arrows that you can fire out against Satan’s dominion in the world and make a difference for God by having as many children as possible. There is a verse in the bible that says as arrows in the hands of a mighty man, so are his children, blessed is he who hath his quiver full of them. So, the Quiverfull movement is the idea that you should have as many children as God would allow you to have in order to partake in this spiritual warfare through overpopulation.

T: I just want to say, very good memory of that bible verse! I find I can’t remember them very well; well done, well done.

S: That’s intentional Tracey; I think we try to block that shit out as much as we can.

Chad: I may not have quoted it exactly in the King James, but it’s definitely still there. Scripture memorization was a large part of IBLP. So what happened was my parents decided oh that sounds like a good idea, and they decided, at seven years after I was born, to go ahead and have two more children, which was all mom was able to have physically before she hit her mid-40s. But, along the way we became very good friends with this doctor and his family, and we all kind of went in together to the seminars that they started having in our areas, that was endorsed and propagated by one Bill Gothard. To my recollection, the doctor’s family and my family all went into IBLP at the same time. They were our best friends in the cult. We started doing their home schooling curriculum, which according to my mom would work best for my much older brother and myself, and my younger siblings coming along when they were of school age, because Gothard purported that everything in ATI, which was the home schooling branch of IBLP, could be taught to children of pretty much any age range, because scripture is timeless, doncha know.

T: Yep.

Chad: So they started us on the Wisdom booklets, and that was effectively my home schooling throughout the vast majority of my school life. I was the only one who stayed in until I graduated high school. My younger siblings eventually started doing the Abeka video courses and everything, when they reached about pre-teenage, but I was 100% home schooled through IBLP from the time I was about six or seven years old, and it was just night and day difference. What I can remember from my previous years home schooling, using whatever curriculum my folks thought was good that week; it was very regimented, and an extreme change for us.

T: Wow. So in that, did you have any kind of relationship with God yourself? It sounds like you’re brought into this system that has a lot of rules. Where were you at as far as your own concept of God and your relationship to Jesus?

Chad: Well, I essentially had to have a relationship with God, otherwise…

T: Always effective.

Chad: Yeah exactly. Otherwise we would make dad look bad, and we just couldn’t have that. I was a very – what my folks deemed, a strong-willed child. They followed the teachings of James Dobson before they went into IBLP, and all the books that went along with that. If anyone is unfamiliar, James Dobson was a huge proponent of physically beating your children. Folks call it spanking; I call it beating.

T: Mmhmm.

S: Yeah.

Chad: He propagated child abuse; he was a voice for the old school ways of raising your child, and he had a lot to say about children who were deemed strong-willed.

S: There was actually a book called The Strong-Willed Child by James Dobson.

Chad: It may as well have been called The Chad Harris Story.

S: Doctor.

Chad: Doctor James Dobson, you are correct. It still strikes me just how many people with actual degrees bought into all this weird fundamentalism. But I was a strong-willed child, and my mother used to brag to complete strangers that I was the child that she spanked the most out of anyone in our family. And it was true.

S: My god.

Chad: I received a lot of physical beating growing up; my mother had a very short temper. I’m sure she has some unresolved mental issues which dad was aware of. He consistently told us that our jobs as children were to make sure that she didn’t fly off the handle, because if she did, it was our fault.

T: Oh my gosh.

Chad: My dad – of course he was also complicit in all this, not only enabling mom but also performing much of the ritualistic spankings that you saw in Shiny Happy People. That was almost word for word what happened in my case.

S: Oh god Chad, I want to just pause here for a moment and tell you that it is just excruciating to hear and to know what you and so many of your generation were subjected to. That disconnection, that fucked up, bizarre, horrible, horrible ritual of needing to hug and say I love you to the person who has just beaten you, is such a mind fuck and so unfair. You know what, it would be bad enough if it was just some sadistic asshole doing it, but of course it’s your parent, and even worse, it’s done in the name of God, as a demonstration of God’s love. If that doesn’t fuck a person over for relationships and trust and intimacy, I don’t know what the hell else will.

Chad: Oh you’re right.

S: So I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you were subjected to that.

Chad: Well thank you, and thank you for expressing that. I told someone the other day that there is no way you can go through this abuse that they encouraged and not turn out fucked up children, and I am Exhibit A on that. It was horrible, it was abusive, and one thing about the entire ritual that they display which again – if you all haven’t already figured out trigger warnings on everything I’m about to say; the whole act of hugging afterwards, that was something we absolutely did. But when I was watching that, the fact that the child was put back over the knee when he didn’t hug convincingly enough? I don’t recall that happening to me, but if it had I definitely would have been caught in an endless loop of that. I was spanked until I didn’t register any emotional response at all. No crying out, no yelling, no act of self-protection. I learned very quickly at an early age how to block out pain. But in doing so, I would just block out any emotion. So if I was asked to express love immediately after that? I couldn’t. I was empty.

S: Dissociation.

A: I will say this about that spanking video, kind of to Chad’s point; I don’t have a recollection, a specific memory of someone telling me I didn’t hug them well enough afterwards, but I had such a visceral response to that moment in watching it in the documentary – I actually watched it again last night. I have to believe my body that there is a reason I had such a moment with that now, multiple times watching it. It had to have happened.

S: Yes.

T: Yes. I want to say, as somebody – I think we talked last time; for the listeners who want to go back and listen to Abigail’s story, we talk about this in our first interview with her. You’re talking to two people who were parents, who definitely read James Dobson’s books; definitely read Larry Tomczak, who does another version of this horrific child abuse scenario. When I watched that also on the documentary, I had to walk away. The visceral reaction also was really strong. I too cannot ever remember trying to make my child hug me, but I think what it was triggering is this whole element of controlling their emotional response. It’s in the actual manuals – they cannot fight too hard, because you have to get them to accept this is their discipline; they can’t be melodramatic; they have to have the right kind of response. I think when he goes in for that hug, it is all of that just rushing over all of us that this is so sick and twisted, and trying to get all of the emotional response – just like you said Chad, and I’ve heard that from other podcast survivors; you’re empty. You’re completely empty. I’m assuming you went into completely dissociated mode at that point.

Chad: I did have to pause. I told Heather Heath, who I watched it with – she’s in the documentary as well, the devil sticks individual; I told her we need to stop here for a minute, because there’s a lot that just happened in my mind. She graciously did, and we talked about it. we talked about over the phone with our friend Lindsay Williams; she’s also in the documentary but she couldn’t be there that night. We called her and all just had a session of processing, which was healing and which was needed. But watching that really drove home to me the fact that this wasn’t a mistake. This wasn’t just a one-off thing. This was something that 100s of people sat in a congregation and laughed at and encouraged, and shamed that poor kid up there, to have this demonstrated to them for them to do at their own homes. That is so fucked up, it’s so intentional, and it’s so on the surface wrong that looking at it now – even if I’d been in then, something in the back of my mind would have said this is wrong. I don’t know why all these people sat there and let it happen, and not one person that I could hear or see said stop. This needs to stop now.

S: It’s the systematic mind control. Whether it’s IBLP or extreme evangelistic messages, or us in Last Days, the overall message is that your heart is desperately wicked,

Chad: Yes.

S: And therefore you cannot trust your heart. Emotions are labelled as sinful, so the whole idea of questioning or “rebelling” or not being happy gets painted with this broad brush of sin, and it’s this matter of eternal life and death. They cultivate a belief in us to not trust our own hearts and minds, and that’s how that slippery slope just gets worse and worse and worse.

Chad: That was definitely true in my childhood. I was told at a very early age that – there is another bible verse that says rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. Now I think witchcraft is kind of a good time, but…

[laughter]

T: Yes.

Chad: Right? But that was what was planted in my mind over and over. If you say anything other than yes ma’am, no ma’am, yes sir, no sir; anything other than instant obedience, it’s the same as if you had cast an evil magic spell over this family. That’s another way you can fuck a child up by giving them so much power to literally invite the devil into your home. It’s more than a six- or seven-year-old should be able to handle – which incidentally was also when I got “saved” as a child, because I knew that my parents had been pressuring me to do it for a long time. They start you early. From age three or four they start telling you you’re a rotten no-good sinner and you need Jesus. So by the age of six years old I told dad after church one night, I need to get saved. There was this big hoop-la when I finally prayed the prayer and did all the things he told me to. I was baptized about a year later; guess I’m waiting to see if it stuck, I don’t know. The indoctrination starts – even all that even started before we got in IBLP. The fact that I was a preacher’s child meant that the pressure to believe, and the pressure to publicly express that belief; and the pressure – if nothing else – to make the ministry look good and to make dad look good, was on from a very early age, and it only intensified when you added the cult element to it.

S: Yeah. Chad, when you “got saved” – you say the sinner’s prayer, you’re reading your bible; you’re praying; you’re doing whatever they’re telling you you need to do to be a “good Christian”. Did you ever feel a sense of actual conversation with God or guidance from God, or any kind of moving of the Holy Spirit or whatever you want to call it – did you ever have that kind of sense or was it always just going through the motions to satisfy what your parents and what the church expected?

Chad: I mean, if you’d asked me that as a child I would have said oh absolutely, God speaks to me all the time. I’ll pray and I’ll feel some kind of way about something; that’s definitely the prompting or the Holy Spirit or that’s the Holy Spirit’s conviction. I’ll give you an example: there would be times when I would read something in a book that might have been a little bit too much for me to process, maybe something about death, or something that was heavy fare for a child; but going to my dad about it would almost always lead to a long discussion about how I was being spiritually attacked or whatever, just by having emotions. So I was taught that any thought in my head was either the Holy Spirit speaking to me, or the devil trying to get in through a side door. Also, if I ever went to dad with any of these normal questions that a child would have, it would get turned into a sermon illustration two or three weeks later, and – you know. I learned very quickly that nothing I ever said was ever private. So I believed at that point I was getting all these promptings from God and that I was also getting all these tricks from Satan trying to get me to misbehave and what have you. I didn’t stop being a strong-willed child, so I was still routinely punished for even minor infractions, and told over and over that Satan was trying to take over my mind. I was just trying to live life as a kid, you know?

S: Oh god.

Chad: So I realize now a lot of that was just my brain hadn’t stopped cooking yet. One of the most freeing things I ever learned in therapy was that your brain doesn’t really mature until you’re in your mid-20s. Holy shit – I was expected to be a 30 year old at age seven. Of course it didn’t work!

T: Of course, yes.

Chad: But I always was curious, and I always had these questions, because I truly did read my bible. I was an early reader; I would get bored and start reading it during dry sermons and everything, and go off on rabbit trails of whatever else I wanted to learn. And I noticed some of the contradictions. I noticed for example, the differing order of events in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 about the creation. But I learned very quickly if I started asking questions about that, it would lead to yet another long lecture and possibly a beating for entertaining any doubts. So, I just had to toe the party line that the bible is 100% true and the inspired word of God; specifically the King James Version thereof, and if I deviated any which way from that I would face the consequences. But looking back I know now that that little voice I talked about in the documentary that said in the back of my head, this is wrong – that never went away. I learned later on, through my own healing process; that wasn’t a demon, that was me.

T: That was you.

Chad: That was my own critical thinking; that was my own self-preservation saying hey, this is something you need to keep in mind, and when you’re able to safely deal with it, you need to deal with it later.

S: Yes.

T: Wow. That is something that strikes me to the core of my heart, that we labelled strong-willed children. It’s usually the very intelligent among us, right? You have this really strong inner voice, a lot of critical thinking skills, and now you’re having to figure out how to – I don’t want to say manipulate – your way through the family, but I can relate to that with my own children. I have one who would have been labelled a strong-willed child, and I am so grateful for him today. I am so grateful for voices like yours, Chad, and Abigail and all of the ones that have been giving voice to all of these feelings you’ve been feeling growing up, because sitting on the other side – those are tough conversations to have with your own child. I don’t know if we can get into that in a little bit, as far as you trying to go back and telling your parents, but you all have been my teachers, because I have been able to step back and listen to the podcasts and listen to your stories, and understand what you were going through in those times, and then going to my children on my own and saying let me tell you what I’ve learned about what this did to you. I can’t thank you enough for growing up and being able to give intelligent voice to all of that. It’s been very powerful. We’re doing everything we can with our generation that are still in this – listen to these people.  Listen to what is happening! It’s very, very powerful.

Chad: That means so much. Thank you.

A: It really does. I think – it’s hard to describe what it means to hear especially parents going back and talking to their children about these things in a really honest and meaningful way. It’s what I talked about in therapy this week, actually.

S: Very good. Well Chad, in our conversations with Abigail we heard very in-depth how purity culture impacted her, starting at I think she said at 9 years old and then through her teens, of course. Tracy and I had our own experiences, but it was a bit of a different version of purity culture. We had signed up for it, whereas you guys were dragged along by your families. I was thinking okay, me, Tracey and Abigail talking about it – we’re all women and I realized that I’ve never actually talked with a man who grew up in purity culture and to hear a bit first hand how that affected you in growing up, in your development mentally, emotionally, sexually, and if you’re up for it I’d love to hear your personal perspective, as well as anything you care to share about what you saw and think about what this does to boys and young men in general.

Chad: Absolutely. Whenever I talk about this I always preface it by saying nothing I’m about to say right now should ever take away from the fact that women in particular, and those assigned female at birth – they had it the worst, because this system was designed specifically to oppress them and they suffered greatly because of it.

S: Yes.

Chad: So whenever I talk about this I want to make it very clear that I never want to sound like oh the men had it so rough, and everything. There was damage, and there were things that happened – yes, but it should never take place over the people it was designed specifically to hurt. Now, that being said, there was a lot of hurt and especially for someone like me. I have been told by many people across all walks of life that I don’t really fit the general traditional masculine mold. I’m a straight dude, but I don’t really do a lot of the typical things you would associate with that – I’m not much of a hunting, fishing, working on trucks kind of guy. I am more at home reading a book or playing on a computer – or fixing a computer, for that matter. I’m more an indoorsey type. I’ve always had my own interests; I’ve never been athletic in the least, even from a very early age. I always had a lot of energy but I never had a lot of interest in going out and exercising. I had bad joints as a child which were never seen about, because we were too poor to afford the doctor, most of the time. So I’ve always just been who I am. One of the things you’re taught early on in IBLP is by virtue of being male, or being assigned male at birth, you are expected to be a leader. You’re expected to be the top tier of the umbrella, under God (and secretly under Bill Gothard as well) but you’re supposed to be the one that’s protecting your family; you’re supposed to be the one that’s leading your wife and children; you have the greater responsibility and you’re going to stand before God and talk about how you used that responsibility. Frankly to me, that all sounded exhausting, because I was like, I just want to live my life, guys. I just want to do the things that make me happy, you know?

T: Do you remember how early you can pinpoint when that kind of message started, or were you – I think we talked about with Abigail, the slow frog boiling in the water. Did it just always seem to be there.

Chad: I mean, it always seemed to be there. Dad took a lot of umbrage anytime anything took the place of his authority in the home, and he would tell us about that. One of the reasons early on the TV was just flat out shut down was because we happened to be watching it (this is even pre-IBLP) – we were watching it when he came home and we didn’t give him an enthusiastic enough response that he was home from work. So he was like well, obviously something else is the leader of the family so we’re not watching TV anymore. That lasted a few months. But yeah, the idea that the man is in charge was always put into us from a very, very early age. Of course, with an abusive mother who tended to have very bad emotional control issues and everything, that dynamic looked weird from time to time, because it was very unclear who was struggling for the power dynamic win, but we were told early on that the man is always in charge of the house. Dad would tell me during those ritualistic spanking times that the reason he was doing it was he was going to have to stand before God and give an account of how he reacted to the situation I put him in. So again, all the blame was put on me. It was very much ingrained, and I think where it came to a full head was when I attended the Alert Cadet program in Knoxville, 1997 during our big family seminar that year. It was the week of my 12th birthday – I turned 12 in the middle of that week’s activities, and it was just three days of going out and doing boy scout adjacent things, but very unplanned and very sloppily put together, to say the least. Now again, I was a nerdy kid, I didn’t have a lot of athletic interest at all, so the first time we double-time marched in formation I fell like, three units back, because we were literally running and I couldn’t keep up. So I ran from the big arena we would meet in every morning all the way to the field, and I’d be exhausted when I got there. Other things, like we went rappelling down the big World’s Fair tower in Knoxville. I fainted as soon as I got out there in my harness and everything and started to go down the wall. They had to pull me back up.

T: For our listeners, and for you Chad, I live in Knoxville, so…woohoo. I’m visualizing that beautiful building with that big shiny sun sphere on top.

Chad: Yep.

A: I think it’s also really valuable here to think about, as we had discussed when I was telling my story previously that I was so jealous that the boys got to do Alert and the girls had to do Excell, which is like tea parties and cleaning. I really appreciated hearing Chad’s version of how horrible Alert was for him when I on the other side was so jealous of it. That has been a super-valuable perspective.

Chad: Absolutely. Well, I’ll be honest – I was kind of jealous of y’all, until I learned the horrific misogynistic reasoning behind it, because as a kid I was like – well they get to be indoors all day and I’m out here sweating my ass off.

T: And do you know what’s awful about that, is there’s no place to understand children and what you would like to do for the summer.

Chad: Right?

T: And just putting you in these camps that are drilling all these things that absolutely have no interest to you at all. I’m so sorry for that. No one can just go have fun! You can’t go to a fun place where you get to pick and choose!

S: So Chad, in the midst of this Alert or other IBLP sponsored programs, was there anything official that presented to the boys about puberty and changes in your body, and hormones and all the stuff that comes with gradual sexual awakening – was that ever addressed?

Chad: Not officially in Alert, but it actually did happen that way because as I said, I turned 12 in the middle of it. So the second day of Alert – it was a three day thing, Alert Cadet – I turned 12 and after I was done, and that was the rappelling day, the obstacle course day that I failed miserably in, and I was done. I begged dad, I was like, please don’t make me do another day of this. I said I will sit and listen to the boring speakers all day, I don’t care. So dad decided well, it’s your birthday, we’ll skip a couple of sessions, I’m going to take you out for a nice burger and ice cream or something for your birthday. We went out there at some kind of mall, I forget where it was, in the Knoxville area. We had a burger, we had some Dairy Queen, and then we walked around the mall while dad told me that my difficulties with Alert Cadet were his fault because he didn’t train me to be a man enough. He said, I should have from an early age, forced you to do more physical things. I should have never let you just sit around and read books, and work on the little Commodore computer we had. He said you should have been out there doing things as a man, because we had some horrible things coming up for Christianity in America and we’re going to need warriors. Your name Chad means war-like. You’re supposed to be a defender of the Lord and we can’t have you not strong enough to do that. And he said that’s where I’ve failed as a father.

T: Oh my god. Chad.

Chad: So that taught me that my spirituality was linked to how much of a caricature of a man that they were pushing these fathers to push on their children in these sessions they were sitting in.

S: Right.

Chad: And then we walked past a Victoria’s Secret display.

T: Ohhhh.

Chad: I remember my dad told me also, you’re probably going to be getting some urges and you’re probably going to getting some feelings you don’t understand, and be tempted to look at things you’re not supposed to. He said that happens to everyone, it happens to me too, so I’ll make a deal with you. If you tell me when it happens to you, I’ll tell you when I’m tempted as well, okay.

T: Ohhh. Ohhh.

S: That’s so appropriate!

Chad: That’s the thing. I was a sheltered 12 year old cult child. I knew that was a trap. I was like, oh that is 100% something I’m never doing, so to my knowledge and recollection I never told him any time I was tempted to look at anything. I was just like, nah.

[laughter]

T: Well good for you! That goes to that intelligence again. Thank God.

Chad: Strong-willed! But yeah, we never really had any formal sex talk. He tried to tell me a couple of things one time when we were on the deputation trail as missionaries going church to church raising money. It was just me and him going off to some church in Kentucky one time, and he took the long drive to explain to me. He was like, some things are going to be changing with your body, it happens to everyone, don’t worry about it. Also, don’t play with yourself. We’ll talk more about that later. And we never did. Also he kind of planted it in my mind; I’m like wait – that’s an option?

[laughter]

Chad: So yeah thanks dad, you did give me some good advice, that that was possible.

[laughter]

S: Did you struggle with – if you were still bought into this belief – or I don’t know, maybe you weren’t bought into the belief about purity, maybe it was just I’m just keeping my head down and going along to get along? Or did you believe it?

Chad: I believed it. To the point where I knew that if I expressed any kind of interest in anyone or if I expressed any kind of sexual proclivities at all, I would immediately be submitted to yet another interrogation by my parents, so I just kind of kept it all on the down low. As much as I learned to block pain, I also learned to block any kind of interest I had in anyone I was talking to; any girl I found attractive or had interest in, I would just go into that mode of okay, well this is all business. Because I mean, you weren’t supposed to talk to girls in the first place; but, I did because I wanted friends and I’m a chronic extravert. So whenever I did I would try painfully to make it look as platonic as possible, because I didn’t want anyone to even think for a minute that I had an interest; otherwise I would get her dad asking me questions; my dad asking me questions; stuff like that. So I bought into it so much I became very wooden around others.

S: So it sounds like your survival technique was to close down, shut down, cut off the emotions, interest, curiosity – whether it had to do with a particular girl or the whole sexual realm; for you, it’s like no, no, don’t even go there because that’s going to make everything worse?

Chad: Yes, but at the same time I still had – you know – hormonal changes that happen to everyone; I still had the interest in sex and what have you, so I would just find different ways to find out about it. And I think the most brilliant stroke of genius I had as a teenager was using the fact that my parents were thrilled I would read the encyclopedia for fun – against them on that one, because when they weren’t looking, I would pull the S volume of the encyclopedia off the shelf, and learn what they weren’t telling me.

[laughter]

T: Oh, that’s so smart.

S: How old were you?

Chad: I was like 15 or 16.

S: Perfect.

T: It seems that you were really learning the skills of reading the room and reading all the different things that you knew would get you into trouble, and then monitoring your behavior by what can I get away with, or how can I couch this so that it’s not going to set any alarms off for them. Which is another sign of intelligence.

Chad: Well that’s the thing; IBLP didn’t actually make us better. They just made us good at hiding what we truly wanted to do.

T: Wiley. Wilier.

S: Sneakier! Schneaken! What do you remember about the other boys; the other friends; teenagers – what did you see happening around you with how they were navigating these purity culture waters?

Chad: I will say one thing, especially about the men, from that perspective – one of the reasons I think we don’t hear as much from them is because a lot of the guys I grew up with and who were in IBLP; they tended to take a view of well, I went through it and it’s behind me now, why should I ever think about it again. And I’m like, well, lucky you, because all that brainwashing and all that toxic shit I learned keeps me up at night, so I mean – glad you can do it, but some of us just couldn’t.

T: Well, and it’s so powerful for other people to hear because while they may be perfectly fine to turn away, I bet you 100% it’s impacting their lives.

S: Mmhmm.

T: And you giving voice to it gives other people the courage to like, oh, I was thinking that, I was struggling with that. So definitely very, very grateful for that.

Chad: It’s a little difficult to tell what happened during my teenage years with my peers who were in the cult, because at that point, right after we went to the conference in 1997, we went back overseas as missionaries to The Netherlands and Belgium where I stayed from the age of 12 to age 19. During my teenage years I was kind of isolated, but I do remember what happened before I left the States, and what happened after I came back. One thing I noticed was a lot of the boys, especially the ones who went through Alert Cadet and what had you, they learned that at least playing that version of masculinity that was preached to us – in between all that activities and everything, we did have speakers that would get up and tell us that we were training to be warriors for Christ and we were going to bring in the next era for Jesus and what have you. I did notice that a lot of boys took that to heart and they went full on into trying to be the best version of IBLP’s idea of masculinity that they could. I think some of them because it meant less trouble at home, and they were more approved by the cult and their peers and their parents; others, they kind of had a natural proclivity to it whether through trauma or whatever, and it just became more of a natural fit. Unfortunately when I came back to the States I did see some of my friends who tended to be more excited about the worse teachings that we got about our sex and everything.

S: When you say that, are you talking about the ability to kind of lord it over the women in your life?

Chad: Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. The whole idea that we were special because of who we were as men.

S: Because you have a cock and balls! That’s why you’re special!

Chad: The cock and balls made us superior in some way. A lot of guys really latched onto that and unfortunately when I came back I noticed they’d become variations of the abusive assholes that ran the cult. That was very disappointing to me. Others didn’t. I sincerely hoped – and I can only tell you that how I’m judged on this is by the people who knew me at the time, and I sincerely hope I wasn’t one of those folks because I didn’t want to be. But there were some who kind of kept their heads down and just pursued their own interests, and maybe took advantage of the fact that they were in large families to kind of hide out and do whatever they wanted to – kept quiet until they left home, and then could pursue their own interests themselves. It was a mixed bag, but the goal was to make essentially Josh Duggars – which, look how well that turned out for Josh Duggar.

S: Yeah.

T: Yes, I was giving a little heads up that we had done our purity culture episodes one through four, and one of the things Sharon and I explored was masturbation. Of course, we lived in a commune where that was very much preached that that was sin. Since your dad gave you a hint that you could play with yourself, was that something that you had to fight and feel guilty, or did you just have a more healthy relationship with that than a lot of people in that belief system have?

Chad: Oh 100% I felt guilty every single time. I found out pretty early on that I could play with myself and it felt good. The first time I ever orgasmed through masturbation I thought I had broken something. I did not expect that reaction but…

[laughter]

Chad: Then I found out later okay, well that’s normal, that’s fine.

T: Okay, wait. Wait – so you found out that was normal – was that through the encyclopedia?

Chad: Yes.

A: That was 100% my question Tracey. I wanted to know if it was from the encyclopedia.

[laughter]

Chad: Yeah, the encyclopedia said that it happened and I was like oh, that’s what that looks and feels like. Okay, cool.

S: But you didn’t leave like, sticky evidence in the pages of the encyclopedia, did you?

Chad: I did not have the encyclopedia when this occurred. I had a very vivid imagination, let me just put it that way.

[laughter]

S: Excellent!

[more laughter]

Chad: No, no, that’s a valid question though. Also – and I’m just going to go straight into it – wet dreams, nocturnal emissions, those started even before that, and I had a great deal of shame with that because that was another thing my dad was like, if that ever happens let me know and we’ll take care of it. Well, I didn’t trust dad with pretty much anything.

A: Okay – was he going to take care of it with magic? How was he going to take care of that? You’re asleep!

Chad: I don’t know! I did not know and I didn’t want to find out, because I learned from an early age that anything I said, there was a possibility of it becoming a sermon illustration later, and you don’t want that as a sermon illustration.

T: Oh no.

S: No, okay, but I’m gonna stop you for one second. I’m going to admit that the last few days I have really been having my own private enjoyment party, imagining Bill Gothard who is now in his 80s, never married – how many times in his lifetime do you think he’s whacked off?

Chad: Ugghh. Um…

T: Wow Sharon.

S: Stunned silence! Come on, think about it. You think that this dude has not had an ejaculation because he’s so pure? You think that as he’s been spewing this shit…

Chad: (so to speak)

S:…to everyone else about purity culture ..

[laughter]

S: Yeah, spewing. I mean, come on. You KNOW this guy whacks off.

A: I just had this insane repressed memory moment. Just now. I cannot for the life of me remember who told me this story – it was someone I grew up with. Somehow they had found out, I guess from their mother, I don’t even know. But every time they had sex and he came, his coming words were what a blessing from the Lord.

Chad: Oh no!

A: That is a repressed memory that just came into my head, a story a friend of mine told me about her parents, and I cannot – somehow when you said that about Bill Gothard all I could think about is him whacking off saying what a blessing from the Lord.

[laughter]

Chad: Abigail, you know what he probably actually called it? An awesome, awesome sight.

[laughter]

T: Oh no.

A: Oh my god, he did! That is absolutely what he would have said.

S: Okay wait, you gotta fill me in. I think I’m out of the loop. What’s the awesome awesome part?

Chad: He would say that at gatherings like Knoxville and such.

A: If there was a group of like, 100 beautiful Gothard women and they would sing his favorite hymn (which is so traumatizing to this day) and when it was done, like, all of his little horrible enslaved women would sing this hymn, and he would get on stage and be like, oh, what an awesome, awesome sight.

[laughter]

S: More of his jerk-off fodder. I bet you he played it in his head while he’s playing with his other head.

T: Exactly.

S: I’m sorry but you know what? I feel like – this guy is put up on a pedestal and who of his followers – who can imagine; what, has he been in virginal purity himself his whole life?

Chad: Many people think that, yeah.

S: Give me a break!

A: I would say that is the predominant belief system is like, he is akin to Paul in his virginial thorn in his side-ness.

S: Wow. That’s just too funny. That’s just ridiculous.

A: How many times do you remember people likening Gothard to Paul? I mean, it was constant.

Chad: Yep.

T: Yeah, I mean, even that for me – I mentioned to you Abigail in our earlier interview, that I went to the Youth Conflicts seminar, and that was one of the things that somebody with critical thinking had posed: how does this man who has never been married give advice on family and children, and it was always likened to Paul. Well, Paul was not married and he didn’t have children and look, he wrote most of the New Testament. Jesus wasn’t married and he didn’t have children, and he’s able to give us instructions, so Bill Gothard can also give us instructions.

A: Mmhmm. Yeah. That was it.

T: Okay so back to Chad – I’m sorry, you started to say Sharon that that gave you a little enjoyment, and we’re a little worried about you.

[laughter]

S: I’m sorry, it just does.

Chad: I may not masturbate again for another month after that but yeah.

A: I think it could ruin us all.

[laughter]

S: Oh my god, that’ll cure you. That’ll cure you! Just imagine Bill Gothard doing it.

T: Oh my god.

A:  I think if they had just preached that from the pulpit it would have worked much better.

[laughter]

T: It’s so eww.

S: Ewww. Okay, sorry.

T: So Chad, how do you follow that?

[laughter]

Chad: Well, yeah. The only thing I can say is, when those things started happening – when I did have a wet dream – I never told my parents about it. I would go through elaborate attempts to hide my night clothes, underwear and everything…

A: Your sin, Chad! You were hiding your sin.

Chad: Yes. I was hiding it until I could put it deep into the laundry hamper where mom would never see what had happened, or she’d just think oh that’s something from a couple of days ago. I got really good at hiding anything involving my sexuality or anything I desperately didn’t want my parents to know about. I would hide masturbation as well. I got pretty good at taking short showers and getting things done in pretty quick order. God I miss being 16. But…

[laughter]

Chad: But it was also a shame because every time I would do it, inevitably something awkward would happen in my life; maybe I would get a cold, or maybe I would twist an ankle or something like that, and I would always tie anything that happened in my life to oh, I masturbated so therefore God is judging me.

T: Ohh.

Chad: Again, it’s that whole cult mentality of if something wrong happens to you, it’s probably on you.

S: Not probably.

T: That’s the mindfuckery. It’s so terrible to have that part in your adolescence and growing up. So terrible.

S: So Chad, I’m curious about how and when your beliefs began to shift.

Chad: Phew. Yes, me too actually. Um, it was not overnight, I will tell you that, and even after I graduated and left IBLP and ATI behind and my family moved onto other things for my siblings, I still tried to make the beliefs make sense for me. One thing IBLP and ATI do not do is prepare you for the real world. I was already too old and my parents were too broke to send me to any of the training centers or headquarters, and they didn’t care at that point anyway. The colleges I was recommended that my parents did approve of were all fundamentalist paper mills, like diploma mills rather – like Pensacola Christian College, Bob Jones University, Patrick Henry College, which was my personal pick. All those – they didn’t work out so I took a bit of a gap year, and I started working as Minister of Music for a church in Mississippi that my dad was affiliated with. It was a small church, older congregation, and they were trying to rebuild to a sustainable amount of folks every week, basically to keep the lights on. So I saw it as my mission to help this church. Well, it was a secluded church; very fundamentalist; very old school. The pastor was a younger fella, he was in his mid-30s which is unusual for most Independent Fundamental Baptist churches. We struck up a friendship and he kept telling me his vision for the church. I believed in his vision as he shared it with me, even though I noticed he had a tendency to be a bit of a control freak. This came to a head about a year after I started working for him when his wife left and sued him for emotional abuse. It hit the paper and everything, in that little town.

S: Wow.

Chad: He resigned as pastor, but somehow a month later she came back and everything was just fine and he wanted to be pastor again. I knew something was wrong there. This has red flag all over it. I come to find out this had also happened previously at another church he had pastored before he had come to Mississippi, but no one had mentioned that to us when he became pastor there. So the church voted him back in, and I resigned immediately. Again, there was that little voice in the back of my head that said this is wrong. I said I can’t serve under this, I’m sorry, I’m out. I told my dad about it because he was also involved in the situation and we commiserated on it later, and he said well, it’s sad, but these things happen and it’s best not to talk about it because we don’t want to damage his ministry. That was unusual for me, because my dad had been very vocal about ministries that had done wrong things before. He had actually left a college in his early ministry and everything, because he was convinced the faculty was having seances, and he led public student protest on that.

T: Wow.

Chad: Right? Horror of horrors.

T: Where’s that church??

Chad: It is no longer there! It was that effective. And he had spoken out against other preachers, but this time because it was something close, he said well we’re just not going to talk about it. That immediately sent up red flags in my mind. As I tried to make sense of what had happened, and why (in my view) why God would have let this happen, because he had allegedly promised to bless ministries, and keep them viable and on the straight and narrow and if you did the right things, the right things would happen – it didn’t happen here, and now we’re not supposed to talk about it. So I started looking into other ministries where there had been allegations of things happening, and inevitably they all led back to preachers that I was taught to revere, and to hold in high regard that my dad did. People like Jack Hyles, who led a cultish church up in Hammond Indiana. He had horrible allegations levied against him by his own daughter, even, that I believe are absolutely credible. My dad told me we don’t talk about things like that. His son-in-law who was legitimately convicted and served time for horrible sexual abuse of a minor – dad told me well, we don’t talk about that either.

S: Oh my god.

Chad: I finally had a confrontation with him where I said hey look all these people – this keeps happening. I found out too, while I was gone there had been sexual abuse of my friends here in the Birmingham Alabama area by people, fathers in ATI and IBLP who I’d been taught to look up to. I told dad, I was like, why was I never told about this? And he said well, these things happen yes, but we don’t talk about it because we don’t want to make the ministry look bad and hurt the cause of Christ.

S: These things happen.

Chad: Yes.

S: These things happen. Yep. These things happen, because you know, we’re just men after all. These things happen. It is so maddening, Chad, to hear over and over and over the dismissiveness, the looking the other way, the not facing up to it because of some greater good because of the message of Jesus. I’m sorry, I just had to say that, I’m right there with you. Keep going.

Chad: You’re 100% correct. That needs to be said, because normalizing this shit keeps it going.

T: Keeps it going.

Chad: That’s what I told him. I said, I didn’t sign up to hurt people. I didn’t sign up to let them continue to be hurt. That’s not what I thought was happening here, and I’m disappointed. We had a huge falling out over it and I finally said, I’m out. At that point I tried to make Christianity work for me in other various ways, it ended up not working which is another whole side conversation, but that was really the catalyst for me leaving. It was story after story after story that had been suppressed by people who had been hurt. Then of course, right about that time all the allegations came forward about Bill Gothard and the women who worked for him at headquarters. That shattered my entire world, because this is literally my schooling from the age of seven until my graduation – I was taught if I followed these rules, these things would never happen, and they fucking happened in the cult. That threw me into a tailspin. That was when I started having therapy because I started having random panic attacks, and saw my world collapsing around me. It was traumatizing, in and of itself.

S: What year was that?

Chad: It was a gradual process, but I would say around 2012 – 2014. 2014 was when the allegations against Gothard forward and he resigned.

T: Yeah, I remember that. Can I just say, and call out that the sweet boy in you is having to cry out and fight Christian institution, to say wait, wait, we’re not supposed to hurt people here. And you’re getting argued back! If that’s not screwed up, I don’t know what is, and that’s what we’re seeing – this domino effect of so many of these ministries that have turned away and hidden so many of these abuse stories, and I just want to thank you for being one that would stand up and say no, I didn’t sign up to hurt people; this isn’t right.

Chad: One of the last times my dad and I ever hung out together, just ourselves, me and him – we went fishing together. Sometime in the mid-twenty-tens. I don’t remember when, but I remember him volunteering, it wasn’t even part of the conversation, but he said look son, I saw and heard a lot of things in a lot of the ministries I’ve been involved in, and there was some people who probably should have gone to jail for what they did. But it wasn’t my place to speak out. And I looked at him and I said, whose place was it? You are an Independent Fundamental Baptist preacher. Allegedly there is no body higher up on the chain because you’re independent. There’s no convention or anything. If not you, who? Who had the right to speak out? He didn’t have an answer.

S: That is so good. That is so good, Chad. You know what pisses me off? They’ll look back and point to the scriptures about David and Saul, right? Because David, the man after God’s own heart, he is not going to touch “God’s anointed”. And that bullshit is how it gets justified, and you know what it is? People are just cowards. I’m sorry, they’re just cowards, because if they’re going to challenge the powers that be, that means they’re also going to have to question a few of the foundational beliefs, and they just don’t want to go there. They don’t want to go there.

T: And you say that was the last time you guys had a deep conversation?

Chad: It was the last time we had a deep conversation, just he and I by ourselves. Every other time we hung out after that, which became fewer and fewer as my family became more and more toxic to hang around, every other time after that he always had either my mom or someone else nearby. We never spent any more time alone after that really.

T: And then how did you and Abigail meet? Was it around this time as well?

Chad: We actually met about a year ago. I believe we may have met in an online survivor group for ATI and you picked up on the fact that I was here in Alabama and we struck up a conversation from there. We actually met in person for the first time a couple of weeks ago, because we’ve both been busy as hell. It’s very rare that I get to meet anyone in this area who’s ex-ATI who will still talk to me, because a few people are still sympathetic; even if they’re out they’re not really happy with the choices I’ve made, and that’s fine, they’re allowed to have that. But the few people who have, Abigail included, even though she grew up over in Atlanta – it’s something I treasure and I value. So, thanks Abigail.

A: It’s great for me too, and I do think – you know what Chad says about people who are pretty sympathetic to leaving the IBLP as long as you remain in evangelicalism as a whole, but it is a much narrower pool of people who are really interested in hearing the fullness of your story or my story, when you’ve chosen not to stay within evangelicalism as a whole. That’s been a pretty rare and cherished friendship for me, and I think being able to have those conversations with Chad has been really helpful.

S: That’s great. I’m glad y’all have each other.

T: Yes, and have been so generous to share your time with us. In our earlier interview Abigail, and now with Chad, we did touch on some twisted stuff that’s a combination of that purity culture and that ritualized spanking abuse that we’ve talked about, and how these can be a toxic mix that really impact the development of our human sexuality. We did ask Chad and Abigail if they would be brave enough to dive into that topic with us, so we are honored that you are wiling to come back and have that conversation with us.

S: Yeah, I just can’t overstate how important I think it is to have this open discussion. I echo Tracey’s gratefulness that Chad and Abigail are willing to come out and put it on the table. So, we’re going to push the pause button here and continue our conversation, but you guys are going to get to listen to it next week.

T: Yes. And you will not want to miss it, we promise you, but before we sign off Abigail and Chad, do you want to share with listeners how they can find out more about you or any of your social media, or links they would want to find?

Chad: I’m primarily on TikTok, you can find me @ArchRadish, that’s Chad Harris mixed up. Arch Radish. You can find me at @ArchRadish85 on Instagram – I swear I’m gonna actually start using that. Also on Twitter @ArchRadish. So find me there.

A: Oh my god, we’ve been friends for such a long time and I just figured out that Arch Radish is your name mixed up.

T: I thought he really liked Radishes.

A: I did too! I didn’t know what it was. I was like maybe it’s like a Mario thing from Nintendo or something. Anyway. You guys can find me primarily on TikTok @unicornhabitat.

S: Okay! And we will add those links to our show notes, and Abigail, a little something about your work with the therapy dog non-profit as well. Okay folks, you know the drill. Follow us, rate us, leave a review pretty please – it helps us move up in the ratings.

T: And you can also check out some photos and all of our updates on Instagram, that’s Feet of Clay.CultSisters.

… (bloopers)

S: Wait, I want to ask the brilliant rat…

[laughter]

S: The brilliant radish. I want to ask the brilliant radish, Chad.

[laughter]

T: Do tell us, brilliant radish.

Chad: That’s my official title now. I’m putting it on my business cards.

T: The brilliant radish.

[laughter]

T: I don’t think anything’s better than brilliant radish.

S: It’s too funny.

…

S: Thanks so much for listening everybody. We will catch you next time.

T: Byebye!