Kimi Cook was 15 years old when she arrived at Lester Roloff’s Rebekah Home for Girls in Corpus Christi, Texas. Eager to end the teenager’s relationship with an older boyfriend, her parents pitched the place as an accelerated boarding school. Cook—who had previously done well on tests despite cutting classes at her San Antonio public school—eventually agreed to a month-long trial period.
Within hours of arriving, Cook learned she was no longer allowed to wear jeans, listen to rock music, or use tampons. She would also be required to attend church daily, memorize and chant from the Bible, and scrub her room early each morning. Disobedience was met with strict punishment ranging from revoked snack privileges to receiving “licks” with a wooden paddle, being put in an isolated closet, or being forced to kneel on linoleum for hours on end.
When she was allowed phone calls, Cook pleaded with her family to save her from what she remembered describing as a “jail” and “prison camp.” But three months in, she learned that no help was coming. As Cook recalled, a relative “explained to me that by signing the admittance paper, I had signed myself over into the care of the Roloff homes.”
By the time Cook started there, in 1983, the Southern Baptist Rebekah Home for Girls had already been the subject of state investigations spanning the previous decade, instigated in part by parents who witnessed a girl being whipped at the facility. In fact, Roloff had already temporarily closed the school—and the other homes he operated in Texas—after being prosecuted by the state on behalf of 16 former Rebekah Home for Girls residents. (Roloff grew even more notorious for exclaiming in court, “Better a pink bottom than a black soul.”)
After losing his last Supreme Court appeal in 1978, the Rebekah Home for Girls became the site of the “Christian Alamo,” where religious leaders formed a human chain around the place to defend against attempts to remove girls from Roloff’s care. The issue was eventually “resolved” by Governor Bill Clements, who Roloff himself had campaigned for. With an ally in office—Clements once said the closures amounted to “nitpicking” by his predecessor—Roloff transferred ownership of the homes from Roloff Enterprises to Roloff’s People’s Baptist Church; under this religious auspice, a state court ruled Roloff’s homes could operate without a license.
Roloff himself died in 1982, but by then he had established a strong tradition of exploiting the religious freedom loophole to shield suspect youth residential facilities from outside scrutiny. Somehow, that same loophole still exists across much of America today.
Cook escaped the school she hated when her older brother was killed in a car accident 11 months into her stay. The home was closed again in 1985 following pressure from the state, but reopened yet again in 1999, after Governor George W. Bush introduced religious exemptions for youth residential home regulations. The school operated until 2001, when a supervisor at Rebekah was convicted of unlawful restraint; finally, Texas laws were changed to require licensure for all youth homes—including religious ones.
Rebekah closed permanently in 2001, but at least some of its ex-employees helped found the New Beginnings Girls Academy in Missouri. This residence remains in operation despite state investigations into allegations of abuse. (VICE was unable to reach New Beginnings officials in connection with this story.)
Though Texas laws were changed amid the Roloff saga, many other state governments around the country lack the legal power to oversee religiously affiliated residential schools. Unlike personal religious exemptions, where an individual might argue that a law requiring, say, medical intervention, vaccination, or anti-discrimination violates his or her religious freedom, these facilities don’t need to apply for special treatment. In many states, such exemptions are written directly into the laws meant to regulate residential youth facilities—that is, religious schools are never subject to the rules in the first place.
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In 2010, Clayton “Buddy” Maynard’s Heritage Boys Academy in Panama City, Florida, closed following allegations of racial discrimination and severe corporal punishment. When the prosecution lost witnesses in 2011, a criminal case against Maynard was dropped; in 2012, the Tampa Bay Times reported that Maynard was once again housing children at Truth Baptist Church in Panama City. This past May, a GoFoundMe page raised $500 in support of Maynard and the “Maynard Family Children’s Home.” Currently, he appears to operate the Truth Baptist Church in Panama City and, according to his Facebook profile, a “Truth for Troubled Youth Ministries.” (VICE was unable to reach Maynard for comment for this story.)
The same whack-a-mole pattern of scattershot oversight can be found across much of the country. Bobby Wills’s Bethesda Home for Girls in Mississippi closed in the 1980s following allegations of beatings with wooden boards, with operators moving on to the now closed Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy in Missouri. Alabama’s Reclamation Ranch was raided a decade ago following allegations of torture, yet founder Jack Patterson—who, according to his Facebook page, is a proud disciple of Roloff—continues to run an addiction-focused rehabilitation facility under the same name, now associated with Lighthouse Baptist Church. (Patterson has denied allegations of abuse at his facilities.) Yet another Baptist pastor, Michael Palmer, battled legal oversight over multiple decades and across multiple state and country-wide jurisdictions: In 1991, Palmer closed Victory Christian Academy after the state of California pushed for licensure.
One former student who attended Victory Christian described extended abuse at the school, including something called the “Get Right Room,” a small space where girls were punished with a version of solitary confinement. “You were brain-washed into thinking the abuse was good because the staff and the Lord loved your soul,” recalled Cherie Rife, now a holistic health practitioner in Irvine, California. Alleging that she was singled out for being a lesbian, Rife pointed to the religious justification that loomed above it all: “[Their] Baptist interpretation was used for fear and control and shaming.”
Palmer later helped found Genesis by the Sea, a facility located in Baja California that was closed in 2004 by the Mexican government; though the ensuing investigation asserted that claims of abuse were unsubstantiated, the school never reopened. Instead, Palmer redirected his attention to the Florida Panhandle and yet another residential reform home for girls: Lighthouse of Northwest Florida, which he closed in 2013 following an investigation into allegations of rape at the facility.
As Newsweek reported, Restoration Youth Academy in Prichard, Alabama, was yet another home operating under a modern incarnation of the Lester Roloff approach until 2012. The facility remained free from oversight until Charles Kennedy, the now retired captain of the Prichard Police Department, received a phone call from the mother of a boy who said he’d been abused at the facility. When I spoke with Kennedy, he recalled what he found at the home: a naked boy locked in a closet, widespread allegations of physical abuse, severe exercise, and sadistic mind games. Staff had even encouraged a suicidal student to shoot himself with a gun he didn’t know wasn’t loaded, Kennedy said.
— Nile Cappello, VICE, How Christian Reform Schools Get Away with Brutal Child Abuse, December 6, 2017
I hope you take the time to read all of Cappello’s story. As sickening as the story is, other Baptist group homes escaped Cappello’s investigatory eyes. These homes continue to this day to psychologically and physically harm vulnerable IFB teenagers. I have written several posts on these homes:
Teen Group Homes: Dear IFB Pastor, It’s Time for You to Atone for Your Sin
How Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Churches Deal with Unwed Mothers
Sexual Abuse in the Name of God: New Bethany Home for Girls
The Dogma that Followed Me Home by Cat Givens
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Mack Ford was Calvary’s “missionary to lost teen girls” when I was growing up. He & several girls from his homes would come around every so often and cause an emotional uproar, with much crying, singing & fanfare. Calvary, (myself & hundreds of other families), gave a fortune to him over the decades; it’s ashame he was never brought to justice
“And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yeah, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
Yeah, right.
My grandmother used to listen to Christian radio religiously (yes, I went after the cheap pun). I remember the name Lester Roloff because I thought it was a funny name (I was a kid at the time). I didn’t know he was associated with scandal. Not a surprise. She watched/listened to/read all the famous evangelicals such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Hal Lindsey, Jim Bakker (she didn’t like him that much, it was her mother who liked him), and of course the penultimate evangelist Billy Graham. One of her favorite radio shows was the “Christian Jew Hour” – I truly believe that if she had discovered she was of Jewish descent and was also a devoted Christian that would have been the absolute best combination that could have been bestowed on her by God – to be one of God’s chosen people by blood and one of his redeemed by choice (and Jesus’ blood).
I don’t even want to think about how much money she must have given to those preachers.
In 1975,I got pregnant at 18 but was still living at home. When I refused to have an abortion, my dad wanted to send me here BUT thank God, I had the gumption to tell him I wasn’t going cos, being of age, I didn’t have to.I sure dodged a bullet.
You won’t fool most of us with your lies. This is TRASH from a wicked person who hates God and everyone who stands for Him.
You will face Him someday, and you will regret your hate for Him and His people.
sigh
Candice thinks you’re pretty HOT Lucifer ! You continue to have that insane ability to melt the scum out of the woodwork. Glad you’re on our side. Whew !
Your threat against us has been noted, Candice. Yes, your threat, not something concocted by your imaginary fiend. There is no credible evidence for the god you worship, and no person alive or dead has ever faced it — except in their fevered imaginations.
Hi Candice,
Well there you go. Who knew you were such a loving person. I’ll be you can’t wait for your own judgement day.
I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.
No one here hates your God. Why would anyone hate a fairy-tale character? I think a lot of us DO hate what “his people” say & do in his name though. Like angrily threatening us with eternal torture in posts to the blogs that we read. (Although I think some here are also so bored of Christians threatening people – because they seem to do that A LOT – that they haven’t got the even got the energy to hate it anymore.)
Candice, your pitiful little sadistic fantasies will never come true. Bruce does a good job at showing how so many Christians lie and fail. And your god can’t do a thing about that.
Candice, in attacking someone who points out abuse, takes a stance in favor of abuse. I am here with Bruce’s commentariat because I am anti-abuse. Evangelicals have a huge problem with all kinds of abuse: Sexual, emotional, and financial. The latest evangelical abuser to be in the news recently is Kent Hovind who is facing domestic violence allegations. So, this comment makes sense in that context. Best to avoid them and their churches and stand against their power-lust and control-grabs as much as possible.
I was in the Rebekah Home for girls in the 80’s and I will tell you it was horrific. The they paddled girls to a point of causing bruising. If someone knew someone was doing something wrong and didn’t report it to staff they would get put in a dark room on the floor with nothing to lay on,sometimes for days. Every day twice we had to sit in a circle and chant Bible verses. I could go on for days telling things that went on. If they paddled you and you cried they would paddle you more. It was a year of my life I will never get back and never forget.
I wonder? Just as pedophiles seek out employment in jobs that require day-long interaction with children, do natural born psychopaths and socially created sociopaths seek out jobs as IFB pastors and pastor leaders/staff members at these IFB “rehabilitation” homes? I would guess that the answer is “yes.” What I cannot figure out is why Christian Fundamentalists have not spotted this rather obvious possibility on their own radars? Do they just not think or care?
Oh yeah. I remember the 1980s favored fad term now——-“tough love.” That is when you beat a child to within an inch of her life, maybe rape her a couple of times as punishment, and then loudly quote scripture about sparing the rod and spoiling the child. Tough love? No. This is not love at all. It is abuse plain and simple. This is also how you inadvertently teach that same child to one day become an adult physical and sexual abuser. Children learn from their experiences, but what they learn from them is not always positive. Was Jesus thinking about the positive points of “tough love” when the Roman guards were whipping him, drawing blood, and pushing the crown of thorns down tightly onto his head? I very much doubt it!!!