Posted on 05/31/2022 2:03:17 PM PDT by Morgana
A woman who grew up in an ultra-conservative Christian sect has detailed how she left the fundamentalist group, came out as a lesbian, and wrote her first novel after her therapist helped her realize she was in a 'cult.'
Elizabeth Hunter, 28, was raised by a family in Texas that belonged to the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) — also known as ATI — after being abandoned by her biological parents and rehomed.
The ministry founded by Bill Gothard promotes a patriarchal family system in which children are expected to follow his interpretation of Bible scriptures and always obey their fathers.
Hunter, who is known as @thatlizhunter on social media, has been opening up about her experience and answering questions about being raised with IBLP's teachings in a series of TikTok videos.
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'Whatever your dad said was absolute law, and you had to do whatever your dad wanted you to do or you were disobeying God himself,' she explained in one clip.
She was three when her biological parents gave her up, and she spent years in and out of foster homes until her parents took her in when she was nine.
'My legal guardians drove me up to a home, unloaded my one backpack full of things, and then drove off,' she recalled in another video.
'For the rest of my life, I believed I was adopted by my mom and dad. I told people that. I thought they were my parents. Nine-year-old me thought I was adopted.'
It wasn't until she was an adult and trying to enroll her sister in public school that she learned she had been rehomed and was never legally adopted, though she still considers her mother and father to be her parents.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
The quotation marks belong more around “Christian” than around the word “cult”.
Agreed. And few things are more cultic than the LGBTQP movement she’s now part of.
This is either one of the unluckiest people on Earth, or one of the biggest liars ever, or just somebody hoping to cash-in on a book she wrote.
Qanon strikes again.
...especially regarding abortion, gender reassignment, and exploring their sexuality.
The only responsible choice is to assume that all parents are religious nuts and a constant danger to their children. Only teachers properly trained in DEI, CRT and LGBTQIA+ issues are competent to bring up our future followers, er, leaders.
Yup. Crazy blue haired lezbo claims “Christian” child abuse. Maybe. Could explain what she turn into. Or she’s another lefty liar attacking the only people on this earth who give a shit. And I’m sure there’s no projection, exaggeration, or ‘filling in of details’ either.
I looked at article. She is the only ‘source’ of this claim. No witnesses. No pictures. No scars. Not even a diary. So, again, maybe. Accusing your parents of horrible felonies that went unreported for years [by anyone] and didn’t leave a mark might just need a bit more, I think.
Me and Celtic Conservative say:
Qanon strikes again.
Because I speak for she/him/her/they/zu
Ultra-conservative?
Sounds more like a progressive cult to me.
Exactly... weirdos.
I Don’t believe a word of this other than someone wrote a book to demonize Christians.
Ymmv.
Why are there two guys in one of the family photos?
Later on I knew some of the extended Gothard family, and really can't complain about the way they lived their lives.
But fame is a harsh mistress, and its lashing are not gentle.
We have seen over and over again how the LGBT movement is closer to any cult that Christians ever worried about. Grooming the weak in spirit is just the start of their evil.
... after her therapist helped her realize she was in a 'cult.'
Now, about that therapist ...
at least his name is not Dick Gothard. cause c’mon.
Headlines can be extremely stupid. He family was in a cult. Period. Nothing Christian about it. They used Christianity to further their goals.
Just like Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple. A hardcore atheist who used the guise of religion to sucker people in.
I just came here for the run on sentence.
I just came here for the run on sentence.
And the double posts?
CC
I personally can tell you that her narrative is quite false as applied to the whole slice of our population influenced by IBLP. I have my own story and experiences with deep involvement with Gothard and the Institute. Here are some of mine:
My two sons worked as technicians for the Institute five years each,in the mid 1980s and early 1990s. They received great rewards for applying the principles taught there. Each of them was benefitted by their travels for thousands of miles across the United States and Canada to set up the equipment and organize the convention sites while conducting the Basic and Advanced Seminars that were taught by Bill Gothard.
These were attended and supported by solidly effective church members everywhere. My sons met and worked with local committees of responsible Christians of all denominations everywhere. IBLP was NOT a cult. The organization held morning devotions prior to the working day, but was closed on Sundays, strongly urging its employees (especially resident ones), to seek out and attend their own churches of their own choice, and to support them with involvement financially and in their own local ministries.
IBLP was approved and helped by godly pastors like Charles Stanley, whom I and my sons met; and evangelists like Al Smith and Dr. Frank Garlock, the proprietor of Majesty Music, a hymnal publisher, whom I also met while visiting my sons at IBLP.
Elizabeth's puerile "testimony" here is contradicted by the educational contents of reams of good Christian literature that has guided hundreds of families to a worthy progressive maturation of their children to successful futures far better than the one achieved by this creative false narrative fabricator.
I myself am a scientist retired from the experimental staff of a well-known global corporation. I had worked in two others likewise, and also had post-doctoral exerience in a famous university. In all of these I found a number of sane, productive scientists who were fully true Christians like myself. And I raised my children while doing so.
One of the boys I raised wound up serving IBLP. While there he had learned how to administer mid-range and mainframe computers, and subsequently has been an Information Management System Director to other corporations for several years. He has needed no college degree for it.
One of his children is an engineer-degreed college graduate but has become the dedicated director of a Campus ministry group, working with his wife to gain new recruits to Christianity from the student body there. And successful at it, but not made rich from it.
His four sisters are themselves successful and excellent productive citizens elsewhere, not jobless welfare consumers. They are not liars regarding the godly ways they were brought up, like this unfaithful sexual deviant Elizabeth "Hunter" is doing.
My other son in the early 1990s was first a regular employee of IBLP, but then simultaneously became a full-time student at Illinois Institute of Technology, graduating from it at the head of his engineering class. He was selected to give the student's address at the Commencement, where the chairman of a major corporation was the main speaker. This son was invited back for his Master's degree, an unusual move for IIT. In his life he has followed the principles learned and brought to public attention as an IBLP employee. He is still fully employed as a consultant in civil engineering projects.
Married to the daughter of one of the main administrators of IBLP and contributor to IBLP's literature, my son and his wife have raised and home-schooled ten children, of whom one has a PhD in engineering. He is presently employed in a national science lab. His brother is an Armed Forces officer, next promotion will be to field grade. Two of his sisters just graduated a few days ago from a well-known fundamental Bible college, having traveled as musicians across the country while representing their college to recruit applicants. Their brother, a fellow student, has just returned from a missionary trip to Africa and will proceed into pilot training as a flying missionary.
The whole family has demonstrated faithfulness to their Savior, all engaging in daily meditations a la IBLP while acting as excellent, reliable, conservative, Constitution-oriented contributing citizens, not like this truth-distorting, faithless, sexually deviant exhibitionist whose Christian-condemning publicity you are freely distributing here on Free Republic, undermining the efforts of Christian participants of FR without a leveling comment on your part.
To add to this, my computer-science-degreed daughter, whom I raised in her later childhood in a fundamentally Christian environment. She was exposed to the IBLP Seminars and has been influenced greatly by them, but having become a widow of an abusive non-christian husband (not with my approval), has now for many years been committed to allegiance to a local Christian assembly of fundamental believers.
She is a high-level vice-president of a widely-known national banking system, and has been engaged in the buying-out of others. She is not a self-professing disoriented deviant liar-to-her-origins like this still-infantile would-be author Elizabeth, whose debilitating tale seems worthwhile to be shown here om the Religion ZForum!
I myself still stand by the founding principle proclaimed by Bill Gothard, and furthered by the theme of his IBLP Seminars on basic youth conflicts and their solutions. In rinclple, that is o look at life experiences through God's Eyes and His Word, not through those of ill-founded anti-biblical philosophers, psychologists, and phony religionists.
If you investigate deeply enough, Gothard himself has not fully fulfilled the Biblical promises, but that does not mean that he declared them falsely, nor that they were wrong or hurtful to any degree if not followed, as this rejecting, distorting "witness" Elizabeth tries to falsely picture and report.
There are thousands of hearers of God's basic life principles obtained from the Holy Scriptures, enumerated by the Institute in its Seminars, and followed by the subscribers to the literature it publishes. I am ne of them, and heartily approve of their brochures and pamphlets.
I would avoid publishing anti-Christian chaff like this Hunter article, Morgana.
Can't you see, just from the video clips, the kind of attitude in back of her practiced phony acting out of the lie she is declaring?
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