Two more men have come forward to accuse Christian rock superstar and Maga firebrand Michael Tait of drugging and sexually assaulting them – including Jason Jones, the founding manager of the American hard-rock band Evanescence.

Jones said he was fired from the band – which had ties to Tait – for speaking out about his alleged assault. Jones said the firing, which he claimed happened in 1999, cut him out of Evanescence’s massive success beginning in 2003.

“It destroyed me,” said Jones. “I was achieving my dreams at an early age, and Tait changed all that.”

Evanescence co-founder Ben Moody denied Jones was fired from the band for speaking out against Tait.

Moody said he does recall Jones telling him about a sexual encounter with Tait, but at the time Moody interpreted it as consensual.

“I was a kid, only 18, and clearly didn’t realize what he was going through,” Moody said. “I’m sure I missed a lot of things I’d recognize today. I didn’t realize he was traumatized.”

In all, eight alleged victims have now come forward publicly with sexual assault allegations against Tait. A previous investigation by the Guardian reported allegations of sexual assault by Tait against three young men while another from the Christian news outlet the Roys Report reported allegations by three other men.

Tait became famous as the frontman for DC Talk and Newsboys, two Christian mega-bands known for packaging conservative rhetoric about sexual abstinence, sobriety, Christian nationalism and the coming rapture in catchy rock songs. Tait has been a supporter of Donald Trump and served as a key bridge between Trump and evangelical voters.

Tait has not responded to questions from the Guardian about the allegations against him. But in an Instagram post in June, Tait confessed to a decades-long addiction to cocaine and alcohol and admitted that he had “at times, touched men in an unwanted, sensual way”.

In the post, Tait added that he had recently “spent six weeks at a treatment center in Utah”.

Jones was described by friends who knew him in the 1990s as a happy-go-lucky Christian teenager, bursting with ambition and creativity. Growing up in Arkansas, Jones remembers, one of his biggest dreams was “to meet DC Talk”.

Jones achieved that dream in 1994 after moving to Nashville to manage the band of his friend, Randall Crawford, who was also friends with Tait and introduced the two.

Jones recalled going to McDonalds with the DC Talk frontman and being mobbed by so many teenage fans they had to leave before getting their food. “That kind of thing happened a lot,” he said.

Jones was thrilled to be welcomed into Tait’s inner circle, yet he was taken aback by what he described as Tait’s proclivity for randomly grabbing other men’s genitals. He said he eventually learned that Tait was living a double-life as a closeted gay man, which was becoming a problem for a band mentored by Moral Majority co-founder Jerry Falwell, who called Aids “God’s punishment for homosexuality”.

While surprised, Jones held no negative feelings toward Tait’s sexuality, even taking him to gay clubs in Little Rock (at Tait’s request) when DC Talk performed there.

Jones was regularly traveling back and forth from Nashville to Little Rock, and in 1995 he met aspiring musician Moody – the two of them hitting it off and collaborating on a project that would come to be named Evanescence.

After co-producing the first Evanescence demo, Jones returned to Nashville and began talking up the band to his friend, Tait.

Jones, as an evangelical, was sober and a virgin at the time. But he recalls getting caught up in a whirlwind of partying with Tait in 1995, chain-smoking cigarettes and marijuana and closing down bars, then returning to Tait’s house to continue drinking. Jones said he was uncomfortable with all of it, but was eager for Tait’s approval so he complied.

“I had this band that I was trying to take places,” Jones recalled. “And [Tait] had the power to open doors for us in the industry. So I went along with whatever, but didn’t know what it would cost me.”

Jones’ used his connection with Tait to help Evanescence get a foot in the door in Nashville, speaking with A&R people, record labels, venue owners, producers and musicians.

Sources that wish to remain anonymous alleged that Tait had a rotation of attractive young men at his Nashville home at this time, some of them underage, and that Tait had a “no clothes allowed” rule in his hot tub. “He would put his penis against one of the jets, and tell us to do the same, saying ‘see, it feels good!’” recalled a source who visited Tait regularly at this time, and wishes to remain anonymous.

“He was all about the shock factor,” recalled Crawford, who was close with Jones and Tait throughout the 90s. “He was always saying ‘let’s make out in front of these people!’ And I was like ‘no, you’re gonna destroy your career.’ But he felt untouchable. And in some ways, he was.”

Around this same time, Crawford recalls Tait driving him through the campus of Liberty University – Falwell’s Christian college where DC Talk formed – speeding at 60mph and getting pulled over by campus security, who turned from anger to laughter when seeing Tait behind the wheel, even asking for pictures and autographs.

“After they left, Michael turned to me, calm as ever, and said: ‘I can do anything and not get in trouble.’”

Jones recalls drinking at Tait’s house one night in late 1998, just after DC Talk finished rehearsals for their Supernatural album tour. Jones remembers feeling tired suddenly, and Tait recommended he go to sleep in his bedroom. “I felt honored that he felt that close to me, that he trusted me enough to let me sleep in his bed,” Jones said.

Some time later, Jones recalls waking up, his pants missing, and Tait was giving him oral sex. “I said no and pushed him off, but then, somehow, I passed out again. I woke back up and he was still doing it. I said no again, then nodded out. And then I woke up a third time, aggressively shouted ‘no!’ and pushed him harder. It was then that he left me alone.”

Looking back, Jones said, “I believe that Michael Tait drugged me.”

Two alleged victims from the Guardian’s previous report also say they believe they were drugged by Tait before their alleged assaults. In addition, a female accuser cited by the Roys Report said she believed that Tait supplied Rohypnol or some other sedative to a crew member on a Newsboys tour, who then drugged and raped her while Tait watched.

Distraught and in need of comfort, Jones flew home to Little Rock the day after he said he was assaulted. There he confided in a friend and mentor – who wishes to remain anonymous – that he had had “a bad experience with Tait,” but wouldn’t go into details. “He wasn’t the same after that,” Jones’s friend recalled.

Jones said that in early 1999 he had also confided in his friend and Evanescence co-founder, Ben Moody, about being sexually assaulted by Tait. “Ben was only 18 at the time, new to the music industry, and I wanted to warn him,” Jones recalled. “[Tait] was flying Ben out to Nashville to write songs together, to see if he fit in Tait’s inner-circle.”

Moody remembers things differently.

“He didn’t frame it as ‘sexual assault,’” Moody said. “He described it as like frat-boy joking around while they were drunk, with [Tait] saying ‘what’s the big deal? A dick’s just a muscle.’ And Jason said ‘the next thing I know he’s sucking my dick.’”

Jones said he remains confident that he told Moody the full details of the assault, including that he verbally and physically resisted Tait three times as his consciousness came and went.

Moody said he soon noticed a change in Jones’s demeanor. Jones, a passionate, fun-loving guy who was easy to get along with, began suffering manic swings from depression to rage to paranoia and then to dissociation. “After a late night studio he couldn’t get the car shifter into gear and he just started screaming, hurling his body around, jerking the shifter violently like he was going to break it off.”

Moody said he and the band began wondering if they should continue working with Jones. In retrospect, Moody said: “I didn’t know what he was going through. Looking back I would’ve been a bit more attentive, but I was the typical 18 year old who wanted to be a rockstar.”

Moody said that in a phone call with Tait, he mentioned that Jones had told him about a sexual encounter between them, which Tait then denied. “I wanted to get ahead of [Jason] talking shit about us and ruining the whole thing. Back then there were rumors Michael Tait [was gay] and at that point, right after [DC Talk’s Grammy-winning album] Jesus Freak, he was the biggest thing in Christian music history, and the scandal would’ve been a huge deal.”

Jones and Moody differ on whether he was fired or quit, but both recall the incident with Tait – however it was characterized – as the turning point of the relationship.

“I hid away after that,” Jones recalls. “I started snorting meth, then smoking it.”

His isolation and drug binge would continue for five years.

Moody said he regrets how things went down with Jones back then. “He was my best friend for so many years, and now I ask myself ‘how fucking blind could I have been?’”

Evanescence went on to be one of the biggest bands in the world, winning “Best New Artist” and “Best Hard Rock Performance” at the Grammys in 2003 and eventually selling tens of millions of albums.

The following year, Moody and Tait would go on to be roommates and musical collaborators, with Tait singing on Moody’s solo album, and Moody producing Tait’s solo album, Loveology. In 2003, Moody left Evanescence to pursue his solo career.

Evanescence co-founder Amy Lee and other representatives of the band could not be reached for comment.

Like Moody, Crawford remembers his friend Jones as a “a happy guy, a real sweetheart, but all that changed after 1998. I could tell something had happened. He didn’t tell me about it at the time, but he has since. And I believe him, because the same thing happened to me.”

Crawford first met DC Talk when the band was filming the music video for its first single, Heavenbound, in 1989. Crawford was working in a movie theater in the same Nashville mall the band was filming in. He loved their debut cassette and when they came by to catch a movie he introduced himself and gave them a discount.

Crawford remembers his friend Jason Jones getting squeezed out of the management position of Evanescence in early 1999, and that “it had something to do with Tait”, but was unaware of specifics at the time.

Back then, Crawford was an ambitious musician, and was being hired to write songs for solo projects for Tait and DC Talk’s Toby Mac (the band went on “hiatus” in 2000, and never officially reunited). Mac’s project was later nominated for a Grammy and Dove Award. Crawford had also just signed his own record deal for his band, Webster County.

Crawford recalls being distraught over a breakup one night in the fall 2000, and Tait inviting him over to hang out. “You’ll bounce back,” he recalls Tait saying, as he handed him a shot glass of Makers Mark whiskey.

“I told him ‘just one,’ and took the shot,” he recalled. “I had a pretty high tolerance for alcohol at the time, but I blacked out shortly after I took that one drink.”

Crawford said his memory picks up some time later, finding himself propped up on Tait’s kitchen counter, his pants around his ankles. “My legs were up in the air, and Tait was licking my anus,” he claimed. “I said ‘what are you doing, dude?’ and then he said the weirdest thing: ‘Hey man, did you catch the Colts game last week?’ Like we were just hanging out, chatting.”

Crawford said that he fled Tait’s house, but has no memory of driving home. He said he is convinced that Tait drugged him.

Two close friends of Crawford’s have corroborated his story. One of them confirmed that Crawford told him details of the alleged assault at the time, but only named the perpetrator two years ago. The other friend said he was told the whole story at the time.

“I was never the same after that,” Crawford said. “The joy and drive I had for music went away. Suddenly I had stage fright for the first time, brain-fog, anger issues, depression, and was even suicidal for a time. It ruined my career.”

Despite having finished recording the album for his band, Crawford felt unable to perform as a musician, and the record was never released.

Both Jones and Crawford recall thinking their assaults were isolated incidents and continued to have some involvement with Tait. Jones accepted a phone call from him when Tait’s father passed away and he was distraught, and Crawford says he was “love bombed” by Tait and succumbed to future advances.

After not speaking for years, Tait re-entered his life in 2020. Crawford’s wife was a musician herself, and Tait had offered to produce her album.

“I had buried the memory of that night for a long time,” Crawford said. After seeing Tait again, Crawford said, a lot of feelings came to the surface and he found himself weeping uncontrollably in the shower. After confessing to his wife what had happened, she encouraged him to enroll in EMDR trauma therapy, which he said had been helpful.

“Hearing Jason’s story recently broke my heart,” he said of reuniting with his friend, Jones, decades later. “I believe we’d both be in the music industry today if it weren’t for Michael Tait.”

Jones has been sober since 2008. After leaving the music industry he worked in banking and co-directed a sober living facility. Today he travels around the country sharing his story of abuse and addiction (not mentioning Tait’s name when recounting the experience).

Shortly after getting sober Jones contacted a law firm to ask about potential compensation he could be owed from Evanescence. According to his 2008 correspondence with the law firm that he shared with the Guardian, the firm told him that, because of the statute of limitations, his window for a suit against Evanescence had closed years earlier. Jones said the lawyers told him that, had he pursued the matter sooner, he could be entitled to up to tens of millions of dollars in compensation.

Moody disputed the notion that Jones has ever had the right to compensation for his management efforts in the early days of Evanescence.

Looking back 27 years later, Jones recalled the night he told Moody about what had happened to him. Warning him not only about Tait, but about the music industry in general, he recited a quote from the magazine journalist Hunter S Thompson, who said: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free.”

“And that’s true for the Christian music industry as well,” Jones said. “Even more so, in my case.”

The post ‘It destroyed me’: two more men accuse Christian rock star Michael Tait of sexual assault appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

The Christian music legend Michael Tait, whose hit song God’s Not Dead became an anthem for Donald Trump’s Maga movement, has been accused of sexually assaulting three men, two who believed they were drugged by the rock star in the early 2000s, according to a months-long Guardian investigation. Four other men have alleged that Tait, a founding member of DC Talk and later a frontman for Newsboys, engaged in inappropriate behavior such as unwanted touching and sexual advances.

The Guardian is publishing these allegations days after Tait posted an extraordinary confession on his Instagram account, admitting that for 20 years he had been “leading a double life”, abusing alcohol and cocaine, “and, at times, touched men in an unwanted sensual way”, according to his statement.

The statement appears to be a response to a separate report published earlier this month by the Christian media outlet the Roys Report, which also investigated Tait and revealed similar allegations of drug use and sexual assault against young, male musicians.

In the Instagram statement, Tait wrote: “I am ashamed of my life choices and actions and make no excuses for them. I will simply call it what God calls it – sin.” He added: “While I might dispute certain details in the accusations against me, I do not dispute the substance of them.

“Even before this recent news became public, I had started on a path to health, healing, and wholeness … I accept the consequences of my sin and am committed to continuing the hard work of repentance and healing – work [which] I will do quietly and privately, away from the stage and the spotlight.”

‘Biggest open secret in Christian music’

The allegations about Tait’s behavior revealed today starkly contrast with the public image that he cultivated for nearly four decades. The 59-year-old native of Washington DC has sold 18m albums, containing songs that often encouraged young Christians to stay sober, abstinent and straight. But sources who spoke to the Guardian claimed Tait’s alleged drug use and alleged abusive behavior were the “biggest open secret in Christian music”.

The Guardian has interviewed 25 people in the Christian music industry, most of whom say they had prior knowledge of allegations that Tait had engaged in abusive behavior. The men who have come forward and shared their alleged experiences – two agreeing to go on the record with their names, while the rest spoke on the condition of anonymity – were aged 13 to 29 at the time of their alleged experiences.

All grew up in evangelical churches where Tait’s music was the premier soundtrack of their youth groups, summer camps and mission trips. Having taken the message of Tait’s songs to heart, they were naive about sex and drugs throughout their youth. All were starstruck when meeting their childhood hero, but quickly saw their image of him as a role model of Christian piety dissolve as they were taken on a bumpy ride of rock’n’roll debauchery.

Shawn Davis, who was a lifelong fan and troubled youth who had immersed himself in Christian music, claims Tait pushed him to consume alcohol and cocaine on multiple occasions. He also says he believes Tait once secretly drugged him and then molested him in 2003, while he was still a minor.

“This man destroyed my life,” Davis now claims.

Gabriel (not his real name) also claims Tait pushed him to consume alcohol and cocaine before asking to join him in a hot tub in 2003, where he claims Tait repeatedly groped his penis while attempting to kiss him. “To this day I jump whenever someone touches me unexpectedly,” Gabriel says. “When something like that happens to you, you feel like the worst person, you feel dirty, worthless. It’s heartbreaking to think someone you look up to could do something like that.”

Adam (not his real name) claims he believes he was drugged by the singer while he was visiting Tait’s home in Nashville, and later woke up to find Tait allegedly molesting him. “This person has stolen a little piece of our souls,” he says.

Tait did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the allegations contained in this report.

God’s Not Dead

Over the last 38 years, Tait has emerged as one of the most iconic names in Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). The genre and industry often exists in its own commercial and cultural ecosystem – yet mimics popular trends of mainstream music – creating multi-platinum superstars who are marketed to teens (and their parents) as wholesome alternatives to the “sinful lifestyles” of mainstream rock stars.

Tait was one-third of the rap-rock group, DC Talk, which formed in 1987 while its members were attending the evangelical Liberty University, whose founder, Jerry Falwell, launched the Moral Majority, the political organization that first galvanized evangelical voters around the Republican party in 1980, forever changing the American political landscape. Falwell was a mentor to young Tait – whom he referred to as “my white daddy” – and helped boost DC Talk to stardom.

Blending MTV aesthetics with Christian right talking points, DC Talk instructed generations of teens to stand against the liberalism of the Clinton era, namely abortion rights and sex education. Songs such as I Don’t Want It (a rebuttal to George Michael’s I Want Your Sex), That Kind Of Girl and The Children Can Live shaped the moral landscape of a generation of young evangelicals, mandating sexual purity until marriage.

“They used the sounds often associated with teen sexuality – like hip-hop, rock and pop music – to combat teen sexuality and adolescent desire,” says Leah Payne, author of the book God Gave Rock and Roll to You, an academic critique of CCM history. “In 1994 the True Love Waits organization asked DC Talk to perform at their concert on the National Mall promoting virginity among young evangelicals, which resulted in the signing of 200,000 chastity pledges by the teenage fans.”

In 1995, their Nirvana-flavored smash hit, Jesus Freak, championed being a social outcast for the Lord’s sake; a book companion to the album celebrated the violent histories of Christian martyrs around the world, encouraging young people to follow in their footsteps.

The fight for Christian nationalism was also a premier theme of DC Talk’s music – as well as the book Under God, co-authored by Tait – claiming the US is suffering a collapse of moral values because of the secularization of government and public schools. This was underscored with frightening urgency by their songs warning of the coming rapture. As recently as 2021, Tait warned: “I believe we are living in the last days [before the rapture].”

The CCM industry has been primarily headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, where Tait and most of his colleagues work and live. While it is not affiliated with the country music scene of Nashville, it typically shares the same conservative politics. While DC Talk addressed racism in several songs – with Tait as the sole Black man performing with two white guys (one of whom rapped) – their narrative typically placed racism as an unfortunate touchstone of the past that the US must repent for, but never as a contemporary, systemic problem.

DC Talk went on a hiatus in 2000 and for nearly a decade Tait performed as a solo artist until he became the frontman of the legendary CCM supergroup Newsboys. In 2011, their rock song God’s Not Dead became a rallying cry for disaffected evangelicals in the Obama era. In 2014, Tait and Newsboys appeared in God’s Not Dead, a movie centered around the fictional story of an atheist college professor who threatens to fail his students if they refuse to sign a form declaring “God is dead”. Tait would make an appearance in four subsequent sequels, becoming a recognizable face in the fight against perceived anti-Christian discrimination, a central theme of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Tait endorsed Ted Cruz in 2016, but shifted his allegiance to Trump after the Florida pastor Paula White – chair of the evangelical advisory board for Trump’s 2016 campaign and leader of the White House faith office in 2024 – invited him to pray over Trump before a Florida campaign stop. Tait soon became a key bridge between the candidate and white evangelical voters. Newsboys performed for Trump at the White House in 2019, and the following year Tait sang at evangelical “Let Us Worship” events, which were centered around the false claim that President Joe Biden was using Covid lockdowns to repress church attendance in the US.

“I love you, I support you, and I’m one of the growing number of African Americans who love you,” Tait said in a 2019 video praising Trump’s efforts at prison reform, before adding: “I’m looking forward to hanging out, and eating some Big Macs!”

On 5 January 2021, Newsboys’ God’s Not Dead was sung in unison during the “Jericho March” at the US Capitol, the event that preceded the violent insurrection at the US Capitol the following day.

‘He betrayed that trust’

The Guardian’s investigation has revealed an alleged pattern of manipulative behavior by Tait. Most of the alleged incidents described in this article are alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2009.

Young and sometimes naive male musicians say they believe they were targeted by the star, with Tait allegedly dangling the possibility of career or artistic opportunities before them and then cutting off all contact once it became clear that sex was off the table. According to four people who were interviewed, some of them on the condition of anonymity, Tait would allegedly invite them to parties at his house in Nashville, encouraging them to drink alcohol and use drugs before making sexual advances.

Two of the men who spoke to the Guardian claim they believe they were secretly drugged, which left them floating in and out of consciousness, unable to consent to sexual acts. They claim Tait assaulted them by touching them sexually without their permission. Three others claim they awkwardly rebuffed his advances and left.

“I wore out my Jesus Freak CD as a kid, and so when I met him I was starstruck,” recalls Gabriel, who was 19 when he was introduced to 38-year-old Tait in 2004. “And then he started calling me to hang out, it was just crazy.”

Gabriel was ambitious to become a CCM musician, and now his childhood hero was inviting him out to bars, buying him drinks even though he was underage and taking him to parties at his home in Nashville. Tait often mentioned the possibility of them jamming together, but that never materialized.

Gabriel felt a little uncomfortable at first when Tait would rub a hand on his shoulder and constantly hug him, but attributed the feeling to the fact that he had been abused a few years earlier by a serial child molester. In fact, Gabriel was testifying in a court case about that incident during this same time, an emotionally taxing experience that he confided in Tait about.

“He was very sympathetic,” Gabriel says, “and then he betrayed that trust.”

Tait started inviting Gabriel over alone, when the house was empty. When Tait introduced him to cocaine, “it was a huge shock”, Gabriel says, partially because he had no experience with drugs, and because it was being served by the man whose music informed his moral universe. “But I was too excited to be there, and didn’t want to screw up this opportunity.”

The two used cocaine together a number of times over the next few weeks. One night, while they both were high on the drug, along with a couple of vodka and Red Bulls, Tait proposed they jump in the hot tub.

It was there that Tait unexpectedly “grabbed my crotch and tried to kiss me at the same time”, Gabriel claims. “It wasn’t subtle, and it was out of nowhere. I asked him, ‘What the hell is going on?’ He said he was just joking, but then he did it again. I jumped out of the pool and drove home, which I shouldn’t have done because I was more intoxicated than I’ve ever been, but that’s how scared I was.”

Gabriel didn’t tell anyone for 15 years, when he confided about it to the same friend who had introduced him to Tait, Shawn Davis.

Shocked, Davis told him he had his own bad experience.

Davis says he was 16 when he met 37-year-old Tait in 2003 at a Nashville party that was loaded with mainstream celebrities. But Davis’s attention remained only on his childhood idol, Michael Tait. A mutual friend introduced them, and Tait took down his number, calling Davis to hang out a few days later.

“DC Talk were my heroes in a lot of ways,” Davis recalls. “They were Christians, but they rocked out, and I thought that was so cool.”

Looking back, both Davis and Gabriel realized that while they spent time together with Tait at bars and parties, at some point they were only invited to his house separately and alone, which began when he allegedly introduced them to cocaine.

According to Davis’s claims, months passed with Davis and Tait hitting the Nashville bars (Tait was able to get Davis, a teenager, drinks), before going back to Tait’s house to smoke weed and cigarettes, and snort coke along with the opioid Lortab, which Tait would crush into a powder.

Like Gabriel, Davis confided to Tait that he had been molested when he was eight years old. “Tait made me feel like, and seem like, he was my only friend,” he says.

Davis says that Tait always mixed their drinks, and claims he often felt pressured to drink heavily. One night he recalls the drink tasting strange, and Tait insisting he finish it. “Suddenly, I felt super sick, dizzy, nauseous, going in and out of consciousness,” he says. “I woke up in the closet, and he had my pants down, and was giving me a blowjob. I pushed him off as best as I was able in that state, but he pushed me down, and then I punched him twice and left.”

Davis says he believed he was drugged by Tait. He was 17 at the time.

In the months that followed, Davis claims, Tait aggressively pursued a reconciliation. “He was relentlessly love-bombing me, trying to talk his way back in the door,” alleges Davis. “He apologized to me for what happened, but never got into specifics, it was more of a broad statement.”

Davis was attempting to get a CCM label off the ground, and forgave Tait’s behavior with the hope that he would help him get a foothold in the industry. He claims that “Tait had convinced me that what happened that night was my fault, he was very manipulative. And I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

All of this came to a head one night in 2012, when Davis was in Tait’s kitchen, and Tait texted him from his bedroom, sending him a picture of what Tait described as $5,000 in cash. “He said something to the effect of ‘this could be yours if you let me suck you off and cum in your ass’,” Davis claims.

After that, Davis called his mother and asked her to quickly come pick him up; Davis snuck out quietly without alerting Tait. On the drive home, Davis says he told her everything he had allegedly experienced with Tait. He and Tait never spoke again.

Davis’s mother, and a friend he had confided in at the time, confirmed the details reported in this story. Davis has had one run-in with the law. When he was a teenager he stole his mother’s debit card to rent a limo for prom. He got probation but was then found guilty of violating his probation in connection to drug use, which occurred at a time when he was friends with Tait. He served about five months in prison. He is now married, has a 12-year-old son and owns his own construction company in Nashville.

Both Davis and Gabriel express regret today for not speaking up sooner, believing they could have prevented other people from suffering the same experience. At the time, they each thought their experiences were isolated incidents.

Another young man who got to know Tait, Abraham (not his real name), claims Tait rubbed his thigh and caressed his ear minutes after meeting for lunch in 2006. Abraham was a 22-year-old musician in an up-and-coming band. “He said, ‘At Liberty University, we weren’t allowed to let our hair touch our ears,’ and then he brushed my hair back with his hand, which was weird,” Abraham recalls.

Zach (not his real name) was a 29-year-old aspiring DJ with little experience when, he claims, Tait invited him to his house after they met in a Nashville dance club in the summer of 2008. “He was doing a solo tour and said: ‘What we need is a DJ who can come on the road with us,’” Zach alleges. “And I asked: ‘That would be so cool! What would I need to do?’ And he said: ‘You need to hang out, come around [my house] a lot.’”

But when Zach arrived at his house, and was brought to Tait’s studio, he noticed the only furniture in the room was a bed, and Tait kept encouraging Zach to sit close to him.

“I was a virgin until I was 37,” Zach recalls. “And I’d always thought to myself: ‘Michael Tait’s been single his whole life, and if he can hold out so can I.’”

Feeling uncomfortable, Zach made up an excuse to leave early. Afterward, he sent Tait several messages to follow up on the DJ opportunity, but Tait never replied.

Adam (not his real name) was another young and ambitious musician in a Christian rock band that was slowly gaining steam in 2004 when he met Tait in Nashville. The 22-year-old was ecstatic when Tait texted him a few days later, inviting him out for some bar-hopping. “Tait was like the Christian Elvis, the GOAT,” Adam recalls.

Adam was dropped off at the bar to meet Tait by some friends, one of whom said “don’t get molested!” as he was exiting the car, a comment he found strange but dismissed.

A wild night out concluded at Tait’s home, where Adam was awed by “his trophy room, where he keeps all his Dove awards, Grammys and other accolades”. At one point they needed to buy more booze, and Tait showed him his collection of cars in the garage, telling him to “pick one”. Adam selected a white MG convertible.

It was nearly dawn when they got back to Tait’s house, which was empty but for the two of them. They drank more, and Adam recalls suddenly feeling profoundly sleepy. That’s when, Adam says, Tait told him, “‘It’s OK, just go to sleep,’ and then he laid my head on his lap.”

Adam’s next memory of that night is “waking up in his bed, my pants unzipped, and [Tait] was jerking me off. I passed out again, then woke up, wondering: ‘What the fuck is happening?’ I went to the bathroom and had a panic attack, asking myself, ‘Am I supposed to go there and beat him up? Or am I supposed to play it cool?’”

Like Davis and Gabriel, Adam had been abused as a child. “It made me a lot more insecure, wondering, ‘Why me? Am I weak? Too innocent? Was this my fault?’ I didn’t ask for this, I was just hanging out with a superstar.”

Adam says he believes Tait drugged him that night. He shared the story with his girlfriend at the time, and a couple of fellow musicians who were close with Tait, and recalls that “some of them stopped hanging out with me after that, which hurt, and made me afraid”.

A close friend of Adam’s at the time confirmed to the Guardian that Adam told him about what he says happened.

Many sources we spoke with also feared reprisal, and would only speak on the condition of anonymity. Several people who were interviewed said they recall Tait stripping down to his underwear or naked at parties and backstage at a concert, often exposing himself to young musicians touring as his opening act.

Jacob (not his real name) was a 21-year-old musician when he met 40-year-old Tait in the winter of 2004. The two were both performing at a church concert, and Tait invited Jacob to fly out to Nashville and stay a few nights at the home of his childhood hero. Once there, Jacob was surprised at the amount of cigarettes and alcohol Tait and his friends consumed, as he had never had a drink in his life. One night, the two of them alone in Tait’s kitchen, Jacob claims, “Tait somehow brought up that he had a huge urethra. And then he just whipped it out and showed it to me.”

Jacob had been sleeping on the floor of Tait’s house, as he didn’t have a spare bed, and when Tait offered to share his king-sized bed with him, Jacob didn’t think anything of it, as this wasn’t uncommon among touring musicians. He wasn’t sure what to think of the massages Tait kept giving him in the hot tub earlier that night, and then in his bed. When Tait’s hands “moved lower and lower and lower, until he was massaging my butt-cheeks, I didn’t know what to do, because I looked up to him, and didn’t want to make him mad”.

Jacob tried his best to delicately rebuff Tait’s advances, saying, “‘Hey man, I’m not into that.’ Tait said OK and went to sleep.” (Jacob’s girlfriend at the time, who is now his wife, corroborated the details of his story, which he shared with her at the time.)

Israel Anthem was only 13 when Tait allegedly exposed his penis to him in 2001. Anthem descended from the Rambo family, who were legends in the field of gospel music. His grandmother Dottie Rambo (whose songs had been recorded by Elvis, Johnny Cash and many other musicians) was being honored with a lifetime achievement award, and the members of DC Talk were in attendance. Anthem and his family took pictures with the band, and a few weeks later they were eating in a Nashville restaurant when “Michael walked in, and came by our table to say hi”.

Anthem was “a huge, lifelong DC Talk fan”, he recalls. “Some kids sleep with teddy bears, I slept with DC Talk cassettes.” He says he was stoked when the two happened to be in the restaurant bathroom at the same time later that night, sharing side-by-side urinals.

“He was still at the urinal when I was washing my hands, and as we were talking [about a CD that had just come out] I noticed his penis was out, and he was facing me, turned away from the urinal. I thought he was putting his penis away, but then he was rubbing his penis, and making eye contact, while I was talking.”

Anthem recalls this lasting anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds, with Tait “visibly aroused” and “fondling himself”. Back at the table, a family member recalls, Anthem looked “white as a ghost, absolutely terrified”. Anthem later described the alleged bathroom incident to that family member, who corroborated his story to the Guardian.

‘I felt he was fair game’

Tait’s career was on a stable trajectory until January of this year.

Last Christmas he made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, and the previous Christmas he played Carnegie Hall with Amy Grant and others. That all came to a halt on 15 January, when the host of the Yass, Jesus podcast, Azariah Southworth, claimed Tait was gay in a viral TikTok video that received more than 250,000 views before it was removed for violation of TikTok guidelines.

“I felt he was fair game,” Southworth says. “Some people disagreed with the ethics of [outing someone against their will], but this deserved to be said out loud. Keeping quiet would allow a false narrative to continue, fueling a movement that is hurting myself, as a gay man, and my trans brothers and sisters.”

Southworth – who grew up in a strict evangelical household, and was traumatized by five years of “conversion therapy” – was the host of a Christian reality TV show in 2004-05 that featured Tait. During that time, he claims to have seen Tait gambling, smoking and cursing, behavior that would’ve scandalized Christian audiences.

Within days of Southworth publishing his video, Tait announced in a social media post that “it is time [I] step down from Newsboys”, offering fans little explanation as to why.

The remaining members of the Newsboys released a statement after the Roys Report was published addressing the allegations, insisting that it was only last January when “Michael confessed to us and our management that he ‘had been living a double life’”, the band wrote, adding: “But we never imagined that it could be this bad … Our hearts are with the victims who have bravely shared their stories.”

In the closing of Tait’s “confession” on Tuesday, he offers understanding to those who lost “respect, faith and trust in me”, later citing the story of King David’s prayer for forgiveness after he had committed adultery and murder. Though he is quick to add that “it crushes me to think that someone would lose or choose not to pursue faith because I have been such a horrible representative of him”.

This was Gabriel’s experience, saying he had “blamed God” for the trauma he allegedly endured that night. “Tait was presented as the pinnacle of godliness,” he says, trembling with tears in his eyes. “I get that all people sin, but to use the facade of his righteousness to commit sin, that made me walk away from my faith for a while. He took something from me I’ll never get back. In time, though, I found my own way back to God.”

The post ‘He stole a piece of our souls’: Christian music star Michael Tait accused of sexual assault by three men appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

When I got the chance to attend a conservative, evangelical high school in rural Iowa, I was ecstatic. My early education had been in a similar school – where creationism was the one true science, and evolution was satanic propaganda – and I’d spent the interim as a frightened pilgrim in the unholy land of public school. I was a teenage zealot and longed to be among my people.

Throughout those years, my church leaders urged me to proselytize to the public school students, to debate teachers about the age of Earth or the founding of our Christian nation, to be a spiritual exhibitionist, praying loudly at my locker or the flagpole. The apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?

I viewed my enrollment at Forest City Christian school in my junior year as being honorably discharged from my duty of “reclaiming our schools for Christ”. But what I envisioned as a sanctuary of faith, community and “true” education not only left me more disillusioned and bullied but also robbed me of a high school diploma and set me on a path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.

Twenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.

These efforts test the boundaries of the constitution’s establishment clause, reversing a century of civil rights victories in public schools, and have the potential to fundamentally alter the way American children learn – and what they learn about.

The push comes in two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and for the first time in history, using tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools, generally via vouchers that cover student tuition. Each has the potential to bolster the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.

In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.

In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.

In Texas, the state representative James Talarico has been fighting against a new elementary school curriculum that infuses Bible stories into language arts programs, as well as a bill that could allow students to use public funds to attend private schools, including Christian schools, a move he says will harm low-income students while bolstering the most privileged.

“Attempting to indoctrinate public school students into Christianity is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian,” says the former public school teacher, who is also studying to be a preacher.

And this wave of Christianizing is not limited to the south.

In 2023, my home state of Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded scholarships to families who enroll their children in private schools, including Christian ones. And last fall, a wildly successful Christian lobbying group, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), announced the drafting of a new bill that would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools.

“By bringing back school-sponsored Bible reading, we are bringing God back into public education,” says Morgan MaGill, communications director for IFPC, which has drafted successful state measures restricting rights to abortion and transgender healthcare in Idaho.

Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has characterized the growth of US Christian schools as an “educational insurgency” collecting “recruits” to build an underground army “with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way”, Hegseth said in a podcast appearance. Such militaristic language is reminiscent of the evangelical rallies, camps, youth services and Christian rock concerts I attended as a boy, where we were indoctrinated to be “soldiers in God’s army”, fighting to “take back our schools for Christ”.

That, said Hegseth, is “what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation”.

Talarico views Texas’s efforts to create a voucher program for private Christian schools as not only bad for Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ students, but also as stealing from the poor to serve the rich.

“If you gave my students on the west side of San Antonio an $8,000 or $10,000 voucher, there’s still no way they can afford a $20,000 a year private school,” Talarico says. “But because the voucher program is universal, the wealthy family that is sending their kid to that private school will now get an $8,000 or $10,000 discount on their tuition, at the expense of the working-class kids on the west side.”

Talarico adds that the voucher program includes funding for home-school students, up to 90% of whom are Christian and whose curriculum is often poorly regulated. “So we taxpayers will be funding homeschool programs that teach students the earth is flat,” he says.

The battle for schools

Trump’s promise to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice” fulfills an evangelical wishlist I’d heard about throughout my childhood. The belief that our government seeks to brainwash children into liberal atheists, close churches and outlaw prayer – threats that Trump promised to eradicate throughout the last election – were at the heart of the formation of the Christian right in the late 70s. But the clash over Christian education in America began long before.

Protestant education was the norm in the US for nearly two centuries. MaGill points out that Benjamin Rush – a founding father who helped build the US public school system – was a strong advocate for Bible reading in US schools.

And while opponents emphasize the idea of “separation of church and state”, those pushing to re-Christianize US public schools are correct when arguing that the phrase is not in the constitution. But it is misleading to claim that this was ever a settled – or simple – issue.

In 1797, John Adams signed the treaty of Tripoli, which stated: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

The first amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson later said the amendment created “a wall of separation between church and state”.

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was often explained to me that this phrase was intended to keep the government out of religion and not the other way around. The issue of religion in public education muddies this divide.

Throughout the 19th century Catholics fought for their unique prayers and scripture to be taught in public schools. When Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, the trial of a jailed science teacher captivated the nation, leading to a media circus that portrayed biblical literalists as “yokels”, accelerating the fundamentalist movement in America, as well as a deep distrust of both the media and intellectuals among evangelicals.

In 1962, the supreme court ruled that teacher-led prayer in school violated the first amendment’s establishment clause, essentially banning the practice. Many evangelicals – particularly in the south – felt that their religious rights had been violated years earlier when the court mandated that all US schools be racially integrated, as many white, southern Christians at the time interpreted scripture as mandating segregation.

In response, there was an explosion of what would come to be known as “segregationist academies”, private Christian K-12 schools and universities that believed they could continue to racially discriminate – while enjoying tax-free status – due to protections to their “religious liberties”. In time, they would create their own textbooks and accreditation systems, a whole bubble of education independent from public schools or conventional higher education.

In the late 1970s, the heavily segregated Bob Jones University had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS, a move that was interpreted by many evangelical pastors as the government shutting down a church. The ruling was blamed on Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education (which would become a whipping boy for evangelicals in the years to come) despite the IRS acting on a court ruling from several years earlier.

The perceived attack on segregated Christian schools by the US government helped galvanize evangelicals into voting Republican.

Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.

Escaping the bubble

I was born in 1982, and my education began in this isolated world of alternative facts. In my Christian kindergarten, I learned to read using the Bible and did math equations from scriptures on tithing. We were taught a great deal about the dangers of communism, while our working-class parents fell victim to predatory capitalism, manipulated into paying a tuition they couldn’t afford, convinced public schools were unsafe.

The collapse of my parents’ small business, a farm crisis tanking the Iowa economy, and years of tithing and additional “seed faith” donations to our church had left them broke.

When I was in first grade, my mom and I performed janitorial work after hours for a reduction on my tuition. My dad borrowed money from family members to keep us enrolled and away from the dangers of public school. But following a divorce and bankruptcy, they, like many other working families, could no longer afford tuition.

I was terrified of public school, which I imagined to be a cesspool of adolescent sin.

I developed a hypervigilant paranoia when it came to the lessons of my public school teachers, particularly when it came to science and history. I was not only tasked with rescuing my classmates from hell; I had to avoid it myself, mainly through maintaining my belief in (a very specific definition of) God, which the “secular humanist” curriculum was a threat to. This required me to keep a heavy filter on the information I allowed into my mind and censor the thoughts that information inspired.

Consequently, I flunked half of my classes.

At the Christian school I attended my junior year of high school, things were different. We were taught from the lectures of creationists such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that our planet is only 6,000 years old, along with a detailed meteorological explanation for Noah’s flood. Hovind often blended conspiracy theories, such as evolution being a communist plot, into his lectures. Ham and Jessica DeFord’s book Climate Change for Kids explains to homeschooled and Christian school students: “Man cannot destroy the earth. God promised that.”

In “Logic” class, we learned about gay rights rallies in San Francisco that were attempting, according to my teacher, to “indoctrinate children into that lifestyle”. It was not uncommon to hear leaders in the Christian school movement, like the “Christian economics” textbook author Gary North, argue for capital punishment for all homosexuals. North believed this should occur through the biblical practice of “stoning”. As a thin, effeminate young man with little interest in sports or hunting (yet perked up if the conversation turned to musicals or Alloy magazine), I was a relentless target for the rural boys at the Christian school, who saw it as their religious duty to shout “fag” in my ear as they tussled my hair and knocked books from my hands.

The longer I stayed at the school, the deeper I fell into a malaise of depression and self-harm. In addition to the stress of bullies, I had trouble getting my mind around the logic of these classes, and knew that if I didn’t understand it, and believe it, eternal torture awaited me. Meanwhile, costs remained difficult. I was working part-time at Subway and Bennigan’s to pay for my Christian education, but it still wasn’t enough.

I headed back to public school for my senior year. I’d been there a semester before it was explained to me that my credits from Forest City Christian school didn’t transfer, because they weren’t “accredited” by the government. (The school has since closed.)

Instead, I was directed toward the GED testing center, where my education came to an unceremonious end with a generic certificate. Colleges and universities, I was told, were even worse than public schools in their liberal indoctrination, so I drifted through a decade of low-wage jobs in factories, restaurants and construction sites, as my fellow students who’d graduated from public school, then college, ascended the socioeconomic ladder.

In time, I developed my own education at libraries and bookstores. But first, I had to, in the words of Yoda, “unlearn what you have learned”. In fundamentalist education, all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters. The itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.

It was only through breaking out of the Christian education bubble – defecting from my duty to “reclaim America for Christ” – that I was able to cultivate strong learning faculties, eventually clawing my way into a career in journalism.

Perhaps my financial prospects would have been much brighter if I had stayed in my Christian high school, attended a Christian college like Liberty University (which accepts students from non-accredited Christian schools) and gone on to work at a megachurch like Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church or in a Maga political organization like Turning Point USA. But my inability to get my head around the 2+2=5 logic of creationist science, or the claim that our founding fathers intended to create a Christian theocracy, prevented me from being an effective soldier in the fight for Christian nationalism, despite how eager I was to join the fight.

Instead, I eventually traveled in the opposite direction, reporting extensively on the modern machinations of the Christian right. In the course of that work, I have often felt a deep sorrow for students enduring the bubble of private Christian education – particularly the poor and queer ones. Now it seems that compassion must extend to those in public schools as well.

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After millions of people vanish from existence, the world is thrown into violent anarchy, the streets a playground of theft, murder, rape, looting and suicide. Those “left behind” are about to endure seven years of a Cormac McCarthy nightmare: world wars, plagues and mass starvation, the streets littered with the decaying corpses of half the Earth’s population.

It’s a familiar story to anyone raised as an evangelical Christian in the last century, particularly if you grew up in the 90s with a shelf full of Left Behind rapture novels – which have sold 80m copies – or watched the Kirk Cameron film adaptation in 2000, or the Nicolas Cage version in 2014. Or if, like me, you just attended a screening of the most recent installment, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, starring and directed by Kevin Sorbo (best known for his starring role in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys).

Intended to be taken as a literal prophecy of events right around the corner, these stories terrorized me as a child – and haunt my dreams to this day.

I’m working on a memoir about these experiences and have interviewed dozens of people who grew up under this toxic theology. They all have the same story of being unable to reach their parents or siblings (a much more common scenario back in the pre-smartphone age) and suffering panic attacks at the thought of being left behind. It’s a sensation that strikes to the core of your being, the overwhelming sense of abandonment reducing you to a crying infant unable to conjure its mother.

Unlike Hollywood Bible epics, these films are almost always independently financed, star B-list celebrities like Louis Gossett Jr or Margot Kidder, and are chiefly driven by proselytization over entertainment.

Rise of the Antichrist expertly weaves contemporary Christian right boogeymen (big pharma, Silicon Valley, mainstream media, Davos, the Covid vaccine, mental health experts) into an otherwise typical tale. It’s the same narrative every time with rapture films, books and plays: the antichrist uses world war to manipulate the UN into installing him as leader of a global socialist government centered on the Mark of the Beast, a tattooed credit card – often a barcode bracketed by the numbers 666 – on everyone’s right hand or forehead.

Sorbo’s film also skewers the “globalist mainstream media”, which has supposedly conspired to use Covid, and now the rapture, to keep people indoors, distracted and afraid, all in the name of power and profit. It’s a boldly ironic stance for this movie to take, considering it rests in a tradition of using questionable theology to terrify audiences – often children and teens – resulting in lucrative bestsellers and a motivated voting base.

While every generation since Christ has interpreted modern events as evidence of the Book of Revelation prophecy coming to pass, it was a collection of post-hippie evangelicals in California who created the pop-theology of “the rapture” – a word that never actually appears in the Bible.

As part of “the Jesus Movement” – or, pejoratively, “the Jesus Freaks” – sober hippies like Bob Dylan were getting “born again” and preaching on stage about the coming antichrist. Following the collapse of the hedonistic ideals of the 60s, many flower children were being slowly seduced by the religious right, culminating in figures like Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson joining Billy Graham’s Explo ’72 festival, which Time magazine called “the Jesus Woodstock”.

The literary accompaniment for this was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, impressively tying modern events (the reunification of Israel, the rise of communism, the loosening morals of the postwar era) to biblical prophecy. One of the bestselling nonfiction books of the 1970s, it fueled the conversion of what would become much of the Christian right voting bloc of the 1980s.

A film adaptation starring Orson Welles hit theaters in 1978, but it was the low-budget rapture scare-fest A Thief In The Night that would set the template for not only countless films and novels about Armageddon, but an industry of fear-based plays, Christian haunted houses, and youth group sermons.

A Thief In The Night was filmed a short drive from where I grew up in Iowa. My parents were part of the tail end of the Jesus Movement (culture always reaches the midwest late) and hosted Bible studies and a youth center focused on end times prophecy. My mother wasn’t certain if the end was near, but my dad regularly told me there might come a time when we would have to live off the grid, grow our own food, avoid money (the Mark of the Beast) and live in hiding in the wilderness. If we were found, we would be tortured by the armies of the antichrist, determined to get us to accept “the mark”.

Our church held a screening of the sequel to A Thief In The Night, which was better financed and produced than its DIY predecessor. In A Distant Thunder, we follow a group of Christians who have been arrested by the antichrist’s fascist army, and have the choice to either receive the Mark of the Beast or be executed. They know that if they receive the mark, they will eventually “drink the wine of God’s wrath”, as Revelation 14:9 says. They “will be tormented with fire and sulfur … and the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.”

The task we’re given is to “be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life”.

A Distant Thunder ends with our lead character screaming hysterically as she watches her friends refuse to renounce Christ, then get decapitated by a guillotine.

My Christian friends and I were too young to understand the questionable leaps of biblical interpretation at work in these movies, or the political machinations fueling the cold war, the culture wars and the revolution of the Christian right in US politics. But we understood pain. We understood torture. We knew we were sinful. And we were convinced the world was not a safe place for us, and we shouldn’t get too comfortable in our beds at night.

After my parents divorced and Dad moved out, Mom worked around the clock at a nearby hotel while attending community college at night. I was alone a good deal of my childhood, and at least once a week I was convinced that everyone I’d known had been raptured up to Heaven, and I was about to face the violence, disease, starvation and isolation of the seven-year Tribulation. Worse, I might succumb to torture, agree to get the Mark of the Beast, and accept relief from momentary discomfort in exchange for an eternity of supernatural agony.

By the mid-90s, rapture fever was in full effect with my generation. DC Talk, arguably the Beatles of Christian rock, released a cover of Larry Norman’s rapture anthem I Wish We’d All Been Ready, with the heartthrob Kevin Max singing the bridge with an eerie vibrato: “The father spoke, the demons dined / how could you have been so blind?”

The same year, the evangelist Tim LaHaye and novelist Jerry B Jenkins released the first in a series of 16 Left Behind novels placing biblical prophecy in a modern context. I don’t know how many times I’d meet a new face at youth group or church camp saying the books had scared them straight. Meanwhile, speakers at my camp and Christian rock shows often tied the rapture to the coming Y2K disaster, and on New Year’s Eve I was honestly surprised when the lights didn’t go out – followed by explosions, sirens and gunfire – at the stroke of midnight.

It’s the marriage of ancient prophecy with contemporary tropes that strikes an urgent fear in audiences – especially children. When you’re still figuring out what the world is, it’s easy to be convinced that your home, family, everything that makes you feel safe is ephemeral and can easily be replaced with unspeakable horror.

After watching Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist last week, we were treated to a special message from Sorbo, followed by footage of Mike Huckabee leading us in prayer.

“As you watched the movie, you probably noticed some scary references to the way the world looks today,” Sorbo explained in that gruff, fatherly voice I remember well from my childhood watching Hercules. “We live in a world of chaos, uncertainty and fear.”

The audience was mostly retirement age, and laughed heartily at jokes mocking “the media”, “trusting the science”, and liberals embracing “mental health experts” over “conspiracy theorists”. Much of the film reads like a Tucker Carlson segment come to life.

But I remembered very well the psychic impact this toxic theology has on a young mind. In fact, I don’t need to remember. I still dream of demons, hell, the Mark of the Beast and the Lake of Fire a few times a week, sometimes sleepwalking – or sleep running – out the front door, convinced the antichrist is coming to tattoo 666 on my forehead, followed by an eternity of torture in hell.

The post I grew up evangelical. Terrifying rapture films scarred me for ever appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

“As believers, we train ourselves to be valuable to the marketplace,” said the minor-league baseball player-turned-real-estate investor Jason Benham. “How do we use the talents, opportunities, abilities and resources that God has given us so that the Kingdom of Heaven may come to Earth through us?”

Jason and his twin brother, David, were our emcees for the day at Life Surge, a Christian finance conference in Denver. A blending of faith and finance, Life Surge tours the nation offering both motivational and practical lectures on building wealth the Christian way, with emotionally charged, musical worship services peppered throughout the day. The former NFL superstar and evangelical hero Tim Tebow and Willie Robertson of the hit reality show Duck Dynasty were among a host of conservative celebrities speaking at the event, catered by the fast-food restaurant Chick-Fil-A – a pariah among liberals and martyr to the religious right for executives’ public opposition to gay marriage.

Life Surge follows a long tradition of evangelists offering financial advice through the lens of morality and the supernatural. The Iowa farming community I grew up in during the 80s and 90s was steeped in these institutions, which vampirically drained my family and community’s economic momentum. Many of our church’s leaders attended Oral Roberts University, named for the televangelist most associated with the “prosperity gospel”, which explained that your financial success or failure was directly tied to your Christian morality.

These teachings often find the most success in economically impoverished communities and developing countries. During the farm crisis of the 1980s – which radiated out into all avenues of the Iowa economy – many desperate families in my home town were susceptible to the get-rich-quick opportunities offered by proponents of the prosperity gospel. But they were often left with little but shame and debt.

When my dad filed his first of multiple bankruptcies after our retail waterbed store went out of business, people from our church explained that it was his affair that had caused this. While we remained poor, my parents gave an estimated $100,000 to our church over many years, partly in tithing 10% of our business income but also in extra “seed faith” donations, a practice that the prosperity gospel teaches will yield a seven or tenfold return – depending on which preacher you talk to.

I was working on a memoir about these experiences when I was inundated with social media ads to “Surge Your Life God’s Way”.

Tickets to Life Surge ranged from $52 to $500, and after purchasing the cheapest option, I found myself devoting nine hours of my Saturday to sitting in a packed arena, learning how to “Grow Your Faith to Grow Your Business”, “Change the Marketplace for Christ” and “Build for Tomorrow & Eternity”.

According to Pew, nearly half of evangelical Protestants never attended college, and more than half earn less than $50,000 annually (a third earn less than $30,000). Financial literacy is desperately needed in many of these communities, and while Life Surge offered some pragmatic advice on real estate, stocks and taxes, each speaker employed a litany of culture war rhetoric – prayer is needed in school, the snowflakes of cancel culture are coming for us, Hollywood hates Christians – implying an us v them worldview and fueling an ominous urgency for not only investment, but proselytization.

Life Surge declined “to answer any specific questions” for this story, saying it was “blatantly apparent that [I] and the Guardian have a strong bias against the Christian evangelical community and our values”.

‘Surge your wealth’

Employing a Smothers Brothers style of ribbing each other with sibling rivalry jokes, the Benham brothers blended humor with a call to “surge your wealth” (nearly every speaker worked this phrase into their talks) as a form of Christian duty.

They told the story of HGTV greenlighting their reality show in 2014, only to pull the plug following protests against them for, in their words, “saying politically incorrect things”. According to Right Wing Watch, David Benham led a protest in 2012 to stop, in his words, “homosexuality and its agenda that is attacking the nation” and “demonic ideologies tak[ing] our universities and our public school systems”. Additionally, he protested against plans for an Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York, saying: “The difference between Islam and Christianity: Islam takes life and enslaves it. Christianity lays its life down and sets you free.”

In response to their TV show getting the boot, Jason Benham told the Life Surge crowd: “Sometimes when God gives you a platform it’s not just to stand on, but sometimes to burn on.”

We were told the brothers had the opportunity to continue the show if they’d promise to keep quiet about social issues, but they refused. Similarly, Tim Tebow told a story later that day about rejecting a million-dollar ad deal so he could join the Patriots (which he ultimately did not): “I was willing to make that sacrifice for football, but would I be willing to do that for the Great Commission?”

The retired quarterback wasn’t talking about a sales commission but rather the order Jesus gave to his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations”.

This was the overarching theme of the day: Christianity is under attack in America, cancel culture is silencing us, so God commands you to earn a lot of money (which we’ll teach you to do, via the stock market and real estate) in order to fight the culture war and recruit new believers.

“Why on earth are we not buying Twitter?” asked David Benham. “Why can’t we get our money together and buy Disney, who have been so open-minded their brains are falling out? How many of you are sick and tired of seeing the devil take all the influence in this culture?”

The crowd rose to their feet and cheered.

Shortly after this, a flood of beach balls descended from the arena rafters as the crowd danced to uptempo worship music, many with eyes closed and hands waving. I engaged in this emotionally charged ritual every day until I was 20, and a heady mix of dread and euphoria swirled through me as I recalled those days, and the belief that anyone outside of this Pentecostal bubble wasn’t to be trusted.

“We need more Christians doing TV shows and music, because if we’re not filling those jobs we know who will,” said Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson (sans trademark long hair and bandanna), apparently referring to atheist liberals. “We said a prayer at the end of every [Duck Dynasty episode], which was unheard of at the time.”

The notion that secular America can’t be trusted and so “real Americans” need a Christian alternative in all avenues of culture and commerce has been around much longer than even Fox News. For nearly a century evangelicals have been branding their businesses as explicitly Christ-centric, even if the service is something as innocuous as plumbing or furniture restoration.

This presents ample opportunity for claims of religious persecution in any conflict – as in the gay wedding cake debacle Colorado endured in 2014 – as well as a devoted fanbase, who are taught to be suspicious of the secular competition.

“I could learn finance from an atheist, but getting it from a Christian gives it a relatability, and takes it to a deeper level,” says Jacob Hayward, a Life Surge attendee from Denver.

While Donald Trump’s name was notably absent from the event, each speaker seasoned their presentations with a variety of Fox News touchstones: everything from spineless American parents to Biden causing inflation to legalized marijuana.

“I may offend some of you, if you’re part of that cancel culture, you’re a snowflake fruit cup and everything upsets you,” said James Smith, a real estate educator who used his investment advice as opportunities for conservative commentary, speculating that Dick’s Sporting Goods stock is down because they pulled assault-style guns from their shelves, or that digital currency is a bad investment because of government surveillance.

“Did you know that a couple weeks ago the president signed an executive order allowing America to go on digital currency?” Smith asked the crowd. “Coincide that with 87,000 new IRS agents. Do you know why they did that? For surveillance of you economically.”

“The United States government wants us dependent on them right now so they can get your votes,” Jason Benham had said earlier in the day.

A simple message

Hysterical fear of a coming socialist takeover of America was at the heart of both the conservative movement of Barry Goldwater and the apocalyptic fever of evangelicals. Throughout the 90s, our Left Behind rapture novels and televangelists like Pat Robertson linking the Book of Revelation with the day’s headlines kept us in a constant state of panic, ready to blindly follow any conservative huckster with a surefire escape plan.

In addition to fears of Armageddon, the existential fear that you’re spending too much time at work and too little with your family is a common tactic among evangelicals preaching finance. Multilevel marketing companies (often pejoratively referred to as “pyramid schemes”) like AmWay are often founded by evangelicals, and use churches as recruitment centers, offering the opportunity to “be your own boss” and have more family time. (This was a common refrain at Life Surge as well.)

Believers are often encouraged to go deep into debt for these schemes, told to employ a “fake it till you make it” approach, growing their businesses and living a flashy lifestyle long before any profit comes in.

“The evangelical community has been one of the more susceptible groups that have been so infected by this and still is today,” says Robert FitzPatrick, author of Ponzinomics: The Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing. “It spreads through churches, and is presented with this moral authority, you are told not to argue with anybody who criticizes it, they are non-believers … And in the end, only a fraction of one per cent of people who get into multi-level marketing ever turn a profit.”

It’s the simplicity of the message that often captivates people like my dad, who invested not only in AmWay but in other MLMs like vitamin supplements, phone cards, gold, or phone cards with gold in them.

With these presentations, and at Life Surge, we are inundated with success stories of simple folks who went from pauperdom to prosperity, thanks to “one simple trick”. At one point at Life Surge we were presented with an algorithm that predicts stock trends – for “only a dollar a day” we could simply click “buy” or “sell” based on the program’s recommendations.

Whether subtly or overtly, this was the takeaway from every speaker’s message: that opportunities for wealth are all around us, at all times, in the stock market, real estate or internet businesses, and so climbing out of poverty is easy, having more time to spend with your family is easy, raising the funds to fully support a ministry is easy, if you’re not a sinner and are armed with the right financial knowledge and tools.

And at the end of each presentation, such knowledge and tools were offered to Life Surge ticket holders at the cost of $900 – no, wait, $500 – no, wait! Sign up now and only $99! – by hundreds of black-clad volunteers walking through the audience with clipboards.

I did not purchase the followup classes, feeling that $52 for nine hours of Christian right economics (and a Chick-Fil-A box lunch!) was sufficient to give me the Life Surge experience.

While there was significantly less materialism (only a few mentions of sports cars and mansions) than the AmWay or Oral Roberts seminars of years past, and a good deal more practical financial strategy than Tammy Faye Bakker ever offered, the Life Surge call to earn wealth in the name of spreading the gospel is just as insidious and manipulative a grift as any in the history of evangelical conmen.

It communicates that poverty is a reflection of sin, not circumstance. If attendees fail to become wealthy enough to fund missionaries, or Christian entertainment, or Christian politicians, it is explained, they will fail to convert potentially thousands to Christianity, damning them to an eternity of torture in hell.

For desperate people simply looking for an opportunity to keep their heads above water, that is a heavy weight to bear.

The post Get-rich-quick schemes drained my town’s wealth. At a Christian conference, their legacy lives on appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

Throughout its 50 years as a genre, contemporary Christian music (CCM) has often functioned as a propaganda wing of the Christian right. Whether it’s the war on drugs, Christian nationalism, colonial missions trips, or prayer in schools, the industry has effectively used popular aesthetics to sell a conservative Christian message, often while demonizing outsiders.  

This is especially true of the LGBTQ community, one of CCM’s most frequent targets. Whether a subtle jab, as in Scott Wesley Brown singing about “fools who march for the right to justify their sin,” or more overtly in the case of white rapper Carman warning of “the homosexual in San Francisco trapped in vile bondage,” prominent artists within the genre have often peppered their lyrics with reactionary homophobia. For multiple generations, this music was pumped into the ears of queer and straight children alike through music festivals, church-camps, youth groups, and mission trips—often paired with similar messages about abortion, women’s rights, and anti-socialist fearmongering.     

But in the past two decades, the once-clear lines between CCM and secular music have been disrupted, and some queer Christian songwriters have begun challenging many of the genre’s long-held cultural norms. This is especially true as a wave of prominent LGBTQ musicians have come out publicly to an audience that once shunned them. CCM luminary Ray Botlz, whose “Thank You” scored countless evangelical funerals, announced in 2008 that his 30 years of attempting to “pray the gay away” hadn’t worked and that he would be living his remaining years with a man. British worship vocalist Vicky Beeching, who The Guardian called “the most influential Christian of her generation,” announced she was gay in 2014, followed by Trey Pearson, frontman of the 90s Christian pop punk band Everyday Sunday, in 2016.  

Although some queer artists have found success marketing their work to Christian listeners, they have often had to leave the rigid confines of CCM to do it. Preacher’s Kid, recorded by the queer, non-binary musician Semler (whose real name is Grace Semler Baldridge), quickly landed at #1 on iTunes’ Christian albums chart following its February 2021 release, blasting its way past the mega-church soundtracks. Semler’s music explores topics that would have been unthinkable decades ago, criticizing “fame hungry pastors” and calling out mission trips as “scams” on the EP track “Bethlehem.”

Preacher’s Kid, which flourished despite the support of the traditional CCM pipeline, is an indication of an industry at a crossroads. If queer artists are finding that they simply don’t need the Christian music gatekeepers to live their truth and express their art, does CCM change with the times or double down on hate? 

Baldridge, for one, believes the success of Preacher’s Kid shows that “Christian music needs a big dose of honesty.” “It needs to deal with the fact that faith—like people—is messy and complicated,” they told VICE. “I think the heyday of CCM is over. The days of creating a Christian alternative to secular music the way they did in the 90s came to an end with streaming. CCM is going through a transformation and search for identity.”  

Hillsong, the L.A.-based, celebrity-obsessed, quintessential cool-kids megachurch whose anthemic, emotionally rousing worship music is performed every Sunday morning, has commonly come to characterize almost the entirety of the CCM genre today: conservative rhetoric wrapped in hipster clothing. Founded in 1983, the church has used the allure of access to famous congregants like Justin Bieber, Nick Jonas, and Selena Gomez to appeal to young worshippers more socially liberal than Christian music’s traditional demographics. A 2019 study from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 51 percent of white evangelicals under 50 support LGBT rights, compared to only 34 percent of their parents and grandparents. 

That divide has led Hillsong, whose beliefs are based in an offshoot of Pentecostal Christianity, to make statements that appear welcoming to the LGBTQ community but only at the most surface level. In a 2015 blog post entitled “Do I Love Gay People?” Hillsong founder Brian Houston said the church’s convictions mean it does “not affirm a gay lifestyle” or “knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership, either paid or unpaid.”

This rhetoric is a watered-down version of the homophobia peddled for decades by the Christian right, as well as its most prominent mouthpieces. In the 1980s, CCM often functioned as an unofficial marketing campaign for the Moral Majority, a Christian political movement whose leader, Jerry Falwell, once referred to AIDS as “a lethal judgment of God on the sin of homosexuality.” DC Talk would go on to be widely regarded as the most influential Christian rock band of all time after meeting at Falwell’s own Liberty University in 1987. In 1992’s “Socially Acceptable,” DC Talk appeared to parrot many of the same talking points in a song that appeared to comment on the AIDS crisis at its height: “Times are changin’, with morals in decay / Human rights have made the wrongs OK.” 

As CCM grew into a commercial powerhouse in the late 90s and early 2000s, many of its artists were finding the genre artistically claustrophobic and began to spill over into the secular world. Jars of Clay, Switchfoot, and MxPx were beginning to appear on MTV, preceded by Amy Grant’s “Baby, Baby” a decade earlier. Five Iron Frenzy were writing songs that subtly addressed native American genocide and police brutality (which most censors at the time missed). But queerness was still incredibly taboo—and for no one more so than queer artists themselves.

While some straight Christian rockers could experiment with an androgynous or even outwardly effeminate look—such as DC Talk’s lead singer, Kevin Max—many queer artists have been forced to present themselves as conventionally heterosexual as possible. Growing up in Mississippi, Michael Passons had a lifetime of experience in the closet, which wasn’t likely to change when he moved to Nashville and helped found the massively popular vocal group Avalon. As the feel-good soundtrack for every evangelical housewife in America, Avalon was under more scrutiny than Christian art-rockers like Joy Electric or industrial rockers like Klank to be standard-bearers for all the nuclear families that attended their concerts. 

“The best way to avoid scrutiny is to have a wedding ring on,” Passons told VICE. “I wasn’t wearing one, and I was almost 30 and wasn’t dating, so I was under the microscope. There were rumors about me that weren’t true, but some that were.” 

While he wouldn’t come out for nearly 20 years, Passons was kicked out of Avalon for being gay in 2003. His band members forced him to go to conversion therapy if he wanted to stay in the band, and he attended a few sessions before eventually dropping out. After, Passon said he could no longer find work in the Christian music industry. “We had sold millions of records, Grammy nominations, a five-year record deal with EMI—a real pinch-me moment—and then I lost my way to make an income, had to sell my house, and was sleeping on couches,” he said.

Jennifer Knapp found herself navigating this cultural vortex in the late 90s and early 2000s when she sold a million albums and CCM anointed her the Christian alternative to Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton, although she never would have described herself that way. Knapp, who grew up in southeast Kansas, wasn’t raised in a religious household and said it was a “culture shock” to suddenly find herself entrenched in the evangelical world. While she said that it was initially exciting to explore her faith through her music, she encountered a number of “purity culture” tropes familiar to women who grew up evangelical, which conflicted with her identity as a feminist. 

“I would arrive at a show in a tank top and be told I had to change before going on stage,” she told VICE. “People were asking me to be a spokesperson for sexual purity, because I was viewed as one of the role models for young girls. I would tell them that I didn’t agree with a lot of this, personally and theologically, and that cost me opportunities.”

Recording music in the CCM industry forced her to put her sexuality on hold for a decade, and Knapp finally came out as a lesbian in 2010. But it’s important to Knapp to note that she wasn’t closeted during her years at the forefront of CCM and that she didn’t leave because she was gay. She said that she disagreed with a range of ideologies of that world and found she couldn’t write the songs she wanted to within the genre’s corporate propaganda machine. She got her masters in theological studies, married a woman, and returned to music in 2010 with a new album and a publicly gay identity. 

Among the changes in Knapp’s image in releasing her comeback record, Letting Go, is how the album was sold. Although her previous hits “Undo Me” and “Romans” had been favorites of radio programmers—reaching #1 on the Christian rock charts in 1997 and 1998, respectively—Knapp chose not to release any singles from Letting Go. The album was still a modest success, reaching #3 on Billboard’s Americana/Folk charts.

The decision not to market the record for Christian radio reflected a conscious choice by Knapp to forge her own path separate from the industry that once attempted to define and constrain her. “Too often CCM is made by Christians, for Christians, to make more Christians,” she said. “That undermines the experience of contemplating faith and spirituality through art, and that’s what I wanted to do then and do now. CCM has mostly given up on artistry. It’s just praise and worship music now.”

Although queer artists are creating music on their own terms, they haven’t yet found a home in the traditional channels of CCM—which include megachurches, right-wing political rallies, and national Christian radio stations like K-LOVE, a kingmaker of the genre. Shortly after coming out, Trey Pearson was ousted from the Christian rock festival Joshua Fest. Michael Passons came out in 2020, and while he is still making music, he has yet to enjoy the success that he did during the apex of Avalon’s heyday. Passons sang backup vocals on a 2020 cover of Avalon’s “Orphans of God” released by gay country singer Ty Herndon and Broadway staple Kristin Chenoweth. 

In order to keep making music within the extremely rigid confines of CCM proper, many LGBTQ musicians are forced to hide who they are. Marsha Stevens-Pino, a prominent figure in what history has dubbed the Jesus Movement of 1970s California, would go on to form Born Again Lesbian Music (BALM) and discover a wealth of queer-affirming Christians that dug her music, but things weren’t always so easy. After she came out as a lesbian following her divorce from bandmate Russ Stevens in 1979, the wildfire of gossip lost Children of the Day their booking agent, and the band split up soon after.

Stevens-Pino said that many prominent producers and songwriters remain closeted to avoid the same scrutiny she and others have faced. The fact of their sexuality is an “open secret,” she said, even though they “don’t want you to talk about it.”

“The first Sunday of every month is gospel music night at the gay bars in Nashville, and I see multi–Dove Award winners there every time,” she said, referring to the evangelical equivalent of the Grammys. “The night before the Dove Awards there’s something called a Pink Party for all the gay nominees, and its a super gay, drag queens–and-fountains-of-champagne-type party.” 

It’s unclear where the sexual battle lines of CCM will be drawn in the future. Amy Grant and Kevin Max both received heavy criticism among evangelicals for their divorces in the 90s, only for the same communities to support thrice-married Donald Trump for president in 2016. And without the isolation that the 90s music industry provided—where evangelical parents only bought their kids the Christian version of their favorite rock band—it’s difficult to imagine the industry existing in 20 years. 

But that’s a pipe dream in many ways. So long as there’s a Christian right in need of a popular culture set apart from “Hollywood liberals,” and so long as that movement uses social issues like trans people in bathrooms and queer Disney characters to further its political agenda, there will be a need for a music industry that reflects the “traditional” American identity, however sidelined it might be in a given cultural moment. Although that still raises a question that CCM is struggling to answer: How powerful could such an industry remain if young people are increasingly jumping ship? 

Jennifer Knapp thinks it would be smart for the Christian music industry to open its doors to queer musicians if hopes to appeal to millenial and Gen Z listeners, but she isn’t holding her breath. “There are evangelical queer musicians in those worship bands, living double lives, but that market won’t sign an out person until they’re a financial competition,” she said. “They have the right to have their own type of quality control for Christianity, but at that point, it’s not a genre that’s supporting the diversity that Christianity has to offer.”

The post Christian Rock Has Demonized LGBTQ People for Years. Now It Needs Them to Survive. appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

When volleyball coach Inoke Tonga was called in for a meeting with the leadership of Valor Christian high school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, this fall, he thought he was about to be offered a promotion.

Instead, he was interrogated with a series of vague, leading questions that attempted to get him to admit he was gay.

Tonga had been out for years – and knew his contract never stated he couldn’t be gay and teach at Valor – but shame-filled memories of his closeted years as a young man rose up in that moment, as his job slipped away.

“They offered to help me stop being gay, with my ‘struggle’,” Tonga says. “They said I should take my time to decide if I will accept their help, and they’ll tell everyone I’m on a spiritual journey.”

The offer they made was for Tonga to attend some form of “conversion therapy”, and when he returned to announce he isn’t gay, cut off contact with his fiance, scrub his social media of any support for the LGBTQ community, and denounce his support for them before the school.

“They said a lot of parents pay a lot of money to go to Valor, just so their kids don’t have to mentored by someone who is gay,” he recalls.

Tonga declined their offer, and resigned.

Outrage on the part of students, parents, alumni and allies over Tonga losing his job for being gay is part of a decades-long battle between anti-discrimination laws and the right of private Christian schools (of which there are approximately 34,500 in the US alone) to religious freedom.

Ever since the 1964 Civil Rights Act threatened the tax-exempt status of Christian schools who refused to racially integrate, religious schools in the US have tangled with social justice activists seeking equal protections for minority students and employees.

Freedom to discriminate

In 2020, the supreme court ruled employment protections in the Civil Rights Act should extend to LGBTQ+ employees, thereby federally outlawing termination of an employee for their sexual orientation or being transgender. But buried deep within the Civil Rights Act is an exception for religious institutions who want to discriminate against employees of a different faith.

“So while a secular employer can’t say, ‘I’m not going to hire you because you’re Jewish, I only hire Catholics,’ the Catholic school can say that, because they’re exempt from the prohibition against religious discrimination,” says Joshua Block, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & Aids project. “And religious schools have argued that that limited exception should be interpreted broadly to mean that I can discriminate against anyone based on my religious beliefs.”

Courts have, for the most part, been saying no to this argument, Block says.

But Tonga’s story is far from an isolated incident – even at Valor Christian high school, where a lesbian teacher was pressured to leave under similar circumstances.

Earlier this summer, music teacher Todd Simmons claimed he was fired from Our Lady’s Catholic Academy in Queens, New York, after filling out health insurance forms that revealed he was married to a man. A nearly identical scenario involving a gay music teacher fired from a Catholic school played out only a short distance away at the same time.

The issue is further complicated in states like Florida – where the line between public school and private religious school is sometimes blurred. Steven Arauz, a sixth-grade history teacher, found himself fired from a Seventh Day Adventist school – which is publicly funded with $1m a year in tax dollars and credits – after he was featured in a Gay With Kids article where he discussed his adopted son.

“You are aware that this conduct, if true, does not comport with the Seventh-day Adventist church’s standards,” he was told in an email that terminated his $49,000 a year position. “Hand over your keys. Hand over your badge. You’re not allowed on Forrest Lake property.”

Block and the ACLU have found some success litigating these firings.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that the firing of the North Carolina teacher Lonnie Billard from a Catholic school for being gay was a violation of the Civil Rights Act, shutting down the school’s attempt to argue that they had a religious exemption from the law.

“After all this time, I have a sense of relief and a sense of vindication. I wish I could have remained teaching all this time,” Billard said in a statement released by the ACLU. “Today’s decision validates that I did nothing wrong by being a gay man.”

Predator myth

The work of Block and the ACLU is standing on the shoulders of decades of litigation that provides civil rights legislation the legal muscle it has today. Much of this played out in public schools, particularly in the south, where segregationists like the Alabama governor, George Wallace, stood blocking the entrance of a school that black students sought to enter.

Around this time, the marketplace for private religious schools – thought to be protected from integration laws – began to explode in size.

“Hoping to keep their racial purity, their white evangelical identity, a lot of rich churches created their own schools,” said Frances Fitzgerald, author of the Pulitzer prize–winning book, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. “They thought they could get away with being segregated.”

This proved not to be the case when Bob Jones University – which gave Wallace an honorary degree – found itself stripped of its tax-exempt status as a religious institution due to its ban on black students.

Forced integration and taxation of private religious schools – along with bans on teacher-led prayer in public schools – created a narrative among conservative evangelicals that a liberal government was waging war on Christianity, galvanizing them into the political force known today as the Christian right.

“Before this, they weren’t terribly organized at all,” Fitzgerald said of the previously apolitical demographic. “When Paul Weyrich went around trying to enlist evangelicals and fundamentalists into the Republican party, they didn’t respond to any of his issues other than forced integration of Christian schools.”

This laid the groundwork for the following generation of evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Tim LeHay, who partnered with the Republican party to stir up anger around issues evangelicals previously cared little about, like abortion, drugs and the rights of women and gays.

Campaigns to overturn gay rights legislation like “Save Our Children” in Florida (led by evangelical superstar Anita Bryant), or California’s Prop 6, which sought to ban gay men and lesbians from teaching in public schools, both equated homosexuality with pedophilia and accused gay teachers of being sexually motivated in their career choice.

While the villains were new, the tactic of ginning up baseless fears had been the cornerstone of white flight to Christian schools a decade earlier.

Bob Jones University’s lack of black students was rooted in its ban on interracial dating. When the university eventually integrated in 1971, it allowed only married black students to attend, and in 1975 allowed single black students but denied “admission to applicants engaged in an interracial marriage or known to advocate interracial marriage or dating”.

While openly opposing racial integration eventually became an ineffective tool for galvanizing evangelical voters – replaced by racist dog-whistles – gays integrating themselves into the American family remained a potent touchstone for the Christian right.

“In 2004, evangelical leaders were running out of money and their voters had been falling away, so they all got in a room together to decide what issues would bring their flock back to the fold, and they decided on gay marriage,” says Fitzgerald. “And so they flooded the nation with anti–gay marriage ballot measures, and that not only helped get George W Bush elected to a second term, but the ballot measures sometimes performed better than he did … They were against gay people in principle, but they also thought gay teachers were a bigger threat to kids than anything.”

Think of the children

“He was awesome– he really cared,” says Schuylar Daniel, a junior at Valor Christian high school, of his former volleyball coach, Tonga.

On a chilly November evening, Daniel was joined by dozens of classmates, alumni and LGBTQ activists outside a Valor high school football game, protesting against the treatment of Tonga. Cars honked their horns as they drove by, showing support with signs that read “God Is Love” and “Every 45 seconds one queer teen attempts suicide.”

This statistic comes from the Trevor Project, an advocacy group and crisis center for LGBTQ youth struggling with suicidal ideation. While the Christian right views gay teachers as a threat to students, the Trevor Project’s research shows that “LGBTQ youth who have access to an LGBTQ-affirming school report lower rates of attempting suicide.” Yet, “only half of LGBTQ youth reported having an LGBTQ-affirming school.”

Skyler Daniel and other students and alumni are laboring to make Valor an LGBTQ-affirming school through their organization, Valor for Change. Through their Gay Straight Alliance (which has to meet off campus) and a list of demands for school leadership, the group aims to make their school a place where all students can feel safe and supported.

The Guardian reached out to Valor high school to comment on Tonga and Valor for Change, but did not receive a response.

Who’s a minister?

While 81% of Americans say gay teachers should be able to teach at elementary schools, religious schools catering to the remaining 19% have been developing a varied strategy for keeping them out of their classrooms.

“There are constitutional arguments they make, that [being forced to employ gay teachers] violates their freedom of association, free exercise of religion, but those have been rejected,” says Joshua Block of the ACLU. “One thing that hasn’t been rejected is the ‘ministerial exception’ [to discrimination laws] which is also grounded in the constitution. It says that there are certain positions that are so close to the exercise of an organization’s religious identity that the government can’t interfere with them.”

So if Valor Christian high school wanted to say that because Inoke Tonga, for example, led his students in a prayer before a volleyball game, or spoke of the holy spirit guiding them during a game, could his firing for being gay fall under a ministerial exemption from discrimination laws?

“It hasn’t been tested at that level of specificity,” says Block, “but a lot of religious organizations are trying to incorporate religious duties into the jobs of their employees to have that sort of insulation.”

Protecting religious freedom is at the core of America’s history, identity and constitution. Over the course of the 20th century, many legal battles have been waged over when the freedom of an individual or persecuted minority should trump that of a religious institution’s freedom to behave in any way their theology instructs.

There are a seemingly endless number of lines to be drawn on this issue, but for Block and the ACLU, the freedom to seek employment is essential to individual liberty.

Block said: “It is one thing to have a belief that you practice in your own religious community, but when you go out into the public market and start hiring people, you are engaging with the public at large, and you have to respect that there are a lot of people out there who deserve equal treatment, even if they don’t share your religious beliefs.”

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A months-long investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, published this month, asserted that dozens of churches within the SBC knowingly hired sex offenders, silenced victims, neglected to fire sexually abusive leaders and declined to report cases to secular authorities, or even document them within their own organization.

The SBC is the closest thing evangelicals have to a Vatican. That has lead to the two newspapers’ work being compared to the Boston Globe’s 2002 revelations about sexual abuse within the Catholic church, which were retold in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight.

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But not any more. The hotel is hosting the second annual Flat Earth International Conference – an event that Davidson himself founded and organized.

“I’d first heard it in the Bible and thought ‘this can’t be true,’” he recalled, speaking with rapid excitement. “I mean, I believed everything else, that the Earth was created in six literal days, but what about all this other stuff [about a flat Earth]? To be consistent as a biblical literalist, I can’t pick and choose.”

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Known today as “purity culture,” it was a meticulously designed system of rules and mind-games aimed at curbing adolescent Christian libidos. One of the most popular books of this phenomenon, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, has since been acknowledged by its author, Joshua Harris, as contributing to a great deal of psychological trauma in its generation of readers.

When Linda Kay Klein was a teenager growing up in the midwest in the mid 90s, she was completely saturated in purity culture, where the simplest thought, sensation, or G-rated touch with a boy was not only destructive to her self-worth, but a threat to his.

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