#daniel groth

Got the boys together for the holidays. ❄️ My OCs from my three different webcomics, from left to right: Daniel from Daniel Devere from Knell Florian from The Devil's Trill

Based off of this image.

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

Like many longtime religious right watchers, I’ve wondered how the religious right could knuckle under to Donald Trump despite knowing that he was a reprobate. Well, to my mind, part of the answer lies in the rise of one of the religious right’s titans, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. Dobson rose to fame on the right-wing evangelical circuit despite using one of his books, The Strong-Willed Child, to essentially brag about beating his dog—behavior that any reasonable person would consider to be cruelty to animals.

The passage in which Dobson describes beating his dog into submission has remained unchanged through four editions, most recently in 2010. One would think that at some point, Dobson would have been told, not asked, to remove that passage. But it didn’t keep his retrograde views on child-rearing, reproductive rights, and the family from becoming gospel in the evangelical world. Nor did it keep him from getting the ear of three presidents. Apparently as long as his teachings were deemed correct, it was all that mattered. Seen in that light, it makes sense that Dobson and his compatriots didn’t back off one inch from Trump after the Access Hollywood tapes came out. So what if he was reveling in degrading women? All that mattered to them was that he was going to give them what they wanted on social issues—and above all else, pack the courts with line-drawing conservatives.

The message was obvious—as long as your teachings are correct, it doesn’t matter if you’re a depraved jerk and reprobate. If I had any doubt that this mentality was SOP in “mainstream” evangelicalism, it was put to rest by the latest development in the dumpster fire that is Gateway Church. One of the minions of Gateway’s now-disgraced founding pastor, Robert Morris, was hired by the church founded by another charismatic titan even though he knew his former boss had molested a 12-year-old girl. Worse, he made his former boss an overseer at his new church.

The story begins in late 2006, when Ted Haggard, the first independent charismatic to become president of the National Association of Evangelicals, was fired by the church he’d founded, New Life Church in Colorado Springs—not too far from Focus on the Family’s headquarters. Haggard had grown that church from 22 people meeting in his basement to a campus of 14,000 people. But none of that saved him when he admitted to buying meth and receiving a massage from a gay escort. That escort, Mike Jones, had also claimed Haggard had paid him for sex for three years; he’d come forward when he learned Haggard was helping lead the charge for a ban on same-sex marriage in Colorado.

Haggard had already gone on sabbatical after Jones came forward. He never returned; the church’s board of overseers fired him on November 4. At the time, I remember this decision being hailed as a model for proper church governance. What we didn’t know at the time, however, was that it was a prelude to a complete failure of every standard of decency that is known—one that makes the religious right’s knuckling under to Trump almost nine years later look minor league.

The extent of that failure became clear in late May, with the release of legal filings related to Morris’s attempt to collect retirement payments from Gateway. They revealed that the man tapped as Haggard’s successor, Brady Boyd, had known the true extent of Morris’s crimes. In the filings, Morris claimed to have told his elders no fewer than three times—in 2005, 2007, and 2011—that he had molested Cindy for almost four years starting when she was 12 years old. Among those elders was Boyd, who was Gateway’s senior associate pastor from 2001 to 2007. More damningly, those filings also reveal that the news Boyd was a finalist to be Haggard’s successor didn’t sit well with one member of New Life—Cindy’s sister, Karen Clemishire Black. When Black learned this, she was concerned enough to request a meeting with the search committee. At that meeting, Black spelled out the extent of Morris’s crimes. Boyd had long claimed that he only learned about his former boss’s crimes was in June 2024. He spoke to New Life’s congregation shortly after Morris resigned; Julie Roys got a clip.

He reiterated this at the June 8 service, when he told his congregation that reports he knew about Morris’s crimes—specifically, Roys’ inquiry into the matter—were “an attack of the enemy.” He claimed that once Black told the search committee about her concerns, the committee “immediately” called Gateway’s elders to demand an explanation.

[...] For those keeping score, if Boyd didn’t know who Morris was in 2005, he certainly knew about it in 2007. Whatever the case, he was now firmly among those Gateway elders and staffers who, as Gateway elder Tra Willbanks revealed on the weekend before Election Day 2024, knew beyond any doubt that Cindy was most assuredly not a “young lady”—and did absolutely nothing. To put it in the most diplomatic terms I can use, Boyd and these so-called men and women of God in Southlake did a really shitty thing. If Boyd knew this and brazenly lied about it to his flock, he’s missing the switch that makes him human.

According to the FAQ, Coles and Newberg were alarmed by the prospect of Morris influencing the church, but didn’t bring their concerns to the elders. When Coles and Newberg learned Boyd wanted to name Morris as an overseer, they objected. However, Boyd appointed him anyway. According to the FAQ, Coles and Newberg had a duty to bring their concerns to the elders—and didn’t. It came back to bite them when the extent of Boyd’s deceit came to light. It was untenable for Coles and Newberg to stay on, and the elders asked for their resignations as well.

When I read this FAQ, I felt like I was going on a time warp to 2016. After all, from where I’m sitting, Boyd is displaying the very same mentality shown by the so-called moral guardians who rallied behind Trump despite knowing exactly who Trump was. As outrageous as their reaction to the “Access Hollywood” tapes was, those tapes were merely the cherries on top of a litany of outrages.

He plastered a private cell phone number on social media. He mocked a disabled reporter whom he almost certainly knew was disabled. He condoned outright un-American and undemocratic behavior from his supporters. To name just two of the most outrageous examples, he suggested a Black Lives Matter supporter got what he deserved when pro-Trump thugs beat him up, and mused that Trump supporters who pummeled a homeless man were “very passionate.” Even before the “Access Hollywood” tapes came out, he claimed that Megyn Kelly raked him over the coals at a debate because she had “blood coming out of her whatever.” By Election Day, at least 25 women had come forward to say Trump had sexually assaulted them. Despite his denials, the sheer volume exceeds any possible good-faith interpretation.

And yet, such upstanding evangelical “leaders” like Dobson, Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, and Ralph Reed told us with a straight face that none of that really mattered. I suspect that they considered his depravities on the campaign trail as mere sins to be forgiven, not behavior that rendered someone unfit for office. To be sure, most of the religious right’s base probably hadn’t seen the worst of Trump’s outrages given that, then as now, they live in a bubble. But the leaders of the religious right had to have seen it all. Any reasonable person should have looked at this and concluded that Trump was not to be supported, even if they liked the clucking noises he made. And yet, they did it anyway—and they’ve continued doing it for more than a decade. I first started wondering if I was seeing parallels between these situations in the weeks after Boyd’s ouster. A week after Boyd was pushed out, several New Life members gathered on the streets near the church to support Boyd. 

[...] If that isn’t enough, there’s an actual Facebook group dedicated to supporting Boyd. In recent weeks, Boyd and his wife, Pam, have essentially taken over the group and used it to cast themselves as the victims while promoting their new ministry, Psalm 68 Ministries. Let’s see if we’ve got this right. A pastor has been pushed out for knowing his former employer was a sexual predator and lying about it—and he still has any support at all? Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah—when the religious right continued to rally behind Trump even after January 6 left no doubt who Trump was. The most outrageous example of this came when Franklin Graham wagged his finger at the Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for the horror he launched that day. He even made the patently blasphemous suggestion that the Democrats had enticed the Republicans who broke ranks to forget “all he has done for our country” in return for “thirty pieces of silver.” Graham and others kept up their decade-long campaign of bullying people of faith into bowing down to Trump—ultimately convincing a whopping 81 percent of white evangelicals to vote for him in 2024. It’s likely a lot of ink is going to be spilled about how evangelicals were willing to vote for a man who falsely claimed the election was stolen from him, then stood and watched while election workers and tech company employees were being viciously harassed and trolled due to said lies. Likewise, a lot of ink will be spilled about how these lies led to a violent insurrection, an attempted self-coup. How could someone who professes to live for God vote for that? To my mind, the same mentality that led the religious right to rally behind Trump even after January 6 is the same mentality that allowed Boyd to have any kind of support even after it emerged he had covered for a sexual predator. There’s one big difference. While the religious right merely breached every standard of decency that is known by supporting Trump, Boyd crossed another line—a legal and criminal one. 

Years ago I made a couple written side stories (with a few illustrations) based on my Daniel webcomic and now they're finally available as a one-time purchase in my Patreon Shop!

“Slashed”