Different Decade, Same Messages: American Evangelicalism's Focus on Public Education
And gender roles within marriage as well as corporal punishment
Virtue Christian women’s magazine was a national publication produced by Bethesda Christian Center and edited by Devi Titus, wife of Bethesda’s charismatic evangelical preacher Larry Titus. Bethesda was headquartered in Monitor, Washington and rose to prominence in the 1970s, spawning offshoots across the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. The church’s large choir traveled to Europe for choir concerts and supported missionaries who smuggled Bibles into the former Soviet Union. The church gained a huge influence and following in Wenatchee and some folks even took out mortgages on their homes and orchards to give the money to the Titus’ and Bethesda.
At its high water mark, the church not only owned a publishing house but also a gas station, a bookstore, a school, and a college and produced audiobooks as well as broadcast quality TV specials.
Eventually, the Titus’ first religious empire came crashing down amidst a Federal fraud trial that saw Bethesda’s business manager charged with financial crimes he said Titus put him up to. There was a Ponzi scheme involving diamonds imported from “The Holy Land” that the county sheriff at the time fell prey to as well as mob money in the mix. The county prosecutor at the time called it “the biggest trial in the last 100 years” and you can read about how it ended here.
There is an uncanny amount of overlap between Bethesda and Grace City Church, which I have touched on before. High-profile and wealthy members of Bethesda, like the Ballard family (owners of Ballard Ambulance) migrated from Titus’ flock to GCC Pastor Josh McPherson’s. But it’s also the messaging and values communicated by these two different “independent” churches in the same location four decades apart that are eerily similar.
Take for instance the 1979 Jan/Feb issue of Virtue Magazine, which features articles focused on public education.
In an article titled “Do I send my children to Public School” former public educator Paul Chase lays out his rationale for pulling his son out of public school and leaving his job to teach at a Christian school.
“…it became obvious to me that the public system was not a good place to bring up a child ‘in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,’” Chase wrote.
On pages 82 and 83, another author named Doug Murren points to the “failure of secular education” in an article that seems like it could have been written by McPherson himself.
“Public education, once proclaimed god of our age and panacea for society, has been unable to produce the product implicitly promised,” Murren wrote. “Educational centers have in many cases become no more than forums for the distribution of atheistic viewpoints, called foolishness by God; unproductivity, labeled creativity; and moral license, uncovering the baseness of human nature in the cause of liberality.”