This must be the season for exposés on Christian youth ministries.
Business Insider just came out with a huge piece on Young Life and a lot of folks are talking about the New Yorker’s recent exposé on the Christian drug rehab organization, Teen Challenge. Based on 60-plus interviews, it’s about one teen-aged girl’s story of being taken from her adopted parents’ home in the middle of the night and forced into a hellish residential program in central Florida.
The story has been framed as Teen Challenge attacking gay teens, although Emma, the central character, arrives at the school pregnant and ends up marrying a man four years later. Much of the story is about how she was forced to give up her child while sequestered at Teen Challenge.
It’s important, when reading this vivid story, to keep asking: Where are the voices on the other side of this drama?
Many of the events reported by The New Yorker took place a decade ago. Here’s how it started:
In the spring of her freshman year of high school, in 2011, Emma Burris was woken at three in the morning. Someone had turned on the lights in her room. She was facing the wall and saw a man’s shadow. She reached for her cell phone, which she kept under her pillow at night, but it wasn’t there. The man, Shane Thompson, who is six and a half feet tall, wore a shirt with “Juvenile Transport Agent” printed on the back. He and a colleague instructed Emma to put on her clothes and follow them to their car. “She was very verbal, resisting,” Thompson told me. Her parents, who had adopted her when she was seven, stood by the doorway, watching silently.
Thompson drove Emma away from her house, in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, and merged onto the highway. Emma, who was fifteen, tried to remember every exit sign she passed, so that she could find her way home, but she was crying too hard to remember the names. …
Part Scottish and part Puerto Rican, Emma was slight, with long, wavy blond hair. Her parents, whose lives revolved around their church, admonished her for being aggressive toward them and for expressing her sexuality too freely. She watched lesbian pornography and had lost her virginity to an older boy.
“Being aggressive toward them?” I know a little something about such places; my own daughter has lived in such facilities where the age of consent for medical treatment is 13, after which kids choose whether or not to remain in treatment. The age of medical consent in Florida is 18.
The majority of cases involve violent kids; the sorts where you have to lock your knives away because of what the child may do with them.
How violent was Emma? The story doesn’t say. Did she bounce from one foster home to another because of her behavior? The story doesn’t say.
After a three-hour drive, Thompson pulled up to a ranch house in Lakeland, a small city in central Florida. About thirty yards behind the house was a much larger one, with white shutters and a brick fence. Emma was escorted inside the second house and told to strip naked and bend over while she coughed, to prove she wasn’t hiding any drugs. She was informed that this would be her new school. It was called Teen Challenge, and she would remain there for at least fifteen months.
Upon reading it, I was quite confused. What I (and most other people) knew about Teen Challenge came from reading “The Cross and the Switchblade” in our teens; watching the 1970 movie starring Pat Boone as David Wilkerson, the founder, and getting familiar with the group’s expertise at helping people get out of drug addiction.
Looking at their national site, there’s no hint on their site of a gulag of institutions that imprison teenagers; in fact this is a side of Teen Challenge I’m guessing few people know about.
However, a simple Google search reveals that Teen Challenge has been a mess for some time. This 2012 Time magazine article tells how the problems linked to Teen Challenge and similar groups were so bad in Florida that the Tampa Bay Times did a three-part investigation. The Daily Kos did an eight-part series in 2008. The Wartburg Watch blog sounded the alarm in 2015.
Teen Challenge, a network of nonprofits that has received tens of millions of dollars in state and federal grants, has more than a thousand centers in the United States and abroad.
Also, the Teen Challenge website says there are more than 200 residential centers. The story says there are 1,000 in the USA and abroad. So, where are the other 800? Confused, here.
George W. Bush has praised it as “one of the really successful programs in America.” The organization, which is affiliated with the Pentecostal Assemblies of God church, is made up of centers for adolescents and adults seeking to overcome “life-controlling issues,” such as drug use, depression, or sexual promiscuity. Many people are sent there by courts, as an alternative to juvenile detention or jail.
The school followed a Bible-based curriculum emphasizing character development, and a counselor gave Emma a thick handbook. Touching was forbidden, she learned.
Throughout its 60-plus years of existence, Teen Challenge has come up with some very high success rates among its graduates. I am trying to square those figures with what the magazine article tells us about what goes on behind closed doors.
Again, I’ve met enough kids in similar facilities and been in enough classes and conferences with their parents to know that you’re not just thrown in there because you’re reading lesbian literature. You’re there because you’re suicidal, violent, drug-addicted, mentally ill or some similar problem.
When Emma saw that there was no way for her to get an abortion, she began whispering to the other girls that she wanted to keep her baby. Emma had been born when her biological mother, who used drugs, was in jail. Emma had immediately been put in foster care, and she didn’t want her child to grow up with the same sense of abandonment.
I’ve met girls who are like Emma; I’ve met their families too and know a lot of their stories. The latter gives up such kids usually because the kid has either physically threatened other members of the household or refuses to go to school or do anything the family asks them to do.
These families don’t give up such kids after one bad day. They are at their wits’ end, they’re desperate and often there’s a years’-long waiting list to get into a state mental health facility; hence the parents turn to a private group like Teen Challenge. As for the Twitter mob going calling for the closure of all these centers, what if they all shut down tomorrow? Where would you send these kids? Their families won’t take them back, so … solutions, anyone?
Finally, did the reporter try contacting the family?
If so, I can’t find any reference to that in the piece. I am not excusing the bizarre way in which this girl appears to have been treated, but her adopted family sounds completely heartless. And did Emma have further contact with them post-discharge? Is there a story there?
Like all the residents’ parents, they had signed a contract unconditionally giving Teen Challenge control of their child. According to a 2020 version of the form, parents agreed “not to interfere with the custody or management of said minor in any way.” At a recent family orientation for the Lakeland Teen Challenge, which was recorded, the director, a young man who with his wife replaced the Del Valles when they retired, instructed parents not to believe their daughters when they complained about the program. “Know that, No. 1, that’s a lie,” he said. “It’s all a ploy,” he went on. “It’s all a tactic to wear you down, to get you to pull them out of the program.”
Later on:
Each year, some fifty thousand adolescents in the U.S. are sent to a constellation of residential centers—wilderness programs, boot camps, behavior-modification facilities, and religious treatment courses—that promise to combat a broad array of unwanted behaviors. There are no federal laws or agencies regulating these centers.
The same holds true for adoption agencies. We have a mental health crisis in this country and the state institutions are overwhelmed. These residential centers aren’t cheap, either; I know one family that spent a good portion of their retirement on one to help their suicidal daughter.
The story goes on to record how Emma was forced to give up her son, was not given adequate legal representation, then forced to start her Teen Challenge program all over again.
One might wonder if this is a mental health story or a religion story, but the latter does make its way into the piece eventually.
In the mornings and evenings, the staff often dimmed the lights in the living room and played Christian music. Emma found herself letting go of her inhibitions. “I’d be on my knees, bawling, and then the other girls would start doing it,” she said. “It was presented as if we were becoming vulnerable to God — I was told I had a gift for worship — but I think it was actually all of us feeling overwhelmed and oppressed and stuck. It was a collective cry session.” Sometimes Emma would speak in tongues, a practice encouraged by the Assemblies of God. “It made me feel free and powerful, but I also knew that I was being watched,” she said. “It was, like, ‘Please see this. Please validate that I am experiencing God, and He is real.’ ”
Every week, at different churches, Emma was asked to give her testimony, the story of her son’s adoption, in the form of a poem. She told the story so many times that the plot points no longer seemed connected to her. “To give him the best life, adoption is the only way,” she recited. “I was the one who was the prodigal daughter / But I turned right around and went straight to my Father.” After her performance, a collection plate was passed, the proceeds of which went to Teen Challenge. Other students selected to share their stories typically had personal histories involving rape, murder, or dramatic abandonment.
Well, it is a haunting piece and worth the read even though I have questions about why the state of Florida has done apparently nothing about these places despite more than one media investigation. Near the end, Emma does say that something happened spiritually to her (in a good way) inside this program that she can’t explain or categorize.
But, she added, “at Teen Challenge, I had very vivid experiences where I felt I encountered God, and that’s been the most complicated part — untangling what I actually believe.”
It wouldn’t have weakened this article to have included at least one contrarian point of view.
I would have liked something, anything, from a person who’d benefited from this program or, was there truly no such person to be found? Are all the positive testimonies on Teen Challenge’s website false? Many of the events described in this story happened 10-20 years ago. Has Teen Challenge changed at all since then?
I don’t believe such things are completely black or white and despite the villainy of many characters involved, there has to be another side to this story as much as we may disagree with it. But we’ll not find it in this piece.
FIRST IMAGE: Illustration posted with a media bias report at the website of the Columbia University School of Professional Studies.