At a therapeutic farm in Georgia, troubled teens are possessed by demons, depressed because of technology—and allegedly mistreated by their caretakers.

This is the first in a two-part series examining the therapeutic Christian boarding school Shepherd’s Hill Academy. Read the second part here.

O n August 22, 2014, Trace Embry, executive director and founder of the therapeutic Christian boarding school Shepherd’s Hill Academy (SHA), wrote in the school’s monthly newsletter:

“It’s been awhile since we’ve dealt with anything overtly demonic here at SHA, but it appears ‘Old Dark Eyes’ has paid us another visit.”

Embry was referring to two boys arriving to SHA on the same day who, he said, brought with them “baggage from the dark side.” He solicited prayers so the team at SHA could properly minister to these boys, as “mere counseling and psychology will fall short.”

Little did they likely know that in coming to SHA, those boys would be relinquishing their basic human rights — and that no one would be around to defend them.

SHA, formerly known as Shepherd’s Hill Farm, provides year-long residential care for kids grades 7-12 on an 86-acre farm in Martin, Georgia. According to a December 2016 episode of SHA’s weekly podcast License to Parent (L2P), which is co-hosted by Embry, tuition is $88,900 per student per year. Licensed for a capacity of no more than 36 students, SHA is intended for teens who are “troubled,” the word the academy uses to describe those with ADD, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, reactive attachment disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, Asperger’s syndrome, anger management, and generally rebellious behavior.

Embry believes the demonic forces operating within contemporary video games and pop music, and in the media at large, are the root cause of many of the mental and behavioral health issues affecting today’s teenagers. Students at the academy are intentionally isolated from society and undergo a mandatory media and technology fast. They begin their first 10 months in the Outdoor Therapy Program, where they live in “structurally sound rustic cabins” without any electricity or running water. They are only allowed access to shower facilities, a cafeteria, and classrooms on the main campus. As Embry told Katherine Albrecht last November, when participating in this outdoor therapy program, the teens “don’t have access to technology. No electricity whatsoever except in the classroom from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.”

Students at Shepherd’s Hill Academy are intentionally isolated from society and undergo a mandatory media and technology fast.
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The boys and girls remain separated and under constant staff supervision throughout their stay, even after the intensive 10-month wilderness program. During this time, the boys “contribute to the maintenance, repair, and/or construction of” the campsites, while the girls cultivate a garden, learn beekeeping, sewing and quilting, and take care of the academy’s barn. Each student also takes part in the Equine Therapy Program. After the period of rustic living is over, the students graduate into the Next Step Program, where they live in houses on the main campus, designed to mimic the environment they will return to when they go home.

Established in 1994 by Trace and his wife Beth, Shepherd’s Hill didn’t begin enrolling teens in crisis until 2001, and it operated unlicensed for 10 years. It was not until September 2010 that Georgia’s Department of Human Services was made aware of the wilderness camp’s existence, when a social worker filed a complaint concerning SHA’s illegal operation. It took another 15 months for the school to become officially licensed; it stayed open and operating that entire time.

SHA is now fully licensed by the state of Georgia, but it has surfaced several ethical concerns, including the lack of appropriate care for teens with mental health issues, abusive treatment, and anti-LGBTQ practices similar to those practiced at conversion camps.

The Devil In The Details

Like many schools that specialize in care for troubled teens, SHA provides a checklist on its website for parents to consider while searching for help for their child. Among the more credible warning signs mentioned — like threats to self or others, drug addiction, and violent tendencies — are attributes of typical adolescent behavior, like opposition to the belief system of the family, not wanting to participate in family activities, defending peers, and general disobedience.

The Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic and Appropriate Use of Residential Treatment (ASTART) — a volunteer organization that works to protect children from abuse and neglect in residential programs—warns parents against relying on checklists like this. The organization also stresses the importance of considering all possible factors that may be contributing to a child’s change in behavior.

“If you are very worried, frustrated, angry, confused, or emotional in other ways, you may see behaviors as more extreme than they really are,” the alliance writes. Removing a child from their home environment and sending them away can amplify “strong resentments in your child,” and impair an already capricious parent-child relationship.

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SHA’s vaguely defined parameters for removal from the home also enable parents to punish their children for religious disobedience. If a teen no longer wishes to participate in church activities, or begins to openly question their faith and their family’s biblical principles, a parent or guardian could label that behavior as rebellion and subsequently send their child to a place like SHA. If the teen also began spending more time with friends who don’t share their parents’ belief system and started to act out at home in response to the unyielding and volatile environment, a parent could be convinced after consulting SHA’s website that their child needs a Christian wilderness atmosphere to return them to the path God has chosen for them.

If any of this sounds like an overreach, consider Embry’s own words.

During a three-part series on L2P, Embry and his podcast co-host Rich Roszel said that reading the Bible is foundational to healing the students at Shepherd’s Hill. When asked about the most important and effective method of therapy used at the farm, Embry said, “It’s the knowledge of, and a healthy submitted and committed relationship with the God who created them, through Jesus Christ.” He then boasted that the pastor from the pulpit of his church “said the best kids on the planet would do well having a year at SHA. It’s really a discipleship clinic.”

In its reliance on religion and technology-fasting to treat “troubled kids,” SHA has advanced dangerous ideas about mental health.

Embry has specifically written and spoken often about anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure that’s a common symptom of many mental illnesses — most notably, depression. According to Embry, most students who come to SHA, whether they were formally diagnosed beforehand or not, are struggling with anhedonia due to being overly dependent on modern technology, and the medication their doctor prescribed is, as he’s put it, “making it worse.”

Embry focuses on technology as a cause for mental health issues in teens, and Bible study as a treatment, despite scientific evidence contradicting his stance.
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In August 2013, Embry stated in his podcast, “Anhedonia is not ADD, ADHD, or even depression, although the symptoms are very similar. Anhedonia is a destruction of the pleasure center in the brain, which comes from unbridled multitasking on today’s popular electronic gadgets.”

The source for Embry’s views on anhedonia is Dr. Archibald Hart, former dean of Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Psychology. In an appearance on L2P in July 2010, Embry asked Dr. Hart what he thought of anhedonia being misdiagnosed by doctors. Dr. Hart replied, “Oh, 100 percent. They might call it depression, put you on an antidepressant, which is the last thing you should do.” Hart added, “There is no medication for anhedonia. It’s a lifestyle change.”

Unsurprisingly, the science doesn’t support Embry or Dr. Hart.

Dr. Jean Kim, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University (GWU), confirms that anhedonia “isn’t anything accepted or recognized by the general medical community as an official illness. [Embry] seems to be misappropriating aspects of neuroscience that are partly accurate to serve his own pitch.” Dr. Ronald Pies, professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University, seconds this: “We know that serious psychiatric illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, have existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, long before ‘technology’ came about.”

Embry’s views on anhedonia, though discredited by science, are fundamental to how SHA operates. In 2010, he wrote, “We at [Shepherd’s Hill] understand that if an anhedonic troubled teen cannot think critically, constructively, or creatively . . . God becomes an abstract too difficult and boring for the anhedonic brain to conceive or desire.” He earnestly believes the effects of anhedonia are preventing today’s youth from comprehending Christianity, and is the primary reason these teens are put under his care in the first place, because “culturally-induced (i.e. technology) stimuli is affecting our teens through anhedonia.”

This is why Embry has also openly advocated for religion as a substitute for professional mental health treatment. He proudly advertised on his blog that 70% of the students at Shepherd’s Hill are weaned off their medication. In 2010, he wrote:

“Stimulating a kid with the love, training, nurture, discipline, and truth of God’s Word, will, over time, transform a troubled teen far more efficiently and effectively than medications . . . This is why so many kids who come to Shepherd’s Hill Farm on bushel loads of medication can leave medication-free at the end of a year.”

Again, Embry’s assertions contradict scientific evidence. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), “the results of a comprehensive review of pediatric trials conducted between 1988 and 2006 suggested that the benefits of antidepressant medications likely outweigh their risks to children and adolescents with major depression and anxiety disorders.” The experts at NIMH go on to stress that once a medication treatment is started, it “should not be abruptly stopped. Although they are not habit-forming or addictive, abruptly ending an antidepressant can cause withdrawal symptoms or lead to a relapse.”

Dr. Kim at GWU also warned of the potential harm that can occur from the methods used at Shepherd’s Hill:

“[Embry’s] advice/methods seem potentially harmful insofar as they don’t seem based in any sort of formal scientific or clinical evidence, or known medical-psychiatric neuroscience. Some general aspects of his treatment may still be helpful for some, but if it isn’t grounded in evidence-based research or scientific knowledge, it will be easy for him to veer into pseudoscience and even dangerous or harmful practices (like not giving someone with a serious psychiatric disorder who actually needs medication an appropriate diagnosis or treatment).”

While these views on mental health treatment are dangerous, Dr. Kim notes, “if [Embry] had a licensed professional screen clients and triage them for appropriateness into his program, that would be less worrisome.”

It’s troubling, then, that there are no clinical psychologists or psychiatrists on staff at Shepherd’s Hill; all personnel listed on the website under the Therapeutic Team are counselors, and it wasn’t until late last year that they all held a professional license by the state of Georgia.

Staff members oversee children with behavioral and mental health problems deemed severe enough to warrant year-round residential treatment with 24/7 supervision, but of the 21 members on the residential teams, according to their bios on the SHA website, fewer than one-quarter of them have completed educational programs related to mental or behavioral health.

More troubling than this lack of qualification, though, is SHA’s record of abusing its students.

Abuse Allegations

As part of its treatment plan, SHA has been accused of engaging in multiple forms of abuse. Kids who “act out” or defy God may be subject to physical punishment, humiliation, food restrictions, and more.

Angela Smith is the national coordinator for HEAL, an organization that works to expose abusive facilities designed to treat teenagers with behavioral problems. She confirmed via email that, “HEAL received a signed, under penalty of perjury document from a survivor of Shepherd’s Hill Farm.” The author of the statement has not returned our request for comment, but the full account is published anonymously on HEAL’s site. Within the testimony of the former student are specific allegations of abuse, the use of which Trace Embry has justified repeatedly, on his radio program, in newsletters to SHA’s community, and on the school’s website. All parents or guardians are required to sign a power of attorney document, essentially giving up their own rights as parents, upon enrolling their child at SHA.

Here are some of the abuses allegedly suffered by those who have attended the academy.

Corporal Punishment

In the statement, the survivor alleges that he was hit with a paddle by Trace Embry in front of other classmates for being disrespectful, an act of discipline for which Embry has openly advocated.

On L2P, Embry repeatedly dives into the topic of corporal punishment. For instance, on an episode dated September 18, 2012, he said parents should urge their local school boards to bring back paddling: “The [paddle] applied to the [posterior] of a disruptive and rebellious few, occasionally, might just make a better learning environment for the majority.”

A month later, Embry said, “I don’t feel it’s healthy, or wise, that a teen should feel that [corporal punishment] is ever out of the realm of possibility . . . There may be a circumstance that requires a parent to physically intervene in order to bring justice to a situation at home.”

Then, in April 2014, Embry stated, “Nowhere in Scripture is spanking, at any age when appropriately administered by a loving parent, ever condemned.” And in June 2015, he and his co-host Roszel interviewed psychologist and author John Rosemond on the topic of spanking; all three men advised parents to spank their children in private, where no one else can see them, so they do not have to worry about the Department of Human Services accusing them of abuse.

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On February 6, 2016, Embry declared spanking “an effective tool against foolishness and rebellion.” A week later, he argued that not considering corporal punishment as a form discipline is abusive, and because of Proverbs 23:13-14, punishing a child with a rod will save their soul from death. (Corporal punishment is technically legal in Georgia schools with parental consent, but it is in violation of the state’s Outdoor Child Caring Program [OCCP] licensure rules.)

Indoctrination

The survivor also claims in his statement to have interrupted a Bible lesson taught by Embry. “[He] raised [his] hand and said, ‘You are brainwashing us.’ Embry smiled and replied, ‘Yes we are! We are brainwashing you in the blood of the lamb!’”

In February 2014, Embry exclaimed, “It’s not uncommon for Christian parents to be accused of indoctrinating their own kids with dangerous ideologies and beliefs.” He then boasted that if training your children with biblical principles is considered brainwashing, “then I’m all for it.” On the December 29, 2014 episode of L2P, co-host Rich Roszel said, “[Shepherd’s Hill Academy] is a place where you can have kids’ brains reset to their original factory setting.” Embry replied, “I like that statement, too.”

On July 15, 2015, Trace Embry was a guest on Dr. Michael Brown’s radio program, The Line of Fire with Dr. Brown, where he said, “We brainwash [our students] with Jesus.”

Escort Service

During a school break at home, the survivor declared to his father that he did not want to go back to the farm; the next morning, “two very large men” came into his room. According to his account, they said, “We are bounty hunters to take you back to Shepherds [sic] Hill Farm.”

SHA advertises the use of a transport service to bring teens to the farm, using SafePassage Adolescent Services. The company writes on its website, “It is our experience at SafePassage that it is always better to wait until our Professional Transport Team is with you at your home to deliver the news through intervention that you have chosen to add a therapeutic component to their education.” To make sure the child remains unaware, the company advises parents to password protect their email and computer access, delete all cache history, and provide a phone number where a voicemail can be left without the child hearing.

Using these private “escort” or “transport” services is considered a warning sign for future abuse by the residential program by ASTART, which explains:

“The company typically sends two or more physically intimidating bodyguards to wake the child in the middle of the night, and force them from their bed into a waiting SUV — often in pajamas and handcuffs — while the parents look on…This is how the child learns [they] will be leaving home…This is a scene filled with tears and pleading and promises and begging. This is what many residential programs consider the first step in ‘healing family relationships.’”

This is “trauma, not therapy,” ASTART insists. This is harm, not healing. ASTART goes on to describe the trauma of those who have been escorted to a residential program:

“They experience years of nightmares, flashbacks, emotional ‘numbing,’ inability to concentrate, angry outbursts, difficulty sleeping or other symptoms — primarily, survivors say, because of the trauma of being forcibly taken against their will, by strangers, to a completely unfamiliar place, and kidnapped with the knowledge and permission of their parents — parents who are supposed to be the child’s trusted protectors.”

Special Meals And Clothing

On October 6, 2015, Embry released a video in which he argues, “One of the consequences we’ve found at Shepherd’s Hill Academy to be quite effective when a major offense takes place — is what we call a ‘special meal.’” He goes onto say it consists of unseasoned beans and greens and stresses, “There’s nothing mandating your child’s right to a gourmet meal every time he comes to the table.” He used the same script in a daily feature from May 2014 and then again, in December 2015.

In his statement, the survivor said he was put on “‘special meals’ for a month and a half.” These meals consisted of a can of beans or a can of vegetables, bread, a piece of fruit, and water.

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Dr. Kim expressed concern for this form of punishment, saying, “any sort of punitive or aversive conditioning isn’t a good thing for children or teens. And any sort of controlled meddling with dietary behaviors (other than something obviously medical, like a food allergy) can potentially exacerbate or worsen eating disorders.”

Over the years, a handful of former students have spoken out about abusive practices at SHA on various comment threads and blogs, most of which are no longer maintained. A young man by the name of K. Hicks told a similar story in 2010. (I reached out to Hicks, but he has not replied.) He claims to have enrolled in SHA in May 2005, during which time he and another student ran away. The local police department and Embry caught them and returned them to the farm. They were punished with “three weeks of orange jumpsuits, two weeks of sandals, and a week and a half of shackles.” They were also given “two weeks of special meals.”

Forcing students to wear these special clothes, rather than their own, is another form of punishment. In a newsletter from October 2015, Embry recounted an incident concerning a student who had run away while at home visiting his parents over a weekend. The local police department picked up the boy at a “restaurant after hours of hiding in a wooded area. He was then promptly returned to SHA, where he is now donning a bright orange jumpsuit.”

Physical Restraints

In June 2014, Embry wrote of a student in the SHA newsletter who “went berserk when the student couldn’t convince the parents that going home was the best option.” As a consequence of this episode, he said, some of the counselors were punched and scratched, and, “The wavering parents were a tick away from taking Junior home; but, were strongly advised to buck up and stand their ground.”

After the parents were encouraged to not allow the student to return home with them, Embry wrote, “An insightful parent understands that rebellion like this is a carnal desire fueled by succumbing to a spiritual battle — albeit an unholy spiritual victory.” He went onto say, “This student had to be physically restrained. It wasn’t comfortable; but, knowing that outbursts like this weren’t going to be tolerated, it sent a message of love to this student’s spirit that, in due time, is likely to be articulated in the flesh.” He later writes, “The real problem in most cases is not that parents take things too far; but that, often, they don’t take them far enough…”

In November 2015, Embry recounted an incident that occurred a month prior. During a chapel service, a boy who had only been in the program a few days was “triggered by something.” A counselor then escorted the student out, where Embry joined them.

“After the three of us exited the chapel, that’s when the boy began to shout a litany of profanities and other scary threats. When it looked like the boy was going to get physical, Frank was quick to secure everyone’s safety. That’s when the intensity and the volume of the boy’s displeasure increased…After talking the young man down, I put my hands on him and prayed for him as other staff arrived. Though I had already told him that we would meet him at every turn — and for as long as we needed to — I could feel his body go soft as I was praying.”

Embry has, not surprisingly, refuted claims of abuse; on SHA’s website, he states that the school is accountable to God, SHA’s board directors, and to state and federal regulators, and says allegations of abuse are false.

Conversion Therapy

SHA doesn’t just seek to mistreat kids with mental illnesses and non-religious beliefs; it has also targeted those who are LGBTQ via conversion therapy practices. On SHA’s application for admission, administrators specifically ask parents to, “Select the sexual orientation your child claims.” Included in the list among homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual are the options of “transgender” and “currently sexually active.”

The term “conversion therapy” often conjures stark images of forced institutionalization, castration, and electroconvulsive shock treatments being administered to helpless individuals. While these methods were more prevalent in the past than they are today, all forms of reparative therapies are incredibly harmful.

According to Just the Facts about Sexual Orientation and Youth: A Primer for Principals, Educators, and School Personnel—a publication endorsed by the American Psychological Association (APA), American Counseling Association (ACA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and 10 other prominent organizations — “reparative therapy and sexual orientation conversion therapy refer to counseling and psychotherapy aimed at eliminating or suppressing homosexuality. The most important fact about these ‘therapies’ is that they are based on a view of homosexuality that has been rejected by all the major mental health professions.”

According to guidelines from the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), methods of reparative therapies deemed favorable in these conversion programs include medication, hypnosis, sex therapies, and behavior and cognitive therapies. But these methods can produce dangerous effects — especially on adolescents who face rejection from their families. As noted by the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), “Research shows that lesbian, gay, and bisexual young adults who reported higher levels of family rejection during adolescence were more than eight times more likely to report having attempted suicide, [and] more than five times more likely to report high levels of depression…”

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Embry regularly discusses the immorality and sinfulness of LGBTQ people on License to Parent, often interviewing “doctors” who rely on pseudoscience to make their case against any sexuality and gender identity that rejects a cisgender, heterosexual criterion. Oregon, California, Illinois, and New Jersey have laws that ban conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors. In 2016, Embry interviewed David Pickup, a supporter and practitioner of conversion therapy and the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that sought to overturn California’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. In 2015, he talked with Christopher Doyle, director of the International Healing Foundation, a non-profit that’s “dedicated to helping people in their struggles with sexual orientation,” who Embry called a “key figure in the conversion therapy movement.”

Embry invites these anti-LGBTQ activists to the school as well, such as in May 2016, when he invited Ciara Leilani to speak to the students at Shepherd’s Hill. Leilani says on her blog that she “lived as a lesbian in a homosexual lifestyle for 20 years. A lifestyle of choices that kept [her] further from [God’s] truth.” Now she is a Christian blogger and founder of the religious non-profit Kingdom Asylum Ministries.

On an episode of L2P that aired after she spoke to SHA students, Leilani said that not long after she promised she would abstain from sex with a man outside of marriage, a “lesbian encounter” took her by surprise. She discussed her “radical deliverance” when she turned 34 and explained she “knew [God] was tangibly in the room” with her. When asked about the supernatural deliverance she referenced, she recalled, “I know I had many demonic spirits that occupied my body, my soul, and I had no control. I was set free from lust and perversion immediately.”

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This isn’t the first time students were exposed to sexual orientation fear-mongering—and exposure to the extreme views of guest speakers is the least of it. Embry has, on more than one occasion, publicly stated that he practices a form of conversion therapy at Shepherd’s Hill.

In a newsletter from August 2015, Embry wrote about a three-week series he did with SHA students on homosexuality. After this series, he wrote, three students approached him. “The result was that all three kids, two girls and one boy, renounced any future plans to pursue that lifestyle!” He stressed that despite what “liberal-minded people may imagine,” all he did was “share the truth in love” about the topic. “I never coerced or used shame or fear tactics to invoke these renunciations,” he continues. “There’s so much confusion about this topic; unfortunately, much of it comes from those who would call themselves ‘trained professionals’ and now unfortunately, from our own American lawmakers.”

He then writes about mental and behavioral health conferences he attended, where, according to his views, political correctness, lack of common sense, junk science, and the “spirit of the enemy” confound LGBTQ issues. He proudly deadnames and misgenders Caitlyn Jenner, writing, “After [Caitlyn] Jenner was hailed as a hero, I finally had to speak up. The Emperor’s New Clothes was exposed by little ole me. I asked why a conference full of well-educated people are now defining heroes and taking their mental health cues from an individual who is emotionally disturbed and on suicide-watch as I spoke?”

Ending the newsletter, he insists that the Supreme Court ruling that brought marriage equality to all 50 states has made it harder for SHA to do the work that they’re doing. “Already, secular associations are strong-arming SHA to agree to unbiblical policies in this area.” Finally, while referencing a now-debunked 23-year-old study that falsely predicted a shorter lifespan for gay Americans, Embry fears, “Without some drastic and immediate action, SHA may never be allowed to steer another kid out of a lifestyle” that is “proven” to be more detrimental to a person’s life expectancy than cigarettes.

Students have been exposed to sexual orientation fear-mongering, and Embry has publicly stated that he practices a form of reparative therapy at Shepherd’s Hill.
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A month after writing about his three-week series that convinced three students to renounce their queer identity, Embry raved about another student making the same commitment, writing, “[A]nother SHA student renounced any further pursuit of that lifestyle, making her the fourth student in two months to do so.” Two months later, Embry wrote, “While several students have renounced their homosexuality in recent months, yet another did so in October. This same student, along with many others, have come to Christ also.”

Students at SHA are persistently encouraged to renounce any part of themselves that does not align with a cisgender heteronormative identity. Current technology, the media at large, and the ways in which teenagers interact with their peers in the 21st-century are seen as demonically influenced and the root cause of the “troubled” students at the farm. Pseudoscience and the “experts” that propagate these dangerous concepts are exalted due to their claimed biblical origins, and religious indoctrination is seen as the most important and effective method of therapy. Meanwhile, allegations of abuse mount.

Most distressingly, all of this has been given the stamp of approval by the state of Georgia — and SHA is, in having its dangerous practices sanctioned, far from an anomaly.

The free public library is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the mid-1800s, only the rich read. That all changed, however, when Melvil Dewey took over as State Librarian of New York in 1888. The concept of a free public library had been gaining ground sluggishly since the mid-1800s but, few libraries were truly free for all, with most requiring annual subscription fees. Dewey goosed the growth of free public libraries with funding, infrastructure, and regulation.

He invented professional organizations and opened librarian schools, bullied committees, and made rousing speeches. He was a zealous librarian celebrity, famously arrogant, and completely committed to the idea that the public could only improve themselves if they understood and embodied Christian morality. Dewey could provide this education with books, which would “elevate” them through a system of ideologically coordinated public libraries. When shown the foundation of Western literature—ran the logic—readers would understand how society functioned as well as their place within it. The result would be literate but passive components of a capitalist machine. Public libraries would be its oil.

Those same public libraries began to move away from Dewey’s vision almost immediately upon his ouster from the profession for sexual harassment, anti-Semitism, and career-spanning fiscal hijinks around 1905.

Almost as soon as Dewey opened a library school, librarians began to migrate away from his conservative ideals. Library doctrine of the 21st century emphasizes empowerment rather than passivity; the library should serve as a bastion of free thought and durable democracy. The American Library Association—Dewey’s own organization—vigorously supports seditious and controversial literature, and the Office of Intellectual Freedom thrives with its blessing. Librarians of the 21st century are more likely to be secret radicals than soldiers of conformity. They have appeared at Occupy Wall Street, stood up against White supremacists, advocated for Black lives, and gone to bat for LGBTQ book displays.

Nevertheless, the bones of public library work are Dewey’s, and if the profession no longer exists purely in his image, then it still bears a striking familial resemblance. As libraries move forward into an increasingly diverse future—one where the yawning gap between rich and poor is constantly exacerbated by technology and lack of education—it finds itself in the rare position of equalizer, leveler, and sharer of privilege. Public libraries could be powerful mitigators of a class crisis in an increasingly class-distressed nation, but first, they must grow past Dewey’s architecture and define themselves anew.

Those at the very bottom of the class pile make up the public library’s most loyal and most dependent users. For them, book purchase and charitable giving are simply out of the question, never mind a run for the office of Trustee. Their voices will not be heard in public discussion of the library; if money talks, they are nearly mute. However, they make their wishes known through their avid use of the Internet, driving libraries through classic consumer modeling. Low-income library patrons don’t just enjoy public-access computers, they rely on them.

Craigslist is now a critical housing service; many high schools distribute homework over Google services; being unable to use the Internet at will is debilitating. Even reliance on mobile technology–which is how most low-income people access the Internet—can’t make up what users lose when printers, keyboards, and full-size screens are out of the picture.

Public libraries are keenly aware of their role in bridging the digital divide, which is the little-discussed but gaping success gulf between people who can afford technology and people who can’t. But even as libraries work to fix a digital revolution that is crushing vulnerable people, cognizant of the fact that few other organizations are filling this niche, they struggle to keep the library “nice” for donors, who may jump ship if the library seems to be “deteriorating,” and elected trustees, who may cease to support library outreach to marginalized communities if they feel that a quaint, attractive book warehouse is becoming un-vote-for-able.

Vulnerable voices will not be heard in public discussion of the library; if money talks, they are nearly mute.
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Compounding this problem is the fact that many librarians in administration can’t articulate, and sometimes don’t realize, the importance of class awareness in library work. This is because most librarians are white, middle-class people who are able to afford graduate degrees. Those who can’t afford the degree may still work in libraries as technicians or clerks, but administration is generally out of reach for them. Opportunities to steer the library’s direction are rare for non-degree holders who might otherwise give the profession a more diverse perspective. Again, we have Dewey to thank.

Dewey believed, at least in word, that idealists shouldn’t worry about money when devoting their careers to the public good. His own initial willingness to take less money for library work compounded his later willingness to pay other people less money for library work, leading to his decision to hire women into the profession. After all, a woman could be paid far less than an equally qualified man, and she posed no threat to established male leadership. How ironic that Dewey’s conserve blinders led to the eventual women’s takeover of libraries, to the extent that 79% of librarians were women in 2017. How tragic that this very same takeover still resulted in an internal pay gap.

In 2016, the average degreed librarian was paid a little north of $27 per hour. The degree that made this wage attainable costs at least $5,500 from Texas A&M Online and upward of $50,000 from Syracuse University; the Master’s requirement to become a librarian functions as a gatekeeper, and many people—especially those from disenfranchised backgrounds— simply can’t afford the toll. Alternatively, if a graduate degree becomes possible for a student who otherwise couldn’t afford it, why not make the most of the opportunity and become a lawyer—who average a yearly income of $118,160—instead of idealistically gunning for a middle-class job?

Anyway, most library jobs are now part-time positions, even those requiring degrees, and breaking into a benefited full-time library job can take years. In effect, the graduate degree—which Dewey also introduced as a requirement for professional librarian status—filters talent and diversity out of the profession. The result is a cohort of well-meaning librarians who may not have vital enough connections to the marginalized sectors of their communities to make the best possible impact there.

The digital divide is the little-discussed but gaping success gulf between people who can afford technology and people who can’t.
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Though modern librarians celebrate the role of non-degreed colleagues—also known as “para-professionals” or “para-librarians”—they also find themselves in a bind when confronted with the fact that the degree is a barrier for some of their colleagues. If the Master’s requirement goes, then librarian salaries may become devalued and current degree-holders, already struggling to find full-time work, will suffer financially. Lower salaries could also undermine the profession and fail to draw talent into public libraries. However, it is undeniable that some talent is already failing to be drawn into areas where it could be best utilized. Para-professionals and librarians work on different sides of an invisible fence, often doing similar work but having vastly differing levels of impact on their institution’s direction. In many libraries, they even belong to different unions.

But to all appearances, Dewey never intended the library profession to be accessible to people of non-middle class status. He and his fellow morally—and economically—elevated white Christian librarians were showing up to help everybody else become them, a mission of cultural homogenization. They had no stake in perspectives rooted in the communities they were trying to serve. Their perspective was the only one that mattered, and it was that everybody should read Socrates and the Bible.

During Dewey’s tenure as State Librarian of New York, library grants were determined by the number of “quality” titles that a collection contained. The work of William Shakespeare was of appropriate quality. Popular rags-to-riches fantasies and romances were not. While Dewey himself hailed from a working class background, he held himself separate from and above most of the people he set out to save. His substantial charisma amplified the force of his vision—flawed as it was—and whether because of contemporary ignorance, conscious preference, or infectious enthusiasm, nobody called him out on the problems with his model.

The first generation of truly professional, organized librarians were a pack of Dewey converts, peppered with the occasional skeptic who knew better than to speak up.

If Dewey could have imagined the diversity of modern library clientele and their respective needs, would he have considered them important? Not likely. The critical literature of homeless LGBTQ minors, Muslim immigrant mothers, and college-bound men of color isn’t conducive to the creation of obedient class-dwellers who sit contented in their particular pigeonhole.

Dewey’s concept of “quality” literature would never have extended to the likes of James Baldwin or Camille Paglia. Today, librarians and the ALA stand robustly in favor of diverse literature, but they are hampered by the homogeneity that Dewey’s system still fosters. Class fractures that run along racial and ethnic lines quickly become library problems; in an increasingly bilingual America, it is still the rare librarian who can explain how to use a printer in Spanish.

This issue isn’t limited to libraries, of course. Many middle-class professions, including social work and teaching, are overwhelmingly white and well-meaning for similar reasons.

The obligatory graduate degree filters talent and diversity out of the profession.
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Like teachers, librarians tend to put in a lot of off-hours work, often reading for several book clubs and professional background without even considering reimbursement. The relative value placed on books holds strong thanks to state and regional offices that depend on book circulation statistics as metrics of a library’s performance. But book culture, too, is privileged territory. A book takes time, and time is money.  

The concept that all people should or even could set aside hours in every day to “improve themselves” through reading has simply fallen through in an age when poverty is expensive and maintaining middle class status requires workaholic tendencies. Reading is a luxury activity; the ability of libraries to develop will depend on getting books into the hands of a broader audience.

Here, at least, the library is starting to change the game. E-book lending models are a roaring success fewer than ten years after their debut. They’re remotely available, mobile-friendly, and fee-less incarnations; they fit into pockets, budgets, and schedules alike—literature is available on the bus for free. The most significant threat to this new innovation is a chaotic publishing model that has shown itself to be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of digital loaning, however. Going forward, one of the library’s most critical missions may be to stand between their patrons’ reading rights and the companies that want those rights to cost money.

Librarians have worked hard to flip the script of the judgmental, classics-heavy library. Meanwhile, in the face of constant budget squeezes and the departure of full-time jobs, libraries themselves are reorganizing. Many are trying to combine innovation with healthy caution for ideas that could prove bad. As long as the moment is right for skepticism and self-awareness of present shifts, then perhaps it’s also time for a look at the roots of the public library, especially at Dewey and the men who sought to use libraries to impose class obedience through reading. Attempts are being made. Loanable collections of tools empower apartment-dwellers. Community meeting room space and summer lunch programs have become library projects. The traditional book bastion is growing into something more.

Book culture is privileged territory. A book takes time, and time is money.
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But if libraries are truly to transform, it’s time to do some much-needed navel-gazing. Only diversity will empower them to serve a diverse nation. If the solution must include the graduate degree, then it could manifest as an extensive, aggressive program of scholarships and recruitment. Without, it may involve union-like behavior on the part of the ALA, or even partnership with existing bargaining units. This may be prudent anyway. There are plenty of reasons for libraries to employ knowledgeable professionals full-time. The fact that these reasons may not always involve books only speaks to the fact that knowledge is versatile. Unions may be crucial to ensuring that librarians of all degree statuses do not fall between the cracks of the digital age themselves.

Dewey was short-sighted: providing information for free is always radical. Despite their problematic mold, libraries have reshaped themselves into unifiers, and deeply important Amazon alternatives. There has never been a better time for a free public information alternative to corporate greed. There has never been a better time for that alternative to represent a force for anti-division and equality.

By Monica Busch

Like most fundamentalist Christian kids raised during the golden years of Focus on the Family, I grew up watching VeggieTales on VHS any chance I got. Videos were often borrowed from my church’s lending library, where I would drag my grandmother after church services ended on Sundays. She would hover over me as I selected two tapes that I hadn’t seen yet, or at least not recently enough to remember.

Most of the show’s episodes and movies are musicals, and they all feature a segment called “Silly Songs With Larry,” a goofy sing-along featuring one of the show’s main characters, who is a cucumber. I can still recite the lyrics to “Everybody Has a Water Buffalo” (“yours is fast and mine is slow”) without tripping up too much. And somewhere on the internet, there is a video of me singing “God is Bigger than the Boogie Man” into a flashlight.

The show is fun, goofy, brightly colored, and riddled with Christian parables as catchy as the music. I remember the words to the song “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything” with the same clarity that I remember the moral lessons imparted by the series week after week.

My favorite episode was called “God Wants Me to Forgive Them?!” In it, Junior Asparagus deals with some nasty bullies who call themselves The Grapes of Wrath. They are a family of grapes who ride around in a rickety car and bully those they encounter. Predictably, while Junior Asparagus is playing in his front yard, donning a yellow baseball cap, the family stops by to berate the unsuspecting young vegetable.

“Is that cheese on your head?!” one yells from the car. The whole family laughs and dubs the young asparagus a Cheese Head.

The Hidden Trauma Of Life After Fundamentalism

As these types of stories go, Junior learns — after considerable anguish — the difficult lesson that God wants him to forgive his enemies, and He wants him to do it every single time. The good little Christian vegetable that he is, Junior eventually gives in to his father’s guidance about making amends with his bullies, and the Grapes are so moved by this forgiveness that they promise to change their ways.

The episode references the well-quoted Bible verse in Matthew 18 in which the apostle Paul asks Jesus how many times he is required to forgive people who wrong him. “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22).

Doing the math, it’s unlikely that one single person is going to wrong another person more than 490 times, as Jesus hyperbolically implies to his follower. So the point is, of course, that every Christian needs to forgive every enemy 100% of the time.

This need to forgive everyone, and to do it relentlessly, is a lesson frequently taught and re-taught to fundamentalist Christian children.

When my brothers and I fought, growing up, we were immediately halted and told to apologize.

“Say you’re sorry,” my dad would command, towering over us, brows furrowed.

I’d purse my lips and ball my fists before hissing a “sorry” between clenched teeth.

“Now, hug. Say ‘I forgive you,’ and tell each other ‘I love you,’” my dad would say next.

We did — and then stormed off to other rooms to avoid getting ourselves grounded in a moment of untempered rage.

The same scenario played out in my religious teachings for years. After all, my family and my preachers told me, Christianity itself exists because Jesus forgave our sin-riddled selves, so much that he died for us.

The sacrificial lamb metaphor was never one I completely grasped growing up, though. It never quite made sense to me that some oppressive leaders slaughtered the human embodiment of my religion’s deity because I was going to someday be born, bully my little brother, and go to hell for it. And every time I asked how that sacrifice worked logistically, I was given dismissive answers or elusive explanations with too many contemporary Christian buzzwords like “covenant” and “unconditional.” An English degree later, and I still don’t quite get it.

It’s with this same convoluted understanding that, as an adult atheist who must respect her family’s religious views in order to maintain healthy relationships with them, I’ve been forced to ask a question that Junior Asparagus never posed: If Christians are supposed to forgive every enemy, every single time, does that still apply when forgiveness could cause more harm than good?

My dad molested me throughout most of my childhood, and it tore my extended family apart the second I tearily confessed the abuse to my grandparents during my freshman year of college. What followed after my admission was a harrowing saga of police reports, family members asking for details they probably had no right to ask for but that I offered anyway so that they would believe me, and, eventually, a two-day trial that found my dad guilty on three varied counts of sexual misconduct.

He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and handed a slew of stipulations once he was released, including but not limited to registering as a sex offender and wearing an ankle bracelet for a length of time.

Before the sentencing, my grandmother hugged me, crying outside the courtroom, and asked me to see if the lawyers would go easy on him in their recommendations for penalties. I don’t remember responding. I just remember looking at her and wondering why she would ask me to do something like that for a man who basically tortured me for 15 years. I did not think he deserved my mercy.

When Forgiveness Isn’t A Virtue

Moments later, after I failed through heaving sobs to deliver a victim’s impact statement to the courtroom, the judge punished my dad to the fullest extent of the law. Justice was served, and my mother hasn’t spoken to me since, choosing to disbelieve my allegations and continue living with my dad instead.

Now, years later and as an atheist, I have to reckon with my family’s pervasive religious views. This complicates our conversations, which seem to endlessly focus on what my grandmother calls “healing.”

“Healing is important,” she said to me on the phone this past winter.

It’s a record that plays on repeat between the two of us now, and a major reason for my gradual recession from a relationship I once counted as paramount to my emotional health.

“Where does God play into all this?” she asked me in the same conversation. I choked back a haughty laugh and pretended I hadn’t heard her.

More and more, haughtiness has become my immediate response to these otherwise reasonable, albeit tense, interjections.

Now, to be clear, I’m not opposed to forgiving enemies — even the worst kind. If a victim of a sexual assault can honestly say that they forgive their assailant, then I envy that person. But to contend that it is required in order to get right with God seems at best absurd, and at worse, intensely damaging. This is particularly true within the fundamentalist Christian community, which touts metaphors about being made clean as snow about as often as they plan potluck dinners. Which is to say, pretty damn often.

As a victim, to be told that I should focus on healing or forgiveness, effective synonyms in the fundamentalist community, instead of having a family that rallies around me in a show of support, is invalidating. It’s saying that I can never be whole, never be totally free of my abuse, until I forgive my dad for what he did to me, or more specifically, unless I let go of my anger and resentment. It’s assuming that what he did will latch on to me and hold me back and says that this will be the case until I recompense his actions.

As a victim, to be told that I should focus on healing or forgiveness, instead of having a family that rallies around me in a show of support, is invalidating.
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What’s worse, my dad touts this same self-righteous tone of forgiveness and directs it at me, using other family members to relay the message since we no longer speak. So relentless is this message of forgiveness that just months after the end of his sentence, he forced one of my brothers to send me nonstop text message for nearly two days, explaining and reiterating how changed his heart is.

More times than I can count, I have been offered anecdotal evidence, via secondhand texts and side-comments from family members, that my dad has taken steps toward “healing.” I’ve been told he would accept me back into the family, reminded that he still loves me, and asked to speak to him on the phone. All the while, he maintains that he didn’t sexually exploit me and that I fabricated abuse charges in some deranged attempt at revenge for strict parenting. But in a fundamentalist community like the one my family subscribes to, my unwillingness to engage my abuser in this sort of forgiveness horserace actually manages to make me look worse than my assailant in the grand scheme of eternity.

I Grew Up In A Fundamentalist Cult — ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Was My Reality

Frequently I am told in some variation on a theme that he’s better — “fixed” — because he’s going to church more often and that it’s time to let bygones be bygones, get a therapist, and move on. My sister didn’t exhibit signs of molestation when she was evaluated by the Department of Social Services, I’m told in what feels like a thinly veiled attempt at victim blaming. It was just me, I hear. It was just something that happened. “Healing is important.”

Meanwhile, I’m barely able to sleep at night because of murderous nightmares that exclusively feature my dad as the villain. I haven’t the faintest desire to forgive my dad, or to ever have anything to do with him again. And I think that expecting me to do anything else is unreasonable and insulting to my trauma.

I suspect that my experience is not singular. One needn’t look further than Megyn Kelly’s interview with two of the Duggar sisters to find an example of two molestation victims taught to forgive their abuser under the guise of fundamentalist Christianity. And while the family and their religious practices are a commodified spectacle, I have met hundreds of families over the course of my childhood who profess interpretations of their own faith that are precisely as devout and literal.

I haven’t the faintest desire to forgive my dad, or to ever have anything to do with him again.
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The message often told is that you need to forgive your perpetrator in order to liberate yourself from resentment and other negative feelings that are also considered sinful. Focus on the Family specifically addressed this in a broadcast last year, in which a guest speaker recounts how she forgave her abusive father because she felt God told her to. She goes so far as to express shame over her initial unwillingness to do so.

Christian writers, speakers, and clergy will sometimes delineate what they say is a difference between forgiving and excusing, or forgiving and trusting, but I don’t buy it. Forgiveness, by definition, is to let go of anger and resentment. But a secondary definition is to pardon. One could argue that advising a victim to forgive an abuser is twofold: It means telling a victim to stop being angry about what happened to them, and also means telling a victim to pardon their abuser’s actions. When my family asks me to forgive my dad for molesting me, they’re asking me to pardon the fact that in moments of self-centered sexual desire, he repeatedly violated me, all the while warning me that he would be murdered in prison if I told anyone.

They’re asking me to forgive his irreparable debts — the sleepless nights, the panic attacks, the sexual dysfunction. They’re asking me to make him clean as snow because, after all, if Jesus can forgive me, who am I to judge? They neglect the fact that I am better suited to judge than anyone else because I am the one who was dehumanized.

Forgiveness, by definition, is to let go of anger and resentment. But a secondary definition is to pardon.
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There are things about my abuse that I can forgive, but the list is short and circumstantial. I can forgive my dad’s untreated mental illness; I can forgive my dad’s alcoholism and drug abuse; I can forgive my mother for feeling too stuck in an emotionally abusive relationship to risk standing up for me. But I cannot forgive the act and I will not forgive him.

I don’t feel guilty about this. And that’s the best healing I’ve experienced so far.