Remember the Christian Alamo
Evangelist Lester Roloff drew a line in the dirt to keep the State of Texas from regulating his Rebekah Home for Girls. Years later, George W. Bush's plan to free faith-based institutions from government rules handed Roloff's disciples a long-sought victory. But this Alamo had no heroes—only victims like DeAnne Dawsey.
Liam says: As an evangelistic Christian I can understand the perspective of Roloff and his people. However, their treatment of these girls, though "troubled", just does not seem to be very Christian. They do not seem to show the LOVE of Christ. It would seem to me that treatment such as this would do more to chase someone away from the Lord than to draw them to Him. (January 14th, 2009 at 12:10pm)
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DEANNE REALIZED SOMETHING WAS AMISS that spring day in 1999 when, outside Corpus Christi, they turned off the empty two-lane highway and stopped abruptly at a guardhouse. Their family day trip was not, to DeAnne's knowledge, supposed to include this detour. Stark farmland stretched in all directions, and beyond the guardhouse stood a large, white brick church—"Christ is the Answer" its sign proclaimed—that dominated the landscape. Off to the right, DeAnne could see a vast two-story dormitory that looked incongruous against the wide-open sky, its facade bearing the words "Rebekah Home for Girls" in black script. In that moment, DeAnne knew she had been lied to. For months her mother had been threatening to send her away to boarding school: DeAnne had been running wild, in her mother's eyes, skipping school and spending too much time with her boyfriend, who her mother felt certain was using drugs. High-spirited and restless, DeAnne resented her mother's scrutiny. She had run away from home once, and she wanted nothing more than to escape the seemingly repressive rules that her mother had laid out at home. But in that moment, as DeAnne went pale in the back seat of the car, she knew she was trapped. "Don't do this to me," she pleaded with her mother as two guards approached the car. "Please don't leave me here."
AS HIS CASE MADE ITS WAY THROUGH THE COURTS, Lester Roloff found himself besieged in the political arena as well. In 1973 the Texas Legislature held hearings on the practices of the Rebekah Home and other unlicensed homes for youth. One Rebekah girl recounted how a whipping she had received for smoking a cigarette left welts on her body that were an inch high. The revelations led the Legislature to pass the Child Care Licensing Act, which required all child-care facilities to be licensed by the state. Roloff refused to abide by it on the grounds that it conflicted with his free exercise of religion. "I have no right to go by the Welfare Department's little brown book," he quipped, "so long as I have the big black Book."
In need of a political ally, Roloff found one in Governor Bill Clements, whom he affectionately called Brother Bill. Deftly using the bully pulpit, Roloff had urged his radio listeners to vote for Clements, who was running against Roloff's old adversary, John Hill, in 1978; when Hill lost by 18,000 votes, Roloff credited himself with delivering the votes that made Clements the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction. Clements subsequently praised Roloff's work and accused the state of "nitpicking" in its case against him. With the governor on his side, the preacher continued to flagrantly flout the law—most memorably when he explained why he had not reported an attempted murder at the Rebekah Home to local authorities. "We had a prayer meeting the night it happened," he explained. "We reported it to Him." All the while, he sought to curry favor in the court of public opinion, casting himself as David fighting Goliath, waging a battle against state authorities on behalf of the children. He distributed photos of a girl strapped to a cross in which he stood beside her, draped in the American flag and brandishing a Bible. "It's not a sixty-four-year-old preacher that's being crucified [by state licensing requirements], it's little boys and girls," he would cry.
A series of defeats in the courtroom would soon set the stage for the Christian Alamo. Roloff had kept his homes open by appealing a state district court's order to close them—but an appellate court upheld this order in 1977, describing Roloff's claim that state regulation would conflict with his free exercise of religion as "nothing more than a bald conclusion entirely unsupported by any factual evidence." The Supreme Court of Texas agreed, and in 1979 another state district judge ordered Roloff Evangelistic Enterprises to obtain licenses for its homes or close them. Still Roloff did not yield. "They'll hang black crepe on Heaven's gate if they close these homes," fumed Roloff. Hundreds of his supporters massed around the Rebekah Home, on Roloff's 557-acre compound south of Corpus Christi, linking arms and forming a human barricade to prevent state officials from moving in.
A standoff ensued, with church and state encamped on opposite sides of the South Texas farmland. The three-day stalemate ended when Roloff agreed to close his youth homes and send his Rebekah girls—his "prisoners of war"—to youth homes out of the state. But he was not defeated; he was simply biding his time. He restructured his ministry, placing his youth homes under the auspices of his People's Baptist Church rather than Roloff Evangelistic Enterprises—a device that allowed his homes to reopen that fall. Lester Roloff had stared down the State of Texas—and for the time being, he had won.
LONG BEFORE DEANNE DAWSEY CAME to the Rebekah Home, a succession of girls had stared out of its dormitory windows at a world that lay just beyond reach and dreamed of running. Only a few got away, tearing through the tall grass to Farm Road 665 and thumbing rides to Corpus Christi. So many girls tried to run from the home over the years that its caretakers took precautions—putting up a six-foot fence, rigging the windows with alarms, and wiring the girls' bedrooms with intercoms so they could listen for any plans of escape. Punishment for even talking about running was so severe that most girls learned to accept their lot, turning away from the windows that looked out onto Farm Road 665 and allowing only their thoughts to roam.
The Rebekah Home was bent on driving sin from even the wickedest of girls and making them see the light of God. Jo Ann Edwards was brought to the Rebekah Home in 1982, after running away from home at the age of thirteen. "I was an acolyte at my church before I went there, and God was very close to me in my heart," she said in a phone interview from her home in Victoria, where she is the mother of five children. "But that place turned me against Him for a while and made me very hard. I thought that even He had left me." As a new girl, she was scrutinized by "helpers," the saved girls who handed out demerits for misbehavior. Demerits were given for an endless host of wrongdoings: talking about "worldly" things, singing songs other than gospel songs, speaking too loudly, doodling, nail biting, looking at boys in church, failing to snitch on other sinners. Each demerit earned her a lick, which the Rebekah Home's housemother administered with a wood paddle. The beatings left her black and blue. "I got twenty licks my first time, and I was hit hard—so hard that I couldn't sit for days," Jo Ann said. "I begged [the housemother] to stop. When she was done, she hugged me and said, 'God loves you.' She told me to go back to the living room and read Scripture and sing 'Amazing Grace' with the other girls."
Only Rebekah girls who had proven their devotion by repeatedly testifying to God's grace could avoid Bible discipline. Some girls were genuinely troubled teenagers who had gotten mixed up with drugs or prostitution; others had been caught having sex; many were guilty of nothing more than growing up in abusive homes. Tara Cummings, now 31 and a mortgage consultant in Chicago, was sent there by her father, a preacher, whose beatings had left her badly bruised. Even she was not immune to judgment. "I was told that I was a reprobate, that I was beyond help and was going to hell," she said. She was treated to the full range of the Rebekah Home's punishments, which were not limited to lickings. "Confinement" meant spending weeks hanging her head without speaking. "Sitting on the wall" required sitting with her back against a wall and without the support of a chair, even as her legs buckled beneath her. But kneeling was what she most dreaded. Kneeling could last for as long as five hours at a time; she might have to kneel while holding a Bible on each outstretched palm or with pencils wedged beneath her knees. Only girls seen as inveterate sinners received the full brunt of the home's crueler punishments. "You had to be saved," Tara said. "It didn't matter if you didn't feel moved to do that—you did it to survive."
The worst form of punishment, the lockup, was reserved for girls who had not yet been saved—who had talked of running away or who had proven to be particularly intractable. The lockup was a dorm room devoid of furniture or natural light where girls spent days, or weeks, alone. Taped Roloff sermons were piped into the room, and the near-constant sound of his voice was the girls' only companionship. Former Rebekah resident Tamra Sipes, now 34 and working in advertising for a newspaper in Oak Harbor, Washington, remembers one girl who was relegated to the lockup for an entire month. "The smell had become so bad from her not being able to shower or bathe that it reeked in the hallway," she said. "We could do nothing to help her. I remember standing in roll call one day waiting for my name to be called off, and I was directly across from the door. She was singing 'Happy Birthday' to herself in such a pitiful voice that I couldn't help but cry for her."
Lester Roloff never attempted to hide that he used Bible discipline and all that it entailed; "We whip 'em with love and we weep with 'em and they love us for it," he once said. But he also knew what the State of Texas would have to say about his methods, so when he reopened his homes in the fall of 1979 under the auspices of the People's Baptist Church, he again refused to apply for a state license. "I'll never sacrifice my girls on the altar of an unrighteous decree," Roloff vowed. Attorney General Mark White responded by filing suit and prosecuting the preacher anew, contending that his youth homes were still subject to state licensure. Roloff enjoyed an early victory in 1981, when a district court judge ruled in his favor, but the decision was overturned on appeal. In 1984 the Supreme Court of Texas sided with the state, holding that the licensing of church-run child-care facilities violated no First Amendment religious freedoms. The following year, the United States Supreme Court let that decision stand. The Rebekah Home would have to be licensed or shut down.
Roloff would not live long enough to see the end of his battle with the state. On November 2, 1982, his single-engine Cessna crashed near the town of Normangee, killing him and the four young women on board who made up the Honeybee Quartet. As an "airborne messenger of the gospel," Roloff had always thrived on riding out the rough weather—flying headlong into hail storms and foggy nights and the fiercest of squalls—always crediting "the touch of an unseen hand" in bringing him back to earth. Once, after he had been forced to land on a freeway outside Chattanooga with a dead engine, he took advantage of the crowd that gathered by taking out his Bible and testifying to God's faithfulness. But on that November day, a norther blew in whose winds proved to be too strong, plunging the preacher's plane to the ground and scattering the debris for miles. His death would leave a profound vacuum within the People's Baptist Church, for his magnetism and political influence were suddenly gone. In his stead, his right-hand man, Wiley Cameron, a soft-spoken preacher who had worked for Roloff since 1973, would take his place. Cameron eulogized Roloff as having bravely spent the last eight years of his life fighting "the forces of hell" and vowed to continue the late minister's battle with the State of Texas.
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