I can’t reproduce my original non-review. My server went down and apparently lost all my posts from last week. However, I am still concerned about the allegations that Ms. Scheeres makes in her book, Jesus Land: A Memoir.

I didn’t want to believe the story that Ms. Scheeres tells. Stereotypes and caricatures abound in her memoir. All the Christians, and most everybody else in rural Indiana where Julia Scheeres grew up, are hypocrites, child abusers, racists or simpletons. About half of her book is about her life growing up in a Calvinist Christian home with parents who were negligent and emotionally abusive when they weren’t being physically abusive. Ms. Scheeres has three older siblings who seem to have escaped the abuse she chronicles, and she has two adopted brothers who, according to the author, bore the brunt of the physical abuse that took place in the home. (I know I keep qualifying my statements, but I can’t help it. I do not know whether to believe the story that Ms. Scheeres tells or not.) The two boys, who are black, are repeatedly beaten by their doctor father, and one time David, the brother Julia loves and is close to, has his arm broken when Dad hits him with a 2×4. Her other brother, Jerome, is abused also and becomes an abuser in respones, sexually molesting his younger sister, Julia. As the situation at home gets worse, David is sent to a Christian school for troubled teenagers, Escuela Caribe in the Dominican Republic. Julia becomes the focus of her parents’ abusive behavior, and she rebels, sleeping with her boyfriend, running away from home, and finally getting arrested for being out after curfew. Of course, none of the trouble she finds herself in is her fault. At seventeen years of age, she tells the court that she would prefer to join her brother David at the Christian school in the Dominican Republic rather than go home or declare herself an “emancipated adult.”

The school, a sort of Christian reform school, is filled with more racism, abuse, and spiritual hypocrisy. One of the junior staffers is a college-aged girl who is obsessed with abortion. She spouts anti-abortion platitudes constantly even when unborn babies and abortions are clearly not the issue at hand. The male staffers are all racists, male chauvinists, and abusers. Teenaged students at Escuela Caribe are punched, slammed against walls, and forced to participate in midnight calisthenics, all in the name of Jesus and in the hope of teaching them to respect authority and love the Lord.

The most disturbing abuse that Ms. Scheeres documents in her book is spiritual abuse. Counselors and house parents force teens to mouth words of repentance and faith in Christ in order to earn points toward release from the school. Even though the James Frey debacle has placed a pall of suspicion over the memoir genre, and even though I have grown up immersed in evangelical, fundamentalist, and Calvinist Christian culture and have never witnessed anything like the kind of abuse that Ms. Scheeres tells about in her book, I am forced to believe that New Horizons Youth Ministries may have been guilty of a serious betrayal of the trust placed in its program by parents and their children.

Then again, maybe not. See the post below, reposted from a few days ago because of my server issues. I emailed New Horizons Youth Ministries after reading Jesusland because I was disturbed by the story that Ms. Scheeres tells in her book. The email below is the response I received.

I continue to hope that someone with more financial and journalistic resources than I have will investigate Escuela Caribe and New Horizons Youth Ministries. If Julia Scheeres is telling the truth, young people and families who are already vulnerable and hurting are being further abused in the name of Christ. Such a travesty is unacceptable. If, on the other hand, Ms. Scheeres is lying in order to make a buck or get revenge against her parents or for some other reason, New Horizons Youth Ministries deserves to be exonerated.

New Horizons Youth Ministries, the ministry that runs Escuela Caribe and two other schools in Indiana and in Canada.
The Truth about New Horizons Youth Ministries, a website that posts the stories of former New Horizons students, many of whom say that they also were abused and mistreated at Escuela Caribe or one of New Horizons’ other schools.
Julia Scheeres’ blog.
International Survivors Action Committee, a volunteer group that is dedicated to monitoring reports of abuse at youth treatment facilities.

This email, which I am posting in its entirety because I think it’s only fair to hear both sides of a story, is in response to my email asking some questions about the allegations in Julia Scheeres’ book, Jesus Land:

Dear Sherry,

I have been forwarded your email and will take the time to respond at length
to your concerns if you do not mind. I think this email will be the body of
a response that we will need to make in light of this injurious book written
by Ms. Scheeres.

I have been with New Horizons since 1981 but had left to attend seminary
during the year she was a student. I did return in 1987 to take over as
director and was the director there for the past 18 years ending this past
summer. I have not read this book but will cover some issues that have come
up due to this. Please note I will not be negative toward any former student
as we love the kids God has sent our way over the past thirty-five years. I
am also married to a former student who I met when she returned to work as a
staff member in 1982.

I would begin by informing you that we require all prospective parents to
call four parents of students that have been in the program over the previous
two years, they are given all names any who are happy or upset with us.
Also, our board is made up of parents of former students, former staff and
former students who oversee our work.

Please understand we work with the more difficult to manage youth, not Sunday
school kids, the kids that get kicked out of school, kicked out of other
programs and even kicked out of church. We take the more difficult to manage
kids in the DR and the more manageable here in Indiana.

I would like to answer your questions, yes Julia and Dave were students at
Escuela Caribe. No, a student was not impregnated by the preacher, he did
get emotionally involved with a girl, was kicked out, and she being 18 got
together with him post program, they married and then divorced. It was a bad
year and I was called to return there due to these issues and became the
director.

We have had cases of typhoid, but it is usually para-typhoid but no this is
not commom there and I have had three girls born and raised there and in my
20+ years there, never had typhoid.

No we are not a cult, do not use psychological control, not a boot camp, not
emotional control, we confront issues and deal with reality. What she writes
about is more than twenty years ago. This is not us now. Yes in the past we
had more strong armed tactics, took crisis to the end, did not give up till
we had submission. I personally took the tactic that I would take the heat
of the teens wanting no staff to be abused or struck and would take a kid
down as needed.

What we have done is we have training in TCI or Therapeutic Crisis
Intervention for all our staff that have to deal with student crises. This
is a two man take down procedure that was developed at Cornell University but
is secular and I have developed an in house training as well.

Let me point out something if I can. In the past few months, we have had a
student hold a knife to his throat and hold a house hostage, a student who
double punched a summer staff who stood up to disrepect toward a woman, a
girl who had to be restrained till 2 am and then had to be sent to jail to
settle her down. This is our life and some of the kids we work with,
oppositional defiant, conduct disorder and borderline personality disorder
type kids. Many of our youth are not ones who have crises, do well, settle
their issues and go home, the latter two groups create pain.

We are a therapeutic residential care facility and are licensed in the State
of Indiana and we seek to abide by those guidelines in the DR. We have
licensed therapists and counselors alongside our staff. Do note that our
culture is moving toward a no touch policy with youth and since 1997 when we
really began to back off in crisis my staff in the DR have been assaulted,
kicked, spit upon and attacked, before that no staff member was ever struck
when I was director. Here in Indiana we have police in the grade schools and
we see a five year old being handcuffed and taken from a school in Florida.
Yes, our culture has changed.

We love our kids, we invest our lives in helping youth and families in
crisis, it is a thankless job but we are called to do it. I will say that
Ms. Scheeres visited our school under false pretenses, then returned to her
blog and maliciously lied about a couple at our school. I do not believe her
stories or renditions. Yes there have been things that have gone wrong,
staff that have crossed lines, but things have been dealt with and handled
with families. In Indiana we call the sheriff when a student gets out of
control. I could not do that in the DR and had to be the end of the crisis.
I am good at what I do and committed to youth.

There are many people on our campus all through the year, college groups,
church groups, we have day students attending school at Escuela Caribe,
missionary kids and others, church groups from northern Indiana have been
coming to our school for 14 years each January and stay for three weeks on
our campus and work alongside our kids and even eat in the houses. Many
parents and former students are rallying to our suppport during this time as
well.

The negative website was shut down by the man who launched it. It was going
the wrong direction and in his words was being used to sell her book. The
content was stolen and put back up in another site. This did not settle well
with the small group of negative students and they turned on him as well.
Their blog is declared for hatred and revenge, any former student who is
positive is kicked off thus they started their own blog at NewHorizonsStaff-
Students@yahoo.groups.com. The four or five negative former students have
gone there to give their input as well. We have current staff on there as
well as two current mothers of students.

I am going to ask a former student as well as some others to connect with you
if they would like. We will be putting together a group to deal with this
stuff as we do need to address this as a ministry.

Thanks for your concern. I know this all looks bad and we are not perfect,
but have made so many changes that this coming up now is really old hat but
hurting real time. Many former students call me now and it has been great to
reconnect and hear of their lives. I had a former student in my home this
past weekend, had been abandoned on a church’s steps in Chicago, severe abuse
and thanks to his time with us, over three years he has been married to the
same woman for 14 years. He and I remodeled my bathroom while we revisted
the past, he was the most abused by life boy I had dealt with, ran away 4-5
times down there as well. He is disabled, not completely normal, but calls
us family.

Blessings to you and please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,

Charles P. Redwine, D.Min.
COO New Horizons

I am sorry that your comments have been lost (apparently) by my server. I still think this school should be investigated in light of the serious allegations that Ms. Scheeres makes in her book. I’m sure Mr. Redwine and those who work at Escuela Caribe and New Horizons Youth Ministries would welcome such an investigation by responsible journalists. WORLD Magazine? Christianity Today?

I will try to re-post my initial reaction to Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres later today.