A child rape scandal at John MacArthur’s church has Evangelicals brawling

A superstar pastor enables a pedophile?

On March 8th, 2022, the Evangelical journalist Julie Roys accused John MacArthur of covering for a child rapist on his staff. The details were gruesome.

Roys didn’t even report on the worst of them. I’m looking at the full horror, and watching the religion agonize over a question: Was a superstar pastor—and his church—intent on helping a pedophile?

The story starts in 2001, when a member of Grace Community Church went to the elder board.

Eileen Gray had a story to tell. Since 1982, she’d been married to David Gray, who’d worked as a music teacher at the church since 1994. They’d adopted two girls and a boy. But her husband seemed to hate his eldest daughter. He called her a “lemon,” a “dog,” and said: “we’re getting rid of this animal.”

He’d regularly locked her in a closet, or made her eat off the floor. “Eat it, you dog,” he said. The girl started acting out, hitting her younger siblings, and David started tying her up all night.

From a legal filing:

“Wife repeatedly told appellant to stop, but he said he was responsible before God to keep the family in line, and he had the Bible to support his actions.”

Eileen saw a weirdly sexual vibe around the girls.

“Wife testified that over the years appellant would lie on the living room couch or in his bed in his underwear, and he would tell the girls to lie with him. He often had the girls sitting or lying on top of him, or giving him a massage. Wife told the girls not to do that anymore.”

He’d gotten his daughters into bed with him.

He’d be erect around them, they’d later recall. He took to spanking them in a way that seemed violent and creepily erotic.

He dismissed his wife’s protests.

“He said, ‘No matter what you want, [Wife], you can’t change what God has done. He’s made me this. God has ordained me, and you can’t change that.”

They went to the church for counseling. Eileen asked for a licensed counselor, but only pastors were provided.

Around the same time, David Gray seems to have been quietly dropped as music teacher at the church—as the church went to work trying to get his wife to take him back.

Eileen was very un-Christian in filing for a legal separation—then a restraining order.

Her husband had monitored visitations. But he’d started threatening to kill himself, and them. His stalking suggested he was serious. Eileen went to the church trying to get help for restraining him—on religious grounds—from harming them further.

The focus turned to her instead.

The elders considered the matter carefully. They believed the Bible gave them authority in such situations. They gave Eileen their verdict. She had to take her husband back, and ‘submit’ to him. He was the man, and God‘s power flowed through him—down through his pastor, John MacArthur.

If Eileen was injured in her husband’s rages, an associate pastor named Carey Hardy told her, this would be to “suffer for Jesus.”

If she didn’t take her husband back, the church informed her, she’d not be “the kind of wife that pleased the Lord.”

Or, at least, John MacArthur.

Eileen never spoke with him about her marriage.

But she was sitting in the congregation in May 2002, with 8,000 other Christians, when MacArthur denounced her from the pulpit. She’d ‘forsaken’ her husband. The church, MacArthur added, had no choice but to “treat her as an unbeliever — for all we know, she may be.”

He added: “Pray for David, for the sympathy and compassion and the lovingkindness of God to be his portion.”

MacArthur then led the church in singing “Amazing Grace.”

He repeated the same speech the following August. By then, Eileen had moved 500 miles away.

In 2003, she learned that her husband had sex with two of their children.

She’d sensed it. She’d smelled semen on their second daughter. The stories came out. David had made the girl suck his penis since she’d been age five, and sexually manhandled her in other ways. From the legal filings:

“He squeezed her with his legs and hurt her; she said she could not get away ‘because it was tight where I was.’ He told her ‘[she] was doing it wrong,’ and told her to ‘open [her] mouth wider and wider.’”

He’d done it to his son as well. The legal filings report the boy:

“…described appellant’s pee-pee as being ‘soft,’ and said that after awhile his father pee-peed in his mouth and J.G. swallowed the pee-pee. J.G. later said that appellant’s pee-pee ‘got hard a little bit’ when the pee-pee came out. Appellant then told J.G. to rinse his mouth out and sent him back to his bedroom.”

Eileen reported her husband to the Los Angeles police.

It was a serious matter, as David Gray had also worked as a teacher in North Hollywood public schools. That was the focus of the local media coverage. A child rapist at public school was news.

But it’s just another day in Evangelical America.

The police investigated everything, including the involvement of Grace Community Church.

The associate pastor Carey Hardy was charged with two misdemeanors for failing to report child abuse, and the intimidation of a witness. Another pastor who oversaw the church’s counseling program was also ordered to appear in court.

These proceedings appear to have been quietly dropped. The church had been down this road before — with the failed lawsuit by Walter Nally a decade before seeming to establish the church’s “counseling” was constitutionally protected.

To help solidify the point, the church had gotten national Evangelical leaders involved. Albert Mohler was asked to write a brief saying that Eileen Gray was counseled as part of a religious process. And he did.

In 2005, David Gray was convicted of aggravated child molestation, corporal injury to a child, and child abuse. He pled ‘not-guilty’, and got 21-to-life…as John MacArthur kept on preaching.

The talk around the church was that Eileen had falsely accused her husband, getting the children to provide false testimony. A GCC member later recalled hearing that Eileen “went crazy and didn’t want to go to the mission field.”

MacArthur took to calling David Gray a “missionary to Corcoran State Prison.”

Eileen waited for years to tell her story.

Not that there’d have been much interest. Evangelicals circle the wagons around leaders, and John MacArthur has been an especially protected one. From his mega-selling MacArthur Study Bible to regular rants against feminists, gays, etc., he’s been the standard-bearer for the faith.

The key seems to have been, in early March 2022, David Gray being denied parole for the next ten years. Eileen went to Julie Roys, who’d developed an audience for stories of Christian victims of clerical abuse.

Roys is Evangelical herself, and frames her reporting at The Roys Report as an effort to ‘restore’ the church.

Posting the Gray exposé, her reviews were pouring in.

Were the details even relevant?

The worse it looked for MacArthur, the more his defenders seemed eager to find fault in Roys herself. Why had she not included responses from MacArthur and other named pastors?

Roys replied: they’d been contacted, and she’d not heard back.

Did anyone really expect Evangelical clerics to reply to critics? Of course not.

The debate was expectedly gendered. Evangelical men wouldn’t see much of a problem. Women were less sure? It was such a familiar story.

The Christian writer Rachel Joy Welcher tweeted:

“What Julie Roys recently shared mirrors the treatment of other women at Grace Community who I know personally. Almost to a tee. Their stories are not mine to share, but I can confirm that the kind of advice Eileen was given and treatment she received was not an isolated incident.”

But mostly, Evangelicals who didn’t like MacArthur continued.

To everyone else, Julie Roys was just another woman deranged by hatred of God’s authority…or something.

A hazy legal detail in Julie Roys’ story had been misreported. She issued a correction, and that was seen to have discredited her whole piece — for people who wanted it to be.

The jokes were flying.

A staffer at Grace Community piped up, calling Roys a ‘muckraker’, and offering that “objective” authorities at the church might take a look at the Gray case.

In a Twitter thread, Rachael Denhollander, Evangelical advocate for the sexually abused, tried to guide the religion out of its typical dismissals:

“When serious, well-documented allegations of mishandling abuse are put forward, the proper response is not to say ‘I don’t like the person who wrote the article’ or ‘I disagree theologically with the author’. That does not affect the substance of the facts put forward.

The proper response is not to say ‘that was so many years ago’. The damage to the victims goes on TODAY. And unless significant evidence of change is provided (which necessitates real repentance first), there is no reason to believe that is ‘just back then.’”

MacArthur need have no worry about accountability.

To watch Evangelicals process the charges against him, the rule is first avoidance and, if necessary, attacking the messenger.

Roys added on more details of how the church supported David Gray following his imprisonment—while ignoring his abused children.

I’m not sure that’ll get more notice. And there’s little indication the actual situation will be identified. The church is a culture that fosters and protects child rape. 🔶