Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Genre | Docuseries |
Directed by | Sharon Liese |
Music by | Robert ToTeras |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
No. of episodes | 4 |
Production | |
Executive producers |
|
Cinematography | Yamit Shimonovitz |
Editors |
|
Running time | 41 minutes |
Production companies |
|
Original release | |
Network | Investigation Discovery |
Release | November 24 – November 25, 2023 |
Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals is an American limited television documentary series about physical and sexual abuse in the Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) movement. [1] The series examines various IFB churches, church-run schools, and boarding schools and the testimonies of former IFB members. Many of the abuse accounts involve rape and sexual abuse of minors.
Directed by Sharon Liese, the four-part series premiered on November 24, 2023 on Investigation Discovery. It was also released on the streaming service Max and was the tenth most popular television series on Max a week after initial release. [2] The series received positive critical reception, with critics noting the difficult nature of the subject matter and praising the accounts of abuse survivors in the series.
Let Us Prey explores accounts of physical and sexual abuse in the Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) movement, a network of churches with approximately 8 million members. [1] According to the series, the claims of abuse were covered up by various influential IFB figures, including Jack Hyles, [3] Jack Schaap, [3] Bruce Goddard, [3] and Jon Jenkins. [4]
The series includes the account of Ruthy Heiler, who was raped and abused as a minor by a staff member at Grace Baptist Church, an IFB church in Gaylord, Michigan. [4] The staff member, Aaron Willand, was Heiler's Bible teacher and volleyball coach in the early 2000s. Some of the abuse occurred while Heiler and Willand were in the state of Washington. In 2006, Willand pled guilty in Washington to offenses including four counts of sex with a minor. He was sentenced to five years in prison but was released after serving two years and 10 months of the sentence. [5] In 2022, Willand pled guilty in Michigan to crimes including first-degree criminal sexual conduct. He was sentenced to between 135 months to 40 years in prison. [6]
Ruthy Heiler is the founder of the Blind Eye Movement, a nonprofit whose members are featured throughout the series. [5] The nonprofit supports people who were sexually abused as children by religious leaders and advocates for their claims to be investigated by law enforcement. [5]
Let Us Prey also documented alleged crimes against youth at IFB boarding schools in Missouri, including the Circle of Hope Girls Ranch, which were subsequently closed. [7] In August 2021, 24 girls were removed from the Circle of Hope Girls Ranch by Missouri Child Protective Services following an investigation into the ranch. [8] According to lawsuits filed by former residents, girls at the ranch were raped, molested, denied food and water, handcuffed, chained, and forced to stand in front of a wall for hours. [9] [10] [11] [12] The couple that ran the boarding school, Boyd and Stephanie Householder, have been charged with over 100 felonies relating to the alleged abuse, with their trial anticipated in late 2024. [8]
The series also incorporates the work of Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Sarah Smith, who investigated accounts of sexual abuse and cover-up with the IFB movement. [13] Smith has reported on over 400 allegations of abuse across nearly 200 IFB churches and institutions, some of which were later highlighted in Let Us Prey. [5]
The series was produced by Good Caper Content, the production company that also created the 2023 docuseries Escaping Twin Flames . [14] Initially produced for Starz, Investigation Discovery handled distribution of the series. [15]
No. | Title | Directed by | Original release date |
---|---|---|---|
1 | "Like a Lamb to the Slaughter" | Sharon Liese | November 24, 2023 |
2 | "Swallowing Goldfish" | Sharon Liese | November 24, 2023 |
3 | "The Get Right Room" | Sharon Liese | November 25, 2023 |
4 | "The Reckoning" | Sharon Liese | November 25, 2023 |
The first and second episodes of the series premiered on Investigation Discovery on November 24, 2023, and the third and fourth episodes released on November 25, 2023. [16] The series was also released for streaming on Max, Discovery+, FuboTV, and Amazon Prime Video. [4] A week after its initial release, it was the tenth most popular television series on Max. [2]
John Anderson of The Wall Street Journal reviewed Let Us Prey and wrote, "Outrage, indignation, outrage and empathy are the objectives of a series in which no shortage of pain is revealed, by very brave young women, if well beyond the point that we get the point. What is significant about 'Let Us Prey' is not the experiences of the individuals involved, but the institutional structures that not only enabled their abusers but gave them succor." [1]
Nick Schager of The Daily Beast called Let Us Prey a "scathing exposé" of the IFP movement and praised the efforts of abuse survivors featured in it. He described the series as a "moving celebration of courage, camaraderie and the hope and progress that comes from taking a stand." He critiqued the use of "shots of people posing for the camera, slow-motion, swelling music" during depictions of legal proceedings in the series, but he concluded that the "brave actions" of abuse survivors shown in the series "are nothing short of inspirational, and in fact are so moving that even the proceedings’ overwrought heartstring-tugging ... ultimately feel earned." [17]
Rick Pidcock of Baptist News Global noted that the series examines "similar IFB ministries from Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People that released in June" and commented that "the blunt communication and sexually focused themes of Let Us Prey make this docuseries very difficult to watch at times." [3]
Independent Baptist churches are Christian congregations, generally holding to conservative Baptist beliefs. Although some Independent Baptist churches refuse affiliation with Baptist denominations, various Independent Baptist Church denominations have been founded.
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a religious sect of the fundamentalist Mormon denominations whose members practice polygamy. It is variously defined as a cult, a sect, or a new religious movement.
Warren Steed Jeffs is an American religious-cult leader and felon, convicted of several sex crimes and two assisted sex crimes involving children. He is the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamous cult. In 2011, he was convicted of two felony counts of child sexual assault, for which he is serving a life sentence.
Daniel Peter Masterson is an American actor. He played Steven Hyde in That '70s Show (1998–2006), Milo Foster in Men at Work (2012–2014), and Jameson "Rooster" Bennett in The Ranch (2016–2018). In May 2023, Masterson was convicted of raping two women in 2003. A third count of rape resulted in a hung jury. In September 2023, he was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison. Masterson is a Scientologist, as were his victims at the time of the assaults. The Church of Scientology's attempts to silence the victims, and its subsequent interference, resulted in a 20-year delay in bringing the crimes to justice.
The Thacher School is a private co-educational boarding school on 427 acres in Ojai, California. Founded in 1889 as a boys' school, it is now the oldest co-educational boarding school in California. Girls were first admitted in 1977, with the first co-ed graduating class being the class of 1978. Unique to Thacher are its Horse and Outdoors Programs. Its founder, Sherman Day Thacher, believed in the power of the outdoors to help shape students: “Come West, breathe deep, let these hills be your teachers.”
Jack Frasure Hyles was a leading figure in the Independent Baptist movement, having pastored the First Baptist Church of Hammond in Hammond, Indiana, from August 1959 until his death. He was well known for being an innovator of the church bus ministry that brought thousands of people each week from surrounding towns to Hammond for services. Hyles built First Baptist up from fewer than a thousand members to a membership of 100,000. In 1993 and again in 1994, it was reported that 20,000 people attended First Baptist every Sunday, making it the most attended Baptist church in the United States. In 2001, at the time of Hyles's death, 20,000 people were attending church services and Sunday school each week.
The First Baptist Church of Hammond is a fundamentalist Independent Baptist megachurch in Hammond, Indiana, a suburb of Chicago. It is the largest church in the state of Indiana, and in 2007 was the 20th largest in the United States. Though founded in 1887 by Allen Hill, it was under Jack Hyles' leadership from 1959–2001 when it became one of the megachurches in the United States and during the 1970s had the highest Sunday school attendance of any church in the world. In 1990, the church had a weekly attendance of 20,000. It also operates Hyles-Anderson College, a non-accredited institution established for the training of pastors and missionaries, and two K-12 schools, called City Baptist Schools and Hammond Baptist Schools. John Wilkerson is the senior pastor at First Baptist Church.
Hyles–Anderson College (HAC) is a private independent Baptist college in unincorporated Crown Point, Lake County, Indiana. As a ministry of the First Baptist Church of Hammond, it focuses on training pastors, missionaries and Christian teachers to work in Independent Baptist schools.
L. Paige Patterson served as the fifth president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., from 1992 to 2003, as president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) from 1998 to 2000, and as the eighth president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, from 2003 until his firing in 2018.
Various individuals, courts and the media around the world have raised concerns about the manner in which cases of child sexual abuse are handled when they occur in congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses. An independent 2009 study in Norway was critical of how Jehovah's Witnesses dealt with cases of child sexual abuse but stated there is no indication that the rate of sexual abuse among Jehovah's Witnesses is higher than found in general society. The organization's stated position is that it abhors child sexual abuse.
Preying from the Pulpit was a mini-news series produced in May 1993 by WJBK of Detroit, Michigan, for the 11:00 pm news. The news report argued that sexual abuse in seven different churches around the United States were all connected to First Baptist Church of Hammond and its Pastor, Jack Hyles. Hyles called the program "poor journalism" and organized a national campaign to respond.
This page documents Catholic Church sexual abuse cases by country.
Richard Frank Stika is an American prelate of the Catholic Church who served as the third bishop of the Diocese of Knoxville in Tennessee from 2009.
The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Europe has affected several dioceses in European nations. Italy is an exceptional case as the 1929 Lateran Treaty gave the Vatican legal autonomy from Italy, giving the clergy recourse to Vatican rather than Italian law.
Gerald Francis Ridsdale is an Australian laicised Catholic priest and sex offender. He was convicted between 1993 and 2017 of a large number of child sexual abuse and indecent assault charges against 65 children aged as young as four years. The offences occurred from the 1960s to the 1980s while Ridsdale worked as a school chaplain at St Alipius Primary School, a boys' boarding school in the Victorian regional city of Ballarat.
The Trinity Baptist Church sex scandal was a United States sex scandal that came to national attention in 2011. The scandal centered on the way that Trinity Baptist Church, an Independent Baptist church in Concord, New Hampshire, and its former pastor handled the 1997 rape and subsequent pregnancy of one of its members, an underage girl, by her employer. The employer was another member of the congregation who hired the girl as a babysitter for his children.
Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom has been reported in the country throughout its history. In about 90% of cases the abuser is a person known to the child. However, cases during the second half of the twentieth century, involving religious institutions, schools, popular entertainers, politicians, military personnel, and other officials, have been revealed and widely publicised since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Child sexual abuse rings in numerous towns and cities across the UK have also drawn considerable attention.
Sharon Liese is an American producer, director, and screenwriter. She created the true crime series Pink Collar Crimes and developed the show with Jon Kroll at CBS Studios. They planned to shop it out to various networks; however, CBS purchased the rights prior to any pitch being made.
Widespread sexual abuse cases in Southern Baptist churches were reported by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News on February 10, 2019. The report found roughly 380 clergy, lay leaders and volunteers had faced allegations of sexual misconduct, leaving behind over 700 victims since 1998. The extent of misconduct is further complicated by work within the Southern Baptist Convention to move sex offenders to other communities and resist attempts to address the culture of abuse.
Circle of Hope Girls' Ranch was a reformatory boarding school located in Humansville, Missouri. The school opened in July 2006 and was closed in 2020 amid reports and lawsuits filed by former students alleging child abuse, as well as due to an investigation conducted by the Missouri State Highway Patrol.