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"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."
"He (Roloff) parlayed his traveling tent revival into a multimillion-dollar enterprise by founding the reformatories he called the Roloff Homes and asking his radio listeners for "love gifts" to sustain them. The adult homes-the City of Refuge, the Lighthouse, and the Jubilee Home for Ladies-ministered to alcoholics, drug addicts, and petty criminals who straightened their lives out with Scripture, hard work, and clean living. The Anchor Home ministered to boys, and the Bethesda Home to pregnant teenage girls. But his greatest success was with the Rebekah Home for Girls, which he founded in 1967. The Rebekah Home took in fallen girls from "jail houses, broken homes, hippie hives, and dope dives" who were "walking through the wilderness of sin," he told his radio listeners. Roloff remade these "terminal cases" into Scripture-quoting, gospel-singing believers. Girls who had been saved harmonized along with his Honeybee Quartet at revivals and witnessed to the power of the Lord on his radio show. He showed off his Rebekah girls at every turn, and he was amply rewarded: Each day, packages arrived at Roloff Evangelistic Enterprises laden with checks, cash, jewelry, the family silver-whatever the faithful could provide.
Discipline at the Rebekah Home was rooted in a verse from Proverbs: "Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die." The dictum was liberally applied. Local authorities first investigated possible abuse at the Rebekah Home in 1973, when parents who were visiting their daughter reported seeing a girl being whipped. When welfare workers attempted to inspect the home, Roloff refused them entry on the grounds that it would infringe on the separation between church and state. Attorney General John Hill promptly filed suit against Roloff Evangelistic Enterprises, introducing affidavits from sixteen Rebekah girls who said they had been whipped with leather straps, beaten with paddles, handcuffed to drainpipes, and locked in isolation cells-sometimes for such minor infractions as failing to memorize a Bible passage or forgetting to make a bed. Roloff defended these methods as good old-fashioned discipline, solidly supported by Scripture, and denied that any treatment at Rebekah constituted abuse. During an evidentiary hearing, he made his position clear by declaring, "Better a pink bottom than a black soul." Attorney General Hill bluntly replied that it wasn't pink bottoms he objected to, but ones that were blue, black, and bloody."
His homes were VERY abusive. Do a little googling around. There’s a lot of dirt out there about him. I also imagine that there are Roloff survivors who read here and can comment more on the abuse they suffered.
Roloff’s home were very abusive, and Roloff exported his ways of running these Christianized concentration camps… I mean homes… no I don’t… across the country. My former church runs one of these homes. I am now in contact with several survivors who have told all kinds of horrible things. The hardest thing about it for me is that I knew many of the staff before they went to work for the homes, and they were mean then. I was on the receiving end of a lot of their junk, and I only had to deal with them during school hours. Now I know what these same people did once the kids they singled out were completely under their control. Scary stuff.
More dots…
Olen King was charged with child neglect and kidnapping in SC. So what does he do? Comes to North Carolina (we seem to be a magnet state for fundie wackos) and starts “Second Chance Boys Ranch” in Danbury. The cycle was begun with Lester Roloff and his empire building machine.
FWIW–back in the 70s our pastor told a group of us that Roloff’s wife was obese and that Roloff was embarrassed by that. Roloff visited our church in Greenville, SC, once a year for a while there back in the 60s and 70s. I always wondered about the babies that were born at the home and what happened to them. Roloff often mentioned them and sounded as if he thought he owned them.
The myth of the “wayward teen” was prevalent in other homes as well, but the real stories never added up. Many of the people from my former church’s concentration camp were dumped there after a parent remarried and the new spouses didn’t want a teenager around. some were abuse survivors. One girl was completely abandoned by her parents. The kids who did act up weren’t always the druggies. Sometimes it was normal teenage angst and testing limits.
The threat of being sent out to the home hung over my head for even the smallest and dumbest infractions. Knowing what I know now from the ones who did go there, there was nothing I could possibly have done to deserve the nightmare those other kids suffered, and they didn’t deserve it either.
I suspect Lester Roloff was just fine making lots and lots of watermelons and fried chicken jokes, probably bold enough to make them in front of the black teens, but I’m not really convinced this is that. The mere presence of watermelon and black people doesn’t always predicate racist insinuations. I suspect the black and white guys in that video all had bigger problems going on that trying to divine which fruit snacks were subtle digs at the black guys. I did when I first saw it think “great here comes another blatant racist,” but I just don’t think that materialized here. For the record am white, not that it matters much.
In context the writer may have meant “Lester Roloff Enterprises” the legal entity that was formed and continues to direct the ministry of Roloff. The “Remember the Christian Alamo” article does a better job of tying the Religious and political parts together.
I re read that after yu posted as well, pretty sure they are using it to refer to lester inc. I hate when people name their s corp after their name exactly. Prob would have been better writing to have specified that.
Like all Fundies he craved worship… his ego built an empire and he is still worshipped today by fundies worldwide. (3885 worshippers on his FB profile) Somemay have been helped in his “homes” but the spiritual, emotional and physical abuse (that we know of) has done more damage to lives than the ones he fixed. [many may have been saved by Christ inspite of Lester and his homes.] Sorry, I have no respect for this self-proclaimed, self-anointed m-o-g.
While I don’t like Roloff personally, John Piper has over 105,000 worshippers on facebook (incidently, John Calvin only has 28,000). So… does that make reformed folk more inclined to worshipping men then baptists… or maybe IFB’s don’t have the internet lol.
What did ever happen to the babies?
