by David J. Stewart | March 2022
Ephesians 4:30-32, “And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.”
I
had lived on the island of Guam for 17 years. In July of 2021 I decided
to move to Pensacola, Florida. I chose to attend Campus Church on the
property of Pensacola Christian College (PCC). God knows that I came to PCC
with a spirit of love, an open mind and nothing but a desire to be blessing
to their ministry. But I made a mistake of being honest with Pastor Jeff
Redlin that I was a divorced. My former spouse divorced me in 2006. So after
15 years of utter loneliness I hoped to find a wife at Campus Church, and I
kindly told Redlin so.
You'd think that a senior pastor of a big ministry with 12,000 church members would have compassion for hurting people, but not so. You'd think that Mr. Redlin would have understood my pain and need for a wife, being a man himself. Redlin has a wife, so you'd think he would have at least expressed some sympathy and offered to pray with me. But instead that jerk literally belittled me, scolding me for coming to church to find a wife. It blew my mind that a guy I didn't even know, was taking the unjust liberty to berate me for being lonely. Redlin couldn't have cared less about me as a human being. He treated me like garbage! I felt like killing myself after being subjected to his verbal abuse, woeful lack of compassion and insulting painful words.
So I emailed Pastor Redlin and poured out my heart, trying to become his friend. That was a big mistake! I found out the hard way that you cannot become friends with a heartless thug, a religious phony, a bully who is really a coward, a poor excuse for a man whose wife has more testosterone than he does (no wonder they cannot have any of their own children). Jeff Redlin has no balls! Jeff Redlin is a stupid fool! In front of his wife, Pastor Redlin literally told me that if I found a woman to marry, he would never perform the wedding. That is HATE SPEECH! Redlin is a hateful person! What pastor in his right mind would tell a complete stranger, whom you've only know for 2 weeks, that you would never marry him? What an A$$hole!!! If I had my way Jeff Redlin would be fired and never allowed to stand behind any pulpit again. The idiot cannot even get repentance right! Sadly, PCC is headed in a deadly direction!!!
In my broken heart and frustration, having been verbally attacked and assaulted emotionally by a careless , cruel and abusive pastor, I had a gut feeling that there were more victims at PCC. Sure enough, I found them. Here is the heartbreaking story of Samantha Field, who was brutally raped and assaulted at Pensacola Christian College. And then, as sickening and unbelievable as it is, she was emotionally raped again by PCC staff, told to "REPENT" and let the matter go. I would have told them to go to Hell, where they are all going! PCC is full of religious pricks like Jeff Redlin. Here is Samantha's story (please help share this on social media so she can get justice)...
I Was Told I Needed To “Repent” For Being Raped At My Christian CollegeBy Samantha Field,
My back was pressed up against Plexiglas, a wall of windows facing out into the hallway. I was on display, an exhibit for other college students to peer at as they walked to their classes.
The counselor opened up a cabinet behind her — it was stuffed with off-brand tissue boxes, and I wondered if that was all she had in those cabinets. She set a box on her desk, within my reach.
“How is the wedding planning going?”
“We’re not getting married anymore,” I told her. “He called it off.”
My ex was smacking his lips, brownie crumbs on the corners of his mouth. He looked at me and told me: “I just can’t trust that you’re going to be a godly, submissive wife.” I cringed.
The counselor was trying to be empathic to my situation. She looked at me and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.”
“Yeah,” I answered.
The counselor’s expression changed. She asked, “Was there, possibly, sexual sin?”
“Well, I don’t know how to talk about it,” I told her.
Cold, shivering, my back against blue shag carpet. Pain, cursing, “No, no, please, no,” falling out of my mouth.
“If there was sin in your relationship with him, Samantha, you need to repent of it,” she cooed. “Unrepentance can do so much damage to your heart.”
“I don’t think, I don’t think I would call what happened sin, though,” I stammered. “He — he hurt me.”
“It’s important, though, that you face what you are responsible for,” she continued as I sat there in disbelief. “If you don’t repent, then your relationship with God is broken and can’t be mended. You need God’s grace and forgiveness — and you need to forgive your ex as well. If you don’t forgive him, then bitterness will take seed and that bitterness will be so much worse than anything he could have done.”
~~~~~~~~~
The secretary looked up from her notepad and keyboard.
“They said that if I wanted to change my chapel seat, it would have to be approved by Student Life?”
“And why do you need to change your seat assignment?”
“My ex, he — well, he follows me around after chapel and it’s making me uncomfortable.”
The dean emerged from her office. “What do you mean?”
“He sits two rows directly behind me, and he waits for me when chapel is over, then he follows me around, trying to talk to me,” I told them.
“This sounds like a personal issue that needs to be resolved between the two of you.”
“But I’ve tried. I’ve asked him so many times to stop — to just leave me alone. But he doesn’t. He follows me everywhere, and he says horrible things, and causes scenes.”
“From what we’ve heard, you’re the one causing scenes,” the dean told me. “You could learn a little self-control. Stop antagonizing him, and he’ll eventually leave you alone.”
~~~~~~~~~~
I graduated from Pensacola Christian College, a fundamentalist Christian school in Florida. I enrolled there because my family and I honestly believed that I would be safe there. We believed that the dangers present at secular colleges were absent from PCC’s campus — there was no partying, no drinking, no drugs, and most especially no sex.
The reality was much different and much harsher. I wasn’t safe. At all.
Over the years that I was in a relationship with another PCC student, I was manipulated, verbally attacked, physically abused, sexually assaulted and raped. When I finally — finally — had the courage to tell my ex that he couldn’t call me a “goddamn f**king bitch” anymore, he broke our engagement two weeks later.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I was facing more than the end of a relationship.
Initially, the changes in the way people treated me at college were almost imperceptible — so slight I thought I was imagining things, that I was paranoid. Friends wouldn’t look me in the eye when they passed me on the sidewalk. People who used to smile and shout my name when they saw me started going out of their way to avoid me. RAs, once friendly, withdrew and began giving me demerits for the slightest infractions.
A month later, I was summoned to appear before a dean in Student Life, the administrative body responsible for enforcing their strict morality code. When that meeting gave the dean nothing to punish me with, she forced me into “counseling” — an experience that made me terrified of seeking professional help for years after I graduated. Not getting the help I needed means that, today, I still have panic attacks and night terrors.
My rapist stalked me until I graduated, following me around the cafeteria, to my classes, pestering me with a litany of “Please, I just want to talk to you! Why won’t you talk to me?!”
And slowly, people I had believed were my friends pulled away. I called one of them, his roommate, hoping that he might be able to get him to leave me alone after the administration refused to help me. His only response: “You weren’t the person I thought you were. I’m not going to speak to you again.”
I was an outcast.
I didn’t understand what was happening, so I tried talking about some of what I’d been through with the few people who were still speaking to me. I opened up to someone, only for her to call me a liar a few days later and tell me that my rapist had “told her what had really happened.”
One of the few friends I had left was a graduate assistant. She had an apartment with a kitchen and let me keep a few groceries there. It was my last semester, and I only had two classes every morning. I would rush to class, afraid that my rapist would be waiting for me somewhere, then head straight to the GA’s room as soon as it was over.
I hid in her room for months. He couldn’t come anywhere near me as long as I was there, and I didn’t have to deal with people avoiding me, people abruptly stopping conversations, people making sure I could hear them mocking me.
At PCC, there is no recourse for someone like me. The only way to tell anyone what had happened to me would have been to march into the hostile Student Life offices and tell someone — which could have easily resulted in my expulsion. Even my attempt to explain to the counselor what my rapist had done only prompted her speech about repentance.
The student body, staff, and faculty are given absolutely no education whatsoever about abuse or violence or rape, and the only messages students do receive are Sunday school teachers who hold up half-eaten candy bars and torn apart roses and say, “This is what you are if you have sex.”
They don’t talk about consent, or show students what resources are available to them outside of Student Life, which is primarily focused on answering questions like, “What were you wearing? Were you alone with him?”
Pensacola Christian College markets itself as “one of the friendliest college campuses in America.”
In reality, it is one of the most dangerous places for abuse victims that I know.
SOURCE: I Was Told To "Repent" For Being Raped At Pensacola Christian College (PCC)
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