The LGBT advocacy group Faith In America says YouTube has refused to explain why it removed from its website a video produced by the group about a 22-year-old gay man who says he was held against his will for four months and assaulted by members of a North Carolina church that considers homosexuality a form of demonic possession.
Brent Childers, executive director of Faith In America, said he believes the Spindale, N.C., based Word of Faith Fellowship church misled YouTube into thinking the video infringed upon its religious freedom.
Childers and others who have monitored the church say it has the characteristics of a cult and exerts extraordinary control over the lives of its members and their children. They say Word of Faith Fellowship, which operates on a 40-acre campus, has a long history of abusive treatment of gays.
It is really dumbfounding, Childers said. YouTube allows a controversial video that pokes fun at Islam. But here we have a video in which a person is telling his own personal knowledge of how this bizarre Christian church treats gay youth or those suspected of being gay, and they remove the video.
Attempts by the Washington Blade to reach YouTube, which is owned by the search engine giant Google, have been unsuccessful. A YouTube spokesperson couldnt be reached by phone and the company didnt respond to email sent to an address listed for press inquiries.
Pastors Jane and Sam Whaley, the founders and leaders of Word of Faith Fellowship, posted a message on the church website denying the church has mistreated gays and said the allegations made by the Faith In America video were false.
The gay man who is the subject of the video, Michael Lowry, told the Washington Blade his parents raised him as a church member since he was born and that he attended church operated schools on the church compound from kindergarten through 12th grade.
He said church members subjected him to severe pressure since his early teens to expel what they said were demons within him that were causing him to embrace homosexuality.
I was very different than a lot of the other kids, he said. I was viewed as being gay. I never said I am gay
It was a very hard time. Through my whole school years I was very bullied, hurt because of that.
Lowry said that around July of 2011, church members came to his home while his parents were out of town and forced him to go with them to a building on the church compound known as the Fourth Building, where male church members reportedly are taken for punishment for violating church rules.
He said he was held in the building against his will for four months and at one point was assaulted by church members assigned to watch over him during his stay at the facility. He said church officials released him in November 2011.
FBI may have been contacted by U.S. Attorneys Office
Jerry Cooper, a Baptist minister and former member of Word of Faith Fellowship, said he has been assisting Lowry since last year in his role as a counselor to people who leave the church and who often suffer psychological scars from their experiences with the church.
Childers said the video that YouTube deleted consisted of an interview with Cooper talking about Michael Lowrys case. Childers said for unknown reasons YouTube did not delete a separate video that includes an interview with Lowry.
According to Cooper and Don Huddle, a member of Faith Freedom Fund, a North Carolina group that helps ex-Word of Faith Fellowship members adjust to life outside the church, said church members brought Lowry to a nearby hotel after they released him.
They took him to the hotel with just a few of his belongings, said Huddle, who noted that someone familiar with the church alerted his group to Lowrys plight and informed him that a confused and emotionally distraught young man had been taken to the hotel.
I picked him up from the hotel and brought him to a safe house, he said. Huddle said Faith Freedom Fund has a network of volunteers and supporters who spring into action when they learn of Word of Faith Fellowship members who desire to leave the church.
Cooper said he met Lowry through Huddles group in 2011 and advised him to consider reporting the churchs actions against him to the Rutherford County Sheriffs office, which is the law enforcement agency in the area where the church is located.
He said Lowry reported to a Sheriffs Office investigator that he had been taken against his will and held against his will by church members, and the office began an investigation that resulted in Lowry being called this week to testify before a county grand jury. His testimony was scheduled for Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Childers said Faith In America contacted the U.S. Justice Department about Lowrys allegations in October and called on the department to investigate the churchs alleged detention of Lowry and his claim of being assaulted by church members as a possible anti-gay hate crime.
A spokesperson for the United States Attorneys Office in the Western District of North Carolina, which represents the Justice Department, said she would make inquiries about whether her office has responded to Faith In Americas request for an investigation. The spokesperson didnt immediately get back to the Blade.
However, Cooper said an FBI agent interviewed Lowry for several hours last week about his allegations against the church, a development that suggests the U.S. Attorneys office contacted the FBI to investigate the matter.
A copy of an incident report taken from Lowry by the Sheriffs Office in February 2012 and released by Faith in America, says a group of men affiliated with the church held him down and hit him about the face and chest area at the time the church held him against his will in August 2011.
Mr. Lowry stated that he told them to let go but they would not, the report says. The reason they [did] this was because he was homosexual and they [were] trying to get him to stop being homosexual. When this incident was taking place, the group would tell him he had demons in him and he was going to hell, the report says.
YouTube
is giving cover to a church that believes it is OK to harm gay youth
A statement released by Faith In America says that during Lowrys forced stay at the church facility he was subjected to humiliating acts, such as being made to sleep on the floor in the hallway and had to submit to supervised bathroom visits because church members feared he might be masturbating.
What YouTube is doing, perhaps inadvertently in this particular case, is giving cover to a church that believes it is OK to harm gay youth and families in the name of religious teaching, Chiders said. In doing so, it is giving cover to a vast number of churches who do the same thing, whether a small charismatic church in rural North Carolina or a large Methodist church in some American suburb.
In a posting on its website, Word of Faith Fellowship disputes Lowrys allegations and accuses Faith in America of repeated vicious lies about the church.
We have always been a church that has loved everybody, because God is love, the statement says. What Michael Roy Lowry has said never happened. We would never allow it to happen. We do not discriminate against anyone, and we never have.
The statement adds, We never knew Michael Roy Lowry was gay until we heard it on the news program. It would have made no difference to us, because we love him.
Cooper, who said he has closely followed Word of Faith Fellowship since he left it in 1998, said evidence is overwhelming from people who leave the church that church leaders abuse people suspected of being gay or suspected of engaging in any type of sexual activity not deemed appropriate by the church, even between consenting adults, gay or straight.
He said the church has prohibited Lowrys family from seeing or talking to Lowry, a practice he said the church carries out with most people who leave it.
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