For decades, the people of Hinsdale gave little thought to the mysterious brick building in town. Then came a scandal. T he building, red bricked, colonnaded, crowned with a white cupola, sits on a grassy knoll in northwest Hinsdale. Unmarked, unremarkable, it barely registers as anything more than a garden-variety administrative headquarters of unknown provenance.
The sight of teenage girls walking arm in arm in a nearby park, identically dressed in chaste ankle-length skirts, red scarves knotted around their necks, and modest Mary Janes, and of teen boys seemingly stamped out on a Wonder Bread assembly line—always in dark suits, white shirts, and ties—drew the occasional stare.
Like, what do they really do there? Then, in , came a scandal. Some of those same red-scarfed girls accused Bill Gothard, the charismatic leader of the Institute in Basic Life Principles—the ultraconservative Christian organization operating out of that Hinsdale building—of inappropriately touching them. Gothard stepped down after an internal probe. In many cases, the plaintiffs were underage at the time and had been recruited to work for the organization by Gothard himself.
Whatever the outcome of the case, the shroud of anonymity that once served as a kind of shield for IBLP against unwanted attention has been ripped away. The organization has even tried to make a fresh start by leaving Hinsdale and moving its headquarters to Texas. These days, as more becomes known about Gothard—of what the lawsuit alleges was his almost despotic control over his adherents and of the puritanical, idiosyncratic way of life he prescribed for them—shaken Hinsdale residents regard the benign-looking if somewhat abstruse manor down the street not as just another religious institution but as an organization with a disquieting appellation: the cult in their midst.
That changed last year after an even bigger scandal, one involving TLC reality show star Josh Duggar. Suddenly, a keen interest developed in the brick building in Hinsdale. Just what exactly was that place, and what was going on there? The approach has resonated with conservative evangelicals to the tune of millions of followers, most of whom have become involved with the organization through seminars put on by Gothard around the country. On its website, IBLP boasts that 2.
