The '8 Passengers' Scandal Reveals A Serious Issue In The Fundie Community

Arrests for aggravated child abuse? No, I'm not surprised.

Author’s Note: I wrote about the incident on Newsbreak, but I’m adding more here for fans.

I woke up to my phone buzzing with a news alert—one that deals with one of the religious fundie YouTubers that I’ve been known to watch commentaries about. For those in the know, Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt have both been arrested for aggravated child abuse.

Ruby got her start as a family vlogger on the channel ‘8 Passengers,’ but ceased operations after she came under fire for extremely punitive behavior towards her six kids. She later teamed up with Jodi, founder of ConneXions, to start a new channel.

ConneXions is a Christian fundie parenting “consulting firm” that lets people hire Jodi and Ruby for $75 per session. They take the whole “honor and obey your parents” thing to a new level. They also claim to provide “healing that therapy can’t provide.”

The problem? It was often under fire for being cult-like, encouraging abusive behavior, and saying that anything that even slightly deviates from its teachings is “a distortion of truth.”

No, like, really, ConneXions was very cult-like.

As you can tell from the video, they tend to encourage parents to be hyper-sensitive to any form of deception from kids. This can lead parents to assume that kids are lying even when they aren’t. I wish I could say this was the only issue, but that isn’t true.

Among Fundie Snark groups (like the ones I am part of), it’s also common knowledge that the two were major fans of sending kids to bed without food or using food/water withdrawal as a form of punishment.

They also advocate for giving kids no privacy and worse. While I am not a psychologist, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the advice seemed like it mirrored narcissistic abuse.