American Religion Was Rocked by a Suicide in 1979
The strange story of Kenneth Nally
The history of Christianity might prefer to leave out the chapter on Kenneth Nally, even though he’s one of their more famous disasters.
The facts are scattered in media clips, court documents and legal writings, with key parts of the story somewhat unclear. I’m picking through them, trying to understand.
He was born on November 23, 1954.
His father, Walter, was an American soldier in the Korean War, and met Maria. She was Japanese. She changed religions, from Buddhist to Catholic, but her husband’s family was still dismayed by his choice.
At his Catholic high school in Los Angeles, he was a star basketball player and A-student
A school friend later testified that he was “very intelligent, a very personable kid… He never seemed depressed.” He went to UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), and broke up with his high school girlfriend.
That’s when the trouble started? From a court report:
“He often talked about the absurdity of life, the problems he had with women and his family, and he occasionally mentioned suicide to his friends.”
Then he found Evangelicalism. He was ‘saved’ in April 1973, and began attending Grace Community Church of the Valley, in Sun Valley, whose pastor was John MacArthur.
As the school friend testified, Ken became “a completely different person. He was always talking religion, religion, religion.”
There was some problem inside him
In 1975, Ken is said to have gone to see a ‘secular’ psychologist, but the venue cited was Shepherd’s House, an Evangelical missionary organization. This was religious counseling.
In the early 1970s, Evangelicals were hard at work on an alternative to psychotherapy. Pastors, they reasoned, should be handling Christian problems, even mental illness — since it was only ‘sin’.
John MacArthur and Grace Community Church were big advocates of ‘Biblical Counseling’. But curiously, Ken hadn’t pursued it there.
A biography of MacArthur recalls Ken had a “belief that he was called to the gospel ministry.” He graduated from UCLA, then enrolled in Biola College, a Christian school, then shifted to a seminary on Grace Community Church’s campus.
The magazine Christianity Today reported that Ken “worked part-time” at the church. He had a particular friend on the staff, a young pastor named Lynn Cory. They’d go to football and basketball games, and sometimes John MacArthur would join them.
In the summer of 1977, Ken began dating a fellow seminary student named Katie Thayer
She later testified that he wouldn’t bring her home to visit his parents. Ken, she said, “had a hard time with the fact that he didn’t feel a lot of love from his father.”
Even with a pretty girlfriend and a new religion, his sadness returned. In January 1978, he asked for counseling sessions from Duane Rea, a pastor at Grace Community Church. Rea testified that Ken told him:
“…things at home are rotten. I can’t get along with my Dad. It seems like my hate for him is stronger than my love.”
From a court report:
“During these sessions, according to Pastor Rea, Nally often appeared distraught and cried, indicating that he ‘couldn’t cope.’ Rea specifically recalled Nally’s statement to him in his office, ‘I just can’t live this life.’”
From a news report of Rea’s testimony trial:
“He recalled from his notes that Nally needed ‘regular discipleship’ for problems regarding his family, job, personal image and dating relationships. Concerning dating, Rea testified that Nally was having difficulty suppressing his sexual desires.”
Duane Rea has died, but Lynn Cory is still living
I emailed him, saying I was unclear what this talk of ‘sexual desires’ involved. I wrote: “I wanted to be sure that this was not a discussion of Nally’s sexuality.”
I don’t hear back.
A 2001 legal study, Mark A. Weitz’s Clergy Malpractice in America: Nally v. Grace Community Church of the Valley, noted that Ken had a “desire for intimacy outside of matrimony.”
Weitz replies to a query, saying he doesn’t know any more.
On April 7, 1978, Rea terminated the counseling. It was unsuccessful, he testified in court, because Ken wasn’t following his advice, which was to “rejoice in the Lord and show gratitude for all things.”
As I read the Bible codes, Rea alludes to verses like Psalm 97:12: “Rejoice in the LORD, you who are righteous.”
He means to suggest Ken was an ‘unbeliever’.
In December 1978, Katie broke up with Ken—by letter
She’d testify that she viewed Ken as depressed ‘about 75% of the time’. He talked, she said, of “wanting to go home and be with the Lord.”
Indeed, Ken had a question for the church. What was the religious status of someone who committed suicide? For that matter he seems to have been referred to a pastor at the church named Rich Thomson.
What Thomson told Ken in person wasn’t known, but later he recorded a set of instructional tapes which came to the notice of the court. He’d said:
“…suicide for a believer is the Lord saying, ‘Okay, come on home. Can’t use you anymore on earth. If you’re not going to deal with those things in your life, come on home.’”
John MacArthur’s career was taking off
He was becoming known for his anti-feminist and anti-gay commentary. In January 1979, he’d made a splash in local media with a sermon that said mothers weren’t to work outside the home.
There was disagreement over whether secretaries at his church had been fired, or quit.
Meanwhile, Ken seemed to be trying to re-conceive his life. If he had thought of becoming a pastor, he might be a Christian lawyer? He “decided to serve the Lord through law,” as he put it.
He enrolled in a law school for the fall 1979 semester. But in February 1979, he told his mother he couldn’t “cope.”
She arranged for him to see a medical doctor, who prescribed an anti-depressant called Elavil. On March 11th, Ken overdosed on it. Found the following day in a coma, he was rushed to the hospital.
A doctor recommended involuntary commitment
Ken’s family rejected the idea. His mother was quoted: “No, that’s a crazy hospital. He’s not crazy.”
They asked the doctor to quiet any talk of suicide, and he did.
Ken was visited by John MacArthur, who asked when Ken would be released. The doctor said he had to see a psychiatrist. MacArthur replied:
“All they do is fill you up with pills and scramble your brain. I will take him. I will take him for a few days to my house.”
He would have to leave after two weeks when the family was to take a trip. MacArthur’s wife Patricia was later quoted saying that Ken was “very sick and needed to be committed.”
Back home, Ken listened to tapes of John MacArthur sermons
He was having headaches, and his arm was paralyzed after having slept on it during his Eleavil episode. One of the pastors told him in the hospital that it was “God punishing him” for the suicide attempt.
On March 29th, Walter took Ken to see a registered psychologist’s assistant. According to a court report:
“Kenneth told Walter Nally that Mr. Raup was not a good Christian and would not be able to help him.”
On March 31, 1979, after further family fights, Ken left the house, saying: “Nobody loves me.”
He stayed with a friend, and visited pastors
The church, by this time, was recommending that Ken turn to mental health professionals. This implies he wasn’t viewed as Christian.
But Ken maintained that he was—and he held out for the divine assistance the clerics offered.
“Kenneth insisted he could only be helped by a fundamentalist Christian,” as People reports in 1985. The magazine interviewed Pastor Rea:
“Rea remembers he was trimming trees; at that point, he says, he didn’t want to interfere with Kenneth’s doctors. He invited the young man over only to socialize, not for counseling.”
Ken went to see Katie as well—and proposed marriage. She replied, as she recalled in court:
“No, Ken. I can’t bear you when you’re like this. You’ve got to pull yourself together and put God first.”
On Sunday, April 1st, alone at his friend’s apartment, he got into the closet, pointed a gun to his head, and fired. He was twenty-four.
Pastor Rea conducted the funeral
Ken was buried in a cemetery plot chosen by the church. Later, his father had the remains disinterred, and buried in a Catholic cemetery. “I decided I would bring him back home,” Walter said, “to those who love him.”
His lawyer framed the case as courts needing to hold Christian clerics accountable when they claim to treat mental illness:
“Other professions have licensing requirements to govern and control them, but there are none for the clergy.”
To curtail the First Amendment protections on religion struck many as implausible, but as the court noted, the church had claimed to:
“…treat a whole range of mental illnesses, including depression and schizophrenia — indeed, as Pastor Thomson testified, ‘any type of emotional problem.’”
The grieving Nally parents were sympathetic — and the church less so.
At one point, a jury was about to convict Grace Community Church. The judge, in a sudden move, dismissed the case. It was just too difficult a precedent to allow. If churches could be accused of wrongdoing—the courts would be overwhelmed.
Kept alive by dramatic appeals, the suit dragged on for years. As the New York Times reported, it:
“…generated fears among ministers and rabbis about their liability as counselors.”
In 1988, the Supreme Court declined a final appeal
Ken’s parents were interviewed. “My boy was brilliant,” Walter says. “He was an athlete, and he could run faster than I could ever run. And he was my boy.”
Maria, weeping, recalled that she had a dream in which she saw Ken standing in a white room. He was covered in blood. She said: “I ask him what happened, and he says, ‘Mom, help me.’”
Over the next decade, Walter was often interviewed as an activist against clerical overreach. He died in 2011, and was buried next to his son.
John MacArthur would typically frame the matter as a failure of Ken’s spiritual will. He writes in a 1991 book:
“We urged him to let the Word of God lead him to intimate knowledge and appropriation of the resources available in the One who wanted to heal his troubled mind. Tragically, he refused our counsel…”
The lawsuit seemed to be a sweeping affirmation of the First Amendment
But legally, and in the public’s mind, Nally v. Grace Community Church of the Valley helped to draw a brighter line between pastors and mental health professionals.
A 1992 manual, Law for the Christian Counselor, going over the case, urges:
“…a sober appraisal of the role, duties, limits, and behavior of the pastoral counselor.”
Otherwise, you could end up in court? Or a closet. 🔶
