Mike Johnson Made a Minor His Accountability Partner. So Did the Founder of Covenant Eyes

The Christian Patriarchy Often Hides Abuse in Plain Sight

He sat on a stage with other leaders discussing the dangers of technology. He wore a suit with a tie and sat casually on a stool, one leg draped to the side, one hand holding a mic. There was an audience and a host asking questions. The stage was lit with spotlights and the session was recorded. There was nothing hidden about this event.

That’s where Mike Johnson, who is now the new Speaker of the House, stated his 17-year-old son, a minor, was his porn accountability partner.

He described the arrangement as if it were admirable, in the midst of explaining how the Covenant Eyes software works. He said he and his son each received reports on one another’s online activity and, he was proud to say, his son’s was clean.

This was meant to reassure the parents in the audience that the surveillance-and-behavior-reporting software works. Johnson did not say if his report was “clean” or not.

My first reaction was a cringey laugh. Becuase I knew what MJ had just done—he bragged to insiders using language they’d recognize and respect, without realizing how it lands to outsiders. This is a cult slip-up and it’s not unusual. We forget. We forget the way we live isn’t how the rest of the world lives and some of our practices are weird.

For example, people outside of the cult think an adult asking a minor to monitor his sexual behavior is creepy at best, and criminal at worst. It’s known grooming behavior and a red flag for abuse. So, when this clip circulated online, there were gasps and outrage.

For me, it was a trauma flashback. My laughter was anxious, stuck in my chest, and triggered heart-pounding and a cold sweat on my neck. Covenant Eyes is a ghost from my past.

About Covenant Eyes

You might think the founder of this spy software is Big Tech. After all, Covenant Eyes is big business. They’ve been on Inc. 500 fastest-growing companies list for years. They’re endorsed and promoted by the Promise Keepers. Churches promote them to entire congregations. Bible study groups and adjacent parenting ministries recommend them to men struggling with porn and parents struggling with teens.

Covenant Eyes was founded by Ron Dehaas, a Calvinist who is a ruling elder at his Evangelical Presbyterian Church that teaches TULIP—the “T” stands for Total Depravity, the belief that mankind is so corrupted by original sin that we are unable to obey God.

Dehaas has a tragic story. His first wife and two young children were killed by a semi-truck. He was granted a two million dollar settlement and years later, after he’d remarried and was now the parent of two teenage boys, he decided to start an online behavior monitoring company. This is the Covenant Eyes origin story repeated in interviews, the version that skips the middle part—the years between the settlement and the company’s start.

Those years include Collin Rose, a tech-savvy teenager who worked in some capacity for Dehaas.

When I heard about Covenant Eyes, I was in a parenting support group. A friend evangelized my husband and I, touting the reporting merits. I resisted surveillance software and fought against treating my teens with so much paranoia. But I also believed our friend—he said it was sophisticated software that would increase online safety without too much interference. He was wrong.

A Spirit of Fear

Evangelicals and fundamentalists are afraid of a lot of things. Chief among these is the unknown behavior of another. This fear, and the dangers they imagine, conflate, and monger, is the justification they use to deny others privacy across the board. This looks like “I’ll keep an eye on you,” “Let’s get together for coffee,” and “You’d better keep that door open.” It’s the reason so many evangelicals have husband-and-wife social media accounts and the reason for the Billy Graham Rule.

Coming from Bill Gothard’s brand of Christian Fundamentalism and Doug Wilson’s angry Federalism, I was already aware of the lack of privacy and the expectation that submissives would transparently report every secret thought and deed to their dominant. Spy software on our computers didn’t surprise me. But I had an issue with the assumptions beneath it.

Did everyone “struggle” with porn addiction?

Were my curious kids (who also needed the internet for homework) definitely absolutely looking for trouble?

Weren’t there other ways to handle teenage curiosity and sexual development? Like, I don’t know, actual dialog and relationships?

Was it a given the internet is a scary place? Isn’t it also a wonderful place?

Is pornography automatically “bad” and unethical?

If my kids felt like we were watching them all the time, wouldn’t they (naturally) look for workarounds and ways to hide? I knew I would. Couldn’t those workarounds actually be more dangerous? (They were.)

I didn’t want to cultivate secrecy and shame, and this software seemed designed for it.

I also couldn’t escape the irony that in my experience as a religious person, accountability for actual abuses was rare, almost to the point of nonexistent. The reporting aspect of the internet monitoring felt performative, like a dirty brag, and every time I heard the sales pitch, the same talking points were used. “We’re not making money from this.” “We use it on all our devices.” “If you don’t want to use it, what do you have to hide?”

The Fruit of Surveillance

The last time I heard Covenant Eyes had a big news moment was when Josh Duggar was busted. Reporting his online behavior to Anna hadn’t stopped Josh. In fact, he easily hacked it, created a split browser, and worked around it.

My kids and their friends found workarounds too. My husband and I fought about when to turn it off because safe searches were constantly blocked. Browser updates were always a hassle. He was constantly suspicious of good kids trying to get their computers to work correctly. He and I turned it off on our machines, creating a double standard. Using Covenant Eyes became a parenting nightmare—with a litany of optional problems that didn’t exist for us before we installed it.

And being watched all the time was nauseating. I knew this from church-sanctioned domestic abuse in my first marriage, where even the neighbors were enlisted to spy on me. I was all too familiar with abuse hidden in plain sight. People would look right past disturbing signs and red flags, even when they were on stage, even from the pulpit, even when the family seemed so wholesome. My body remembered and kept the score. The more boldly a high-control patriarch states what he’s doing, the more potential mandatory reporters look the other way.

And I was frustrated with the presumption about porn. If it was truly an addiction, then it was like everything else addictive—self-medication for an underlying pain. Shaming it didn’t help; shame compounds the pain and drives the sufferer to find other (often worse) ways to cope. The conversation was changing about ethical porn, sex workers, female pleasure, and sex education. Like a lot of things in high-control religions, I found their treatment of online behavior to be overly fear-based, outdated, and authoritarian.

However authoritarian structures emphasize surveillance and behavior reporting. Now, I felt, I better understood why so many patriarchs wanted it. And I was chilled to realize it’s now at the highest level of government. I think that’s always been the goal, from the foundation.

Built off of Impropriety

He sat behind a clean pine desk with a cigar box and coffee mug. He wore a blue sweater with a collared shirt, a plump grandfather telling a warm story of good intentions. As he described the founding of Covenant Eyes, he folded and unfolded his hands. The video is professionally produced and hosted on a dedicated page of the company’s website. There was nothing hidden about this story.

That’s where Ron Dehaas, who is the founder of Covenant Eyes, stated he asked his 17-year-old employee, a minor, to be his porn accountability partner.

He described the arrangement as if it were admirable, in the midst of explaining how the Covenant Eyes software works. He said within three days, the boy offered a report on Ron’s online activity. From there, the two of them started Covenant Eyes.

The front page of the website reminds users, “You are not alone.”

Covenant Eyes promises to help you “set a good example.”

This is meant to reassure consumers that the surveillance-and-behavior-reporting software works.

Dehaas didn’t say if his report was “clean” or not.