Cedarville professor who preached sexual morality charged with multiple sex crimes
John Kent Tarwater preached purity in his writing while allegedly violating it in the worst way
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For decades, John Kent Tarwater, a professor of finance at the private Christian Cedarville University in Ohio, dabbled in writing about sexual ethics.
He wrote a 2021 piece for the Journal of Markets & Morality in which he argued it was “permissible for Christian employers to terminate employees on the basis of transgender identity.” That’s because “the employer may rightfully question that employee’s ability to fulfill work responsibilities in a trustworthy manner.”
In 2022, he wrote an article for The Gospel Coalition’s Themelios, a journal of theology, saying that masturbation was evil because God Said So. (In an article for TGC’s website, they said, “we conclude masturbation can never be a God-honoring behavior.”) In 2019, he published a book titled Business Ethics: A Christian Method for Making Moral Decisions.
You get the idea. This man was a noted expert in sex and ethics and Jesus… and so you know exactly where this story is going.
According to The Roys Report, Tarwater was recently arrested on charges of sexually abusing minors (it’s unclear how many victims there might be).
The indictment, filed March 27 in Ohio’s Greene County Common Pleas Court, charges John Kent Tarwater with two counts of rape, three counts of sexual battery and three counts of gross sexual imposition.
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Prosecutors allege the conduct occurred between August 2019 and July 2025, with at least some occurring in Greene County, including at a Cedarville address… he once owned.
The indictment states that, in several counts, Tarwater allegedly compelled the victim by force or threat of force.
The charges include first-degree felony rape, second- and third-degree felony sexual battery and third- and fourth-degree felony gross sexual imposition, under various sections of the Ohio Revised Code.
Administrators at the school said in an email to students that they were alerted last July that Tarwater was under investigation, and so they placed him on administrative leave and banned him from coming to campus. They fired him in October, though they didn’t go into more detail on the timeline. They added that their “understanding is that these charges do not involve anyone Dr. Tarwater met or interacted with as a University professor.”
I will say that it doesn’t seem like the school did anything wrong here; they took action when needed, and there’s no evidence they knew anything earlier or impeded an investigation. But there’s no indication of them even acknowledging the obvious hypocrisy.
What does it say about Cedarville, and conservative Christianity, and the belief that there’s a link between religion and morality that a professor they bragged about in press releases—a man with 10 children—may have committed the most heinous of crimes? Will anyone there admit that perhaps you don’t need the Christian God to be good, or that God can often provide a shield for the worst people?
Cedarville won’t even hire you if you’re not a Young Earth Creationist. But you can have a long and successful career if you’re a fundamentalist child predator. At least until secular law enforcement officials catch you because the school isn’t going to.
Tarwater, in case you were wondering, is not a drag queen. He’s not gay. He’s not trans. He’s just a conservative Christian whose work contributed to making life harder for those other groups.
There are countless examples of this hypocritical moral posturing. If he’s found guilty, it will be worth asking whether his actions were in defiance of everything he believed or a natural consequence of them. Because we know all too well that people who target LGBTQ people and obsess over sexual “purity” are often the ones who have no understanding of boundaries or consent. When you live in a religious environment where “sin” is defined as being gay or trans, rather than abusing power or exploiting the vulnerable, you’re taught to ignore actual harm.
𝑊𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑑𝑚𝑖𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑝𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝐺𝑜𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑, 𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐺𝑜𝑑 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑛 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑎 𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑒𝑙𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: Part of their whole shtick is lying about what morality is and where it comes from. To admit that any god is unnecessary for morality would be to undermine their entire religion. To admit that their god can provide a shield for horrible people would be to admit that their rules for moral behavior are fundamentally flawed and actually immoral.
Not. A. Drag .Queen. (Obligatory remark before reading article.)