The Survivors of Stormfront
Nathan Peternel’s discussions with teens about sex, youth group hazing culture, scarred a generation who left Indiana church decades ago
*** Reporter’s note: This story is written in a narrative style. Much of the attribution is cited here at the start for ease of reading. Some former members of Nathan Peternel’s youth group, like Candy Watson, said they wanted their full name used in the story to help others come forward with their own stories of what happened with them and Peternel. Others asked only for their first name to be used. And additional former Life Church members spoke on the condition their names not be attached to this story. 24sight News independently verified the former youth group and church members’ stories as part of the reporting process for this story. Nathan Peternel, as he has done for previous stories in this series, refused to respond to multiple requests for an interview to discuss the specific pieces of this story. Peternel has retained a lawyer, according one member of his church staff, but neither Peternel nor his staff have provided the name of the lawyer or a separate press contact. ***
INDIANAPOLIS _ Nathan Peternel’s rise to the top of a powerful Indiana church, plugged directly in to state government, started in the late ‘90s because Pastor Tim had computer problems.
Pastor Tim was the senior pastor at Eagle Creek Assembly of God in Indianapolis, a small Pentecostal church serving a diverse area comprised largely of working class residents. One day his desktop computer in the church froze, so he asked for help. Shortly after that, Pastor Tim was fired.
He’d been looking at porn on the church computer.
Not long before, Eagle Creek’s leadership had recruited Nathan, a native of just outside Pittsburgh, who recently graduated college and was “filled with the spirit”. Nathan and his soon-to-be wife, moved to a small apartment in Indianapolis not far from the church.
The new youth pastor at Eagle Creek brought enthusiasm to the previously sleepy church, including boldness in teaching the Pentecostals’ push to sway teens to abstinence with the promise of more a fulfilling intimate life after they were married.
He also made many church families deeply uncomfortable.
More than 25 years later, the former youth group members and others who left the church one by one say it’s finally time for Peternel to be held accountable.
***
Three weeks ago, Nathan Peternel’s 24-year-old son, Jonathan, was arrested at Nathan’s Pendleton, Indiana home on four felony charges of owning and distributing more than 200 videos and pictures of gruesome child sex abuse material. Police retrieved multiple cellphones, laptops and tablets from the Peternel family home, but did not specify who all the electronics belonged to — Nathan, mom, or Jonathan. With the exception of one cellphone, owned by the son, where they found more than 50 videos of Nathan and his wife having sex or naked.
Nathan, a top adviser, friend and employer of the state’s Christian right lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, who preaches at one Nathan’s four campuses of the Life Church, quickly hired a lawyer … for himself.
As he returned to church just a few days after his son’s arrest, Nathan appeared to weep from the pulpit as he relayed the parable of the prodigal son, whose great sin was squandering his father’s inheritance in a far off land in a life of sin, but was nonetheless welcomed home to great food and luxury when he returned broken and repentant.
Nathan also said that perhaps having videos of him and his wife having sex was unwise, but something to be discussed later. He did not say who filmed the videos or how they ended up on his son’s phone.
His son, Jonathan, stayed in the Madison County Indiana Detention Center for two weeks, with no one paying the $2,500 needed for release before trial. Jonathan had said that the church’s main lawyer, Devin Norrick, who is himself being investigated by the Indianapolis prosecutor for a separate incident involving the viewing of a deepfake porn video of a state lawmaker’s wife, would be representing him. But neither Norrick, nor any other lawyer was hired to represent the 24-year-old defendant.
Last Friday, Jonathan sat catatonic in the Madison County Courthouse, answering questions from the county judge, before he was assigned a public defender. His parents did not attend the hearing.
On Sunday, Nathan returned to preaching and said nothing of the matter.
Former Life Church members who have confronted Nathan at various times over more than a quarter century say Nathan’s response to his son’s arrest is the same response they received when they confronted him about his behavior.
***
Shortly after Nathan started at Eagle Creek in the late ‘90s, one of the parents asked him if he understood the implications of his new name for the church youth group: “Stormfront.”
Perhaps Nathan, being still somewhat young himself, did not know that was the name of a neo-Nazi group out of West Palm Beach started just a few years earlier by a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, which pushed for violence as it tried to place White protestants above all other races, religions and creeds.
Nathan laughed and said that if anyone made the mistake of thinking a youth group was a neo-Nazi operation that said more about their ignorance than his passion for God. When the church board asked him to explain why he stuck with the name, Nathan said he was winning it back for Jesus.
His passion was strong, his energy infectious and his ability to woo new families to the church remarkable. Nathan was also very persuasive.
The number of “Stormfront” youth group members grew to anywhere from 30-40 teens, and Nathan introduced new tactics to help them bond and form a tight-knit group. Standards like mandatory ultimate frisbee at church, were met with more edgy fare to keep things interesting. Eating challenges (snorting a Pixie Stix, eating a mouthful of bananas and washing it down with a warm 2-liter of Sprite) sometimes got out of hand, with vomiting and in one case a trip to the hospital for respiratory problems.
Nathan also introduced human contact challenges to help “break the ice”. One teen would call out an object, then they would heap themselves into a “Twister” style jumble to look like the object. A human “car” got 10 teens stacked on top of each other looking mostly like a car. One group member recalled refusing, “I didn’t want people’s crotches in my face.”
The larger group met on Wednesdays, and “small group” of just four or five teens with one of the pastors were on Sunday evenings.
Small group was where he liked to have discussions with the teens about sex.
***
Shortly after Jonathan’s arrest last month, a young woman recounted on YouTube her own experience with Nathan Peternel in January 2016. Alone in his office with then-17-year-old Paige and her 19-year-old fiancé, the 39-year-old Nathan pressured them to describe in graphic detail how they had sex, what techniques they liked, and whether they watched porn together.
After the young couple reported Nathan’s behavior to Life Church, other pastors chastised him for not sharing the full schedule of “pre-marital counseling” sessions and for not having another adult around.
In another YouTube video reported by Paige, she reviewed Nathan’s podcasts with Lt. Gov. Beckwith, on their “Jesus, Sex and Politics” show.
Shortly after the son Jonathan’s arrest last month, they deleted a December 2021 episode in which they interviewed an expert on combatting child sex trafficking. Not long after that they also deleted an episode in which they interviewed their wives about sex.
The two pastors seemed to have a fierce fascination with sex, talking about it in on their show a lot.
In the episodes reviewed by Paige, Nathan and Micah laughed about the graphic stories of the Old Testament. The two angels sent to investigate Sodom and Gomorrah who were promptly met with, as they put it, threats of “gang rape”. The tale of King David’s soldiers killing and then circumcising 200 Philistines, which they said would make a great graphic novel in their forthcoming merch store.
Peternel and Beckwith seemed to be mirroring the edgy podcast culture on the right, led by people like Charlie Kirk, a wave of conservative influencers and comedians turned pundits who pushed a no-holds-barred approach to public debate.
But the two haven’t published any new episodes since two days after police searched the Peternels’ house in September.
Which was stranger, because for as long as former longtime churchgoers could remember, Nathan had been preaching to the congregants about the pleasures he had having sex with his wife, telling families and children of his great pleasure and the pleasure they could have if they waited until wedlock. They could even record video of themselves having sex, former churchgoers recalled Nathan telling them.
***
In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, with a presidential sex scandal and increasingly edgy pop culture permeating teens’ lives, Christian fundamentalists of all stripes embraced the “purity” movement as a rebranding of the biblical demand of abstinence before marriage.
Among Pentecostals, that included a push to start talking candidly with their teen church members about sex — why they should wait, and the incredible rewards for them if they did wait.
Once a week Nathan would have “small group”, with just four or five of the teens, they’d come over to the apartment he shared with with his wife not far from church.
He picked his favorite teens for this more personal setting.
Nathan wanted to know who was having sex with who. He wanted to know what types of sex they were having. He seemed ignorant of first, second, third base and asked them to describe what that meant. And he would talk about the sex he was having, a lot.
“He would go into what it felt like and things that you have to do when how nothing is off the table in the marriage bed,” a former member of the youth group recalled. “And keep in mind the ages of these kids were between 12, and at that point, I think the oldest was about 16 or 17, mainly boys.”
“It was, it was. When I say it was a lot, it was a lot,” the former member said.
And sometimes he would have his new wife tell them of an event that happened to her in college, and how she shouldn’t have been wearing such promiscuous clothes.
His new wife, the group members said, always looked incredibly uncomfortable talking about it as they sat in their apartment.
But Nathan was insistent.
Every February, for the youth group was called “Sex Month”, every small group that month was dedicated to only talking about sex. A lot of the parents told their children to skip going that month.
***
After news of Jonathan Peternel’s arrest burned through Indiana social media circles, the former members of Nathan’s first youth group began finding each other online and sharing their stories, many for the first time.
Two decades ago, at overnight camp at Lake Placid, about 30 minutes north of Muncie, Indiana, two of the older teen boys from “Stormfront” dragged a younger camper, Jon, from his sleeping bag out into the dark. They attempted to yank down his pants and underwear, but he kicked them off, ran back to his sleeping bag and hid in there, sleepless, the rest of the night.
The next day, he reported the incident to Nathan.
For more than 20 years, he believed Nathan never dealt with his assailants, even after his mother pressed the case with Nathan. Being older and having moved on from that and other incidents at Life Church, he reached out to Nathan seeking some closure.
Nathan replied in a message, saying he didn’t remember the assault, but that God loved Jon and he loved Jon and he really missed Jon after he left. Then he said that one of assailants had been harassing another teen and, knowing the assailant’s mother well, he felt ok administering punishment.
Nathan said that he held down the assailant, told him to stop harassing other campers, then spread Cheez Whiz through his hair and sprayed it up his nose.
For Candy Watson and her twin sister, teens at the time in the group, the big red flag went up after Nathan told a group of children, some as young as 12, that the incident that happened to his wife in college had been her fault. Candy and her sister talked to her mother who was a longtime volunteer and leader in the church.
Candy’s mother had tried to counsel the then-20-something Nathan to be more considerate, because he was new to leading. But after this, she told both her children, Candy recalled, they didn’t have to attend Nathan’s “small group” meetings anymore.
“There were a lot of inappropriate conversations,” Candy said, looking back on it now as a mother of a 19-year-old.
When teens were in the church van with Nathan en route to an event or a mission trip, she said, “if Nathan’s in the van, there are absolutely going to be inappropriate sexual conversations going on. What he and his wife do, and this, and this, and this. I’m like, ‘Hey, really, that’s between you and your wife. I’m pretty sure you don’t have consent from your wife to talk to anybody about that.”
For the members of “Stormfront”, the talk was around them constantly.
“It was a whole normalized pattern of, like, now as an adult, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s totally grooming,’” Candy said. “So it seems normal, right? And then you grow up, and go away from the cultist BS.”
Another former member who asked not to be named said that when Nathan’s son was discovered with videos of his parents having sex, it sadly wasn’t surprising. After all, he had grown up in this environment.
“You don’t have that natural sort of ick factor when it comes to thinking of your parents having sex, because they’re talking about it all the time,” said the other former “Stormfront” member.
Candy’s final talk with Nathan was two decades ago, after someone else at the church told Nathan she had been over at her 18-year-old boyfriend’s apartment the previous weekend having sex. Nathan confronted Candy and demanded to know why she was having sex with her boyfriend.
She had been packing with her boyfriend as he was about to move for a job. They hadn’t gotten intimate.
Not that it was Nathan’s business what she was doing.
***
Two decades later, it all seemed so obvious.
But at the time, how could a group of teenagers have had any idea.
Looking back on it, after leaving Indy, spreading across the country, going through therapy, moving on, growing up. Looking back now, as parents, with their own children the same age they were. Looking back and telling the stories again, talking to each other for the first time about all the things that Nathan demanded from them in their private conversations, all the times he said they could never share what they talked about with anyone else.
Why would any pastor need them to talk about their sex lives, or hear about his? Why did they need to vomit to be part of his group, or feel ok rubbing against each other in awkward positions.
Nathan had been testing them. Nathan was grooming them.
Looking back on it, they wanted it all to stop, finally.
So they reassembled as a new group, “Survivors of Stormfront”.
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The “Jesus, Sex and Politics” investigation:
Beckwith adviser was with son in September when police executed warrant in child porn case - 10/24/25
Beckwith adviser Peternel responds to son’s child porn charges in Sunday video - 10/26/25
AUDIO: Nathan Peternel church message on sex videos, son’s arrest - 10/31/25
Peternel pried teen girl about sex life in closed-door ‘counseling’, woman says - 11/6/25
Beckwith adviser’s son gets public defender as church scandal grows - 11/10/25
Indiana deepfake porn scandal stories:
Topless deepfake video roils Indiana office, lawmaker’s wife targeted, per sources - 8/2/25
Indy prosecutor probes topless deepfake, Haggard blasts ‘pornographic smear’ of his wife - 8/5/25
BREAKING: Lt. Gov. spokesman quits amid deepfake probe - 8/7/25
Lawmaker whose wife was targeted launching Congressional bid - 8/11/25
Lt. Gov.’s office adopts new employee handbook, Gov. calls in Beckwith for meeting - 8/14/25