Underneath Southern Baptist Abuse - Part 1
The Sanctity of Scripture, the Sanctity of Life, and the Ghosts that Haunt Us
Content Warning: This series will dive into the Southern Baptist abuse crisis, and will therefore include sensitive language regarding sexual abuse. While I will always seek to be sensitive and write for and from the compassionate Kingdom of God, I do encourage reader discretion.
I am haunted by chapter 2 of Christa Brown’s Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation. Brown’s memoir details the horrors of her Southern Baptist youth pastor sexually abusing her over and over again at age 16.
Reading her story, my stomach sinks. My soul screams. A phantom Christianity hovers over the pages of Brown’s story, sending chills down my spine.
I was a loyal and proud Baptist for nearly two decades. I grew up in Sunday School and youth group, went to Lifeway’s Fuge camps every summer, found an SBC church as soon as I went off to college, felt my call to ministry in SBC churches, led worship in SBC churches and at their Fuge camps, and even attended New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for a couple semesters until I ran out of money. I am still in pastoral ministry, although in another denomination, and I would not be who I am today without the Southern Baptist Convention. I’m not writing because I desire to tear down the SBC, but because I desperately care that Christ’s gospel is never intertwined with the desecration of human beings made in God’s Image.
But this article is not my story.
This is the story of Christa Brown, at the time, a 16-year-old “naive, nerdy, idealistic, true-believer church girl” (p. 71). It is also the story of Tommy Gilmore, “a grown married man,” and Brown’s youth pastor turned predator. This story is a far cry from the SBC I thought I knew as a child and into young adulthood.
One night on a dark, silent Texas road, Gilmore pulled over and asked Brown if he could kiss her. Brown refused, and Gilmore told her to “pray about it” (p. 72). As she continued to reject his advances, Brown says Gilmore would stand over her and pray: “Lord, please help Christa know and accept your will for her life so that she will submit to becoming my helpmeet in accordance with your holy plan” (p. 73).
Gilmore eventually went on to sexually assault Brown — again, a student in his youth group — at least weekly for several months, and I’m horrified by two things:
First, Gilmore’s abuse of Brown — a desecration of the Image of God.
Second, Gilmore’s treatment of Christianity and the Bible — a desecration of the sacred faith and the Holy Scriptures.
In abusing Brown, Gilmore ripped Christianity from its physical reality and projected a Christian specter to create intentional fear in his victim. His weapon of choice?
The Bible.
Brown says “it was my reverence for scripture that made me all the more susceptible to his twisting of it” (p. 73).
When Brown was confused at how Gilmore’s behavior could be Christian, he would quote Proverbs 3:5: “lean not unto thine own understanding.”
When she wanted to refuse his access to her body, he would quote 1 Corinthians 6:19: “ye are not your own.”
He would quote Romans 12:2: “be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed … that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God,” claiming that “the idea of one-man-one-woman was a standard of ‘the world,’ and God’s will wasn’t limited like ‘the world’ was” (p.78).
He gave himself freedom to do what he wanted with John 10:10: “I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”
When Brown didn’t understand how Gilmore could have two “wives,” he would quote Isaiah 55:9: “my ways [are] higher than your ways.”
Gilmore would call his abuse the will of God before quoting 1 John 2:17, “He that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”
When Brown protested against Gilmore, he quoted Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ.”
And when Brown feared that this liaison was wrong, Gilmore admonished Brown with Philippians 4:6: “Do not be anxious about anything.”
For years, even before the assault began, Gilmore turned to their shared faith to groom his victim.
As Brown describes, “sometimes I think every single thing that ever happened in that church was a setup and part of the grooming for abuse. After all, as far back as I can remember, I was taught to be submissive and trusting of … the whole God-ordained chain of command: God, pastor, husband, wife, child.” (p. 59-60).
She laments:
A part of me understands—viscerally knows—the horror of how, for love of God, someone could be convinced to do almost anything. That’s the girl I was—the girl who would do anything for God (p. 80).
I am haunted — horrified — by Gilmore’s abuse of Brown through his abuse of Christianity. His religious gaslighting of Brown blurred the lines between “faithful Christian” and “submissive victim” until they were one. Gilmore turned plowshares into swords, and his abuse torments me secondhand, because the Bible I love became the double-edged sword he used to slice Brown in two. The Bible held in such high esteem by Southern Baptists all over the world was weaponized to assault an innocent young girl. This tension, this contradiction, is too much for me to bear. I crumble under its weight.
Gilmore manipulated, spiritually abused, sexually assaulted, and physically traumatized Brown. But Brown was not the only victim in this story. To get to Brown, Gilmore first robbed Jesus of his compassionate flesh, story, and teachings. This predator broke Christ’s body, poured out his blood, and projected a transparent ghost of a deathly messiah before his victim, all to pervert Christian virtue and scare her into submission to his own wicked desires.
That ghost didn’t just haunt Brown. It haunts us.
As this series continues, we will further examine Brown’s story and the stories of other survivors, but we will also seek to unravel the ways these ghosts threaten to haunt all American evangelical Christians. What goes the gospel of the Kingdom require of all of us in light of a massive abuse crisis across a Bible-believing denomination?
This is exactly why we all need to address this elephant of submission to authority and hierarchy within the church and families! We must reckon with the harm that it is being done to the vulnerable.
Submission in the Kingdom isn’t like this at all. It is a servant hearted desire to use one’s life for the betterment of others. It is to lay down one’s own life that others may live. But so often it is the vulnerable laying down their lives to give even more power to the powerful. That’s so backwards and unrecognizable as the Kingdom.
I appreciate your willingness to address this heinous use of Scripture.