All Part of His Plan

Americans in recent decades have produced several libraries’ worth of memoirs, talk shows, art, and court testimony filled with damning detail about the sordid and cruel things we’ve done to children. Christa Brown’s book, This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Predator Preacher and His Gang, is a powerful document to add to this archive of shame. Brown recounts her own abuse at age sixteen by the youth and education minister at the First Baptist Church of Farmers Branch, Texas. Then, in Baptist style, she moves from testimony to evangelism, detailing her struggles to convince the church establishment to try to prevent future abuse by other ministers. The book is well written, clear-eyed, and honest. It is compelling more in the manner of a court document than a work of art—but compelling nonetheless.

Brown’s testimony is brief but disturbing. The youth pastor (married, with children) singles out a naïve “Queen Regent in Service” in the Baptist Girls’ Auxiliary, a good girl with a speech impediment and a retainer from a somewhat troubled family, who won’t have the courage to turn him away or turn him in. He forces her over the course of many months to do “everything but.” He uses her faith to control her (“You have to trust that it’s all part of His plan,” he says) but also uses beer, despite Baptist prohibitions, to loosen her up.

The rest of the book describes Brown’s struggle to understand that what she experienced was not an “affair” but rape, statutory and otherwise, and then details her subsequent uphill efforts to get the First Baptist congregation, the Baptist General Convention of Texas, and the Southern Baptist Convention to recognize that fact and to work more generally against clergy abuse. There is nothing to suggest that sexual abuse is more or less common in the Baptist Church than in the Catholic Church or Hasidic Jewish communities, or even the Boy Scouts. But particularities of Baptist doctrine and culture have allowed the problem to remain invisible longer.

The first of these is the very American organizational structure of Baptist churches. Baptists aren’t centralized like the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts. Their “congregational autonomy” is analogous to states’ rights in politics: the state and national Baptist conventions can’t tell autonomous congregations who they can and can’t hire, for instance. The executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas tells Brown at one point that any centralized system for reporting clergy abuse “would make us into slaves” and that “what we lose in safety, we gain in freedom.”

In fact, Baptist churches are not really as autonomous as they pretend to be. When Brown, as a grown-up lawyer with a teenage daughter of her own, finally contacts the Farmers Branch church about her abuse, the reply comes from the state convention’s lawyer, who essentially threatens to sue her if she pursues the matter further. When she writes to a childhood friend from that church, the letter ends up in the same lawyer’s hands. Several other abuse victims from different Texas churches have faced this lawyer too. Later, Brown mentions one of the more prosaic ways the Southern Baptist Convention coordinates nationally: A study to advise churches how to “adequately compensate our ministers,” though voluntary, succeeded in creating a denomination-wide standard.

As recently as 2008 the convention nevertheless refused to create even a voluntary database of convicted or credibly accused clergy abusers, or to conduct a study on clergy sexual abuse—on the grounds of congregational autonomy. While church leaders circle the wagons in a centralized way, officially there is no clear line of responsibility. Brown’s activism has been through the largely Catholic group SNAP—the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. She cites Philip Jenkins’ claim that the Catholic Church’s centralized structure created a “relative ease of litigation” that has made Catholic abuse scandals famous, while Baptist abusers were able to disappear into unconnected churches in other states. Like states’ rights, congregational autonomy turns out to be conveniently useful for protecting the powerful.

The other striking thing about the Baptist case as it comes through in Brown’s account is the rather blatant misogyny she encounters among the clergy—not just sexism but actual contempt for women. For Brown, this began with her abuser, who, presumably feeling ambivalent about cheating on his wife by raping a sixteen-year-old, tells Christa she is a temptress, a “serpent,” and “Satan’s ally.” Before he leaves for another church, he makes Christa apologize to his eight-months-pregnant wife for leading him astray. The assumption is that a man is pure and tempted by evil, whereas a woman, once she reaches any level of sexual maturity, is at heart an evil seductress who must check herself.

The Southern Baptist Convention stopped ordaining women in 2000, in another affront to congregational autonomy, and perhaps it is the church’s nearly all-male clergy that steels the resistance to act against child abuse. Women are to submit graciously, are not to speak in church. The men seem to have little concern for protecting the weak. While the perception of Baptist abuse as “straight” (and committed by married male perpetrators) and Catholic abuse as “gay” (that is, victimizing boys and perpetreted by unmarried male priests) no doubt accounts for some of the differences in public treatment of these cases, Brown does not take up that issue.

In spite of all of the obstacles to church accountability, Brown writes, “I still kept thinking that, if I just found the right person, someone might still do something.” But she closes the book with a trenchant and moving account of her loss of faith. “When faith has been used as a weapon,” she writes, “it becomes almost impossible to use it as a resource for healing.” Her abuser used her innocent faith to control her, saying “God loves you” after he raped her. Now the phrase makes her physically sick. She seems to believe in God, but not in the denomination that did nothing to help her: “Thank God,” she writes, “for non-Baptists and non-believers.”

Still, she continues on her missionary quest, evidently retaining enough faith in the church that through the media and through her book she can shame Baptists into acting. But, she points out, “whether or not Baptists ever convert, the stories of survivors should still be told.” The archive of abuse must necessarily grow as the abuse continues. We can hope that, in addition to helping heal the victims, this amounts to a collective talk therapy that will make for fewer victims in the future. But in the face of the powerful forces protecting abusers, perhaps bearing witness is the best we can do.