--------------------------------------------------------
My name is Van James Clifton,
I was born on March 3, 1963,
I've been called an obvious fag my whole life,
and this was my experience:
I was 19 years old when I ended up married and forced to have rape babies absolutely against my will to my violently delusional stalker, mentally unstable rapist, and disgusting fat ugly old female Baptist Church Youth Group Leader who abducted me from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Campus:
Jean Ann Adams
(Jean Ann Adams Clifton Miller)
Jean's recorded confession is
at the end of this statement.
Alaska is a one-party consent state
for recording conversations.
ALASKA STAT. ANN § 42.20.310(b)
There is no statute of limitations
on criminal sexual assault in Alaska.
ALASKA STAT. § 12.10.010.
Jean Ann Adams introduced herself to me on my first day of college at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
She was the campus Baptist Church Youth Group Leader, and she invited me to her church and bible study. I went.
After I barely knew Jean a month, she presented me with a beautiful greeting card, tried to kiss me, and asked me to MARRY her
Jean was just the old church lady who was constantly yelling at the guys around me to stop teasing me and calling me a fag.
I had no idea what she was thinking.
I told her I would absolutely not marry her.
I told her I would never get married.
NOT EVER.
I started avoiding Jean at all costs.
A few days later when I was on my way back to my room from piano practice there were cop cars everywhere and people yelling.
Someone had attacked Jean in her dorm shower.
Jean had bloody slashes carved all over her chest and her blood was smeared on the walls.
[ JEAN'S RECORDED CONFESSION AT THE END. ]
She was cut, bleeding, sobbing and begging for me to stay with her to make her feel safe.
One of the police officers pulled me aside and warned me to maybe stay away from Jean because, he said, "her story doesn't add up."
I had had been avoiding her since she asked me to marry her, but, I decided to stay with Jean because she was crying so hard.
A few days later, when I got back to my dorm room, there was a death threat on my door:
Stay away from her or I’ll kill you.
I told Jean about it. She was still the campus Church Youth Group Leader, and she had already been attacked. She said she had something to tell me.
Then Jean told me she was psychic.
She said the man who attacked her was another psychic named Seth, and they could sense each other through their abilities.
Jean said now that Seth was after both of us, we needed to stay together to be safe, but we couldn't call the cops or tell anyone because they wouldn't understand about Seth and her being psychic.
And then the delusional old church lady just started following me around.
A short while later, Seth started attacking Jean's mind almost every night through their psychic connection. She was in a lot of pain whenever it happened, and she begged me to stay with her, so I did.
And then one night Seth started speaking to me through Jean.
It was like she was possessed by a demon when Seth was speaking through her.
When Jean's personality came back, she just kept begging for me to stay with her.
I had to stay with her each time until it was over. It was too awful to not stay with her when it happened.
[ JEAN'S RECORDED CONFESSION AT THE END. ]
Then one day when I saw her after I had gone to a movie with my coloratura BFF, a beautiful female friend, Jean told me that Seth had come back, and he stabbed her in the leg.
Her leg was wrapped in bandages.
Jean begged me to stay with her because Seth only attacked her when we weren't together. I had to stay with her at least for a little bit. I was scared to death.
That attack left Jean with a scar on her thigh.
Days later when I got back to my room from hanging out with my fireman friend, Seth had left another death threat on my door:
Stay away from her or I'll kill you both.
I told Jean about it, and she said I had stay with her to be safe from now on. I was living in an absolute nightmare, and Seth was making it impossible for me to get away from Jean.
A while later, I was at practice with my absolutely stunning competitive figure skating partner Kara.
When I got back to the dorm, Seth had attacked Jean, she had bloody scratches all over her face, and her shirt was ripped to pieces.
Jean insisted we needed to stay together as much as possible because Seth only attacked her when we weren’t together.
I confided in Jean that my figure skating partner had just asked me to be the father of her baby, and I told her I couldn't, but we were still friends and skating partners.
A day later, I got back to my dorm room, and nearly all of my earthly belongings were TRASHED.
There was another death threat written on my mirror:
Seth was going to kill me.
At her insistence, I slept on Jean's floor that night.
That evening, Seth took over Jean's body again, and again, it was like she possessed by a demon.
In that awful gravelly voice,
Seth said that if I didn't have sex with Jean, he would kill her.
When Jean's own personality re-emerged, she begged me to do what Seth demanded, and have sex with her to save her life.
[ JEAN'S RECORDED CONFESSION AT THE END. ]
The longer it went on, the angrier Seth got, and when Jean's personality re-emerged, the more desperate she was for me to have sex with her to make it stop.
I'm gay, and wasn't able to have sex with Jean, but I was on top of her for a couple of seconds, and Seth vanished.
I felt like killing myself after being forced to have "sex" with a woman.
The first words out of Jean's mouth afterwards will always be the worst words I have ever heard in my life:
"There.
We had sex.
Now you HAVE to marry me."
I had already turned down Jean's marriage proposal, but, she said we had to get married now because we were Christians and we had sex. I only did what I did because she begged me to save her life, and we didn't really even have sex.
I told her I still would not marry her, and it was somehow like I stopped being a person. Me? Married? I couldn't even bare the thought, especially with an old pig-lady whose smell alone made me want to vomit.
The rest of the semester was a blur, and I couldn't get away from Seth and Jean.
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Jean was trailer-sitting for a friend in Anchorage for the summer.
Jean called me one night at my parent's house in Haines, Alaska screaming and crying, saying that Seth had tracked her down from Fairbanks to Anchorage where she was trailer-sitting, and Seth had made someone throw a rock through the trailer window and she begged me to come and be with her so Seth wouldn't hurt her. She couldn't stop crying, so I went to Anchorage.
When I got there, the disgustingly fat and ugly old pig-lady met me at the trailer door in long lacy see-through flowing lingerie.
It was horrifyingly uncomfortable given what had happened with Seth.
As soon as the trailer door closed behind me, Jean took me by the hand and led me to the back of the trailer, then she pushed me backwards on the bed,
And then that fat ugly old smelly church lady was on top of me and she RAPED me.
I was so completely overwhelmed, I had no idea what to do.
Jean had been still constantly yelling at the guys around me to stop teasing me and calling me a fag, and/but then she was on top of me and she raped me. And she knew I had a boyfriend because she kept on spying on us in my piano practice room.
I wanted to kill myself the second she was on top of me. I had no idea how it was that we actually had sex.
I have no memory whatsoever of what happened after Jean sexually assaulted me in that disgusting little trailer, how many days I was there in Anchorage with her, or even how I got back to my parent's house after.
YEAR 2
When I got back to UAF the next semester, Jean said she didn't feel safe living on-campus anymore.
She said I needed to give up my piano scholarship, drop out of college, and get a job so she would have money to live off-campus to be safe from Seth.
Jean used her connections as the campus Church Youth Group Leader to get me a job through the church working at a grocery store.
Jean lied to the church and said I was still in school, so I had to be out in front of my old dorm every morning so the church van could pick me up for work.
Unfortunately, the place Jean found to live off-campus didn’t allow overnight guests.
I was homeless. For a whole semester. In the middle of winter in Fairbanks, Alaska at forty degrees below zero.
And since the church lady said I had to just give her my paychecks so SHE would be safe from Seth off-campus, I was also completely broke.
I spent most nights sleeping hidden behind the couch in the basement of my old dorm rec room afraid that Seth would find me and kill me. Seth had trashed all of my worldly belongings, so everything I had left fit into one little book bag.
Seth could make anyone throw a rock through a trailer window: every and any person I saw could be Seth coming to kill me, while Jean slept off-campus so at least she would be safe, but not me.
We were at a big semi-religious concert. Most everyone we knew from both Church and college was there.
We were in the lobby before the event, and Jean started jumping up and down and screaming in front of hundreds of people that we were getting married.
And she was showing off her engagement ring.
The crazy old smelly church lady had already bought HER OWN engagement ring.
I absolutely DID NOT want to get married and give up being the person I had FOUGHT my whole life to be. I'm gay, and I told her I wouldn't marry her, but Jean just refused to take NO for an answer.
I couldn't believe what was happening, and I couldn't get away from Jean because of Seth.
I was staying at my parent's house the summer before we got married, and, Jean decided to meet my parents.
When she got there, Jean told me she could also see ghosts.
I had told her about a possible ghost experience when I was a kid, and she just wanted to let me know there were ghosts all over where I grew up.
Even in church, Jean kept us busy describing in detail the ghosts all around us the whole time she was there.
OUR "WEDDING"
The day before our "wedding," Jean said she had something to tell me:
She wasn’t psychic.
Seth wasn’t real.
And she couldn't see ghosts.
I went into what I can only describe as a state of CATASTROPHIC shock. The next thing I knew, Jean was yelling my name, and, when I looked up, I realized I was looking at my violently delusional stalker and mentally unstable female rapist.
And she was in her wedding dress,
And we were in a hotel room.
Married.
I had no memory of our "wedding ceremony."
I wasn’t even at my wedding.
I was in the middle of a
REAL LIFE
stalker / rapist
ABDUCTION
Nightmare.
I immediately told Jean I wanted a divorce, and she started screaming and throwing things at me.
After the almost two-year horrifying and bloody ordeal she had put me through to get me to marry her, I believed absolutely that Jean was capable of killing me if she didn't get what she wanted from me.
Jean had already taken an insurance policy out on my life before I even realized I had a wedding ring on my finger, and I had just realized who she really was to me.
I begged Jean to let just please me go, and, she promised me that if I would just stay married to her for one year so she wouldn't be too embarrassed, she promised she would let me go.
AND THAT WAS JUST THE BEGINNING
AFTER WE WERE "MARRIED"
The disgusting pig-lady's claim to fame with her lady friends was that she had an intimate relationship with what was always obvious to most men around me throughout the entirety of my life, like Jean's sister screamed and laughed at me, "Mom and Dad! Jean brought home a fag!!!" As soon as Jean told me she was just that ugly pig who proposed to me and I said NO? Really? That wasn't reality. Except it was. I couldn't get that disgusting ugly pig off of me, and that is what life was for me: do what Jean says or she'll likely just kill me.
It wasn't too long after we were married that Jean started punching me in the face and screaming at the top of her lungs things like "You're my husband now, so ACT like you love me! ACT LIKE YOU LOVE ME!!! Be happy! Be happy!! JUST ACT LIKE YOU'RE HAPPY!!!"
I turned into something like a constantly publicly humiliated “obviously" gay automatic fembot who just did what Jean said. When I was forced to go in public with her, guys would yell out things like, ""Hey! There's a cock-sucking faggot and a fat ugly pig!" Jean stopped yelling at guys to stop calling me a fag, and demanded that I start "defending her honor," which I could never do.
The pig-lady had me on as many as three blue pills at once to get her what was to me bastard little rape babies out of me.
How many times do you have to punch a little fag in the face to get a rape baby?
My life with Jean Ann Adams was a constant state of bloody fear, panic, shock, and I was constantly in fear of her angry outbursts.
Every single day of my life for so many years I don't even know, my entire life was governed by how many times Jean had to gorge herself with food and throw it up down the toilet, usually 8 to 11 times a day just to be able to get to sleep at night.
I tried to get away from her for years, but she controlled everything. Jean said I was too stupid to know where my money was going, and she was just too smart for me. I wasn't really allowed to know about anything in the outside world.
I had to close and lock the bathroom door to even be able to take my clothes off to get in the shower the over thirty years I was “with” Jean.
I have no earthly idea how we were even able to have children.
Jean's oldest saw her punch me in the face when she was young. Jean was screaming at me to talk to her, and I couldn’t the more she screamed, so she punched me in the face. She always seemed to hit me in the same spot.
HOW I “GOT AWAY” FROM JEAN
Jean woke me up in the middle of the night some time in 2012 and accused me of having affairs with three of the men I worked for. She refused to believe it wasn't true, and gave me until the end of that week to tell our girls that I'm gay, divorcing their mom, and get out of our house. Jean had for years been taking 4 or 5 Ambien and sometimes drinking vodka to get to sleep, and then waking me up in the middle of the night in the middle of a dream or something, but this was different.
I was used to Jean making quite literally every decision for me and US since she went out and bought her own engagement ring in 1981, but, I begged her to at least wait for a year until our youngest daughter graduated, but Jean wouldn't take NO for an answer.
The woman who abducted me and beat me into submission wanted to do a 30-year anniversary renewal of our wedding vows in 2013. I refused. I couldn't take my clothes off and/or stop crying on her make-believe wedding the first time, and I hated that monster the whole time.
Jean got married again in 2013 and moved to Hawaii.
She took over a thousand dollars I had put in a bank account for our oldest daughter and her college expenses while I was on a business trip.
THE AFTERMATH OF JEAN
I had to close and lock the bathroom door every time I took a shower when I was "with" Jean, and there have been stretches of up to six months at a time since I got away from her over ten years ago that I haven't been able to take my clothes off to get in the shower.
I haven't been able to be with anyone since I got away from Jean. I've never in my life even held hands with someone I like. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be “with” someone and not want to kill yourself afterwards.
Both of my daughters stayed with me until they were about 24. My youngest daughter moved out mid-2020. The PTSD from being with Jean had not even begun to heal and I was doing so poorly and unable to concentrate at my sometimes 80+ hour a week Marketing VP position, I had to leave my job in December 2020.
I had an accident while downsizing in January 2021 and I've spent over two years on my back in bed healing from surgeries. In 2022 my therapist recommended in-office ketamine treatments for severe PTSD because of my experience with Jean, but I couldn't get out of my house.
In late 2022 my therapist recommended I started hypnotherapy at home. Unfortunately, I found out in February 2023 I had been interacting with people while I was under hypnosis during my daily and overnight hypnotherapy sessions and forgetting all about it when I woke up. Some of those interactions likely cost me my ability to make a living in the future and the love of my oldest daughter Tessa who's been working through severe PTSD of her own for years, and I had no idea until it was too late. Unsupervised hypnotherapy for severe PTSD at home alone was an absolute family disaster.
It's now April 2023, and I'm 60 years old. Its taken me since 2012 to even begin to come to terms with what happened and everything Jean took from me, including my ability to stand up for myself at all - but also to get to the point emotionally that I might be able to tell the Church about my experience of being stalked, sexually assaulted and abducted by one of their female leaders, “reprogrammed” by years of fear and physical abuse and constantly told how stupid I am - and the struggles it has caused me and our family.
I haven't felt a single moment of real happiness, peace, joy, or hope since 1981.
All of the years I lived in fear of Jean for not just my life, but the lives of my daughters has left me incapable of living any kind of "real" life so far. I still have nightmares about Jean slashing her own chest open to get my attention, and never felt for a second that my daughters were ever safe with her unless I was doing exactly what she wanted.
The PTSD and emotional trauma I've been through since I got away from Jean has cost me my last job, future employment prospects, my humanity, my sexuality, who I am as a person, and most importantly, my relationship with my oldest daughter. There's nothing left of me. I'm 60 years old now. I have lived my entire life in a state of profound hopelessness, despair and constant fear for my life.
I will never recover from what Jean has put me or her children through.
I always knew I wasn't a "real" person because I couldn't see my eyes when I looked into the mirror.
I could never figure out why anyone would want a beat to shit little fag, obviously the smallest person in the room, as a "husband," let alone a "father figure" or "daddy" to her rape babies. There is a VERY real reason why faggots should not be forced to procreate: Jean's girls grew up without anything even close to a "real" man in their house, and they have both suffered greatly from Jean's sins and illegal behavior: Jean's oldest was held and sexually assaulted, just like her mommy did to her "daddy," and her youngest had a stalker who terrorized her, just like her mommy did to her daddy.
Jean should have just told her faggy make-believe fairy princess human slave to just walk off a building in 2012 when she ended her family. Believe me, the fag would have rejoiced in finally getting to end her fractured existence, especially for the opportunity to make sure that everyone would know that her fatherless cutie-pies were orphaned when Jean left, and, as usual for me, I was the laughingstock of far too many of the people around me to be the caretaker those two little tiny people needed. I will never forgive myself for not killing myself in 2012: I just never even imagined that Jean would let me go, I had no idea what a "tomorrow" could even be, and she ended everything so suddenly I was in shock.
-------------------
Thank you for letting me to share this with you.
I started writing about Seth and my life with the woman who took me when I got my first job with a computer in the mid 1980's.
The ONLY reason Jean even got to be anywhere near me was because she was the leader of the church to me, the voice of God. And she un-Godded me for over 40 years. There is no such thing as hope without God.
Making it to the day that I am at a place in my life that I can tell you about them has been my dream since I was eighteen years old.
I don't think you have ANY real idea of that true horror is: nobody would ever help me: folks would just laugh at me and make rude remarks, even after I was trying to be a single dad. I've been a human faggot slave to a woman, now, and still, my whole adult life.
This the best day of my life. - Van
BELOW ARE PARTS OF A 2013 PHONE CONVERSATION I RECORDED WITH THE FEMALE CHURCH LEADER WHO ABDUCTED ME IN 1981.
I had told Jean that my favorite book was The Exorcist. Jean made up "Seth" and acted like she was possessed by a demon, because, she said in her confession, she "knew I would be fascinated by it."
It's HORRIFYING to listen to her
trying to make ME feel bad
because SHE was never happy.
I sent Jean a little bit of her confession just so she knows I have it. For insurance. I'm still deathly afraid of her.
I didn't ask Jean if she slashed her own chest open when I turned down her delusional marriage proposal,
I asked her if she was scared when she did it,
and then she started bragging about how smart she is.
When the news articles like the VOX article below started to come out about the SBC sexual abuse scandal, I was grateful and horrified. It is too much to think about how many lives have been entirely ruined by a trusted church leader the way our family has.
Reporting Jean is the last real thing I have to do in my life.
I reported Jean to the Baptist Convention, and was shocked they actually send me an apology. I could barely put two words together trying to get it done in late 2022 - right after I performed Jean's youngest daughter's wedding ceremony.
I went almost 42 years without being able to see my eyes in the mirror. After over two years of hypnotherapy three times a day and overnight after a terrible accident put me on my back, I can. I'm still getting used to it. It's not normal.
I had to leave my last job because I couldn't stand up for myself. There should be at least 10-15 million dollars in my bank account - instead, because I really am too stupid in real-life things, I had to empty my retirement accounts to do something good for Jean's little girls, and I'll likely die penniless, bankrupt, and alone. And it was all I could do for those beautiful little people. And it's ok.
I'm not sure if and/or when I'll be able to go back to work. I've been experiencing severe and extreme memory loss and have no memory of getting married or having Jean's poor little orphan girls, who now, with very good reason from their point of view aren't even speaking to their fag-bio-dad who has no memory of even raising Jean's rape babies she took from me illegally, and violently against my will.
I've done everything I can for them, but I'm done now. Jean's oldest is screaming mad at me and says now she'll never speak to me again, even if I'm dying. I got her into a new house last year. She later texted me a death threat by her or another unnamed assailant after I had completely lost my memory of even knowing her. I was getting lost going for walks in my neighborhood, and was completely and utterly unable to be there for her like a real person when that poor little girl showed up at her not-at-all a dad or father or even a human's apartment crying about RvW getting overturned. Jean's oldest rape baby was so much older than I could remember ever seeing her, I thought she was her mother when she came screaming into my apartment, it was so much completely not like her, and I almost killed her - for a few seconds when she was screaming, I thought she was her mother, and I couldn't hardly even speak to her. She later texted me a threat to my personal safety by her or an unknown assailant: that poor beautiful little thing had every right to think she had an actual Man in her house growing up, but, no. I will never be able to make up my lack of awareness around me over the past many years as my memory and PTSD got worse and worse after Jean left us. I will never forgive myself for not walking off a building in 2012 for those two tiny perfect little spots of light in the everlasting darkness that is the evil of man - or woman, in this case, so that everyone would know they were orphans.
I will never be able to forgive myself for not being able to stand up for not at all myself, or those two little tiny humans, and, real men started using me for sex starting when I was five, and, it seemed normal and ok, really. It didn't get awful until I was about eleven or twelve. And then came Jean, but men treating me terribly never stopped.
That disgusting three-hundred pound pig covered in eczema and bleeding psoriasis, open boils and pustules oozing puss and blood with grey teeth from vomiting eight to ten times a day with the stench that I will never be able to forget as long as I live is behind me right now with a bloody knife, isn't she.
This won't make any sense to you, but, I'm the Van James Clifton from before I met Jean Ann Adams. I had to keep asking her youngest daughter "when is now?" after Jean left because it was like I was going back in time or something. Oh my God. Jean's daughters were indeed rape babies to me, but, those poor little things did not deserve what happened to them after their Mom, who was most definitely the Man of the house, left us.
I died when I was twelve. Started playing Beethoven in a month when I came back. I've always known where I'm going when I get out of this horrifying shit-hole of a life I've been forced to live. I've been an obvious fag since I was five, when men started using me for sex, and I will take my own life when it is my time. It will be the only moment in my entire life that I will have even the slightest amount of dignity.
And, I will most definitely die alone. I've always been alone in this world, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Plus, making someone watch you take your last breath is a horrifying thing to shove off on someone, and I have no fear of death, at all, in any way, and I can't wait to go back home. Again. When it is my time.
My will states there will be no memorial service, no obituary, and my ashes will be scattered at Beluga Point by my sister Christine.
And nobody will even remember I was ever even here. Which is just fine, because I, the "real" Van James Clifton, wasn't. If you knew the thing that was here before, for my adult life, she went internally by "Nigger Adams," her slave name. I'm sorry, but she was self titled, and she just doesn't live here any more, and after almost two years of hypnotherapy at home three times a day, I'm here, again, back from when I was about 18 or 19 years old: the last time I could see my eyes in the mirror. Don't ask me how or why, but there seems to be some sort of "snap-back" feature to an honest to goodness WTF abduction that I didn't live through. There's photos of me from back then with absolutely nobody behind that poor little fag's eyes in my twenties and thirties. Oh well. That's just how life works: survival of the monsters, and I was a cute kid. Folks have been telling me for most of adult life I need to do shrooms or something. I just couldn't. Not sure what it would have done.
The "real" Van James Clifton was an award-winning fancy-pants competitive figure-skating soprano show dancer with a six foot twelve fireman for a boyfriend at UAF on a classical piano scholarship. The "real" Van James Clifton wore flowery shirts all the time, and was supposed to go directly to Broadway after high school. The "real" Van James Clifton died in 1983 as she was stalked, sexually assaulted, and beaten senseless until she couldn't see herself in the mirror anymore. That won't make any sense to you.
Van tried to keep one last clue to who she was before she was abducted by the pig-lady, a photo of her CATS Broadway friend Alice, who trained her in high school, and tried to rescue her when she came up to Alaska in the CATS touring show, but the pig-lady already had her beaten down to nothing. The pig-lady found the picture of Alice and threw it away. That fag refused to wear the wedding ring that ugly old pig put on her finger.
There is no such thing as Van James Clifton. It's been too long, and her rape babies didn't stand a chance in real life: how many times do you have to punch a faggot in the face to get a rape baby?
I'm not at all sure exactly how Jean thought I would be able to take care of her children after she left us. She just kept screaming at me and calling me stupid all the time. And, I've been called brain damaged among other things, like idiot savant or something, just situational, I guess: I was never allowed to know about real-life things like money or bills. Jean's oldest was always so angry she had to be the brains of the house after her mom made me say I'm gay and then she ran away.
And, it's ok, now. I'm sixty years old and starting a new life with nobody in it. Being a fag, I've never expected to have a happy moment or happy life: that's just how life is, because it's always hilarious to make fun of faggots with fat ugly pigs. One of the most difficult parts of my life was that I was being punished on an almost daily basis for being something I could never really be: a human who could be with another human, and, I forgot who I was before the pig-lady took me.
I'll be praying for your everlasting soul, for thou art assuredly going to hell. I hope you've had a pleasant life, I hope you've had a friend, and I do most sincerely hope you've had somebody who you love who loves you back, and I pray you've had someone to hug and feel the warmth of a beating heart who adores you: and I hope that most of all for the tiny little things I wasn't able to protect in this world. "You're just another man who's failed me! and, "Nobody even knows you're gay!" is what Jean's oldest daughter screamed at me after RvW got overturned. It's the opposite of the truth of my life, and I didn't even know how to respond to her "ignorance is bliss" life Jean constructed for her two little make-believe children. My whole life, nobody would help the obvious fag. Even when I was trying to be a single parent. I've always been a laughingstock, you know, until somebody wants something from me.
Jean, you will spend eternity in Hell - along with that other Monster, that disgusting filthy pig you left us with and fighting against that you knew I could never stand up to.
VOX
Love at First Sight
I have known true evil
It hides behind a mask
Claiming virtues undeserving
Exclaiming patterns of its past.
In the sunlight gleaming
In the shadows it performs
In a favored son or daughter
A constant needy vacuum storms.
True evil smiles sweetly
Gaining trust and worth and fame
Spreading lies and laying waste
And leaving you in shame.
Aggressive in its innocence
Absolute in its desire
True evil knows no boundaries
Only what its soul requires.
A thousand years to break its grasp
Eternal in damnation
Its tethered hold now fast unbridled
Fuck. You. Evil.
The Southern Baptist Convention faces a massive sexual abuse scandal, initially broken by the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle. Community of Faith Church is based in Houston. | Loren Elliott / AFP via Getty Images
The sexual abuse scandal rocking the Southern Baptist Convention, explained
America’s largest Protestant denomination covered up a sexual abuse problem for decades.
By Emily St. James@emilyvdw Jun 7, 2022, 10:40am EDT
.
There’s a natural comparison point for these incidents: the scandal that ensued when the Catholic Church’s cover-up of its knowledge of priests who were child sexual abusers came to light, most prominently in a 2002 report by the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe. In this situation, too, the work of dogged newspaper journalists uncovered a scandal that the SBC was finally forced to step up and acknowledge.
The path forward to actually effecting change within the SBC is fraught with its own difficulties, however. Chief among them is the SBC’s structure — or lack thereof. Where the Catholic Church boasted a rigid hierarchy for parishioners and journalists to inveigh against in the name of justice, the SBC is loose and almost structureless. That will make reforming it very difficult indeed.
What’s more, the SBC’s theological underpinnings will make elevating the voices of those accusing pastors of abuse difficult because it privileges the voices of those pastors over those of their parishioners, especially women parishioners. In short, once a charismatic man becomes the leader of an SBC church, it can be very hard to punish him in a meaningful way.
Yet the SBC isn’t the only institution with a charismatic man problem. Those institutions litter the entirety of American evangelicalism and America itself.
Why the structure of the SBC
poses unique challenges to reforming it
Let’s start with one thing that may not be immediately obvious: The SBC publicly releasing both the Guidepost report and a list of accused abusers that it kept secret for years is an unprecedented move for the denomination. Moore sees some hope in the fact that the report exists at all.
“Before the [Texas newspapers’] report, I would have to spend a lot of time convincing congregations that this was a problem that could happen to them,” he said. “There was often this sense of screening out predators by vibe. People would often think, ‘Well, we know people [in our congregation], so we know we don’t have any problems like that.’ I noticed a big shift in that after the Houston Chronicle report. This investigation happened because grassroots Southern Baptists came to the convention last year and demanded that it happen over and against much of their leadership.”
The most obvious parallel to this scandal is the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. However, where these two scandals differ lies in how differently the Catholic Church and the SBC are structured.
The effectiveness of the Catholic Church’s response to its scandal is highly debatable, but the church’s hierarchical structure (priests report to bishops report to cardinals report to the pope) meant that parishioners and the media had several pressure points they could push against in the process of trying to understand what had happened.
Abuse survivors could also sue individual dioceses to receive financial restitution.
The SBC lacks a similar hierarchy. It doesn’t see itself as a formal denomination but, rather, a loose association of churches that believe similarly. This structure gives individual churches under its banner lots of leeway to handle matters on their own. If your church’s pastor is misbehaving, it’s not always clear whom to report him to, especially if you don’t believe anyone in the church’s membership will do anything. But it’s not as though the SBC was unaware of the abuse problems within its ranks, despite its lack of traditional hierarchy.
“When it comes to addressing sexual abuse, up until now, they have claimed that because of their church policy, they don’t have the authority to track abusers and hold local churches accountable,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. “But in the report we found that they had, in fact, been tracking abusers in their churches and had been maintaining a private database for their own protection.
They had not in any way reached out and tried to prosecute those abusers to keep people safe.”
In addition, while lawsuits can be brought against individual churches or clergy members, the lack of anything like a diocese within the SBC means that any lawsuits will necessarily target either the smallest units of the organization or the organization as a whole. There isn’t really a good middle ground. The convention does have an executive committee, which possesses a fair amount of power to set the stage for what is considered acceptable within the SBC, but very little fills the gap between that executive committee and individual churches.
The difficulty of seeking legal restitution and the lack of a strong hierarchy combine to explain why finding justice for survivors of sexual abuse in many Protestant denominations could prove very tricky.
“It’s not just an SBC thing,” Joshua Pease, a pastor who has also worked as a journalist covering sexual abuse in the evangelical church, said. “There are multiple different denominations that have very loose affiliations or very loose organizational structures. And then there are nondenominational churches that genuinely have zero denominational structure to them, where it literally is just one church, all on its own.”
The SBC report is a decided anomaly, simply because the SBC does have a hierarchical structure, no matter how loose or decentralized. If the pastor of a nondenominational church is sexually abusing congregants, the only authority a victim might be able to turn to is law enforcement.
SBC’s history highlights a schism that may have led to this moment
A term that comes up a lot in writing and discussions about problems with sexual abuse within the SBC or the evangelical church more broadly is “complementarianism.” In brief, complementarianism is a kind of theology that holds that men and women are created by God with inherent strengths and weaknesses, and that those differences should be not only embraced but baked into society.
It’s at the root of many of the evangelical church’s struggles to recognize women in positions of authority, for obvious reasons, but it’s also at the root of many of the church’s problems with queer people.
Complementarianism holds that “there is a hierarchical order. Man is the head of the woman, and so women should not aspire to do what men are able to do. Women should be primarily focused on home and children,” said Molly T. Marshall, president of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. “The complementarian notion is separate roles. I would say it’s not equal roles.”
As a theology, it does not explicitly say, “Don’t believe women and children who accuse men of terrible things,” but it creates a power structure where a man who is accused of terrible things by those this theology views as beneath him is given often endless benefit of the doubt.
The SBC does possess some institutional weight that it can use to punish offending churches. The few times it has, however, it has used that weight to prop up complementarianism, rather than punish churches harboring abusers.
Via a process called “defellowship,” the SBC member churches can remove other churches from the convention entirely. That allows the SBC to maintain some degree of theological consistency across a vast, mostly decentralized organization, which in some cases is important to the church’s mission, according to Moore. As he explains, an SBC church that suddenly started preaching polytheism would no longer be practicing Christianity as any denomination understands it. But defellowship is also used to legislate issues of who gets power and recognition within the church, and who does not.
“If you tried to ordain a woman or someone who’s gay, your church would be kicked out of the convention instantly,” said Pease. Yet this process was not used to remove churches where pastors were accused of abuse.
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The SBC is a collection of loosely affiliated member churches, boasting just under 15 million members.
It has no firm, established hierarchy; it doesn’t even have a central headquarters. In theory, individual churches can preach or believe whatever they want, but the larger “convention” can remove member churches that don’t toe certain lines. Representatives of these churches meet each year at an annual event — also called a convention. At the 2021 convention, member churches voted to conduct an internal investigation of sexual abuse within the church.
Complaints about sexual abuse and sexual assault on the part of pastors were sent to higher-ups who then kept those accusations quiet. Though the report, by Guidepost Solutions, was only commissioned to study the cover-up from the years 2000 on, it found incidents of sexual abuse and warnings of the same going back to the 1960s.
In all, Guidepost found accusations leveled against people at all levels: church volunteers, staff, and leadership, including those at the top of the church’s ladder.
Those accusations were made by people of different ages and genders, and they include allegations of child sexual abuse, the grooming of adolescents, and the sexual assault of adults.
These findings were not unprecedented.
A major investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, published in 2019, first brought many of the accusations against church leadership to light. The publication of that report galvanized a grassroots drive by individual Southern Baptist churches to hire a firm to conduct an investigation.
What the Guidepost report has shown is the sheer enormity of the problem, beyond the already staggering scope the Houston and San Antonio newspapers had revealed. Russell D. Moore, formerly the head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission until he resigned both from that post and the SBC entirely in 2021, called the report the “Southern Baptist apocalypse” in a column for Christianity Today.
“It is horrifying. I expected to be the last person surprised by anything,” Moore said of the report, “and there were sections that were stunning even to me. It’s a horror, a sense of grief. It makes me contemplate the fact that I don’t even know a thimbleful of what must be being experienced by people who have survived these horrific acts of abuse in church settings. That weighs heavily.”
“Whatever vindication there is here for us, it very much goes hand in hand with grief,” said Christa Brown, the author of This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and his Gang. “I know the stories that are behind the names of these pastors [named in the report]. I know the people. I know the decimation in their lives. I know the human cost of what it has taken to get this truth out into the open.”
Various people protest sexual abuse within the
Southern Baptist Convention in 2018.
Rodger Mallison/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Complementarianism was also at the core of one of the most significant events in SBC history: the Kansas City convention of 1984. At that convention, a religious conservative drift within the SBC was solidified as the closest thing the SBC has to a doctrine, and that meant no women pastors. More progressive Southern Baptist churches either changed their views to more closely conform to that doctrine or more often left the SBC entirely, starting new fellowships of Baptist churches.
“I wouldn’t say that the Southern Baptist Convention was affirming of women in ministry so much [before 1984] as there were people and pockets within the Southern Baptist Convention that allowed more freedom for congregations to make those choices,” said Meredith Stone, the executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry. Stone’s organization was formed in 1983, and she has long wondered if its very existence played some role in the Kansas City convention of 1984.
Marshall also found herself at the center of those events. She was the first woman to attend the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and she was working there at the time of the resurgent conservative movement within the SBC. She was later pushed out of her job as a professor at Southern, despite tenure, because her views were no longer in line with those of the SBC.
“In my time as a professor at Southern Seminary, there were horrible pressures to fit into this complementarian modality, which always subjugates women. I would not put up with that, which is why I was run out of town,” Marshall said. “I was undaunted in my claim that women had equal authority in the church and were called to pastoral work, as would be any man that felt that calling.”
The events of 1984 are central to the modern SBC’s understanding of itself, but as Moore points out in his Christianity Today column, the two architects of that moment have been exposed as hypocrites by the revelations about sexual abuse problems within the church. Moore writes:
Those two mythical leaders are now disgraced. [Paige Patterson] was fired after alleged [sic] mishandling a rape victim’s report in an institution he led after he was documented making public comments about the physical appearance of teenage girls and his counsel to women physically abused by their husbands. [Paul Pressler] is now in civil proceedings about allegations of the rape of young men.
Complementarianism’s centrality within the SBC led to a heavily patriarchal institution, which Stone said created an environment in which sexual abuse could happen and be covered up as extensively as the Guidepost report said it was. And as such, she said, simple systemic fixes ultimately won’t be enough to reform the SBC. Instead, theological changes will have to be made, and they will be ones the SBC won’t want to make.
“The underlying systemic issues within the Southern Baptist Convention have to do with a theology that said some people are favored by God, some people have more power, and God supports them having that power and exerting it over others,” Stone said. “That in no way diminishes the culpability of individuals and the decisions that they make to act in an abusive way against another person. But I think when they are in an environment that says God supports power over saying God is about love and inclusion, it makes those actions more palatable.”
Yet the problems within the SBC aren’t just the problems of the SBC. They’re problems within evangelical churches more broadly — and within America.
The evangelical church is obsessed with charismatic guys who are leaders.
But that’s not just true of the evangelical church.
Culturally, the structure of most evangelical churches makes it very hard to imagine reprisal for a powerful, popular leader. Complementarianism doesn’t just place men at the center of the church but also of the family unit; it also defines “man” in a very specific way.
Andrew Whitehead, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and co-author of the book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, has found in his research that the evangelical conception of God is aggressively gendered. Yes, evangelicals are more likely than any other religious group to say that God is definitely a man, but they’ve also turned him into an incredibly masculine man, one who fulfills traditional gender roles, which are then meant to be reflected in the church.
“When you have men at the top with very little accountability and essentially blinders on, they can’t see all the different aspects of a situation,” Whitehead said. “So when things like this pop up, [evangelical men] tend to be absolutely ignorant of it or tend to protect their own, and not listen to those voices that might threaten what they see as their God-given right to be in control.”
The Houston Chronicle’s 2019 report was one major reason the SBC launched an internal investigation.
Loren Elliott/AFP via Getty Images
Du Mez said this contributes to a culture that can, readily and easily, excuse sexual abuse. In her research, she has found that evangelical churches very often suggest a kind of gender essentialism in how men and women approach sex, with men seen as naturally lustful and testosterone-driven and women seen as naturally pure and non-lustful. The woman’s job is to protect purity; the man is often not at fault for giving in to his urges. Couple that outlook with a culture that generally practices deference to leaders, and you have an environment rife with the opportunity for abuse.
“When a case of sexual misconduct surfaces, it is more common than not that women are going to be blamed. ‘What did you do to seduce him?’” Du Mez said. This belief system suggests, she said, that “men just have such a hard time controlling these needs that if they aren’t being met, they’re going to find an outlet. So it’s the woman’s fault, or it’s his wife’s fault, because clearly, if he was looking outside of his marriage relationship to fulfill his sexual needs, she was not meeting them.”
Changing that culture will be difficult for many reasons. Moore suggests that the most lasting changes may have to be grassroots ones. He points to a shift within individual churches in the last few decades that has now spread across almost the entirety of the SBC. In the past, there was little oversight of the process by which parents left their children at church nurseries during services. Over time, individual churches put in place safeguards that led to making sure children were never left alone with a single nursery worker and the introduction of a system in which only people who are authorized can see the child or leave the nursery with them. That reform was introduced at a handful of churches; that it has now spread so widely through the SBC suggests one possible way for micro changes to become macro ones.
What’s more, the church can certainly make broader, more systemic changes and could adopt the recommendations within the Guidepost report. Those would all be major, concrete steps taken to reform the SBC and its culture, and they would lead to an environment where abuse would be less likely.
Brown, the author of This Little Light, remains skeptical. Yes, the SBC could set up bodies to which those being abused could appeal, it could provide protection for other whistleblowers in the organization, and it could set up a restitution fund. Those steps, however, would have to be through groups that were independent from SBC leadership and had authority that existed outside the organization, steps she said the SBC would be unlikely to take. Instead, she fears these problems will be handled within their local churches, the very place many of these survivors suffered abuse.
“They must get past this notion of telling survivors to go to the local church,” Brown said. “All that does is send bloody sheep back to the den of the wolves who savaged them, and people are horribly wounded in that process.”
While it’s tempting to look at the problems facing the SBC as directly tied to complementarianism, requiring an overhaul to a more progressive form of theology, Pease is careful to remind me that churches are uniquely susceptible to the problem of being led by a charismatic man who is allowed to get away with things because he’s seen as guiding the church successfully. That problem applies equally to all denominations, regardless of their larger politics.
But that’s not exclusively a problem of religious organizations, either. It’s a problem with every aspect of American life — from the tech industry to academia to Hollywood to your local church.
“Any institution is going to become a little bit insular, and probably the strongest leader is going to rise to the surface. There’s always going to be a tendency then for abuse,” Pease said. “How do we intentionally build cultures that counteract that? That’s something as a society we’re still figuring out, because we bought into the myth of the charismatic leader so deeply, and we’re paying such a heavy price.”
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__________
Love at First Sight
I have known true evil
It hides behind a mask
Claiming virtues undeserving
Exclaiming patterns of its past.
In the sunlight gleaming
In the shadows it performs
In a favored son or daughter
A constant needy vacuum storms.
True evil smiles sweetly
Gaining trust and worth and fame
Spreading lies and laying waste
And leaving you in shame.
Aggressive in its innocence
Absolute in its desire
True evil knows no boundaries
Only what its soul requires.
A thousand years to break its grasp
Eternal in damnation
Its tethered hold now fast unbridled
Fuck. You. Evil.