Surviving Baptistland

A well-known warrior in the #ChurchToo movement reveals in a new book how she escaped from an abusive Texas home and an abusive Southern Baptist church.

Christa Brown, a former Texas appellate attorney, is revered as perhaps the best-known of the brave women (and men) who blew the whistle on abusive clergy and coverups at churches in the powerful Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). She began her quest at age 51, by bravely sharing her own story of being repeatedly sexually abused as a teen by her youth pastor, Tommy Gilmore, the man she’d gone to for counseling at her church in Farmers Branch. She first came forward as a whistleblower in 2009.

“I think I was ahead of things. That was before #MeToo and #ChurchToo and all of that,” she says. While still running a busy Austin law practice, Brown for years collected and shared stories of others who sought help through the blog and website she set up, StopBaptistPredators.org, which compiled reports on hundreds of abusive clergy and created the first public database of convicted, admitted, and credibly accused Southern Baptist clergy sex abusers.

Brown, now retired and living in Colorado, has continued to lift up other survivors and press for reforms. Her first book, This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and His Gang (Foremost Press, 2009), shares her journey from a frightened teen to an outspoken whistleblower. Her new memoir, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal and Transformation, out May 7, goes deeper. It is the confessional and sometimes excruciatingly intimate story of Brown’s life trapped in Baptistland, and her harrowing escape.

Christa Brown: For me it begins with the stories of so many other survivors that I have heard, and I can’t tell. But I hope that in telling my own story that other survivors see something that will resonate. This is one person’s memoir. But I think sometimes the stories of one person can shed light on history. And that’s part of why I wrote it.

It is a very open and vulnerable and exposed book. And so the tattoo on my skin, and on the cover of the book is a way of showing that vulnerability. This is a story about a human body. It’s about embodiment, how we live. I think the cover reflects that. But I think mostly what that cover reflects [is how] I’m trying hard in this book to peel back these layers of truth, to reveal something. And that’s a very intimate portrait. The cover also reflects that intimacy.

Many years later in my 50s, when I was dealing with cancer, actually multiple invasive cancers all at once. Intellectually, I know that cancer is a multifactorial process. But at the time, emotionally, I felt that experience as the culmination of all the horror of what I had been through in Baptistland.

One of the things the surgeon said when I was diagnosed was: “Well, this appears to have been growing for six years.” and I counted back, I thought, this began when I was literally trying so hard to get people to do something about my perpetrator, get people in the Southern Baptist Convention to do something, and they threatened to sue me and all sorts of things. I wound up feeling that time was so stressful that my very cells were in rebellion. That’s how I experienced it emotionally. But I’m very healthy now, thankfully.

In your case, your abuser often said “God Loves you Christa,” after assaulting you. Initially, he compared you to Mary, the virgin mother, and later to the devil, after he chose to blame you for his own sins. One startling insight comes when a college counselor later told you that you seemed to be suffering the way victims of incest do. Can you explain how being abused by a pastor might be as damaging to a child as being abused by a relative?

I mean, that’s pretty all-encompassing. Sexual abuse when it is combined with abuse of faith, combines into something enormously powerful that just eviscerates all aspects of a person, physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, everything’s gone. Because if this is what God wants of you, what does that say about who you are?

One revelation in this book is that your abuser, Tommy Gilmore—despite being the subject of news reports, and a lawsuit that resulted in a formal apology from your church—continued to be employed in his Florida megachurch long after you spoke out. The Texas music minister, who knew Gilmore was abusing you and protected him, remained employed in churches too. Do you see these men as symbols of how the SBC continues to protect abusers and those who cover up?

Absolutely. The same thing is still happening today. After my first book, I thought that after everything I had been through. As painful as it was, I had succeeded in getting Tommy Gilmore, the perpetrator, out of ministry. It was only later that I realized he had only stepped away from being a staff minister, but he was still doing contract work as a children’s pastor. And since he wasn’t a staff minister, his photo and his name didn’t appear on any church website or staff registries.

And same thing with the music minister, who knew and covered it all up. His career went on. No one held against him the fact that he completely turned a blind eye to child sexual abuse. Both of their careers wholly prospered. There was never any consequence within the institution. Never any accountability.

In this book, you explore generational trauma in your family. The revelations you share about your paternal grandmother being killed (in front of her children) and maternal grandmother being committed to a mental hospital are deeply disturbing. Did you learn those stories while researching this book?

In part. I did grow up knowing that my maternal grandmother lived in an institution. But as a kid, I just didn’t think about it much—about how or why she had been committed. I learned more after my mother died. And I learned about my paternal grandmother’s violent death after the last of my father’s siblings died, when I had some communication from cousins.

In the process of writing the book, I began to put those pieces together, and reflect. Those things gave me enormous compassion for my parents, which doesn’t excuse anything that they did, but does help me see it with new eyes. I mean, when my dad was post-military, we didn’t even have the acronym PTSD. It just wasn’t on the radar for World War II veterans. And so, learning about those things really helped me understand them better.

I know you for your work as a whistleblower, which was critical to our Abuse of Faith investigation and the publication of a database of abusers. For a while, it seemed like SBC leaders would enact real reforms. Instead, as you write, it has turned out to be the “Do-Nothing Denomination.” Do you have any hope at all that the SBC will embrace change after it created a task force, launched a study and published its own formerly secret database?

No. That is something that has changed about me. Once upon a time, I did believe that if only I could show them the extent of this problem and the harm that was being done, surely they would reform. I do not believe that any longer. I certainly don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. I believe they will continue to do as little as possible for as long as possible.

What we see in Baptistland is, at its root, a theology that is founded on oppression, hierarchy, and authoritarianism. It goes all the way back to the SBC’s roots as slaveholders.

Recently, we’ve seen efforts to promote the so-called “trad wife,” with women trying to make the lifestyle where they stay home and cater to their husbands look cool on social media. Why do you think it’s important for more women to escape Baptistland, even if they haven’t been sexually abused?

What we see in Baptistland is, at its root, a theology that is founded on oppression, hierarchy, and authoritarianism. It goes all the way back to the SBC’s roots as slaveholders who protected the interests of other slaveholders. And it comes into the present day with the same sort of rationalizations and justifications for why men should have authority over women.

That’s what we have in the Southern Baptist Convention with their notion that men should have authority over women. And if you combine that foundation with a structure that is wholly lacking in effective systems for accountability, then it sets up a monster of a system in which there is no recourse.

When you tell people that God wants you as women to be submissive to men, that’s an abusive concept. And I don’t think it does men any good either. It doesn’t do families any good. It sets up all sorts of false expectations and harmful expectations. It’s a patriarchy and an authoritarian system.

I don’t think anyone ever escapes the indoctrination of our childhood. We take steps, big steps, little steps. And certainly I’ve done that, but Baptistland is a part of me. It’s where I was raised. It’s how I was raised. It’s the culture in which I was enmeshed. And I also think that when childhood sexual abuse is prolonged and repetitive, and mine went on for many months, I think that too is something that stays. Yes, we move forward and yes, we still have good lives, but it doesn’t go away. My abuse was a part of Baptistland. That’s still a part of me.