NASHVILLE (TN)
Reepicheep Redoubt [Lawrenceburg, KY]
July 21, 2026
By Tim Meshginpoosh
Book Review: Baptistland, by Christa Brown
Introduction
In the fall of 1993, as I began studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, I had a certain idea of what it meant to be a conservative. I thought I was going to be in allied territory.
I was fairly new to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) world. The narrative I heard going in: conservatives—those who identified with a more literal view of Scripture and a right-leaning worldview—were taking back the Southern Baptist Convention from liberals and moderates: people who generally embraced a more left-leaning worldview and who were often skeptical of miracle accounts in the Bible. The liberals and moderates fired back at what they saw as a coordinated power grab that had less to do with theology and everything to do with a cultural fundamentalism that amounted to a good-old-boys network.
The way conservatives would put it today: the conservatives rescued the SBC from going the way of mainstream Protestantism. (And there is some truth to that.)
Sadly, what I would begin to learn almost immediately: there was a lot more going on under the surface.
The first warning shot
A few weeks into my first semester, I sat stunned as a young woman—who had been in church her whole life—told me of a horrific sexual abuse she endured. When she went on the record, the perp went to prison, but she paid a terrible price: her entire family turned on her, her entire church turned on her.
I couldn’t understand how people who believed in Jesus—yes, that Jesus who warned regarding those who harm children, or those who create stumbling blocks—could do that to a victim of abuse. I couldn’t understand why people who purport to love God, would back the perpetrator over the victim. That would be like knowing exactly who Jesus is and still choosing Barrabas!
Looking back, her account was a warning of things to come.
The problem
Back then, I was naive: I thought that conservatives, as a group, would take quick and severe action against sexual predators: defrock them, send them to prison, perhaps even get a little vigilante.
The reality: conservatives think that because they have the Right Doctrine™️, that they don’t have a systemic problem with sexual abuse.
Making matters worse, the predators are almost never the creepy people who are easy to dismiss. The predator? He almost never sneaks in through the back door; he’ll stroll in through the front door; he’ll speak your language; he’ll blend right in.
So when you learn of a predator, it’s usually that revered pastor, or that popular youth minister, or that renowned music minister, or that distinguished professor. When that happens, the pressure is high to minimize the offense, to explain it away, to dismiss it as a “one-off”. No one wants the messy job of confronting the reality: that that leader is not the man of God you thought he was. This is because you may be invested in that lie. A scandal often means you lose members. That hurts the financial bottom line. You could find yourself tarred with that scandal.
As a result, the leaders of institutions will often throw victims under the bus, even blaming them for the abuses of the offenders if it means protecting the institution. And they’ll spiritualize it in terms of “protecting the reputation of the Church”. Oftentimes, they’ll allow the predator to quietly resign and move to another church.
If you’re a leader, you have two choices:
- Siding with a victim is expensive, even as it is the right thing to do. Siding with the victim means bucking a system and confronting a network that pastors rely on. When you’re looking for your next church, you might find that the people—whom you once counted as friends—won’t answer your calls. You might not get invited to speak at other churches or conferences. You’ll be labeled as “woke”, “liberal”, “progressive”, or worse.
- Siding with the system is easy in the short term, but you sacrifice your soul. Embracing a lie means turning and looking the other way, which protects the system and therefore your place in the system. If you keep your mouth shut, click your heels and parrot the party line, you’ll go far. But in the process, you compromise your integrity; you become the hired hand, who sacrifices the one sheep for the 99.
Every bit as severe is a dynamic that often is at play in families: it’s not uncommon for a family to throw members under the bus when they either (a) confront their parents about the “family jewels” or (b) who spill the beans on the “family jewels”.
These leaders operate from a mindset that carries the following implications:
- To confront the institution is to attack the very Gospel itself.
- To confront the family jewels is not just an attack on the Christian family you were raised in, it is an attack on all Christian families.
During my time at SBTS, I got to know some of the liberals and moderates. Some of their backstories were not unlike that gal who got shunned by her church and family. And the abuses they endured were within Southern Baptist churches.
That was the beginning of my baptism in napalm.
Enter Christa Brown.
Fast-forward to early 2018. As the #metoo and #churchtoo wars raged, I became acquainted with Christa Brown, a successful appellate attorney who had spent years keeping tabs on sexual predators in the SBC.
Long before social media was a thing, Christa was the real deal: like Wisdom, she cried out in the streets, calling out for anyone who cared to be wise in this area. Most people ignored her and took the easy way out, but some of us were listening.
I started following Christa on Twitter, as she quickly became my E.F. Hutton on all things SBC. While our worldviews are different, when she speaks, I shut up and listen.
I suspected that the situation in the SBC was bad. And Christa was always good at showing how low the SBC was willing to stoop. Her batting average was perfect.
So let’s talk about Baptistland
A year ago, I started reading her latest book, Baptistland. I had a very hard time reading it, which is why I am only now getting around to reviewing it.
Why? Let’s go there.
If you were in Christa’s circle when she was growing up, you might have thought that Christa’s family was a Good Christian Family™️. They would have appeared to be a middle-class family, carving a life in Baby Boom era, with her parents having conquered the Great Depression and World War II. Christa and her sisters all went to church. If you were the pastor, you might have been happy that they were there and thought they were a good family.
Would you have known that two of her sisters were downright cruel toward her? We’re not talking normal sibling rivalries; we’re talking outright cruelty driven by overt hatred. Would you have known that her other sister passively (and later actively) supported the other two sisters in their cruelty?
Would you have known that her mother was always trashing her or putting her down?
Would you have known that her father was oftentimes violent due to PTSD issues from both his family history and his experience in the Pacific Theater in World War II?
Today, we are just starting to understand the effects of trauma, especially family trauma—domestic violence—and combat-related trauma that includes traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). We are developing understanding of CTE—Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in people who suffer concussions and other head injuries. But even today, we are still light years behind the curve.
But back then, we hadn’t begun to figure out those things. Men came home from war, beat their wives and kids, smoked like chimneys, and drank themselves into oblivion. It wasn’t uncommon for women to develop valium addictions. Domestic violence? Sexual abuse? We shoved it under the rug. Facing the reality might create a societal problem that no one had the bandwidth to begin to deal with.
Today, we still wage war against that paradigm.
In Baptistland, Christa blows the lid on all the “family jewels”; not just those of her family, but the “family jewels” of the Southern Baptist Convention, i.e., Baptistland.
What we get is an account of non-stop cruelty.
If all that Christa had to report was the sexual abuses of her youth minister—Tommy Gilmore—that would have been bad enough. Those abuses were severe on their face.
That her church leadership covered it up in spiritual window dressing (transcendence)—even blaming her for it and co-opting her own mother to support them (triangulation, DARVO)—was cruel on an unconscionable level.
Gilmore was able to continue his “ministry”, move on to other SBC churches, forge a career in children’s “ministry” that took him to FBC Atlanta under Charles Stanley.
Even when Gilmore was finally forced to leave the “ministry”, he used his contacts—which he had built on years of “ministry” that he was allowed to work in spite of having disqualified himself by committing flagrant sexual abuse against Christa—to build a career in real estate.
The evil didn’t stop there.
In Baptistland, Christa dies four times:
- The abuses of her youth pastor and church community.
- The vile cruelty of her family (including her brother-in-law), with her father providing qualified respite at times.
- The vile, evil backlash she endured—from both her own family and the SBC—for telling the truth about the abuses she suffered and the people and systems which enabled the abuses.
- Ultimately getting written out of the family via the collusion of her sisters.
What Christa’s sisters did to her was nothing short of torture. And the evil didn’t stop when they became adults, as Judy and Rita continued to berate and even humiliate Christa throughout adulthood. Her other sister—Nancy, who fashioned herself as the good cop—was every bit as bad in her passive-aggressive support of Judy and Rita. And her mom did next to nothing to confront it, and in fact actively and passively supported the cruelty.
There were two good men in her life: (a) her husband—who did not share the Christianity in which she had been raised—and (b) her father, who, in spite of his horrific PTSD that made him ever-mercurial and unpredictable and often violent, was ultimately supportive of her and lifted her up when her mom would tear her down.
As I read Baptistland, the endless cruelty—from the very people who should have been on her side—was very hard to process. I’ve read many survivor accounts, but Christa’s was one of the hardest reads.
Ultimately, the Church, particularly the Southern Baptist Convention, betrayed her at every level. There is no whitewashing that.
A critic will attack her for marrying a non-Christian, for not subscribing to the Christian faith, for siding with liberal causes. I know this because I personally witnessed that play out in real time on Twitter/X. But given the way she was treated by the conservative side—those who stand for Sound Doctrine, who claim to be on the side of life, who claim to stand for a Biblical sexual ethic, who say they’re all about the Gospel—I must admit that I empathize with her.
Sexual abuse is bad enough; clergy sexual abuse is a different ballgame. When a minister—pastor, associate pastor, youth pastor, basically anyone holding a church office—takes license with someone in his (sometimes her) care, it’s more than a sex offense; it creates spiritual confusion.
And if the target is a child or a teen—who is already struggling with basic issues of self-worth not to mention really big questions like heaven and hell—that compounds the pain by an order of magnitude.
And when the church leadership sweeps it under the rug—even blaming the victim—the score goes up.
And when your own family doesn’t back you, then you really have problems.
And yes, Mr. Evangelist who waxes so eloquently about the need to preach the Gospel to victims, you’re also going to have a problem. Why? Every argument you can make for the Gospel—why Christa should go to church, why Christa should sit under solid Biblical preaching, why [fill in the blank] is the right way, etc.—was a vector for both the abuses she endured and the coverups of those abuses.
But yes, go ahead and lecture her. 🙄
Here’s an example that Christa recalls (p. 367):
As the event drew to an end, one of the organizers called on a prominent Southern Baptist woman—an influencer who speaks at conferences and presents herself as an expert on sexual abuse—to close out the evening. Her presence there is an example of how, even in advocacy circles, there are those so enmeshed with the abusive institution that, functionally, they often serve the institution’s oppressive ends. She walked over to where I sat, gripped my shoulder, and looming above me, launched into a too-long, too-loud prayer for me. Immediately, I felt myself going under into the roiling darkness, weighted by so many past weaponized prayers and reliving the terror of when Gilmore himself had done the same thing—stood over me, gripped my shoulder, and prayed aloud for God to cast Satan from me.
“Get your hand off me!” I wanted to yell. But instead, I froze as waves of panic overtook me. I focused my energy on breathing as I felt powerless, targeted, unsafe, and trapped.
As awful as it was, I initially assumed that the hurt of it was inadvertent, but a few weeks later, the two organizers of the event wrote me that they had actually talked with the woman about it ahead of time and had told her not to pray over me. Just days before Birmingham, The Wartburg Watch had published a piece in which I specifically described how Gilmore had stood over me praying to cast Satan from me, and they had realized how a prayer for me might traumatically mimic that. So they’d told the woman to just say “encouraging words” and “no prayer.”
I was gutted by this news. “Was it really clear?” I later asked one of them. “You actually told her that praying over me like that would likely be hurtful?” Her answer was simple: “Yes. I told her. She knew.”
What would have been so wrong with just being present with her?
The best thing to say: “Christa, I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you for all you’ve done to take the fight to these abusive leaders. We are here today because you were the trailblazer who fought in the trenches for decades at great personal cost. Keep up the great work!”
(Knowing what I know of Christa’s backstory, I probably would have just offered a handshake—hugs from men could be triggering—and apologized for the way the church treated her, thanked her for telling her story and doing a knockout job holding the SBC system accountable, and promised to keep doing my part to fight that culture in my sphere of influence.)
Now someone might ask, “don’t you care about their spiritual health?”
Of course I do. I also know two fundamental things:
- There’s one Holy Spirit.
- I ain’t the Holy Spirit.
I love Christa—no, seriously, I do. And that means she’s not my project. In my world, no one is a project.
And while I want her to have what I have—I’ve tasted and seen that the Lord is good—I also know that someone like Christa has been bludgeoned with a Bible that was used as a vector for her abuser to justify his atrocities, a vehicle for blaming her, a pretext for covering for her rapist, a cudgel with which to attack her for calling out the abuses, even calling her a tool of Satan.
With survivors, the best you can do is love them—with no strings attached. If you want to pray for them, then do it in your proverbial closet. After all, Jesus said something about that…
I would also be wary of anyone who compares Christa with other survivors. As a great philosopher—Barbara Mandrell—put it: Christa “was country, when country wasn’t cool.” Long before social media became a force multiplier, she was waving her hands and trying to flag down anyone who would listen to the truth about the SBC.
The SBC, the very institution that would have you believe that they are on God’s side, is on the side of sexual predators.
- The Godfather of the Conservative Resurgence—Paul Pressler—was a pedophile who enjoyed decades of cover from that institution.
- Key leaders, who talk a great talk about Manhood™️, were nowhere to be found when it mattered. The best they could do? In 2004, the deacons of Second Baptist Church (Houston, TX) wrote a letter of admonishment to Pressler. Did they report him to law enforcement? Nope.
- SBC leaders have been silent in the aftermath of the Pressler revelations. To date, there has been no substantive assessment of the Conservative Resurgence in light of the corruption from the very top, and therefore no attempt at systemic reform. The sitting President at the time—Bart Barber—was mum, as have been his successors; the only two SBC leaders who spoke—Danny Akin and Al Mohler—issued very weak statements.
- While the SBC finally put a database framework together, there has been no effort to make it operational with up-to-date information on offending ministers, volunteers, and those credibly-accused.
Today, even with the damning mountain of evidence, the SBC denies that a sexual abuse problem exists.
In their calculus, it is Christa Brown—not Paul Pressler or his lackeys who climbed the SBC ladder by playing ball with him—who is in league with Satan.
I say it’s the other way around. That’s why I ejected from the SBC in 2022.
In Baptistland, Christa tells the truth in all its ugliness. She tells the truth about her own family jewels, but—most damning—the utilitarian SBC system that would sacrifice some sheep so they can brag about their numbers.
Ultimately, the SBC is sacrificing women and children to Moloch to prop up their system. Like I said, when you choose to throw the victim under the bus and support the system, then you sacrifice your integrity, as you are siding with the abusers.
When that happens, you lose all credibility. What can you say?
- “Sure we coddle sexual predators, but at least we’re pro-life!”
- “Sure we coddle sexual predators, but at least we stand for Biblical sexual ethics!”
- “Sure we coddle sexual predators, but at least we have good theology!”
There comes a point where “the message is right, even if the messenger is flawed” rings hollow.
And the SBC is beginning to reap the whirlwind, as their numbers are in freefall.
Membership has been in decline for the last 19 years. For a denomination that has prided itself in contradistinction from the more liberal mainline Protestant world—which is also in freefall—that is symptomatic of a larger public distrust of religious institutions. That trend does not bode well for Christians in the United States, particularly Southern Baptists. We are in the midst of a major tectonic shift in the church landscape in America, and it is a very unpleasant one.
If SBC leaders were smart, they’d understand that Christa is doing them a good service. If your carbon monoxide alarm goes off at 1AM, it’s not pleasant. Jumping out of bed and evacuating is going to be inconvenient. Of course, you always can choose to go back to sleep…
I found Baptistland to be the hardest book I’ve read in a very long time. The non-stop cruelty made it difficult. It took me a year to finish.
But every Southern Baptist needs to read Baptistland and sit with it.
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