NASHVILLE (TN)
Baptist News Global [Jacksonville FL]
June 26, 2025
By Christa Brown
“Where are the SBC leaders who will call Allen Jordan to account?”
This was the question Mark Wingfield posed in a June 24 column, and I’ve been pondering it ever since.
In part, I ponder this because it’s personal — Jordan has been slinging hurtful smears against me for a lot of years. But more importantly, I ponder this because it illuminates the heart of the clergy sex abuse crisis in the Southern Baptist Convention: Indifference.
For those who haven’t been following this decade-long story, Wingfield aptly summarizes:
“Jordan has been on a one-man campaign to disprove what already has been proved time and time again. He insists that those who speak of being abused by Southern Baptist clergy are lying. … His emails to journalists and denominational officials are relentless and unhinged.”
Jordan’s emails are also typically quite long — more like diatribes — and Jordan copies them to dozens of people. His latest email was directed to SBC Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg and copied to numerous other Southern Baptist leaders, including SBC President Clint Pressley, Executive Committee Chair Philip Robertson, director of sexual abuse prevention Jeff Dalrymple, and Executive Committee staffer Jonathan Howe.
This has been going on for years with scores of emails copied and blind-copied to countless SBC leaders. For example, in 2022, Baptist News Global documented that Jordan sent 15 emails early in the year and then followed those up with 27 more emails in just a five-week period in May.
“Plenty of SBC leaders, past and present, have received Jordan’s emails and could have spoken up to denounce Jordan and to support survivors.”
So, plenty of SBC leaders, past and present, have received Jordan’s emails and could have spoken up to denounce Jordan and to support survivors. But they don’t. They stay silent.
Jordan’s claims are “documentably false.” And they are cruel.
Every time he blasts out one of his missives saying clergy sex abuse survivors aren’t credible, he pours salt on grievous wounds and exacerbates the pain.
For me, it feels as though I am repeatedly bludgeoned while, again and again, Southern Baptist leaders leer from around their corners and watch in the darkness but never intervene.
Each and every time, I feel knocked to the ground by Jordan’s blows, but what is even more painful — and what I will never forget — is the silence of so many others.
Again and again, SBC leaders have watched this scene unfold, done nothing, and then walked away to spew their pious platitudes and performatively proclaim how much they care and, all the while, I’m still bleeding on the ground.
Their inaction makes a mockery of their words and belies their faith.
So, why don’t Southern Baptist leaders denounce Jordan?
I conclude that it is because of indifference, a trait worse than hate.
Decades of indifference to clergy sex abuse has rendered the backbones of SBC leaders into vestigial remnants. They have evolved into a state of spinelessness, and spineless people are not inclined to intervene against bullies.
So, they stay quiet in the face of bullying conduct such as Jordan’s and in doing so, they render themselves complicit in the cruelty.
“The indifference of leadership is a big part of why the SBC’s culture of cruelty toward survivors is so entrenched.”
The indifference of leadership is a big part of why the SBC’s culture of cruelty toward survivors is so entrenched. The cruelty is normalized by leaders who do nothing. And this creates a permission structure for countless others to ignore abuse and treat survivors with contempt.
This is why the indifference of a powerful man like Jeff Iorg can do even more harm than the ignorant hatefulness of a man like Allen Jordan.
When indifference prevails at the top, the institution fails to distinguish between good and bad. By definition, indifference means it “does not matter one way or the other.”
This is how it is with SBC leaders and their attitude toward clergy sex abuse survivors. They simply disregard the horror of what was done to us — to our bodies, our lives, our dreams, our faith, our futures. None of it matters. Survivors are reduced to abstractions, our humanity rendered moot.
In this way, SBC leaders’ indifference reinforces the very message that was inculcated into us by our pastor-rapists: “You don’t matter.”
Over the years, many of us conjured temporary consolation from believing that, if only Southern Baptist leaders knew what was done to us — the childhood rapes, the abuses, the bodily violations, the desecrations of our humanity, the forging of “God’s will” into a weapon, the twisting of Scripture into a directive for evil, and the incessant shaming and blaming — surely they would do everything possible to intervene.
If only they knew, we told ourselves, they would take action.
It was a thought that provided brief comfort, but it wasn’t true.
Because they did know. And they do know. Yet, again and again, SBC leaders choose indifference.
When a know-nothing like Jordan can conduct a decade-long campaign of smears and abuse-denialism and SBC leaders stay quiet and even allow Jordan to think they agree, then there’s no need to wonder why sexual abuse and coverups are rampant in the SBC. The indifference is the reason, and it’s on full display.
But here’s the thing: While indifference is an added torture for victims, it also affects the indifferent. The indifference of SBC leaders reduces their humanity to inhumanity. It is a poison with which they sicken their own selves.
Action is the only antidote to indifference.
SBC leaders should now — finally — use their own Baptist Press to publicly denounce Allen Jordan, to repudiate his abuse-denialism, and to stand with clergy sex abuse survivors.
Christa Brown, a retired appellate attorney, is the author of Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation. Follow her on X @ChristaBrown777 and on Bluesky @christabrown.bsky.social.