NASHVILLE (TN)
In Solidarity with Christa Brown
April 15, 2026
By Christa Brown
Southern Baptist mega-pastor Heath Lambert posted a video talking about “Seven Years of the SBC Sex Abuse Disaster.”
Of course, first off, we all know that the SBC “disaster” has been going on a great deal longer than seven years. It was nineteen years ago, in April 2007, when ABC 20/20 did a national exposé that spotlighted the sexual abuse of children by preachers of the Southern Baptist Convention. So, that’s when Southern Baptist leaders lost plausible deniability. They’ve known for a very long time about the widespread abuse of kids and congregants in their churches.
Now we’re seven years past another major exposé – the Abuse of Faith series in 2019 – and Southern Baptists still haven’t done diddly-squat.
Lambert’s video offers a good illustration of the kind of platitudinous drivel that Southern Baptist leaders dish up to avoid actually reckoning with their clergy sex abuse problem. It’s the kind of propaganda that perpetuates the status quo of their system of impunity. And it’s the kind of propaganda they’re now spewing in the lead-up to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in June.
Lambert wraps it all up in Bible verses, but underneath all that glossy gospel packaging, it’s still drivel. (It’s also filled with the usual men-rule misogyny and anti-LGBTQ bigotry that many might expect from a Southern Baptist pastor.)
Preaching marital fidelity won’t cure the SBC clergy sex abuse crisis
Like that awful “documentary” released a couple weeks ago, Lambert’s video is yet another effort to minimize and distort the full horror of the SBC’s clergy sex abuse crisis. After all, the real “disaster” in the SBC’s abuse crisis is in the human cost of the countless lives decimated, not in the cost to the institution. But Lambert doesn’t seem to see that.
Instead, one of the top “lessons” that Lambert emphasizes is this:
“Never pursue sexual intimacy outside marriage.”
Lambert proclaims this as if he were providing the magic bullet for curing the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis.
“No guilty person in this disaster would be in trouble,” he says, “if they had limited their sexual desires and behavior to loving involvement with their spouse.”
So, while Lambert says nothing about the kinds of institutional safeguards most experts would recommend, nothing about accountability for perpetrators or consequences for cover-uppers, nothing about a system of record-keeping and information-sharing on credibly accused pastors, and nothing about the need for independent assessment of credible allegations, he simply tells pastors to “never pursue sexual intimacy outside marriage.”
This suggests that Lambert thinks clergy sex abuse is about sex.
It’s not.
Clergy sex abuse is about power
Clergy sex abuse is about a predatory pastor’s need to have absolute power over another human being. It’s about control and dominance. And the way he typically exercises that power is by weaponizing faith.
When you combine the tactic of sexual assault with the authority of a pastor and the weapon of God’s word, the domination over the victim is complete along with their dehumanization.
But this is something most Southern Baptist leaders don’t choose to see… how sexual abuse committed by clergy often exploits faith itself as a weapon, how predatory pastors use “God’s will” as a gun and brandish Bible verses as blades to the throat, and how the harm from this – from convincing victims they’re serving God by complying with a pastor’s sexual demands – is unique and ought to be especially disturbing to those who proclaim how precious their faith is.
This particularized aspect of the clergy sex abuse dynamic is what pastors like Lambert ignore, choosing instead to deflect to talking about abuse more generally and treating all abuse the same.
But all abuse is not the same – nor is the harm – and faith leaders have a moral obligation to deal with the special dynamics and harms of sexual abuse committed by clergy. And they must do so in ways more substantive and effective than simply telling pastors to honor their marriage vows.
They must grapple with the reality of how clergy predators twist everything holy into a weapon for the most unholy of crimes. They must reckon with how the very Bible that they hold in such high regard can be weaponized to compel compliance for sexual violation. (Nick O’Brien recently wrote a great piece about this here.)
With faith as a weapon
There is no weapon more powerful than the word of God in the hands of a perverse pastoral con man who traps true believers as prey.
I know because, as a kid, I was a true believer. That was my weakness.
I was a girl who would do anything for God, and that was what allowed a Southern Baptist pastor to rape me over thirty times.
https://christabrown.substack.com/p/the-girl-who-would-do-anything-for
Because of that, belief itself – or even the inclination toward belief – has been rendered into something existentially fearful and highly triggering. The part of my brain that held belief is now the scorched land of the predator, and my visceral instinct is to run from it.
If a stranger had pulled out a knife, I might have stood a chance. At least I would have seen what confronted me and would have known it was a weapon.
But how should I have known to run from the word of God? How should I have known that Bible verses could be so twisted?
With God’s word as the coercion, I didn’t see the weapon. My every instinct was to feel safe in the word of God and safe in the house of God.
Like a fish in a barrel, there was no escape from the boundaries of my own faith-filled self-identity.
How do you run from the faith that you hold in your own heart? How do you run from a faith so strong that it’s the very core of who you are? How do you run from your own soul?
There’s a reason why clergy abuse victims are almost invariably the most devout of kids. It’s the strength of their own faith that renders them vulnerable. It makes them trusting of religious leaders. It makes them easy prey.
We are people who have been violated and degraded not only physically, emotionally and psychologically but also spiritually. The very essence of who we are – our very souls – are sullied, stomped, stripped and subjugated.
If this were all simply about sex, it would be so much easier. But it’s not. It’s not about sex for the perpetrator and it’s not about sex for the victim.
And really, what I’m saying here is pretty elementary. Sexual assault is about power and control. And when sexual assaults are committed by clergy, it’s typically faith itself that gets weaponized.
It is long past time for Southern Baptist leaders to move beyond their apparent ignorance of this. (And maybe if they could bring themselves to understand how their own clergy weaponize faith for power, they could also begin to understand how faith is being weaponized in the political arena… but I digress.)
Southern Baptist leaders don’t learn
You’d think that, by now, the SBC’s top leaders and pastors would have absorbed these basic realities about the dynamics of clergy sex abuse.
But obviously they haven’t. Heck, Jeff Dalrymple, the guy they put in charge of the SBC’s sexual abuse response department is a guy who framed the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis as stemming from “the Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s.
That’s how fixated they are on viewing their clergy sex abuse crisis as being all about sex.
I don’t know exactly why so many Southern Baptists are so fixated on casting clergy sex abuse as being about sex, but here’s what I think: it’s because, by fixating on sex, they shield themselves from seeing the faith-based violence of what their clergy colleagues do in the name of God. And that’s just cowardly of them. They blind themselves to the brutality and view their colleagues simply as men who have “fallen into sexual sin” instead of as men who weaponized the holy for unholy ends.
And while Lambert praises “godly men who stand on Scripture,” he ignores that “godly men who stand on Scripture” are the very men who have committed such heinous crimes – and they have used Scripture to do it.
Southern Baptist leaders keep telling us they’re going to educate their churches on dealing with clergy sex abuse. But if even the top leaders and mega-pastors show such ignorance, like Lambert, then how do they imagine they’re going to educate all the ordinary pastors, deacons, church leaders, and congregants in Kansas?
Answer: They aren’t.
Significant parts of this column were previously published by Good Faith Media in 2008. But it was all still relevant today, because when it comes to dealing with clergy sex abuse, Southern Baptists don’t learn.
https://christabrown.substack.com/p/nothing-good-about-the-sbcs-forces
For more on the ruses and maneuvers of the Southern Baptist Convention, check out my book, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation