Memorial Day Brings Memories

How Southern Baptists used my father's war wounds as ammo against me

My father had chronic post-traumatic stress symptoms from his service in World War II. He was wounded in the liberation of Luzon and survived by playing dead while they bayoneted bodies around him. When night fell, he crawled through the darkness back to allied troops.

As a kid, I didn't understand, and sometimes my father seemed terrifying. As an adult, I know that we were probably like a great many families of those stoic men who never spoke of their ordeals. Families simply coped as best they could with the psychological wounds so many of those men had.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

During one particularly bad incident, the police were called to our house. They just talked a bit and then called our pastor, who came to the house and prayed. He said we should think about others in the church and how upsetting it would be if people found out that a good Christian family like ours had such problems.

He told us not to talk about it.

Not long after, the youth minister cornered me in a church hallway. He said he knew what had happened in my family and that he’d like to talk with me about it. He asked me to come to his office.

I guess the pastor didn’t heed his own “don’t talk about it” message. He obviously breached our trust and told the youth minister about the trouble in my family. But I didn’t see that hypocrisy at the time. I saw only that the youth minister seemed to care.

In hindsight, I now see that this was when the grooming for sexual abuse began in earnest. He used my family’s difficulties to move in on his prey ... me.

The nightmare endured for many months – a nightmare in which the youth minister sexually assaulted me more than thirty times, always with Bible verses in my ear and admonitions about “God’s will.”

Years later, as an adult, when I again tried to report that minister-molester, I mentioned that the abuse began shortly after that incident of family violence when the police came. Naively, I thought this information would help to educate church and denominational leaders on how predatory clergy work. Instead, the long-time attorney for the Baptist General Convention of Texas – I’ll call him Phil Waller – tried to use that information against me.

He wrote back that because I had “suffered from abuse at home” this would have been what caused my distress.

Then he threatened to seek legal recourse against me if I persisted in speaking out. In other words, he threatened to sue … me.

Waller brought it up again when he spoke with me in person. In effect, he tried to use my dead father’s PTSD against me to say that I was emotionally damaged anyway, as though no greater harm was done by the sexual abuse of the church’s minister.

This attitude offended me beyond all words.

And this Memorial Day weekend, as I recall it, the anger still rises.

In today’s sermons, I imagine lots of Baptist pastors will pay tribute to Service members and say some nice words. But when it comes to deeds, the reality of what I encountered, both as a kid and as an adult, were Baptist leaders who used my father’s war wounds to exploit his family, savage his adolescent daughter, and bully her once again as an adult.

Phil Waller wasn’t just some rogue attorney. For over a decade, he was attorney for the largest statewide Baptist organization in the country. He also worked for local churches facing clergy sex abuse scandals; indeed, the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) sometimes referred him to the churches.

Yet this was how he treated someone attempting to report clergy sex abuse (and my report was corroborated by another minister who knew about the abuse when I was a kid).

This was the same guy who, later, tried to get me to sign a nondisclosure agreement, saying I wouldn’t talk about the youth minister’s abuse or about how the church handled it. I refused.

BGCT officials knew this was how Waller treated clergy abuse victims – I specifically told them – and they kept Waller on board anyway. So, I think you have to assume that Waller’s victim-intimidation and silencing tactics were exactly what they wanted. They are the ones who bear responsibility for the horror and the harm of his cruelty.

The attorney works for the Baptist General Convention of Texas (and for the churches to whom the BGCT refers him). They paid him for his handling of clergy sex abuse reports in this manner – with the result that reported clergy predators were left in their pulpits.

This is true of attorneys for the national Southern Baptist Convention as well: They are working for the SBC, and they are handsomely paid. So, SBC officials are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the silencing and intimidation tactics used by SBC attorneys… and for their destructive impact.

My father was a hero, both at war and at home. He worked double and triple shifts his whole life to put Big Chief tablets in his kids’ hands and shoes on their feet. He literally wore his body out trying to provide for his family.

That a denominationally-supported attorney would suggest that my father’s psychological war wound was a form of “abuse” in any way akin to the devastating sexual savagery of a Southern Baptist minister is something I will never forget. That he would use my family's difficulties to try to minimize the enormous harm done by a minister’s sexual violence was revolting.

Over the past couple decades, as I have worked at trying to shed light on the systemic Baptist clergy sex abuse problem, Southern Baptists have kicked me countless times. In person, in emails, in letters, on blogs, and even in the Baptist Press, they have said outrageous, false, cruel, and hateful things. On a good day, I could probably find it within myself to forgive almost all of it. But to effectively degrade my father and try to use his war wounds against me is something I don’t know if I will ever be able to forgive. Certainly, I cannot forget it.

My father was far from perfect, but he was more honest, hard-working, courageous and decent than any Southern Baptist official I have yet encountered. I honor the memory of my father in continuing to speak truth about Baptist clergy sex abuse and about the continuing horror in how the Southern Baptist Convention handles it.

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This column is a revised version of a blog posting I did years ago. A few days after I first posted it, Waller again tried to threaten me, suggesting he would drag me before a State Bar Disciplinary Board. His reasoning made no sense – as best I could figure, it boiled down to a contention that I was adversely affecting the reputation of the legal profession by publicly criticizing his zealous advocacy on behalf of his Southern Baptist clients. But of course, making sense didn’t matter. Like his initial threat to sue me – and like his attempt to get a nondisclosure agreement – his threat to haul me before a disciplinary board was really just another effort to silence and intimidate me.

It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it? However baseless his complaint, this guy had the possibility of threatening to haul me before an independent disciplinary board for lawyers. Meanwhile, there doesn’t even exist such a thing as an independent board for reviewing the conduct of Southern Baptist clergy. Yet, the complaints of clergy sex abuse survivors are far more troubling – and of greater concern to the safety of others – than the complaint of a guy who didn’t like a blog posting.

For more on the ruses and maneuvers of the Southern Baptist Convention, check out my book, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation. It’s currently on sale!