Baptistland Quotes

“Without ever having fully reckoned with how the SBC got things so dreadfully wrong on race, Baptistland now uses similar religious rhetoric to legitimize a patriarchal hierarchy that subjugates women to authoritarian male power. Just as its leaders launched biblical proof texts to justify slavery and Jim Crow, they now use biblical proof texts to justify female submissiveness and male "headship.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“At its roots, the theology of Baptistland is a theology of domination. It focuses not on human flourishing but on the controlling of human beings through hierarchies of power and oppression. It proclaims as divinely ordered that some should hold dominion over those deemed lesser, and it invokes religion to rationalize categorizations of who should exercise authority and who should submit.

No one should ever forget that the Southern Baptist Convention has its very origins in a grotesquely depraved theology that sanctified the enslavement of human beings, consecrated the Confederacy, and birthed a bloody civil war.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“Yet Baptistland is even broader than the SBC. People who don't go to church at all may still find themselves in Baptistland, because Baptistland is also a belief system that permeates broad swaths of our nation's culture, affecting how we structure our relationships, how we raise our children, and how we view others and ourselves.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“The tentacles of the Southern Baptist Convention reach long. Its influence pervades not only all of evangelicalism but also school boards, city councils, and state houses across the country. As I was finalizing this manuscript, the US House of Representatives elected a Southern Baptist as speaker. Mike Johnson, widely described as an election denier and Christian nationalist, is now second in line to the presidency. So, no one should underestimate the impact of this faith group’s theologies and ideologies.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“Baptistland is a giant Potemkin village, propped up for show.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“Southern Baptists normalized and minimized the sexual predations of a president in much the same way they normalized and minimized the sexual predations of their clergy colleagues. Then, with nary a care, they left the rest of us – now the whole of our democracy – to deal with the fallout. With an identity and beliefs rooted in an authoritarian theology, they wound up supporting an authoritarian president.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“After Trump was voted out of office, I watched as Southern Baptist leaders used their mantles of spiritual authority to amplify the big lie of a ‘stolen election.’ With that, the fraud of everything they professed seemed complete. As the country's second largest faith group – and as a mighty voting bloc – Southern Baptists were willing to sacrifice democracy itself for the sake of an ends-justifies-the-means bargain for power.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“When Donald Trump came on the scene, it felt like déjà vu with Southern Baptists. For years, I had listened to their self-righteous rhetoric as they shrugged off the reality of widespread sexual assaults committed by pastors against women and children. So when I saw the overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists championing a president who bragged about assaulting women, it felt like more of the same. Their minimization of horrific conduct was a pattern I had already seen up close. I had lived it.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“Month after month, as I continued speaking out about clergy sex abuse and posting cases on my database, hateful messages arrived in my inbox. Many of them began with ‘I'm a Christian and …’ or ‘I'm a Baptist and …’ before descending into a vomitous gush. The writers led with their faith and then spewed hate.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“At times, BGCT [i.e., Baptist General Convention of Texas] officials tried to downplay the Baptist abuse problem with an ‘at least we aren't as bad as the Catholics’ schtick. They claimed that while the Catholic abuse problem involved children – and usually boys – the Baptist problem was more about clergy ‘misconduct’ with adult women. ‘Most of ours are heterosexual relationships with adults,’ they said.

It was an offensive and minimizing claim, supported by no evidence. To the contrary, The Associated Press had gathered insurance data showing that the abuse of children in Baptist churches was likely just as pervasive as in Catholic churches.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“It's a Catholic problem’ was the dominant narrative for so very long. Over and over, people told me that what I was encountering in Baptistland were ‘just isolated incidents,’ while in the Catholic Church, abuse was systemic. Even well-known experts would explain that clergy sex abuse was predominantly a Catholic problem caused by priestly celibacy.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“When the sacred is transformed into sacrilege, trust is shattered. When rapes are committed in the name of God, then sexual abuse not only inflicts the trust-busting trauma of a bodily violation, but simultaneously, it yanks a primary resource for healing. Faith and its accoutrements become neurologically networked with rape. So rather than being a source of comfort, faith can become a trigger to flee.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“From the start, I viewed their use of ‘local church autonomy’ as a phony excuse for inaction. Even as they proclaimed themselves unable to do anything about sex offenders, I knew that if a Southern Baptist church were to put an openly gay man in the pulpit, state and national officials would take action.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“In the abstract, almost everyone imagines they will do the right thing. ‘I would NEVER cover up for a child molester,’ people say. But in the real world, what I've seen is that when child sex abuse allegations hit on the home turf, most churches do exactly that – they keep things quiet.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“With some forty-seven thousand churches, the Southern Baptist Convention was – and still is – the largest non-Catholic faith group in the country. In that fact, I saw the reality that a whole lot of kids and congregants were being left at increased risk for sexual violation by predatory pastors.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“This was always about way more than an individual predatory pastor; It was then, and still is, about the countless others in Southern Baptist life who enable these crimes, both directly and indirectly, and who maintain a system that fosters impunity and unaccountability.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“The Christa who resurrected no longer believes in those fairy tales. What I know is that a recalcitrant institution like the Southern Baptist Convention – an institution marinated in lies, deception, image, and illusion – will not reform itself voluntarily based on mere appeals to reform itself. It will not do so for the sake of goodness. It will not do so for the safety of kids. It will not do so for the love of God. Rather, it will do so only if prodded by unrelenting outside pressure – from media, lawsuits, prosecutions, and independent investigations. Even then, it will do so only with bare minimum baby steps.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation

“Once upon a time, I believed that if only I told my childhood church – again – about the abuse their pastor inflicted on me as a kid, the good people there would surely want to do something. They would care. They would want to protect others. They would feel remorse. They would want to do better in the present than they done in the past. I believed all that.

It was the fairy tale I told myself because believing the alternative would have been too awful. But the awful was what was true. Just as my childhood family had insisted on a ‘happy family’ pretense, so to my childhood church insisted that what had happened was no big deal.

Then, once upon a time, I believed that if only Southern Baptist denominational leaders knew, they would surely want to do something. I thought that if I showed them the scope of the problem, they would take action. They would care. They would want to protect others and plug the safety gaps in their system. They would feel remorse.”
― Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation