There’s a new sex abuse database on the block: Protestant Accountability. As the name suggests, it gathers and compiles information about any Protestant minister accused of sex abuse or the shielding of sex abusers. Especially now that the biggest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), has apparently decided to walk away from its own sex abuse crisis, this database seems like a timely project. Today, let me show you this project, and let’s explore why it’s needed now more than ever.
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SITUATION REPORT: Protestant Accountability database emerges
On August 19, Christa Brown wrote a retrospective about the past 20 years of sex abuse cover-ups in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In 2006, she had written to Frank Page—then the President of the SBC—to alert him to a pastor who had sexually abused her as a child. She’d also alerted “18 Southern Baptist leaders in four states” about the abuse.
Nothing came of it. In fact, the next year Frank Page would accuse abuse reform advocates of being opportunists seeking to enrich themselves at poor, sweet, innocent Southern Baptists’ expense. Like his cronies in the hardliner Old Guard faction did, Page insisted up and down that sex abuse was a very rare, isolated situation in SBC churches—so gosh, why did anyone need to reform anything?
(Related: The ones who walk away from Ocabos.)
But Christa Brown didn’t let Page’s inaction or bizarre accusations stop her. She launched Stop Baptist Predators. Her website compiled names and news stories. It also featured essays and lists of resources and advice for these predators’ victims.
Her database joined one launched in 2003 to keep track of Catholic abusers, Bishop Accountability. This second site eventually included some other denominations’ abusers, but it mainly focuses on Catholics. It contains some 8,000 names. In addition, Spiritual Abuse tracks abusers operating within the United Pentecostal Church International (UPCI).
Now, a new database joins them in turn: Protestant Accountability. Brown helped with its creation. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a reader of hers since the earliest days of Stop Baptist Predators, and she’s a dearly-liked mutual of mine on Twitter.) So far, this new database contains about 2700 names from the full spectrum of Protestantism—though at a rough glance, the higher-control denominations (like the SBC) lead the pack by far in terms of numbers.
That’s not surprising. The very nature of high-control religious groups allows predators to operate with impunity and in complete safety from accountability. Indeed, the church roles that grant the most power in these groups—pastor and lead pastor—contain the highest number of entries by far.
And these churches’ congregations themselves need all the information they can get, considering how hard their leaders are fighting to prevent them from knowing anything going on behind closed doors.
Why we needed abuse databases: “NO!!! This man is a good man!”
To see why we need databases like Protestant Accountability, let me show you a recent story about sex abuse—and one Christian’s response to it.
I chose this story for two reasons. I already wanted to use it just because it was the most recent one on my wall from the Facebook page for Spiritual Abuse. But second, the abuser involved comes from a very well-known, highly-ranked family in the UPCI. Even I knew of the family decades ago when I was Pentecostal!
The abuser, Stephen Allen Tipton, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison for various child sex abuse (CSA) offenses. His brother, David Tipton Jr., is the UPCI’s District Superintendent for Mississippi. Stephen Tipton sang at The Pentecostals of Grenada, a church pastored by his nephew, Damon Tipton. This is quite a family-affair church, even by UPCI standards! David is listed as the church’s Senior Pastor. Another nephew, Devonn Tipton, is the church’s Music Minister. The Youth Pastor, Kanon Tipton, is almost certainly another close relative.
In response to the news on the Spiritual Abuse page, one Christian wrote: “NO!!! This man is a good man! How could he do such a thing??”
This isn’t at all an uncommon response, either. Hardline, high-control Christian groups are the easiest to fool with surface-level behaviors. The traits this Christian associates with being “a good man” make perfect masks for predators. They only find out who’s really good by elimination, as the predators get outed—though many never do. Likewise, a good enough reputation can easily thwart accountability.
I don’t know what this Christian will do to reconcile “a good man” with “pleading guilty and being convicted of CSA.”
But I do know that finding out about the conviction is a good first step to dismantling a predator’s mask.
Abusers don’t like accountability, and high-control religious groups are great for avoiding it
High-control religious groups are almost always dysfunctional authoritarian in nature. That means they’re authoritarian, but based around personal power rather than merit. The people in leadership aren’t the most qualified for the positions, but rather get chosen based on how useful they are to their superiors. As long as a subordinate is useful—loyal, performs assigned tasks quickly and cheerfully, happy to be dishonest to protect the leader, actively working against whatever enemies the leader has, etc.—then the leader will protect that person’s reputation and standing in the group.
These groups have a great interest in protecting leaders’ reputation and standing. Again, they’re high-control. They make demands of members that go far past what other similar religious groups ask. These demands go far past just time and money. Sometimes, they involve deeply personal decisions like who to marry or what job to pursue. Without sufficient personal power, leaders won’t be able to force followers to live by their dictates. Nor will their group sound like the most Jesusy church that ever Jesused, which has a significant impact on recruitment.
So when (not if) a leader in such a group does something disastrously hypocritical, his fellow leaders and close subordinates will close ranks around him. They silence victims, hand-wave away accusations, and even offer the accused opportunities to make money while the situation quiets down.
Sidebar: Examples of this protection
As one example: In 2018, Paige Patterson lost his SBC seminary leadership job because he had grievously mishandled a sex assault report. After losing that job, he immediately went on a speaking tour. The leader of his enemy faction, J.D. Greear, counseled against hiring him, but SBC pastors did anyway. One SBC church in Texas even gave him a “defender of the faith” award. Patterson was instrumental in dragging the SBC into its current fusion with fundamentalism, and so he’s got a lot of personal power within that denomination. He’s all but untouchable—no matter what he does.
And another: Darrell Gilyard was once a rising star in SBC circles. Paige Patterson was one of his mentors—and shielded him as assault reports soon began pouring in. Gilyard got another pastor job soon after being released from prison, though it doesn’t seem to have lasted long once everyone found out. From what I could find, though, he still makes a living preaching. I’ve heard rumors he got behind a pulpit at a huge, historic Jacksonville church just this past year.
Things worked similarly for the Catholic Church decades ago. Their lawyers worked very hard to silence victims, and the Church shuffled abusers around and around to keep that silence. The Oscar-winning movie Spotlight (2015) opens with their strategy:
Yes, a high-control, dysfunctional-authoritarian environment must look very attractive to predators seeking lush hunting grounds.
Abusers need silence and darkness to flourish
Of course, the need for this database runs close to home for me as well.
When I was Pentecostal, our mythology about our denomination’s founding involved hypocrisy. As the oft-told story went, our first pastor was in another denomination. It was a teetotaler group, meaning it condemned all alcohol consumption (like Southern Baptists used to). But the leaders of that other denomination drank liberally after every religious function! They were also reportedly super-racist, but it was the alcohol abuse that usually got highlighted. It disgusted our first pastor, who left that denomination and found his way to the UPCI. There, he found people who lived out their faith and followed their own rules. Hooray Team Jesus!
That’s the story. But my first pastor would soon allegedly become involved in a CSA coverup. The youth minister at another UPCI church had been credibly accused of molesting and grooming his charges. My pastor allegedly ran damage control behind the scenes to protect him and his dad both (since his dad pastored that church). I only found out many years later in the 2010s because I ran across the court case accusing him of exactly that. This abuse had to have been going on for years beforehand, easily to the mid-90s when I deconverted, but nobody suspected a thing. Everything was kept under wraps.
Since then, I’ve heard similar abuse stories about an evangelist I held in enormous esteem when I was Christian. But at the time, nobody knew anything. If any rumors flew about him, they never reached the ears of his extensive UPCI fanbase.
That kind of silence and secrecy benefits only abusers, and only at the expense of their victims. But I can tell you that the UPCI in the 1990s rode very hard on its reputation as squeaky-clean and obedient to their rules. I knew of nobody in that church I could consider a hypocrite with certainty—besides my own husband Biff, and that’s only because I knew him extremely well. Thus, nobody else considered him a hypocrite.
Yeah, my crowd knew exactly how to look like “good” people, to borrow that one Christian’s word.
But now the world knows of many hypocrites in that one denomination alone. There’s a website devoted to unmasking predators within just the UPCI! And we will soon learn of many, many more thanks to Protestant Accountability joining the ranks of abuse databases online.
Past performance indicates future behavior: Predatory minister edition
Now if we can only train Christians to look online for any news of their potential future pastors, and then encourage them to heed the warnings contained in that news, hopefully we can prevent at least a few future cases of abuse.
Unfortunately, both of those are very tough asks. Evangelicals in particular get trained to ignore red flags in their churches and leaders. They don’t think about how their church’s high-control environment could harm them. They’re taught to consider their leaders to be extra-spiritual and extra-disciplined and extra-moral than they are—that Jesus himself hand-picked those leaders to lead them. Therefore, they must be worthy of the titles they bear!
Similarly, evangelicals hand-wave away allegations against popular and charismatic leaders. They’ve done exactly that at every turn in every serious scandal that’s ever arisen within evangelicalism. (Here’s one I wrote about many years ago, where one of the pastor’s followers speculated that an underage girl had maybe tempted the pastor. If you needed a big mad today, that ought to do the trick.)
Still, this database functions as the first essential step. It exposes these scurrying predators to the light. It rips away the façade of “a good man” that predators wear. And thus, I welcome it and hope it continues to build on its successes.
NEXT UP: Religious leaders give away the game when it comes to opposition to AI. See you soon! <3
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