A few months ago, we talked about how Matt Queen and some of his seminary associates outright lied to the feds about a sex assault on their campus, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). I suppose nobody told these Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) guys that the FBI’s investigators have zero chill about blatant lies. Thankfully, Queen seems to have figured that out and folded quickly enough to avoid a lifetime in prison.
In the wake of his recent guilty plea, I saw sharp contrasts play out among evangelicals. Queen had a good reputation within the SBC. Many people respected him and considered him extremely Jesusy. And yet he 100% lied to the feds to cover up the seminary’s egregious mishandling of a sex assault accusation. One evangelical, Benjamin Cole of Baptist Blogger, even wrote a moving post on Baptist News Global about the downfall of his former schoolmate at that seminary. Other evangelicals are rightly furious that Queen’s case merely illustrates how unwilling the SBC’s leaders truly are to do anything about that crisis.
We’ll cover the news today, and then explore why Matt Queen finds himself in exactly this situation.
(From introduction: A good site that pursues justice for animals. This post appeared on Patreon on 11/5/2024. Its audio ‘cast is there too, and available to anyone by the time you read this!)
SITREP: Matt Queen and the Desperate Guilty Plea
(Full timeline of the entire case here.)
On October 16th, Matt Queen pleaded guilty to the FBI, effectively ending a long period of lies and more lies he spun to avoid accountability for him or his cronies or his seminary. The FBI had charged him with making false statements to federal investigators during a mid-2023 investigation. He’s admitted they’re right and he sure did.
At the time of the investigation, Matt Queen worked for Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). He was their interim provost. The false statements he made concerned a student who had sexually assaulted someone at the end of 2022. Queen, along with at least one other seminary officer, Chief of Staff Heath Woolman, allegedly covered up the sex assault and tried to “make it go away,” in Woolman’s words.
By the time the feds caught up with these two liars, they’d already both left SWBTS.
Fleeing the sinking ship
The seminary’s board suspended Queen in July 2023 after he admitted he’d lied. At that point, he resigned. This past February 2024, Matt Queen took a pastoring job in North Carolina with Friendly Avenue Baptist Church in Greensboro, NC.
As well, the campus’ former police chief, Kevin Collins, got suspended and then fired in June 2023 for not reporting the assault to seminary leaders. Those leaders found out about it when the police showed up to SWBTS with an arrest warrant.
Of note, though, Woolman doesn’t appear to have been charged with anything yet. He’d already left SWBTS the previous May to be a pastor in Florida. Both his new church and Queen’s both seem to stand behind their new pastors. Hilariously, Queen’s church insists that the apparent god of the entire universe told them to hire a liar who lied about sex assault on an evangelical campus.
(Local archive of the handout the church gave members to introduce them to the new pastor.)
As you might guess, any evangelical who cares about sex abuse is furious at this entire story. Queen’s trial was scheduled for November 13th, but now we must wait till next February for sentencing instead.
Many other evangelicals have observed Matt Queen’s dramatic fall from grace with confusion and sadness. Once upon a time, Queen’s star never seemed like it would ever dim.
Background: How Matt Queen climbed his way to the near-top
Nowadays, before writing about any specific evangelical, the first thing I do is head to my archives to see if they’ve ever come up before. And as often happens, this one has! Back in 2018, he formed part of the SBC’s official EVANGELISM TASK FORCE.
That’s a big deal.
At the time, the SBC had been in a solid decline for almost ten years. Its Dear Leaders decided that if the flocks would only get out there and recruit like mad, that would reverse the decline. The task force idea failed, of course. I barely need to say that, right? Obviously it failed—just like every other similar attempt has failed. The flocks do not like evangelizing, and they never will.
But that committee had a lot of very interesting names on it. It was one of those busy-work things that leadership-minded SBC-lings clamor to get into so they can show their team spirit. It helps build their resumes, so to speak. Denominational sinecures and endless committees matter a lot when a guy wishes to go far within the SBC.
Paige Patterson led the task force. At the time, he was a powerful force within the SBC’s Old Guard faction. That’s my informal name for the super-duper-conservative faction trying to take over the SBC now. Their dread enemies are the Pretend Progressives, who are also very conservative but pretend they want to do something about sex abuse and racism—and who are largely are winning all the squabbles lately. Though Patterson lost his cushy seminary job—get this, for egregiously mishandling a sex assault involving one of his students—he’s still a kingmaker with a very loyal court.
And oh yes, Paige Patterson liked Matt Queen.
Matt Queen, the rising star of SWBTS
Matt Queen graduated from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2009. He hit the ground running too: The next year, he took a job as an assistant professor at SWBTS.
In 2011 and at SWBTS, Matt Queen finished an evangelism campaign called “Taking the Hill.” It involved students trying to recruit everyone who lived within a mile of SWBTS. As far as I can tell, it was a massive failure in terms of actually recruiting new church members.
As that link also tells us, Queen also attended regular evangelism-focused prayer meetings at the seminary. Patterson had requested the faculty hold these, and hold them the faculty did. As far as I can tell, they likewise didn’t get much of what they requested in prayer. Neither of these endeavors were truly about evangelicals’ ostensible stated purpose, so that was fine.
In 2014, according to Biblical Recorder, Matt Queen received a tremendous vote of confidence from SWBTS. That year, the school’s leaders installed him as the “Chair of Fire.” That’s the seminary’s nickname for the L.R. Scarborough Chair of Evangelism. This office is, the site tells us, “reserved for professors who displayed a particular fervor for evangelism.” I’m sure it went nicely with his doctorate of “applied theology with a specialization in evangelism.” The site even talks up his new book, Everyday Evangelism. (Of late, the SBC’s official site has been flogging a book with an identical title. It’s not Queen’s.)
But on that Biblical Recorder link, we also learn that Matt Queen has been associated with his current church, Friendly Avenue Baptist Church of Greensboro, NC for some time. More than that, even, he is almost certainly very plugged-in with the Calvinist/Reformed crowd:
He then served as pastor of Union Chapel until November 2006 before joining the staff of Friendly Avenue Baptist Church in Greensboro as associate pastor for discipleship and evangelism (2006-2010). He served as a teaching assistant at Mars Hill College and at Southeastern before becoming the Bailey Smith Chair of Evangelism Teaching Fellow (1999-2002) at Southeastern. He was an adjunct instructor of evangelism at Southeastern College (2004-2005), adjunct instructor of discipleship (2010) at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, Va.
Folks, that’s the life path of someone aiming very high indeed. This guy is way, way into evangelism. Or at least, he wants his superiors to think so. And they are very pleased with his enthusiasm.
In 2018, as part of his time as the “the Chair of Fire,” Matt Queen rhapsodized about evangelism:
“Passion for evangelism will never come from reading a book alone,” Queen says. “It will come by looking people in the face and seeing them convicted because of their sin.”
He’d go from here to lying about sex assault to FBI agents’ faces in just a few short years. But then, fundagelicals tend to do whatever they please, then apologize to Jesus later. In fact, in May 2022—just a few short months before the sex assault that started his saga, in fact—Southeastern Seminary published a puff piece praising Queen for his evangelistic zeal.
I can really, really see why Matt Queen at first insisted he was innocent of the feds’ accusations in June 2023. Indeed, he initially pled not guilty. He said:
“Prosecutors believe I misrepresented that conversation and my notes about that conversation during my interview with them. My integrity is everything to me, and I will cling to that integrity and seek to be vindicated by God and man.”
Yeah, I imagine he had some really unpleasant conversations with the FBI after that. I’m sure at least a few of those conversations involved a potential 20-year federal prison sentence if the case went to court—which, again, was set for November 13th.
A guilty plea for Matt Queen
So yes: Matt Queen has admitted he created fake notes from the meeting he had with Woolman and other seminary officers regarding the 2022 sex assault. He offered those notes to the feds as PROOF YES PROOF that nobody’d done anything out of bounds there. And then he kept lying.
It appears that he’ll face sentencing in February 2025. Because he pleaded guilty, he faces no more than five years behind bars. Christianity Today thinks he’ll more likely face only “several months.” I agree with them, for what it’s worth.
Wartburg Watch did their usual good writeup on the situation, including going into great depth about just how convoluted and insistent Matt Queen’s lies grew over time. My sympathies rest with sex abuse advocates and survivors, though I do understand why so many evangelicals are confused and sad about Queen’s lies. This is not the behavior they have been indoctrinated to expect out of men like Queen. Unfortunately, evangelicalism as a system really doesn’t have any effective way to spot these guys’ hypocrisy early on, nor to do anything about hypocrites who’ve achieved power.
That’s why it took the feds to bring Matt Queen to heel. Nobody in his broken system could have—or would have. That’s why the evangelicals at his current church are dithering so hard about firing him.
After all, it’s really hard to walk back the recommendation of the apparent god of supernovae and sugar crystals.
Segue: A curious staff page—or rather the absence of one
One of the weirdest red flags of dysfunction within evangelicalism is the tribe’s love of secrets. Secrets are currency and punishment, blackmail material and weird team-building exercise. Knowing secrets, threatening to reveal secrets, offering secrets in trade for other secrets, these are all things I saw many times as a fundamentalist across the length and breadth of right-wing Christianity. As for Queen’s lies, those grow out of secrets. He had a really big one to guard by the time the FBI first sat him down.
The entire Southern Gothic literary genre wouldn’t even exist without fundagelicals and their hypocrisy and their lies and their cover-ups of it all. To be fundagelical at all is to live two lives tightly compartmentalized away from each other, like secret second families full of children wondering why Daddy doesn’t spend more time at home. Fundagelicals have their “church self,” the one they briefly trot out when they must, and then their authentic self that hunts alone in darkness and cowers at the light.
I could not find a single hint of leadership on the official webpage of Matt Queen’s new church, Friendly Avenue Baptist of Greensboro, NC. Here’s where it gets interesting, though: I can see hints that a staff page once existed. It was part of their site until very recently. Here’s where it used to live before April 2024, right under “Service Times”:
According to the Internet Wayback Machine, “Our Staff” vanished somewhere between April and May 2024. However, that “Our Staff” link now goes nowhere. It goes to a page saying the link is excluded. That means someone contacted that archive site to ask them to exclude the entire staff page from their site. Consequently, the Wayback Machine contains no records of their staff page.
One idly wonders who contacted the site to request this exclusion. And one further wonders why they asked to exclude this one page, and not their entire site—unless, that is, they have other secrets to hide that I haven’t found yet.
Tsk tsk! Jesus seemed to equate such behavior with hypocrisy, one recalls.
If this whole situation involved a regular private person who hasn’t done anything objectionable to anybody, like just some twee emo kid who grew up and was embarrassed about his grouchy MySpace phase and wanted the internet to forget about it, I wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at all or even bring up the exclusion. This time, though, the apparent god of quarks and quasars told this church to hire the liar Matt Queen, and yet they don’t want the internet to remember the staff page that presumably contained the evidence of their hiring decision.
So yes, I’m curious about why they seem so deeply ashamed of that decision.
I mean, I know why I personally would be deeply ashamed of having hired him. That’s not confusing. What’s confusing is that instead of just firing him and saying they misheard Yahweh, they’re obscuring the page containing his credentials but keeping him on staff. They’ve made it impossible to find a single webpage online containing Matt Queen’s status as a pastor on the site of the Friendly Avenue Baptist Church of Greensboro, NC, now or in the past.
At least now we know that Matt Queen used to work for this church between 2006-2010, so during and right after graduating from seminary. He only left there, it seems, when he left to work for SWBTS. When he had to flee SWBTS with his tail between his legs, Friendly Avenue Baptist Church took him in again. But they don’t want to trumpet that fact.
(PS: This is why we archive on sites that will not delete pages.)
But still no accountability on the horizon for Matt Queen
The other leaders of Friendly Avenue Baptist Church don’t seem like they know quite what to do yet. They’re still trying to buy time to figure it out. Amazingly, as part of that process they invited a guest speaker, Chuck Register, to preach a sermon on October 20th.
He preached about what qualifications a pastor should have.
None. That’s how many words I have. None.
(Apparently Matt Queen preached about similar topics early in his rehiring: “Marks of a Deacon” on April 28.)
I guess it’s nice that they’re thinking about this question. It’s strange they didn’t think more about it in the months after rehiring Queen as he fled SWBTS with a thick baffle of lies to cover his passage.
If I were that ashamed of my leader, I wouldn’t be in that group at all. One of the nicest things about being an ex-Christian is no longer having to figure out how to square hypocrites like Matt Queen with my beliefs about Jesus as an omnimax god who lives inside his followers.
The evangelical crony network has offered Matt Queen to the feds as a scapegoat and sacrifice
To understand what’s happening to Matt Queen, we need to understand how evangelical churches and denominations work behind closed doors.
Evangelical leaders operate within an informal group of frenemies that I call a crony network. Think of them like high school cliques. A school might contain a dozen of these groups, all jockeying for power within their own little ingroup. Each ingroup contains levels of power, with its own little kingpin, with one leader ruling them all.
In evangelicalism, individual members at each level of power protect each other and do each other favors when they can. In turn, they expect protection and favors when they need it.
Matt Queen’s entire problem, throughout this entire cover-up and interrogation and legal business, has been simple: He didn’t have quite enough time to climb into a coveted insider spot in the evangelical crony network, but he got into the kind of trouble that only top-level cronies could possibly have helped him avoid. Even then, his future usefulness needed to outweigh whatever their help might cost them. And let’s be clear here: By last June, that cost might have started to include prison time.
The top level SBC cronies know Matt Queen, of course, especially those of the Old Guard faction. I’m certain that they value him as a lackey. But he had not become the commander of lackeys. Not yet, anyway. With more time, he could have gotten there.
And that would have protected him. Alas for him, he ran out of time.
Instead, as a mid-level lackey, Matt Queen makes the perfect scapegoat to throw to the feds.
He’s high enough on the ladder of power that nobody can call him cannon fodder, but low enough that none of the powerful cronies need to fear for their own hides after sacrificing this one pawn. He’ll satisfy the FBI well enough.
After all this FBI stuff is done, the leaders of the SBC must be looking forward to getting back to business as usual: Wheelin’ and dealin’ and forever puttin’ off their long-awaited date with accountability regarding their sex abuse crisis.
As long as the flocks keep paying tithes and warming pews, they’re not worried about the future.
NEXT UP: We are feeling very helpful. So we will helpfully answer Baptist Blogger’s heartfelt questions about Matt Queen. See you soon!
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