Philip Robertson and his false accusations about sex abuse expose ‘Abuse of Faith’

Last week, Christa Brown knocked it out of the park again with a post about a self-serving comment from Philip Robertson about the systemic abuse problem in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). He’s the new Chair of the SBC’s top-ranked Executive Committee (EC), you see, and his hardliner faction is doing its best to push the denomination’s entire crisis under the rug. So he recently erroneously claimed that the SBC doesn’t even have a systemic abuse problem or a sex abuse crisis to worry its pretty li’l feather head about! Then, for good measure, he threw some slime at his factional enemies in the form of serious unsubstantiated accusations.

So today, we’ll meet this powerful new Southern Baptist. We’ll learn the various false accusations he’s made against people he doesn’t like and hear his constant complaints of having to deal with stuff he doesn’t wanna do. Then, we’ll correct all his false accusations and negate his attempts to avoid accountability for his denomination’s many, many problems.

(Next time, we’ll tackle his ignorance about what crises are and how systemic sex abuse works. This got way, way too long even for me for one sitting.)

(This post originally went live on Patreon on 8/13/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too!)

Quick Refresher about the SBC Factions:

The Old Guard faction consists of the ultra-conservative hardliners in the SBC. These include all of the now-very-old guys behind the Conservative Resurgence schism, the eternally-loyal, lickspittle ass-kissers they elevated to power who are now old, but not quite as old as their mentors, and a legion of angry, control-hungry mostly-Calvinist Millennial guys with unkempt beards who think that last schism didn’t go half far enough.

Instead of resolving any of the SBC’s serious problems, the Old Guard insists that Jesus super-wants the denomination to focus on recruitment and the culture wars. When you hear an SBC leader talking up the “Great Commission” and downplaying, denying, or simply ignoring the SBC’s dealbreaking issues, you can trust that he’s an Old Guard guy. As the video I’ll be linking later demonstrates, our guest star today, Philip Robertson, falls solidly into this faction.

The Pretend Progressives are doctrinally identical to the Old Guard. However, they do differ from them in two important ways. First, they talk about wanting to do something about the SBC’s endemic, entrenched sex abuse crisis and its eternal racism problem. Second, the Pretend Progressives aren’t quite as insistent on there being no women pastors in the SBC, ever, ever, EVER. They’re also not fond of Donald Trump.

For any one of these offenses, the Old Guard would gladly eviscerate every last Pretend Progressive leader and leave the entrails on the ground as a gooey warning to the rest. I doubt they’ve even noticed that their enemies have avoided making any real changes whatsoever to the basic core of the SBC.

Something interesting, perhaps, in how they interact: The Old Guard’s leaders and commentators constantly insult, smear, and malign their counterparts—along with any Old Guard adherents who are even slightly less draconian than they are. However, I’ve never heard the Pretend Progressives return fire. Really, the Pretend Progressives tend to be pretty nice to their enemies.

Can their niceness last? I don’t know. But by now, I am sure that niceness is their actual strategy. I can’t possibly be the only one who’s noticed how one-way the vitriol has always been.

Everyone, meet Philip Robertson. I don’t like him.

As I mentioned earlier, Philip Robertson is the new Chair of the SBC’s top-ranked Executive Committee (EC). He’s not the President of the EC, of course. That’d be Jeff Iorg, finally filling a seat vacated in 2021 by Ronnie Floyd—which we’ll explore in a minute here. But it’s still a very powerful position.

The EC elected Robertson last year to be their Chairman. Really, the whole affair was one of the very, very few wins the Old Guard faction have enjoyed lately. But it wasn’t an unexpected one. For decades—as we’ll explore more in a minute too—the EC has been the mountain fortress of the Old Guard. From there, the Old Guard’s leaders didn’t need to care how much their enemies piddled around on other committees and conventions and interviews.

None of that matters. Not even the Presidency of the SBC itself matters—at least in terms of denominational power. (It sure helps pad a lot of resumes, though, and likely sells a lot of books.) That stuff’s completely ephemeral. It changes like the tides. These men come and go so quickly that it barely pays to learn their names.

You see, all roads lead to the EC. These folks last for much longer. They are also beholden to way fewer people once elected or appointed. Once assembled, the EC sets annual budgets for all of the SBC’s denominational sub-entities and projects. Without money, ain’t nothing happening!

This combination of long-term tenure plus enormous, concentrated temporal power has produced a throbbing contradiction at the heart of the SBC. It defies its members’ insistence that shucks, y’all, the denomination is really just this loose federation of independent, completely-autonomous churches. Nobody of high rank within the EC acts like they even believe their own bullshit.

No, the EC’s leaders are the true rulers of Baptist County. The denomination’s many sub-groups and task force members and committees and seminaries and evangelism boards can bend the knee cheerfully or with a grimace or even with a snarl. But they will bend the knee regardless.

Philip Robertson’s path to the near-top

Before he became the EC’s Chairman, Robertson pastored a church in Louisiana. In 2018, someone appointed him to the EC as a trustee after Frank Page resigned—which we’ll also be exploring in a minute. Back in April and almost a year after he became the EC’s Chairman, Robertson wrote movingly of his boyhood growing up “on a dairy farm in southeast Louisiana.” He contrasted those bucolic, working-class days with his meteoric rise to very nearly the top of a billion-dollar religious franchise.

Yes, he writes, it sure was a “journey through the wilderness!” Being on all these committees with big-name leaders quitting or getting fired every few months sure took it out of him! Whew! But finally, Jesus worked a miracle—with the help of all these committees and meetings and votes over months and years, and of course with Robertson’s help too; we can’t forget that! At long last, the EC got Jeff Iorg elected.

(Man alive, what a stupendous miracle! Nobody could possibly hear that story and think Iorg’s election had anything to do with mortal effort! Can I hear an amen?!?)

Philip Robertson’s writing has the simpering stink of pious fraud and crony-network ingratiation to it. He knows how to talk the lingo, that is for sure.

The incredibly stupid, boneheaded thing(s) Philip Robertson said about sex abuse in the SBC

Back in May, the Emmanuel Discipling Network interviewed Philip Robertson (archive):

By the way, I don’t know who these Emmanuel guys are. But you may safely assume that any “discipling network” or discipleship-emphasizing leader will be prone to at least emotional or what some folks call spiritual abuse, which is very-church-flavored emotional abuse. The only evangelicals who like discipleship are those who ache for direct personal power over others, but can’t get it through legitimate means. So they try to borrow divine authority instead to strong-arm others into obedience.

During this interview, Robertson felt it necessary to air his opinion regarding the SBC’s sex abuse mega-scandal. And here, I ran into the first WTAF moment of the topic: Originally, I was just going to clip out the bit around 30 minutes in that Christa Brown quoted in her post on Baptist News Global. But he actually spoke at length about all the dark hypocrisy that SBC leaders have committed over the years. It was too much to clip!

Suffice to say that this guy refuses to hold SBC leaders accountable for a single person they have ever hurt or ethical boundary they have ever violated. As I’ll be outlining shortly, he’s got an excuse for everything his Dear Leaders do! Moreover, at about 10:25 he brandishes an excuse for himself or more precisely, his faction. Here, folks, is why the Old Guard has always been such a pack of sneering hyenas toward the Pretend Progressives:

Our disagreements tend to get highlighted – oh, absolutely much more than our unity. You know, we are, I think, in agreement on more than we are in the disagreement, and that’s a blessing. It is. And you know really, scripture in Ephesians chapter 4 I believe, the scripture teaches us that it’s not our job as Brothers and Sisters in Christ to create unity. That unity is created by the Holy Spirit lives inside of us. Ephesians 4 tells us that it’s our job to maintain that unity.

See? Jesus didn’t put unity in the hearts of the Old Guard! They can’t maintain what’s not there! Indeed, Philip Robertson spends quite some time slamming mainline and progressive Christian flavors as inferior to his TRUE CHRISTIANITY™. I’m sure Jesus won’t mind all that divisiveness.

Phillip Robertson offers a compelling explanation

Around 14:00, the Emmanuel guy begins to hand-wave away the SBC’s faction warfare:

In SBC circles, it seems we always have these heated discussions going on about something. There’s always something, you know that. We’re trying to safeguard against to slide this way or that way. And that’s like you said, that’s important. But much of the discussion the past couple of years has been focused on the Convention’s [meaning the SBC mother ship’s] handling of – and the Executive Committee, you know, specifically, you know, handling of the sexual abuse allegations and those things. And so can you just kind of give us a quick rundown of how the Executive Committee is addressing those concerns?

By the way, this is how they both talk throughout the video. Neither of these guys has ever taken any kind of public speaking class. They meander and babble constantly. Really, this 1:09:33 video should have been about 20 minutes long, tops. (In quoting them, I’ve politely tidied up some of their verbal diarrhea.)

Regardless, here is Philip Robertson’s answer, summarized:

• Sex abuse is totally ickie and gross. “We’ve got to be intentional here,” he intones. Intentional is advanced Christianese. It means decisive and forward-thinking, but in a Jesus-flavored way. Unfortunately, it often plays out in reality as setting big goals, then doing nothing. And that’s exactly where Philip Robertson goes immediately: “HOWEVER, having said that…”
• Having paid his grudging lip service to how horrible sex abuse is, Philip Robertson now accuses the mean ol’ Pretend Progressives of “politically hijack[ing]” the scandal. Sex abuse is now hopelessly “aggressively political.” That means the Old Guard is now no longer obligated to do anything about it.
• Gosh, y’all, sex abuse in SBC churches is just… so… COMPLICATED. Muh church autonomy! Muh local churches! Autonomy matters much, much more than sex abuse!
• He lets slip that the Old Guard’s leaders are still beyond pissed about the 2021 Annual Meeting. Not only did their enemies snag the SBC Presidency again, but the attendees held a last-minute vote denouncing white supremacy. Even worse, the attendees batted away the Executive Committee’s shockingly self-serving suggestion of investigating itself for wrongdoing in the whole sex abuse scandal. Instead, the attendees demanded a third party handle the investigation. And its results needed to be made public. In response, the mother ship was obliged to hire investigators and appoint a task force. Oh, and Ronnie Floyd quit over the mere threat of transparency.
• The SBC may be full of sex abuse. Philip Robertson may be all for protecting his leaders over dealing with sex abuse. But y’all, it is totally mean and politically-motivated for his enemies to insist on transparency. How very dare they! Muh attorney-client priv’lige! Muh Renaissance-era legal doctrine!
• Seriously, this guy talked about 6x longer about how mean it was to strip away his “attorney-client privilege” than he spent denouncing actual sex abuse.
• OMG SO MEAN.
• Philip Robertson is still mad at Russell Moore for leaking incriminating anti-Old Guard letters right before the 2021 Annual Meeting (and SBC President election). In October that year, Mike Stone tried to sue Moore for allegedly costing him the SBC Presidency.
• Also, since sex abuse is a crime, all anyone has to do is call the police and report it to them! Just call the police! Sheesh! Why is this even a thing?
• (Shakes jingly keys: Lookit them Catholics! Nobody really “addressed” their child-rape scandal! Why are we being singled out? We only fostered a culture of sex abuse for decades and covered up the results!)
• If the Old Guard had handled the sex abuse crisis from the start when it dropped in 2019, it would already have been dealt with. Their grand plan would have been ignoring it, but in a really Jesusy way.
• Hilariously, he complains that the Old Guard were seen as complicit or worse for refusing to deal with sex abuse and for refusing to accept the transparency mandate. Well, yes, both charges are 100% true—and remain so today.
• Later, he frets about the potential legal liability of a sex offenders database. Hey, so did former SBC and EC President Frank Page years ago—before, of course, he resigned from the presidency of the EC over “a morally inappropriate relationship.”

Incidentally, I’m not being hyperbolic here. Philip Robertson really is this self-serving, tribalistic, and lacking in empathy. He’s a living example of that “Counter-Signal/Smuggie” meme about rudeness being less acceptable than pedophilia:

I’m sure Jesus loves it when Philip Robertson makes unfounded, baseless, utterly unsupported accusations about those investigating sex abuse

Christa Brown’s article dealt mostly with some disturbing accusations that Philip Robertson leveled against the journalists who broke the original series of stories about the SBC’s sex abuse crisis in 2019. They called this series “Abuse of Faith.” It is a grim and extraordinarily high-quality read even today. It’s held up well five years later, too, particularly since virtually nothing has changed in the SBC since it was written.

At around 30 minutes into the interview, Philip Robertson shamelessly smears those journalists while the Emmanuel guy endlessly and very gravely nods like a bobblehead doll:

Philip Robertson: Essentially, this article claimed that there was systemic sex abuse taking place within the Southern Baptist convention that was elevated to a crisis.
Emmanuel guy, head-bobbing gravely: Yeah. Yeah.
Philip Robertson: Now, there’s a lot of problems with that article.
Emmanuel guy, head-bobbing gravely: Absolutely.
At this point, Philip Robertson leaks what sure looks like a Duper’s Delight smirk.

Here are Philip Robertson’s accusations. Just imagine the other guy head-nodding away like mad, cuz he never stopped:

There have been numerous individuals who have done a lot of digging into that article and have found a lot of it to be very problematic. In other words, there were many many people listed in that article who had no connections to Southern Baptist at all. In fact, there were only a a very small relatively small amount of the people named in that article um who were part of the Southern Baptist convention. But it was used to help create this, you know, um, idea, yeah, that there was this systemic problem within the Southern Baptist convention that quite frankly in my opinion was not true.

Really? Who were these “numerous individuals,” hmm? What digging did they do? Most importantly, who were the people listed who weren’t “Southern Baptist at all”? Or is Philip Robertson simply waving around unrelated pieces of paper like Joseph McCarthy did decades ago?

I checked the first part of “Abuse of Faith” to make a list of every single abuser specifically named in that article

You know me, right? I hear weirdness, I dig. Just to get our party going, therefore, I’ve listed all of the named sex abusers described in just the first part of “Abuse of Faith“:

• An SBC pastor, Dale “Dickie” Amyx, molested Debbie Vasquez at 14 and impregnated her at 18. After she sued him, he admitted paternity of her child but insisted that he’d only had consensual sex with her.
• Michael Lee Jones sexually assaulted a teenage congregant at an SBC church. After that conviction, he started another SBC church. Predictably, he also now runs a youth nonprofit.
• Heather Schneider’s molester, her SBC church’s events coordinator John Forse, attacked her at 14 in a choir room at Second Baptist Church in Houston. For months, church leaders refused to fire him. Later, they denied all responsibility for any of it.
• A youth minister at First Baptist Church of Conroe, Riley Edward Cox Jr., admitted that he had abused at least three boys in his church in the 1980s. However, he “still works at an SBC church.”
• Leslie Mason, a prized SBC pastor in Illinois, returned to pastoring with an SBC church after being convicted of sex assault. Eventually, he admitted he had had “relationships” with four different children. After a short prison sentence for that, he returned to pastoring another SBC church.
• Joseph Ratliff sexually abused a man he was counseling while he was pastoring an SBC church in Houston, Brentwood Baptist. The man sued him and they settled it out of court.
• And of course, Paul Pressler, one of the biggest names in the SBC and the one responsible for the creation of the original Old Guard and the Conservative Resurgence schism itself, turned out to be a serial groper and rapist. His preferred prey was handsome young men and teens, which his law partner allegedly funneled right to him. Everyone around him allegedly just ignored the situation. Dude’s dead now. (May he rest in piss.)
• Paige Patterson, just as big an SBC name and Old Guard figure as Pressler, egregiously mishandled sex assault allegations on the SBC seminary he led. He also publicly aired his weird ideas about abused wives Jesusing their way to happy marriages and totally changed husbands. After a lot of fighting about what to do about it, the SBC finally fired him from the seminary gig. However, he still enjoys speaking engagements, meets with Old Guard figures, and plans strategies. The Old Guard refuses to turn away from him.
• Darrell Gilyard, one of Patterson’s brightest and most talented protégés, turned out to be a rapist. Shockingly, after his conviction for molestation of Tiffany Thigpen and two other girls who were under 16, another SBC church hired him right away.
• After Gilyard “viciously” attacked Thigpen when she was 18, she tried to get help from Jerry Vines. He’s an SBC pastor in Jacksonville and a former SBC President himself. In response, Vines tried to shame her into silence. He never called the authorities.
• Mark Aderholt, a former missionary and onetime employee of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, assaulted Anne Marie Miller as a teenager. When he wanted a position with the SBC’s International Mission Board (IMB), he revealed the assault to them. They verified her story and apparently didn’t hire him after all. Though he resigned those other positions too, Aderholt continued to work at SBC churches and for a state-level convention. When Miller inquired about the IMB’s investigation, the IMB general counsel, Derek Gaubatz, told her to “let it go” and to forgive her attacker “as Christ has forgiven you.”

I don’t think I missed any of the named names. But if you spot one I missed, let me know.

Who in that article was not Southern Baptist, Philip Robertson?

As far as I can ascertain, these listed names all belong to Southern Baptist men who held Southern Baptist positions at the time of their offenses. In fact, almost all of them worked in ministry. Some are huge denominational names, though most are small-timers who took advantage of the anonymity of small towns and overly-trusting congregations—and, largely, still do.

So now I must ask Philip Robertson these questions:

Who, out of these named men in the first story alone, turned out to have “no connections to Southern Baptist at all”? Which of them, O Master Lorekeeper Philip Robertson, might have been the “many many” men who weren’t SBC “at all”?

Or is this repulsive liar-for-Jesus just hoping against all hope that nobody sympathetic to the Old Guard ever actually reads “Abuse of Faith”?

It’s obvious that he wants to chill any future impulses among the flocks to investigate sex abuse. This is the fate that awaits any such person: Accusations and smearing from one of the top leaders of the SBC’s top committee. Don’t imagine anyone warming the pews will miss this message, especially anyone even tangentially involved in advocating for reforms. Or anyone who’s endured sex abuse from SBC employees or ministers.

The political football that the Old Guard didn’t so much drop as refuse to pick up at all

Philip Robertson is clearly angry that “Abuse of Faith” and sex abuse became a political cause that his faction doesn’t control. But it did so only because the Pretend Progressives realized what good optics it presented them. Remember, they don’t want to change anything either. They just want their faction to win votes. They know that the flocks will vote for their faction if they make mouth-noises about supporting sex abuse reform. And so they do.

The more of these mouth-noises the Pretend Progressives make, the more the Old Guard is contrasted as not giving a single flying woodledoodle about sex abuse. Their tribalistic tendencies will always force them to the the opposite of whatever their enemies are doing. If their evil ickie un-Jesusy enemies are doing X, then the Old Guard must renounce X, reject X, slime and smear X—and do the opposite for Y. As you might guess, Y then becomes their special tribal marker. In their eyes, Y completely differentiates them from their enemies. Y is what Jesus really wants them to do!

So it’s hilarious that their leaders are this mad about being too late to pick up the political football themselves. They ignored it because the Old Guard always ignores the rabble. (What, does anybody really think that “Abuse of Faith” was the first time anybody tried to alert the SBC’s leaders to their sex abuse crisis? It was not. Nine months before that series dropped, a now outcast Old Guard leader, Al Mohler, had wept crocodile tears over that precise issue.)

Now, the Old Guard can only whine pitifully about recruitment, culture wars, and evangelism. Those were the causes they divvied up for themselves. Alas, that tactic strikes any truly good, moral person as absolutely bizarre concerns to have while there’s a major sex abuse crisis to resolve. It’s the equivalent of the Old Guard fretting about a park bench needing repainting while the park is on fire.

They’re trying to add more people to the SBC’s tithing rolls while it’s manifestly obvious that they can’t even ensure the safety of the ones they’ve already got.

Philip Robertson is not fit to lead SBC-lings to a buffet table, much less to any greater understanding of Jesusing

I’m guessing that Philip Robertson didn’t expect Christa Brown to pick up on the video on YouTube—much less to write about it. Southern Baptists have a great many media sources, after all. And tons of information flows through those sources. That makes it just about impossible to keep abreast of all of it. And in recent years, I’ve become certain that the worst-of-the-worst guys in the denomination take advantage of all that noise to hide in plain sight. So in that video, Robertson addresses only sympathizers.

So it’s always funny when some internal, completely damning information from some terrible dystopian person or group leaks out into the open. This video interview just might be another example of the genre.

I found it particularly interesting that the Emmanuel guy seemed to know all about Philip Robertson’s accusation of “Abuse of Faith” containing any “problematic” elements. These two men shared some unspoken dialogue there.

This might be an interesting future rabbithole to pursue—along the same lines as those other right-wing sites I lurk. Some cesspit of fundagelicals out there somewhere is creating false rumors about “Abuse of Faith” and elevating them to dogma. Suddenly, I need to know more.

Secrets are harder to keep these days, even for SBC leaders

Until then, though, I can be sure of this:

Sex abuse advocates are watching for SBC leaders’ accidental admissions of the truth. Hopefully, they’ll stir the flocks to start noticing how little has truly changed since “Abuse of Faith” dropped. In fact, perhaps things have only gone backward. Now the Old Guard is manufacturing own fake news about coverage of the crisis.

And as we will see next time, the SBC’s supposed reforms have only added the trappings of accountability without the actual substance of it.

Philip Robertson, as a major Old Guard leader with real power, likely dreads the day when the flocks finally find their real strength. I hope he does. That day, they shall leave his sick, corrupted money train at the station.

The rest of us can only hope that day comes soon. Irrelevance is the very least the SBC’s masters deserve.

(Just so you know: Christa Brown is my mutual on Twitter. I’ve admired her integrity and courage from afar ever since her stopbaptistpredators.org days. I’m very sympathetic to her advocacy goals.)

NEXT UP: We’ll helpfully define big scary words like crisis and systemic, since Philip Robertson is so incompetent that he has no idea what they actually mean in Reality-Land. See you soon!

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