Recently, a rising star in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Matt Queen, fell to earth in the most singularly SBC way imaginable: By lying to the FBI about a sex assault that had occurred on the SBC seminary campus where he worked. After news of Queen’s guilty plea broke, one of his seminary chums, Benjamin Cole, took to digital print to express his sadness and confusion. But he also wanted to offer his fellow evangelicals answers concerning why this studious, Jesusy, obedient seminary student had blown up his life for a lie. Overall, I agree with what he wrote.
Today, I want to shine a spotlight on Cole’s post—and to offer some very gentle pushback to some of his takeaways.
(From introduction: The movie we’re not allowed to watch over here in Freedom Land. That’s not an endorsement or suggestion, just a sad statement about *waves vaguely at everything*.)
(This post appeared on Patreon on 11/8/2024. Its audio ‘cast is there too and freely available by the time you see this!)
Very quick rundown of the Matt Queen situation
At the end of 2022, a student attending the undergraduate part of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) sexually assaulted someone. The Dean of Women, Terri Stovall, reported it to campus police. But nothing got done about it till a few months later, when city cops showed up with an arrest warrant for the assaulter.
As you can imagine, the whole thing was a public relations nightmare. It was also one that the school’s chief of staff, Heath Woolman, desperately wanted to bury. After all, the FBI was actively investigating SBC leaders’ potential role in covering up their denomination-wide sex abuse crisis.
During what sounds like an impromptu meeting, Woolman allegedly told Stovall to “make it [the report of the assault] go away.” At the time of the meeting, Matt Queen was the school’s interim provost. For most colleges, that means he acted as the main nuts-and-bolts administrative officer of the seminary. So naturally, he also attended that meeting.
Woolman and Queen both tried to gaslight Stovall into repudiating the assault report, but she persisted. Additionally, it’s worth noting that neither Woolman nor Queen have expressed any concern about harboring a sex assaulter on their campus, nor in allowing him to continue toward his degree and a pastor gig somewhere.
When the FBI questioned Queen in the summer of 2023, he told them he had taken notes during that meeting. These notes showed that nobody’d said or done anything amiss. Further, they showed that Queen had no clue about Woolman’s request to destroy the report.
Unfortunately, these notes were fake. Queen created them well after the meeting.
At some point, Queen changed his story. He admitted the truth and pled guilty to lying to the FBI. Meanwhile, the FBI hasn’t charged Woolman and the campus chief of police with anything yet, though I do hope and suspect their time is coming.
Some people will indeed “die for a lie,” though evangelicals refuse to think too hard about that. Half of the episodes of House, MD center on that exact situation! More often, though, people just blow up their entire lives and futures for one.
You were supposed to save them, Matt Queen!
When I think about the entire Matt Queen debacle, that scene from one of the Star Wars prequels keeps coming to mind. In the final confrontation between Anakin—now fully consumed by the Dark Side of the Force—and his former master Obi-Wan, the two have a very dramatic exchange:
Indeed, Anakin was all but a messiah to the world of Star Wars. Immaculately conceived, as much the stuff of the Force as flesh, and the most powerful wielder of the Force that anyone’d ever seen: This kid amazed everybody. But he had some major faults, too. Defying the Jedi’s ideals, he felt deep and passionate love for his wife. He also had an intense connection to his mother. These emotions drove him into darkness to try to save them, and yet he still lost them both. Finally, he would lose his master, too, along with most of his own body.
In Obi-Wan’s words to his former Padawan (protégé), we see his heartbreak and confusion. Since he’d been but a Padawan himself, he had championed this youth’s cause. He shepherded Anakin’s progress from early childhood to adulthood. He taught Anakin as best he could.
Obi-Wan and the rest of the Jedi thought Anakin would destroy the Jedi Order’s worst enemies, the Sith: Corrupted knights consumed by the Dark Side.
Instead, Anakin joined them.
Obviously, nobody thinks Matt Queen was a messiah-gone-wrong. But that’s close to the level of hope that Southern Baptists had in him. For about the past 15-20 years, he has positioned himself as someone who can finally coax the pew-warming flocks to leave their comfort zones and start evangelizing.
Matt Queen’s evangelism suggestions are always thick with Bible verses and lots of super-duper-Jesusy hype. As a result, I don’t think anybody ever bothered to see if his suggestions actually worked. It was enough for evangelicals that Matt Queen at least sounded like he knew what he was doing. That was all it took to send him to the upper ranks of SBC leadership.
All this, and the guy was a loyal member of the SBC’s extremely conservative faction, which I’ve nicknamed the Old Guard. Whew!
But instead of saving the Old Guard and the SBC from their own decline, Matt Queen has only embarrassed them even more.
Take a drink: An evangelical has diagnosed The Big Problem Here
In Benjamin Cole’s October 17th post on Baptist News Global (BNG), he laments the downfall of his onetime seminary friend.
(And I just want to say it’s funny as hell that Cole begins by comparing Matt Queen’s downfall to “an old Irish drinking song” with the refrain, “Johnny, I hardly knew ye.” At one time, Southern Baptists were known for their refusal to drink alcohol or dance. I guess abstaining from fun stuff is nowhere near as fun for SBC-lings as arguing with people online. I’m not sure if Cole’s SBC or not still, and BNG is more generally Baptist than specifically SBC, but it’s still funny. Alcohol used to be such a dealbreaker for these guys!)
In his post, Cole paints an evocative picture of Matt Queen’s student days. Back then, Queen was so zealous an evangelist that he simply couldn’t wait until graduation to start large recruitment projects. At the same time, he seemed obedient, quiet, gentle, and above all studious. While Benjamin Cole got reprimanded for being the very picture of an obnoxious, over-politicized culture warrior, Queen evangelized and got love and support from everyone around him.
Cole’s diagnosis of Queen’s weakness is simple:
Those who’ve known Matt Queen for decades confess he never was built for that sort of spotlight on the denominational stage. In truth, he probably never was well suited for the administrative positions to which three successive Southwestern presidents imprudently promoted him. Nevertheless, and as I’ve opined for decades, competence and character too often take the backseat to blind loyalty and uncritical obeisance when denominational posts are being handed out.
Cole’s assessment of SBC culture is, of course, correct. He also points out that Matt Queen has been the Padawan of “some shady characters.” Also correct. These include Paige Patterson, who apparently mentored Queen for a while. The two even served together on the SBC’s EVANGELISM TASK FORCE in 2018.
So The Big Problem Here, to Cole, is simply the nature of the SBC itself. It is, as he puts it:
[. . .] a convention whose most prominent theologians and denominational powerbrokers routinely apply an over-bloated hermeneutic of authority and submission to everything from the inner operations of the eternal godhead to the meal planning and suitcase packing of twentysomething newlyweds.
In a general sense, he’s not wrong. As you might guess, I agree with most of his points. But just as with conservative politics, we have to look beyond that obvious corruption and control-lust.
First and foremost, let’s look at the topmost, obvious level: Matt Queen’s suitability for the high-level role the Old Guard gave him at SWBTS. At any well-run school that’s not wracked by dysfunctional authoritarianism, Queen wouldn’t have been suited for that role at all. Heck, I’m not even sure he’s suited to be a pastor, which is his current official role.
Alas, his superiors don’t have a lot of other places to put him. They don’t really have a role for someone who’s only an evangelist. Sticking Matt Queen in an SBC seminary wasn’t a bad idea at all. But making him a provost, right as the denomination’s leaders and its seminary officers are bracing for an FBI investigation into their role in covering up sex abuse?
That turned out to be a very bad idea. And it reminded me of another one, centuries ago.
The right guy, perhaps, but in the wrong job and at the worst possible time
Sometimes I’ve heard Pope Clement VII (r 1523-1534) called “the right Pope at the wrong time” or “the most unfortunate of men.” He really was both. The funny thing is that as Renaissance popes go, he wasn’t the worst they’ve ever had. He was a Medici princeling’s love-child, with all of the local/Italian political connections, artistic appreciation, diplomatic skill, and business savvy that family link should imply. In terms of being a high-level Catholic clergyman, he kept things ticking along. Though the Church’s coffers ran dangerously low, he even became the patron of some of the greatest artists the modern(ish) world has ever known.
However, Clement wasn’t much of a military leader, and he didn’t handle international politics all that well. Both erupted into major concerns during his rule. As the Reformation took form, the French started arguing with the Holy Roman Empire—and they both wanted his help. Various countries’ leaders stopped wanting to kneel to the papacy. Back East, Islam was turning into a theocratic empire. As the situation worldwide grew more and more dire, Clement only spiraled further out of control.
The troubled marriage of the English king, Henry VIII, gave this entire squabble a tangible form. Henry wanted to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. However, he wanted to do so on extremely shaky grounds which would have deeply dishonored Katherine and their daughter Mary. Nonetheless, Henry wanted Clement’s blessing.
And normally, such a request might not have been that much of a problem. Just right then, though, it was a huge one.
If Clement sided with Henry despite the obviously self-serving nature of his request, Clement knew he would deeply offend Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was Katherine’s nephew. If Clement sided with Katherine, whose cause was very clearly just, obviously that’d anger everybody else and maybe push Henry out of the Church itself. Perhaps more importantly, however, Charles had imprisoned Clement after his army thoroughly sacked Rome. So obviously Clement didn’t want to annoy Charles too much. Clement survived only because of the last shreds of Charles’ goodwill.
Clement just wasn’t built for this kind of international-scale power politics. Maybe if he’d been pope a century earlier or even later, chances are good that he’d now be remembered more kindly by history.
An evangelical seminary? Or a foul refuse dump full of the smoke of backroom deals, the stench of sick secrets, the keening silent cries of justice denied?
(Why not both?)
Similarly, Matt Queen wasn’t built for Southern Baptist backroom politics. Not as the denomination stands now, anyways.
Queen’s strengths would have played out much better had he taken the interim provost role either decades before the decline or well after the sex abuse crisis gets either handled or forgotten. During the crisis and amid continuing decline, he’s far more prone to acting according to his weaknesses—just as Clement was.
To the Old Guard, making Matt Queen the interim provost of an SBC seminary probably felt like a solid, unmistakable affirmation of their dedication to evangelism. For his own part, I can’t imagine Queen saw the matter any differently. His superiors didn’t even consider whether or not a guy who was an evangelist to his fingertips could handle the bureaucracy and crony insider politics required for a job at one of the major cesspits of evangelical cronyism and politicking. And really, Queen couldn’t have been reasonably expected to know what to expect.
The SBC’s leaders do this sort of thing all the time. Even nowadays, they still appoint pastors to be the leaders of their multi-billion-dollar denomination, then go all surprised Pikachu face when shockingly poor decisions get made and nothing ever gets fixed. In the Old Guard in particular, loyalty to the party overrules any qualifications candidates may have or lack.
But we must move beyond the obvious faction fracas and dysfunctional power structure of the SBC. There’s something much more fundamental going on here, if you’ll pardon the term. To me, one of the more important facets of the Matt Queen story involves the particular and all-too-common weaknesses of evangelists themselves.
Christianese 101: On having a burden
Evangelicals think that Jesus has a set of tasks and a life goal for each one of his followers. Very often, they think of his marching orders as having a burden for something. The phrase always means that Jesus gave them the burden—and that the burden relates to his overall plan for that follower’s life.
It usually translates roughly as really wanting to do that thing.
So someone who feels a burden for the lost wants to evangelize. Someone who has a burden for children might go into education or volunteer with the Sunday School department at church. If the burden is a place, like France or the city of Eugene, Oregon, then that person really wants to go do Jesusy things there (and probably wants other people to pay for it all).
Occasionally, one might hear anecdotes of an evangelical who feels a burden for something they don’t care about or want to do. Or they lose interest in a burden they really thought Jesus wanted them to have. This usually becomes PROOF YES PROOF that it must be Jesus’ burden and not something they made up for themselves. However, sometimes other evangelicals will reprimand that person for making Jesus’ yoke heavy. Others still chide their peers for not “learning to have a burden” for whatever they think is important right then. A burden for evangelism crops up often as a rich source of guilt and shame.
Since there’s not a single objective way to tell what the source or nature of a burdened feeling might be, evangelicals do all kinds of policing and gatekeeping around the concept. There’s no way to win at the more-hardcore-than-thou horse races. All you can do is walk away from the track.
And yes, I can guarantee you with 100% solid confidence that Matt Queen and his superiors all thought he had a burden for evangelism. It’s been his singular focus since the 2000s.
That’s exactly why it was such a huge mistake for the Old Guard to make Queen the interim provost at SWBTS.
The thorn in their sides
I am hard-pressed to think of many modern(ish) evangelists who didn’t have some huge dark secret just waiting to chest-burst forth into a full-fledged scandal.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Lonnie Frisbee became the spark of the entire Jesus People movement—which, in turn, created modern American white evangelicalism. He was unbelievably good at selling religion. However, his private life was both messy and confused. He abused hard drugs, had very off-limits sex, and fell in with evangelical conjobs like Kathryn Kuhlman. In 1993, he died at 43 of AIDS. I doubt many young evangelicals nowadays even know who he was.
And yet without his exceptionally charismatic preaching and zeal, modern white evangelicalism would likely look very different. The converts of the Jesus People movement went on to found the most popular and definitive evangelical churches ruling the Christ-o-sphere today. (In particular, Willow Creek Community Church. But there are many others.)
Ravi Zacharias might be an even better and more recent example. His evangelistic crusades and products converted countless people. And yet for years, he abused and harassed women behind the scenes. I could also name any number of televangelists from the grand ole ages of the 1980s and 1990s. Or Ted Haggard.
Even the Apostle Paul mentioned having a “thorn in his side” that kept him from the moral purity he demanded of his followers. I’ve heard a lot of evangelicals theorize that this thorn was sexual licentiousness or even (GASP) homosexuality—or they hotly deny that it could possibly have been!
But take a closer look at the names and people I’ve described here. Their thorns were not completely unknown to anybody. Frisbee, Zacharias, Haggard, you name the scandal-causing evangelist and we can find lackeys of theirs who knew and covered up their leaders’ behavior. These evangelists weren’t actually that good at hiding it.
Big lie, little lie
Nor would I expect them to be.
Part of being powerful in a dysfunctional authoritarian system requires at least some people in the inner circle to know that the leader is flagrantly disobeying the group’s rules. Breaking rules is how dysfunctional authoritarians show their power. Someone has to notice that the rule’s getting broken. Someone has to cover up the rulebreaking so the rubes in the flocks never know.
So I am certain that at least a few people around Matt Queen have noticed over the years that he sometimes stretches the truth. When lies get as big as the one he told to the FBI or as absolutely false as the one I’ll describe below, I cannot help but remember the rule:
Big lie, little lie.
Where you find the one,
you’ll usually find the other as well.
Evangelism requires dishonesty and the willingness to trample boundaries
None of this is new. Evangelicalism’s most successful salespeople tend to be hypocrites. They just about have to be. Honesty doesn’t sell their one and only product: Active membership in an affiliated church. Only the salesperson willing to lie through his teeth and trample boundaries wins customers. That is exactly what Matt Queen did to a very anxious young man in the throes of his first bout of religious euphoria:
But the notion of a “burden” being lifted stood out to one of the attendees at Queen’s session, a high school graduate named Andrew. At the close of the session, Andrew went to Queen and asked him, “Is that what it’s supposed to feel like?”
Initially unsure of what Andrew was asking, Queen asked what he meant. Andrew responded, “That story you told about that encounter with that lady, is that what it’s supposed to feel like when you get saved—like a burden is lifted off of you?”
Queen explained that this is not necessarily the case for all new believers, especially children. “But for somebody who’s a little older and has lived through a lot more and has a lot more anxiety, it can feel that way,” he said.
As that story tells us, Andrew was a lifelong evangelical. Despite that, he’d spent his entire life terrified of Hell and uncertain of his posthumous safety. So this encounter in the story was not a conversion in any sense. The young man needs a good therapist specializing in religious trauma, not a shot in the arm of short-lived euphoria.
Undeterred, Matt Queen diagnosed Andrew as having “never truly surrendered his life to Christ,” then victoriously declared it a conversion and then used the whole exchange as a sales anecdote at that very conference. Not only that, but Andrew—who, again, is a lifelong evangelical—is getting baptized again, this time for realsies. A sale and a completely false new notch on the baptismal pool? My goodness! Get the good silverware out tonight, folks!
My heart just breaks for that kid. So many of us have been there! Once the euphoria wears off, he’ll return back to his usual anxious self. At that point, his scrupulosity will latch onto something else he’s scared he did wrong, Hell will begin to torment his thoughts again, and he will be terrified. But this time, he’ll be far more ashamed of seeking help for it.
Matt Queen hasn’t solved Andrew’s main issue. He’s just pushed it forward and splotched down some sticky Jesus frosting to hide its roughest edges for now. So yes: I regard Matt Queen as deeply dishonest.
Benjamin Cole is wrong when he asserts that Matt Queen was a terrible candidate for the interim provost job at SWBTS. In that dishonesty, however, the evangelism-focused Queen might actually have been perfect for it. But that’s not all Cole might be wrong about.
Pushing back against some assertions about Matt Queen
In his post lamenting his onetime school friend’s downfall, Benjamin Cole writes this:
Clearly, nobody made Matt Queen falsify records. Nobody induced him to lie to federal investigators. And nobody told him to subject yet another Southern Baptist church or institution to the trauma and tragedy of a failed ministry leader and a fallen preacher.
I’d sure like to know how he knows that. Because from where I’m sitting, that’s as far from “clear” as it’s possible to be.
No, I don’t think anyone held a gun to Queen’s head to force him to lie to the FBI, then produce fake notes for the meeting he had with Woolman and Stovall. But I do think something far more powerful compelled him: Self-interest.
Matt Queen cared not at all about justice or even compassion for sex assault victims. To my knowledge, he’s never shown even the least concern for the guy who assaulted someone but was still allowed to attend SWBTS so he could go be a pastor one day. I don’t think he’s ever expressed concern for the assault victim, either. If Queen’s mind felt troubled at all after lying to the FBI, that certainly didn’t stop him from maintaining the lie until he realized the feds aren’t as easy to dupe as his usual targets.
I assert as well that Queen’s superiors might have a larger role to play in those lies. None of them offered any pushback to those lies. ZERO, NONE, NOT A BIT, NOT EVEN A SMIDGE. Their consciences weren’t troubled at all by Queen’s attempt to cover their asses. Not a one of them has even one moral bone in their body, if they can cover up a sex assault and not hinder the assaulter one bit from a future career in church and/or denominational leadership.
Matt Queen might have been “hot-hearted” about evangelism, as Cole put it. Sure. But he was not “a faithful Christian witness” or an “exemplary denominational servant.” He was a liar and just really good at faking it all, just as he was good at dazzling evangelism marks like Andrew with false claims about his product.
I’m sick of this compartmentalization. Matt Queen is not who Benjamin Cole thought he was. It’s really that simple. Queen should never be allowed to hold power over anyone or represent his denomination in any official way again. But then, neither should his superiors, who might never be charged with anything at all.
It’s so funny to see evangelicals try and try and try to recover from decline, though
In a world full of bad news these days, one bright spot involves evangelicals’ ongoing inability to diagnose their real problem, much less fix anything.
As we’ve seen for years, evangelicals know they’re in serious trouble. They need to reverse their decline before they reach full irrelevance. They’ve known this for years. Even before they realized they were in decline, they tended to idolize anyone who claimed to have a burden for evangelism, to use the Christianese.
But now? Oh, it’s a seller’s market—and the buyers have no idea how to assess the goods.
Evangelicals can always be counted upon to cover their asses and lie through their teeth rather than acknowledge anything that might hinder their desires, whatever they might be. The higher up the leader, the more true that rule seems to be.
Perhaps that’s why there is almost no site or blogger out there right now talking about Matt Queen’s guilty plea. We’re now about two weeks into the story, but you’d hardly even know it happened if you only followed the Religious Right for your evangelical news. Benjamin Cole is one of the few to tackle the story, and for that I thank him. The rest barely even offer the bare facts of the guilty plea, refusing to comment or editorialize on the story.
And who’s even surprised by that?
NEXT UP: Some interesting new stuff going on with evangelicals’ ever-more-desperate attempts to reverse their decline. See you soon!
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