My first life ended with an assault on a dark dirt road near the old Addison airport north of Dallas. There were many more assaults that followed, but that’s where my mind returns most often. For fifty years, I have pictured myself on that dark road, pinned between the pastor’s body and his baby-blue station wagon. Over and over again, the past keeps clawing its way out from the hellhole of Farmers Branch.
There’s the me who existed before the dark road and the me who existed after it—the dehumanized ghost girl. But at the time, I didn’t even realize I had died. And I didn’t have a clue why I struggled so much for so many years to follow, constantly trying to figure out how to be human and whole again.
I think of that dark road as when it all began. It’s a marking point. But really, I don’t know when it began. When did I become prey for the pastor? Probably much sooner.
How many times did it happen? How many people knew? How many Bible verses did he weaponize?
By reducing my story to such calculations, I can detach from it, because no one would ever want to be stuck inside this story, least of all me. Detached is far better, so I use tricks like this to force my mind out of the rut.
Despite the way my brain tends to fixate on that dark dirt road, maybe it all really began with his off-color jokes. Before the church bought him that baby-blue station wagon, he used to drive a ’66 stick-shift Mustang, and after church, my friends and I would cram into it to go to Taco Bell or Baskin-Robbins. One of us always had to sit in the middle and scrunch up our knees in between the bucket seats, and invariably he’d crack a joke about how he was going to put his stick between our legs. It was the same joke every time, and we all just laughed. All of us. He was the pastor, and we were just giggly girls.
Since Tommy was a touchy-feely kind of pastor, I didn’t think much of it when an arm around my shoulder became a hand massaging my neck. Or when ordinary hugs became longer, pressed-in hugs. Or when holding hands in group prayer circles became holding hands in solitary prayers. Should I have realized something was amiss? We were praying, and he was the pastor.
Then came a hand goosing my butt when I got a drink at the water fountain, and then a hand on my knee, and then a hand going up my thigh. Though I sometimes felt uncomfortable—and even refrained from practicing the piano in the sanctuary because he interrupted me so often—never once did I imagine there was anything inappropriate going on. He was, after all, my pastor.
Then there were the times when he seemed to be all over me while we played Twister. It was a game he often brought out at youth group gatherings, and it never occurred to me—and apparently to no one else—to think there was anything inappropriate about the pastor playing it with the kids, twisting his body and pressing against us as he did. I thought it was just good clean Christian fun.
“Grooming”: it’s the word everyone uses, but it doesn’t begin to convey the full premeditated ferocity of what actually happens. Strangely, it’s a word that carries a connotation of care. You might imagine someone tending a horse and giving attention to its coat. But for the horse, there is no ulterior motive. By contrast, in the “grooming” of human children, there is a profound, conniving evil.
It began when I was fourteen or fifteen—it’s hard to know. Apart from all the lewd jokes and handsy stuff, sometimes I think every single thing that ever happened in that church was a setup and part of the grooming for abuse. After all, as far back as I can remember, I was taught to be submissive and trusting of pastoral authority. “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way.” It was a hymn I’d sung a thousand times, and even though I knew it was about trusting God, it was the pastors who carried the authority to tell us what God wanted. My role was to “trust and obey.”
Maybe it runs even deeper. The very essence of evangelical faith is the relinquishment of personal autonomy with an all-encompassing surrender to a higher authority. True love for Christ meant dying to self. It’s what that nauseating “I Surrender All” hymn was all about:
All to Jesus I surrender
All to Him I freely give
On countless Sundays, I’d stood singing every verse through interminable altar calls, sometimes weeping as I sang, praying others would find the path of surrender, even as I fervently renewed my own determination to live surrendered.
Of course, despite the words of the song, it’s not really a “surrender” that you “freely give”; instead, it’s a “surrender” given to avoid eternal hellfire. Sometimes I think this single hymn may say everything anyone needs to know about the faulty foundation for evangelical notions of consent: give everything or get damned for all eternity. Talk about a power differential. And once you “surrender all,” that singular decision gives tacit consent, not only to God, but to the whole God-ordained chain of command: God, pastor, husband, wife, child. Kids are at the bottom, so kids are expected to surrender to pretty much everyone. Faith demands it. And I was a girl of infinite faith. Heck, if Abraham had told me to lie down on the sacrificial altar because God said he should plunge a knife into me, I might have hopped up onto that altar and shouted “Hallelujah!” That’s how surrendered I was.
Like some indoctrinated Young Pioneer of the Soviet Union, I’d marched into the church sanctuary every summer from my earliest years, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” at the top of my lungs. That was me, a soldier in the cause of Christ, determined to do whatever it took to further the mission.
And how many times had I recited Hebrews 13:17 in some Training Union memorization drill? “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves, for they watch for your souls.” That was God’s word telling me that the pastors were the ones watching out for my soul, keeping me from eternal damnation in a literal hellfire. Disobedience was unthinkable.
Of course, back then, it never occurred to me how convenient it was for the pastors that they got to channel God into telling everyone they should obey them. Instead, that “trust and obey” stuff was so embedded that it was as though the church had implanted some chip in my brain to control me from within.
Nowadays, I find it impossible to segregate any part of my faith that didn’t somehow factor into the grooming for abuse.
Adapted with permission from Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation by Christa Brown. Photo above by MANITO SILK on Unsplash.
Named as one of the “top 10 religion newsmakers” of 2022, Christa Brown has persisted for two decades in working to peel back the truth about clergy sex abuse and coverups in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. As one of the first to go public with substantiated child molestation allegations against a Baptist minister—and documentation that others knew—she has consistently demanded reforms to make other kids and congregants safer. Brown has been featured in The Houston Chronicle, Vice, writes for Baptist News Global, and has had numerous mentions in national media. She’s the author of Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation and This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and His Gang, a retired appellate attorney, a mom, and a grandma. She lives with her husband in Colorado. Follow Christa on Substack.
