An interview with Baptistland author Christa Brown:
On telling her story of survival, the betrayal of church leaders, and the journey toward healing

An interview with Baptistland Author Christa Brown. You can preorder Baptistland here, or at your preferred bookstore. Available on May 7.

In her bestselling 2023 book Disobedient Women, journalist Sarah Stankorb wrote of Christa Brown, “For so many years, she was one of the few people Southern Baptist sex abuse survivors knew they could call, someone they knew would listen.” I sat down with Brown earlier this month to talk about her new book, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation, a book that I hope everyone in the Into Account orbit will read.

I’ve trusted Brown for years as a consistent source of reliable, clear-headed analysis whenever the Southern Baptist Convention gets up to some shenanigans. As a survivor of child sexual abuse perpetrated by her SBC youth pastor, Brown was one of the first to come forward publicly and seek justice from the SBC. Over the course of decades advocating for herself and other survivors, Brown learned from hard experience just how theatrically empty the SBC ‘s reforms actually are. “Never feel guilty for skepticism,” she said to me. “We have given them the benefit of the doubt for decades, and they have decimated hundreds of lives with that benefit of the doubt.” As a skeptic hungry for hope, I find so much comfort in Brown’s steadfast, compassionate voice.
– Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director, Into Account

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What follows is an interview with Baptistland author Christa Brown. It has been minimally edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about what sparked the idea to write this particular book.

It’s something I’ve worked on for a long time. I think what sparked the idea really is so many other survivors, [and their] stories that are always turning around in my head. And I can’t tell all of those stories. But I hope that by telling my own, other survivors can see something of themselves in that. And I hope that my own story provides a microcosm record of the horror of how the Southern Baptist Convention has handled–not handled–clergy sex abuse, and how awfully they have treated survivors because my story is far from alone.

“I hope…my own story provides a microcosm record of the horror of how the Southern Baptist Convention has handled–not handled–clergy sex abuse, and how awfully they have treated survivors because my story is far from alone.”

 

I’d love to talk about the way you structure the book. In the introduction, you tell the reader that the book is the story of four deaths, and the deaths are of yourself. Would you be willing to talk about how you use the notion of death, you know, metaphorically and or literally in the book?

I think a lot of survivors of clergy sex abuse describe it as soul murder, which is obviously a death. And I think that’s kind of accurate, because of the impact. It’s not just a physical thing to our bodies. I think Sarah Stankorb was the person who said or wrote when paired with faith, abuse is a unique violence. Because when you pair it with faith, it is just all encompassing of your identity.

The four deaths, they are times in my life when the entirety of identity, everything that I thought and knew and believed about myself and about the world, the entirety of my identity was cast into the dark void. I had to rebuild after that, and become someone else. And I think we all have times in our lives very, very, very painful times, when our identity, what we thought we knew, when it’s all just shattered to bits.

What really struck me, particularly in the first two of the deaths you describe, before you met your husband, is just how utterly alone you were.

Yeah, I think I was I was very, very alone. I didn’t have support you know, and that’s so necessary for sexual abuse. And then they researched this — survivors who have support, who are cared for in some way tend to have less long term traumatic responses. So that makes a huge difference, having that support.

And by the same token, when people pile on and heap on all sorts of additional harm, they really exponentially magnify the trauma. That is what a whole heck of a lot of churches wind up doing. And that’s not a neutral. That is an additional harm-magnifying thing that churches do.

So, alone? Yeah, I feel that to my very bones. I look back on the girl I was, and oh my god, I just I feel such compassion for her. Because she was really, really alone. And she had to figure it out and deal with it herself. That’s a really hard thing to put on a kid. It’s a really hard thing to put on anyone.

Do you think that your aloneness was visible to people outside of your family? Or even within your family?

I certainly don’t think it was visible to people within my family because I was largely invisible. I think people often ask survivors, why didn’t you talk about it sooner? Why didn’t you tell someone? If my book does nothing else, I hope it will put to rest that question. Because what you see in my story, you see in lots of survivor’s stories. We don’t all come from these perfect families. A lot of us come from families that were deeply dysfunctional.

I hope people will see in my story, “Why in the world would that girl have told anyone? What was normal for her?”

What was normal for her was to be ignored. And so much so that it wasn’t even part of her consciousness that it was happening. She didn’t think of herself as lonely. She didn’t think of herself as being alone. This is just the box she lived in. This was normal. And I think that’s how it is for so many. I can’t imagine when I look at the girl that I was that she would have had the capacity to actively try to tell people.

I did tell some people and what it got me was absolutely nothing, and more hurt. So that was the pattern.

“I think Sarah Stankorb was the person who said or wrote when paired with faith, abuse is a unique violence. Because when you pair it with faith, it is just all encompassing of your identity.”

 

Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking, Who on earth would that girl have told? And you told your music minister.

Whom I loved dearly.

I want to talk about that a little bit, if you’re comfortable with it, because that particular betrayal was so similar to things that many survivors have shared with me. You know, that the abuse was terrible, but the even worse wound was when people who they thought they could trust didn’t believe them, or as in your music minister’s case, already knew about it.

He didn’t challenge your framing of the story, which was that you were having an “affair” with your youth pastor. He didn’t do anything to reframe it so that you understood that you weren’t responsible. So he allowed the secrecy to continue, and encouraged you to keep living in the secrecy. Can you talk about what that betrayal meant to you?

As I look back on it, that is what I feel in my bones is really the worst betrayal. Of course, I didn’t experience it as betrayal at the time, because this was someone I revered. I looked up to him enormously. He was not only the music minister of the church, he was also my piano teacher. I sought only to please him. And at the time that I told him, the perpetrator, the youth pastor, had reached the point where he just constantly told me that I harbored Satan.

I’d sat in the pews countless times, listening to these searing vivid imageries images of hell, where you burn forever, and never burn up. And when he told me I harbored Satan, it was terrifying. I thought that I would go to hell, and I thought “How can I have harbored Satan? How did I let Satan in?” I was a kid.

It was all just overwhelming. And that really was kind of my emotional and psychological undoing. So when I talked with the music minister, it was at a piano lesson. I’m there in the church sanctuary, where so much has happened. I literally just reached this point where I froze, and my hands would not move on the keys, and I just froze. I am begging the music Minister, “Will I go to hell? Will I go to hell?” He told me that I should never speak of it again.

It was only many, many, many years later, decades later, when I learned that he had actually known even before that. Because the perpetrator himself had talked to the music minister about it. He was afraid that someone had seen him with me. And the realization, I mean, that betrayal there! Because of course, abuse tends to escalate and it gets worse over time.

The realization that my beloved piano teacher, the music minister for the church, could have stopped it all so much sooner. Yet he did nothing. He did nothing. I’ll never get over that. I’ve had many, many survivors tell me the same thing. That is how so many others respond, and that just does such enormous, grave, and greater harm than the original abuse itself. Which is plenty awful enough.

When the music minister said never speak of this again, what theological justification do you think he had? If any?

I don’t know. He certainly didn’t give me his reasoning. Probably in his mind, he rationalizes it somehow, theologically. I think he was using Matthew 18, right? Because he did talk to the youth pastor; he did tell the youth pastor don’t do this again. At some point he told the youth pastor, if you do this again, then I’ll have to take it before the whole church. And that’s essentially a Matthew 18 kind of scenario.

But of course, the youth pastor ignored it all. It left me completely exposed and vulnerable as a kid. And mixed in with all that pseudo-theological rationalization that may or may not have been going on in his head, I suspect is probably just “how do we protect the church?” It was after I broke down, then the youth pastor moved on to another church, a much bigger church. I was told that he got a higher salary as a children’s minister.

“[During a piano lesson with my youth minister], I literally just reached this point where I froze, and my hands would not move on the keys, and I just froze. And I am begging the music Minister, ‘Will I go to hell? Will I go to hell?’ He told me that I should never speak of it again.”

 

I think what really stuck out for me is how dehumanizing that silencing was to you. You had every reason to assume that the music minister, your piano teacher, thought of you as a full human being. And then he went and did something that made it clear that whatever he thought you were, it wasn’t a full human being. Because if he thought you were a full human being, he would have tried to understand how you were affected.

Yet he was a father himself. You know, you might think that he would have some concern. That he would think, “What if someone did this to my own child?” But that wasn’t there. Instead, he kept it quiet, and he told me to keep quiet. The youth pastor moved on to a bigger and better job. His career prospered. They gave him a big going away party at the church. And I watched all that. They praised him from the pulpit and preached how lucky we were to have this great man of God in our midst.

As a kid, I don’t know how I could have arrived at any other conclusion than that this was a great man of God. And I was a girl who had harbored Satan.

I find that one of the biggest barriers that I come up against is in trying to make people understand why kids who are targeted don’t tell in church environments. I’m not sure that a lot of people who have the luxury of not knowing fully realize how much perpetrators use theology and biblical stories to manipulate their victims.

One thing that really stuck out to me was the way that he used the story of Mary. And also the way that you thought about Mary, could you talk about that a little bit?

Thank you for seeing that and giving voice to that. I really wanted that to come across in this book, how much he weaponized my faith against me. All the Bible verses he twisted so incredibly. I think it is very hard for people very connected to their faith to grasp what a powerful weapon that can be. And yeah, the Mary thing.

Where would we all be if Mary had not trusted in what God wanted from her even when she could not understand? Sometimes I would balk as a teenager at things he [the perpetrator] would want. He would say, “where would we be if Mary had been like you and balked.” As a girl who loved God, I wanted only to be like Mary. I wanted to be a girl with strong faith and to have the faith of Mary to trust. That’s what faith is supposed to be. You trust, even when you don’t understand. And so that’s what I tried to do.

It is hard for me to look at the story of Mary nowadays. We know that she was a teenager, you know, 15, probably at the oldest. She said, “according to Thy will.”

This is an all powerful God that we’re talking about, who overshadowed her. Mary complied. But from my own story–compliance is not consent. And there could not be a greater power differential there. I’m not saying I was like Mary. I never thought I was gonna give birth to a Christ child or anything like that. But perpetrators twist even the most holy and sacred of stories that people of faith hold in their hearts. They use them against victims in ways that are just so unholy. To persuade them into compliance.

“Perpetrators twist even the most holy and sacred of stories that people of faith hold in their hearts. They use them against victims in ways that are just so unholy. To persuade them into compliance.”

 

I had moments when I was reading that the first part of your book when I just felt physically nauseous. You do such an effective job of putting the reader inside of the head of that child that you were. It’s making me tear up just thinking about it, in part, because I see so many of my clients in the words that you use.

I’m not exactly sure how to ask this, but there were some things that made you particularly vulnerable to being targeted by someone like your perpetrator. I think about the way that your mother ran down your confidence, just constantly. I’m so glad that you’ve included those details, because they’re just so common. The way that you were treated at home, do you feel like there was a relationship between that and the reason that you were someone that he picked out as someone that he could exploit?

Yeah, I do. And I also just want to say thank you, Stephanie, thank you for your empathy. I can tell that you get it, and I appreciate that.

I do think that all children are vulnerable, and all people have their vulnerabilities. Predatory people are very, very, very good at targeting those vulnerabilities. In that sense, anyone who thinks they’re immune? I don’t think so. And I certainly don’t think any child is immune. Children, by their very nature are vulnerable. It’s the essence of being a child. Some children are, because of the circumstances, more vulnerable than others, more easily targeted than others.

I was a kid who grew up with a severe speech impediment. It took me until I was really at the edge of high school to learn how to speak without an impediment. And that affects how you think of yourself. That affected how my mother thought of me. She had her own problems, of course. She too, was very influenced by this cultural dynamic of Baptistland. I think her expectations for me were quite low.

I was kicked down a lot, as a kid, and kids at school bullied me a heck of a lot. Also, I was really fortunate to have some good close friends growing up as a kid. Still, kids tend to bully kids, if they’re a little bit different. And I was a little different.  I was also bullied incessantly by one of my sisters. You take all that into your body, and you begin to believe that this is how you deserve to be treated. You don’t even consciously know that’s what you believe about yourself. But I think I did. And so it never would have occurred to me, to tell anyone that I was being mistreated.

It was so normalized.

Yeah.

I think a lot about what sense we make of children, theologically. The Southern Baptist Convention has contributed extensively to national political conversations around what childhood, abortion, and reproductive choice mean.

I think one thing that has happened for a lot of people is that some of the some of the veils have been lifted in terms of how cynically the leadership of SBC has used the idea of the sacredness and preciousness of childhood to further their political ends. While at the same time, what is going on with the way that that denomination as a whole treats children? Could you talk about that?

You know, Ryan Stoller has a new book out called The Kingdom of Children. He’s more of a theologian, but he does try to talk about that very thing, about how we have completely dismissed the holiness of small people, small children, as separate human beings. In the Southern Baptist Convention, and in other more fundamentalist faith groups, oh my gosh, why do we hit children? Why do we hit children? And why do people not only do it, but teach and preach that this is what God wants? Somehow sacralize the hitting of children? I find it just horrific. Because what does that teach children about themselves? Those things are just so sad to contemplate.

As children, we all think we’re more mature than we are. It really wasn’t until my young daughter approached the same age I had been at the time of the abuse, that I began to grasp the full horror of what was done to me. Because I knew that I would react very differently if anyone had ever done to my daughter what was done to me.

I’m so tired of hearing church people talking about “precious children.” That phrase, “precious children.” They’re patting themselves on the back for how much they purportedly care about precious children. They’re exploiting children for their own image of self righteousness. While at the same time, they completely turn a blind eye to the horrors that their own pastors are inflicting on children, and to the fact that they are doing nothing about it. I’m sure you can hear the anger in my voice because it does make me angry.

 

“I’m so tired of hearing church people talking about ‘precious children.’ That phrase, ‘precious children. They’re patting themselves on the back for how much they purportedly care about precious children…While at the same time, they completely turn a blind eye to the horrors that their own pastors are inflicting on children, and to the fact that they are doing nothing about it.”

 

You have woven so much love and respect for children throughout your book. And particularly when you write about the revelations that came to you when you had your daughter, which you just spoke about. You brought some language to a phenomenon that I think is very familiar for survivors of child sexual abuse who become parents.

I’d like to talk about the “second death” in your book for a minute, if you’re okay with that. You talked about your brother-in-law coming on to you sexually, and how that separated you from your family and the long lasting repercussions of that. The experience of being victimized multiple times is just so incredibly common. What about that experience made it the second death?

Yes, my brother-in-law made a move on me, he told me that he had married the wrong sister, and he should have married me. I don’t know whether he knew what had happened to me with the pastor or not. But I think what I knew from that experience with the youth pastor — instinctively, absolutely, clearly — was that if I said anything about my brother-in-law, I would have been blamed. I knew that without even articulating it in my head.

It was just one more dark shadow that completely hung over me that I could never talk about. He was my oldest sister’s husband. So he was like, seven years older than me. As a kid, I had grown up with him. Almost like a brother. It really shifted the dynamic with someone I trusted and thought was family.

It’s striking, how often – whether the familial relationships are genetic, or in-law relationships, or formal or informal adoptive sort of relationships – how often the transgression of family lines is part of sexual violence. Even in stories that aren’t overtly about incest.

I think clergy sex abuse has an awfully lot in common with incest. In the Southern Baptist Convention, we call these men you know, “Brother Bob.” The men in the congregation are our “brothers”. There is that sense of a familial closeness. We refer to “church family.” I think there’s a lot in common with the dynamics of incest. The same Southern Baptists who would purport to be horrified by situations of incest, largely, collectively, it’s a giant shrug for what their pastors do.

Do you want to talk a little more directly about the SBC and about your journey with them? I really value your book. I also often think, “I’m going to go look on Twitter and see what Christa Brown has posted lately.”

Before your publisher ever reached out to me, I have followed you as someone I could count on to always see clearly when churches were spinning some shit about sexual violence.

They spin a heck of a lot of shit don’t they?

So often I’m working with survivors in different denominations who really have been taught that it is spiritually virtuous to give people the benefit of the doubt. They’ve heard the “forgive seventy times seven.” They’ve had every Bible verse about trusting God weaponized against them. So often when something comes out about the SBC and I’m hearing a lot of noise, I think, okay, I’m going to start by looking at what Christa is saying about it.

Your book helped me understand how you got there. I find you similar to David Clohessy [long-time former Executive Director of Survivors Network for people Abused by Priests, (SNAP)]. You just see something that’s happening structurally and say, okay, folks, this is what’s going on. I know that knowledge is hard won. Your book details the process of being strung along.

Well, spinning a lot of shit, man, your words, is exactly what they do. It is another way of exploiting the very vulnerability that many survivors have.  A faith group raises a survivor from toddlerhood on, and indoctrinates us in being good, being nice, giving grace. Oh, we are raised to give grace to people. 

I think people feel that in themselves: no one wants to be not good. We all want to be liked. We all want to be good. At least most of us do. When churches continue to spin out these narratives of “oh, look how much we care, we’re caring! Look at all that we’re doing, look at how much progress we’re making.” I think that is re-abusive. It strings survivors on for a very long time.

So many survivors really, really want to believe the leaders of this faith that they hold in their hearts. That endless spinning churches do is a way of re-abusing people. Churches set people up, and exploit survivors as props in this theater piece that they’re putting on about how much they care. Churches use survivors all over again. For most survivors, it is a long and very slow process of putting trust in church leaders, then being cut off at the knees again and again and again and again, until survivors are able to see the abuse. And I think some never do.

I’ve been doing this now for some 20 years, and thank God for David Clohessy, because he was certainly a big influence on me. There have been numerous times when I’ve gone to David, and just said, “Whoa, David, what the heck is happening here?” He is so very clear eyed. He sees right through all the bullshit. Thank God he does. That has been a big help to me. I also think that because I was an attorney, it is the nature of the profession to cultivate a bit of skepticism.

When the other part of my brain would be going down the rabbit hole of “Oh, maybe they’re really trying,” the skepticism would kick in for me. I would just encourage all survivors: never feel guilty for skepticism. Church leaders have not earned your trust; you don’t need to feel guilty for skepticism. It is not a matter of not being nice. We have given them the benefit of the doubt for decades, and they have decimated hundreds of lives with that benefit of the doubt. None of us owe any apology for holding skepticism towards them.

 

“Churches set people up, and exploit survivors  as props in this theater piece that they’re putting on about how much they care. Churches use survivors all over again. For most survivors it is a long and very slow process of putting trust in church leaders, then being cut off at the knees again and again and again and again, until survivors are able to see the abuse. And I think some never do.”

 

I wonder if we could switch gears for a minute and talk about the law, and attorneys. It seems to me that the experience of talking to lawyers is often in and of itself so re-traumatizing that even when survivors have the means to do it, they go away feeling like if it can’t be litigated or prosecuted, the abuse they survived isn’t really real enough for anyone to care.

What would you say to survivors who feel completely overwhelmed by the legal system, or maybe have tried to engage it and been retraumatized? Or just don’t know if it’s worth even looking at?

I’m a retired lawyer nowadays, so I don’t give legal advice. But I was a practicing lawyer during the time period when I was dealing with my own story. I often think, “if all of this was so incredibly overwhelming for me—and I had the kind of ability to analyze some of these things in a different way than a lot of people might—what’s it like for other people?

For me, it was so overwhelming that during that period of time when I was dealing with it, I believe my very cells mutated in rebellion because it was so incredibly re-traumatizing. If it was that difficult for me, what is it like for others? My daughter was nearly grown by the time I was really starting to grapple with all this. What is it like for people who have toddlers underfoot and they’re more distracted and have a lot more going on? There’s only so much energy you can give to this.

There is always some element of re-trauma in talking about it. I think the instant many survivors begin to think about talking to a lawyer, they project themselves onto the witness stand like they’ve seen on TV, and imagine themselves sitting there. And the horror of sitting in a courtroom and talking about this thing is so overwhelming that they don’t even want to go anywhere near a lawyer’s office.

I would say that the vast majority of cases never get to that point, of course, never ever, ever get to that point. It’s much further down the line when they do so. It’s a mistake to project yourself mentally into that, but people do that, because it’s what we see on TV. There are some good attorneys out there who handle almost nothing but clergy sex abuse, or other kinds of sex abuse cases. And they understand the dynamics and the trauma of it.

If you do go and talk with a lawyer, most attorneys practicing this type of law, they won’t charge you anything for that initial consultation. I would encourage survivors to at least go talk to a lawyer and understand what your options may be. Sometimes the law is not a remedy for everything. It really isn’t. I wish there were good legal recourse for all survivors, but there definitely is not. Part of that problem is many, many states still need statute of limitations reform. Part of the problem also with the Southern Baptist Convention is that a lot of lawyers look at cases against small local churches. And those do not look as desirable as for example, suing a Catholic Diocese, which is a much larger entity.

I believe we will break that barrier, that hurdle eventually. But the law is lagging on this. Nevertheless, I always think it’s worth it for survivors to explore their legal options. If you can, go and talk with experienced abuse attorneys, which is much less traumatizing than talking with church or denominational officials and imagine that they are going to help you. That’s what I would urge people to do.

The other intimidating system that I that I frequently discuss with survivors is the media.

Every week, we have a half dozen more of these clergy sex abuse stories, but I think what people should realize is that it is the tiniest tip of the iceberg. The ones that get media coverage are very few in number compared to the much bigger picture of how many are out there. I hope people will realize that. You think you’re seeing a big crisis problem here with these overwhelming numbers? It is one hundred times that.

I think working with the media is a process. Even for me, it was a process. I remember talking with a media person in Austin and interviewing with her in person at a coffee shop. I had been talking about my advocacy, and the general problem of religious sexual abuse, and she brought it back to the question “Well, what exactly did he do to you?” I froze. My mind flooded with images. What image do I pick to talk about? I couldn’t. She wound up not writing anything at all. It was a futile experience. I think many survivors wind up feeling that talking to the media is futile.

I’m so grateful for reporters doing extraordinary work. The extent any of this has been brought into the light, it is thanks to good and dogged journalistic endeavors.  Without reporters pressing away, denominational officials and church leaders would hide every single time. For survivors, it is very hard. I always tell survivors that there’s no shame in not talking to the media. You need to do what you feel like you can handle, and don’t go beyond that. If it’s not the point in time when you can talk with reporters, then wait. It can be re-traumatizing. Take care of yourself, that is always the priority. Love yourself. This is what we all need to learn. Isn’t it? Love yourself.

Is anything I haven’t asked that you would really like to say to a survivor audience?

You have already come so far. Every survivor who reaches the point of acknowledging even their own selves, that “Whoa, I was really victimized terribly.” That’s a hard, hard thing to face up to. We seek within our own selves ways to minimize it, and to tell ourselves that it wasn’t so bad. Every survivor, by golly, give yourself some credit. You have already taken enormous steps. Every survivor who shares it and talks about it with a spouse or a close friend. These are all steps that you should give yourself credit for. We all want to just be holy, healed and moving on all at once. For some of us, it is a lifelong journey and every step of the way, we need to be applauding ourselves. So bravo.

Thank you. This was just fantastic. Thank you so much.