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This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and His Gang

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This book is a "must read" for survivors of clergy abuse and for all professing Christians who believe in the congregational style of church government stipulated by Baptist denominations. Without self pity or self indulgence, Christa Brown maps out exactly how she was manipulated as an innocent, guileless teenager into becoming the obedient, submissive sexual partner to a Southern Baptist youth pastor who continually used Scripture to assure her that this was God's will for her, and who answered her doubts and questions by demanding that she needed to trust God.

I wish that Christa's story were a new story or a rare story, but it is not. It has been more than eight years since I started advocating for adults who are childhood victims of Christian Fundamentalist clergy abuse (mostly Independent Baptist), and I have seen stories similar to this so many times that I no longer count them. But Christa's account is clear, vivid, even suspenseful at times, as another reviewer noted.

She breaks her book into five parts, but for me it was really two basic parts: the abuse, and then her realization and confrontation of what happened to her. It's in this second half that Christa Brown's account really launches into something new for abuse survivors and those who are concerned about the growing incidents of clergy sex abuse in Baptist and Evangelical denominations.

A lawyer by profession, Christa maps out and documents, step by step, in every corner where she searched for honesty, compassion, biblical church discipline, and accountability of ministers in the Southern Baptist Convention, the utter indifference of the SBC and the outright contempt it has demonstrated for victims of abuse by its own clergy.

The level of evidence is amazing, and Christa Brown ably proves that at the local, state, regional, and national level, the Southern Baptist Convention is simply not going to act in obedience to the Bible and in conformity to the nature of Christ to confront, rebuke, and expel these pastors who commit sins of unspeakable perversion.

In my own experience, I have learned that there are two topics Baptists never preach on: child abuse, and their own need to repent of any sin, ever. It is an unspoken doctrine in the SBC that other people abuse children, not them, and that other people need to repent of sin, not them.

My only point of disagreement with Christa Brown, a woman I profoundly respect and am indebted to for her supportiveness of my work with clergy abuse victims, is the concluding sections of the book. I understand that victims of clergy abuse have had their faith taken from them. I would urge all victims of Southern Baptist Clergy abuse and Christian Fundamentalist clergy abuse, to throw out the Disney version of God and Christ that these corrupt denominations push. The greatest blasphemy of these religions is that they have turned the Lord God of Heaven into a corporate president, and they have made the Lord Jesus Christ a Republican, and with that corrupted view of deity, they have directed their branch of Christianity towards materialistic, shallow, banal, vengeful, military, and political pursuits.

Still, I believe that, over time, the suffering saints who have been sexually abused by corrupt clergy will unlearn, learn, and relearn Jesus Christ and have joy in Him, our Savior. That is my prayer.

Read this book!

Christa tells the story of Clergy sexual abuse with honesty and bravery. I say "the" story because her story can be everyone's that has experienced this abuse. I found myself saying "amen" and shaking my head as I read feeling like she hit the nail on the head. They feelings that she felt were the feelings that I felt. It's hard to find someone that knows what is feels like. People understand, but can't empathize. Thank you for telling your story for all of us.

Christa Brown's story is an amazing wake-up call to those who have children in a Baptist church, and who mistakenly think their children are safe there. Brown's account of her own experience with a sexual predator masquerading as a minister is unsettling enough, but the more disturbing story is the response of the Southern Baptist convention. First there was denial, and then an elaborate cover-up. Even while her predator's name sat in a file of "known offenders" at Baptist headquarters in Texas, he was able to continue working in children's ministry in Florida. Instead of responding gratefully to the revelation that a predator was in their ranks, as any church member and every parent would expect of their church, the entire Baptist machinery strived to silence Brown. Baptist leaders prayed not for guidance, but prayed that Brown would just go away. Even if you are not a Baptist believer, this book is a fascinating insight into the inner workings of a powerful religious machine. And if you think the Catholic Church cover-up of abusive priests was unique to the Catholic faith, and if you thought that such a thing could never occur in the Baptist church, think again.

"You have to tell everything." Christa Brown, the webmaster behind Stop Baptist Predators, told me when I spoke with her in Texas back in January, 2008.

I was on my way to Jacksonville, Florida to host a public awareness meeting on the subject of clergy abuse. I made a brief stop to interview Christa for a podcast.

Bob Gray, my former pastor who was arrested on multiple charges of child abuse, had not been a Southern Baptist for decades.

There was still the nagging question concerning his early days. Did the SBC of the fifties know about any accusations against Gray? Did they simply allow him to become 'independent' as a way of washing their hands of him?

After the podcast was recorded, Christa and I met the next day and discussed the various methods of getting the accounts of sexual abuse by clergy out in the public arena.

I mentioned the difficulty I was having in writing a book about it.

There were just too many crossovers where regular people, not wanting to become public figures, would be thrust into the limelight. It wouldn't just involve other people, though. It would also be about the dark secrets most of us harbor about ourselves. That would be the most difficult hurdle.

Christa Brown jumps over that hurdle in This Little Light.

She opens herself up by telling the story of how Eddie Dunagan, a youth minister, capitalized on Christa's abusive situation at home. She called the police after witnessing an act of family violence.

The pastor criticized her for doing so. Some things just don't need to be reported!

Eddie used this situation as an opportunity to manipulate himself into her life.

There was no romance or sweet talk. Just bible thumping and scripture twisting.

"God gave us all sorts of ways to show our love for one another," he said. "All of these other ways are good ways that God gave people so they could show their love before they're actually married."

Gee, I wonder if Eddie had the guts enough to preach that to his youth group?

A 'well meaning' friend encourages Christa in this relationship:

"If Eddie says it's God's will then it must be God's will." contended Brenda, "You shouldn't doubt him."

With advice from 'well meaning' friends, who needs the condemnation of enemies?

Eddie badgers her into drinking beer. She drinks it, and whatever drugs might have been implanted in the alcohol. She wakes up naked in the parsonage. Eddie then chuckles and tells her she is still a virgin.

We flash forward to adulthood.

Christa now has a daughter about the same age she was when Dunagan molested her.

She wants to make sure her molester is no longer in the pulpit. After all, what are the chances he, or any other predator, might attempt something with her daughter?

Christa is shocked to find that not only is Eddie still in the pulpit, but other accounts of molestation are being reported by victims from her former church.

She knows the statutes of limitations have passed (Christa is a lawyer), so she envisions a creative solution:

A labyrinth garden that leads to a statute of a millstone.

This monument would not only honor the victims of clergy abuse. It would be an inspiration to victims, and a reminder to churches that they must be vigilant in confronting sexual predators who represent them as pastors and youth leaders.

The higher up's seem to agree. Unfortunately, this is but the first of many experiences where hopes are elevated, only to be crushed by the reality they merely agreed with Christa to get her out of sight and mind.

This leads her to SNAP, the Survivor's Network for those Abused by Priests. She attends the meetings, then throws herself into activism.

She visits her home church and puts flyers on the automobiles. The congregants will know that one of their ministers abused a young girl, and the church did nothing. She contacts people she suspects have been molested.

The church's lawyer sends her a letter demanding she cease these activities.

The lawyer, in this case, happens to be Phil Waller, the attorney of choice for the Baptist General Convention of Texas. He also claims all the church members as his 'clients'.

Christa Brown compares him to Harvey Keitel's Mr. Wolfe from Pulp Fiction. His job is to 'clean up' the mistakes of the Baptists. In the Bob Gray world, that man would be David Gibbs.

If the Southern Baptist Convention thought a lawyer would intimidate another lawyer, they obviously had another thing coming.

This Little Light gives us a fly on the wall insight to the behind the scenes machinations involved with Christa's quest for a written apology for the silence she experienced from church officials, financial costs, and, even non monetary requests like simply playing the piano at the church of her youth one last time.

One of the fascinating parts of the book involves a meeting where they hammer out the details behind the SBC's 'apology' letter. We read how the leaders, and their attorney, argue over every single word in order to sneak in phrases that would excuse themselves for ignoring the abuse she suffered.

A mistake, on behalf of SNAP, leads to the SBC making a bold, obviously exaggerated claim, that SNAP apologized for 'false charges'.

The 'false charge', in this case, being the result of secretarial neglect.

Christa publically accuses the SBC of ignoring a letter she sent. The SBC did send the letter, but it is lost amidst a slew of piled up mail at SNAP headquarters. When the error is discovered, Christa issues a public apology for saying SNAP never received the letter.

SBC officials take advantage of this by issuing press releases that SNAP is apologizing for 'false charges'.

The letter is eventually discovered.

It is a standard 'business as usual'. Not a real apology.

Christa, like many victims of clergy abuse, realizes she is dealing with sharks in the water. She witnesses a beloved music minister, whom she thought would at least confirm her story, suddenly backtrack to make her relationship with Dunagan seem consensual.

This leaves a sour taste in her mouth for how religion, specifically the fundamentalism of the SBC, intimidates and encourages corruption. Phrases like 'God's will' literally make her want to throw up. At various points in the book, she actually does.

The finale has her answering another 'well meaning' Christian who encourages her to put her faith and trust 'in Him':

"This sort of talk of God's love that is in your email is the sort of talk that transports me to the torture chamber that is in my head."

It would be a false statement to say this means Christa has crossed the line into Atheism. If you listen to her interviews at Stop Baptist Predators, you will hear the word 'God' injected into some of her interviews.

There is a growing amount of work being published, from Julia Scheere's Jesus Land to Michele Ulriksen's Reform at Victory, where victims of religious abuse are mincing no words.

Those authors are not giving aid and comfort to 'the enemy' and make no bones about how their abusers were making up the religious BS as they went along.

There is an entire demographic of victims who will never be reached because of 'well meaning' Christians. Their survival is linked to rejecting the falsehoods thrust upon them, but because of all the talk of 'God's will', they tune out. That's too bad, because in the battle for accountability, alliances are everything.

Religious, and pro family, organizations have lost their moral credibility by ignoring abuses done by leadership.

Victims become survivors by realizing their instincts were right.

Such leaders are not worthy of respect.

Victims, if they wish to become survivors, must take their own journey to resolve the confusing issues of sex, religion, and the challenges of 'working and playing well with others'. All talk of theological matters really needs to be left at the front door.

I find it interesting that the dialogue I've experienced the last two years of blogging about the Bob Gray case always leads back to the question, "You don't condemn all religion because of the actions of the few?"

Funny, nobody ever seems to ask how clergy abuse affected the sex lives, marriages, families, or self esteem of victims. Everything always seems to revolve around religion, like the other issues are an inconvenient add-on.

Imagine somebody who just had their family slaughtered by a lone gunman being lectured by a 'well meaning' NRA supporter that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'.

"In spite of your tragic experience, you're still for the second amendment, aren't you?"

It's that insensitive. Not very 'well meaning'.

This Little Light is a book worthy of discussion groups at libraries or your local book dealer.

The simple act of telling her story opens the door for a variety of discussions ranging from the use of art as both a public awareness and recovery tool, the proper place for religious discussion when dealing with clergy abuse victims, and the type of scars child sex abuse, clergy or not, carries into adulthood.

I just read this book, and it was devastating. Her descriptions of physical rape and abuse by "Eddie Dunagan" (real name Thomas Edward "Tommy" Gilmore - Ms. Brown has his real name and photograph at her Webpage stopbaptistpredators dot org) as a teen at First Baptist Church in Farmers Branch, TX, and then her psychological and emotional and legal abuse at the hands of Baptist Church leaders who only wanted her to shut up and go away, will leave you reeling. For those of us who live near Farmers Branch and Denton, TX (where other incidents in the book occurred), where we are everywhere surrounded by Baptist churches, it's quite eerie and even more chilling (at least to me).

The 3-1/2-page chapter 46 at the end (the chapters are short; the whole book is only 222 pp., and I read it in a couple hours) will deeply resonate with victims of abusive and authoritarian religious groups re: why and how such activity can annihilate the faith of the abusees.

Brown's book and story is a nightmare in print. But she is trying to do something with it by telling her story in the book and on the Internet.

I heartily recommend it for victims of church abuse, whether physical or psychological or emotional, but with the caveat that it may be too difficult and unnerving for some to read.

Every Southern Baptist should be broken-hearted that children have been subjected to abuse in our churches. And we must be outraged that the abuse is often covered up by the individuals we've trusted to lead our denomination.

Thanks to Christa Brown for bringing this inexcusable situation to light. Now, what will we do with the information? We can't follow the shallow, self-serving examples of our leaders. We must go back to the Bible for guidance in making sure we do not do anything personally or collectively to offend any of these little ones.

This Little Light is powerful and eye-opening, and I applaud Ms. Brown for her courage in writing it.

"This book should rightly make any honest Christian furious. The smooth-talking, Bible-quoting, God-invoking perpetrator is disgusting enough but the real anger surges forward as one reads page after page of the twisted, lie-filled and hypocritical response of the Southern Baptist bureaucracy. 'Praise the Lord and be saved' suddenly means nothing as the self-righteous, self-appointed guardians of God's authentic words reveal the shallowness of their understanding of the scriptures they endlessly quote and of the mission of the Lord they claim to follow.

Christa Brown is a lawyer who has survived the nonsensical brainwashing inflicted by her church. She has survived the sexual molestation and devastating abuse by the duplicitous pastor who used her naive faith to molest her. Most important, she survived every attempt by the mighty Southern Baptist Convention to shut her down. She has become what her church could never be, a true presence of Christian justice and compassion.

Christa's vivid story is much more than a narrative about sexual exploitation by a minister. It is about yet another main-line denomination that continually used the words and mission of Christ for its own self-serving ends, but has never had the courage or even the spiritual ability to do the challenging word of Christ.

My own written exchange with the highest level of Southern Baptist leadership was an exercise in futility. Placed in the context of Christa's story it is obvious that the Southern Baptists, like the institutional Catholic Church and several other denominations, have, beneath their piety and smooth god-talk, a core of dishonesty and alienation from the Lord they all proclaim as their inspiration. They utterly fail to live those challenging words of Christ, 'When you do this to the least of my brothers, you do it to me.'"

Taken from [...] and used with the express permission of Rev. Thomas Doyle, the former Vatican canon lawyer who first warned Catholic bishops about the looming clergy sex abuse nightmare and who, more recently, made a similar warning to Baptist officials.

This Little Light, by Christa Brown will shock you, break your heart, make you livid and hopefully will inspire you to take action whether you are religious or not, affiliated or non-affiliated with any religious organization. It is a story of the nightmare of victimization, loss of innocence, vicious sexual predation, abuse of authority, denial, cowardice, mean-spiritedness, male sexism and arrogance. This Little Light could very well make you re-examine what it means to be a "moral/ethical" person. It is also the story of great strength and courage by a single woman who, with the help of a few courageous friends and journalists, refused to continue to be a victim and became an activist. It is a guideline for those who, instead of throwing up their hands in disgust and despair when faced with the enormity of the rampant child abuse within religious institutions today, will instead be inspired to act. It provides a blueprint for triumph rather than a retreat into bitterness. As horrifying and widespread as this cultural disease is, it is entirely treatable. By demanding and sharing information and insisting on accountability we can bring the day of predators operating with impunity to a crashing end. Whether you have been a victim, know a victim or are just someone who cares about protecting children, This Little Light is a MUST read!

This was a difficult book to read. Upon hearing at stopbaptistpredators about Christa's book I immediately bought a copy, played cat and mouse with the UPS man, read a few chapters, and then started sobbing so uncontrollably that for my own sake I put it on the shelf for a few weeks. I had to take it by the mouthful, and if you've also been abused, I recommend the same. This book brought flashbacks.

With that warning in place I can only heap praise on this book and its most talented authoress. Christa writes well, she has a VERY interesting, albeit sad story to tell, and an admirable mantra for foundation. She wants kids safe and to NEVER have to endure the "soul-murder" of clergy sexual abuse.

Sounds like a fairly reasonable mantra, but the abuse she has received from "honorable" Baptist authorities just blows me away. I felt affirmed in reading this book because I have received very similar responses within my own ex-denomination.

I am giving this book to my husband and therapist to read so that "you'll understand me better." I want to give this book to you to read now, so please go read this book. It'll bring tears, horror, anger, ugly feelings. The actions (or rather, un-action) of the many will throw flames into your world. But Christa's kind and, for lack of a better word crisp and cool spirit will lead you and comfort you on this journey through hell. She remains, even through her daunting brains, good writing, unfaltering activism and belief, so very human. In reality, with all her lawyerly rhetoric, her breath still inks these pages. That's a rare thing, and needed in this book.

Thank you Christa. All the fancy words I was trying to dream up for this review fail me. Just thank you. You're a wonderful, moral, courageous, beautiful, grace-filled soul. I wept when I heard clips of your story, and hearing it in a sustained arena was helpful and horrible and I think I understand a little more about clergy abuse than I did before, and what needs to be done. You are a leader to those of us who hurt, and I am so grateful our lives have met in the little ways they have.

Okay. So now my husband is curled beside me, purring and looking like he wants me to hug him. I have happy things to attend to. Christa has made these small things a little brighter, given me more hope, and made me smile. It is time to live these gifts a little in thankfulness.

Christa Brown is an attorney who wrote an honest, transparent, well-documented book about the horror she experienced when, as a young teen who had never even held hands with a boy, she was forced into a sexual relationship with a church staff member she trusted. He used Scripture to create a psychological, physical and spiritual hold over Christa. When his behavior became known, he was allowed to quietly move to another church. As Christa shows us, this passing along of sex offenders is happening far too often and Southern Baptist leaders seem to care more about protecting their reputation than protecting the children entrusted to them.

Christa Brown suffered unspeakable abuse from a Southern Baptist minister who went on to serve in several well-known churches. But what she suffered at the hands of her preacher-predator paled in comparison to what she suffered at the hands of Southern Baptists leaders--from leaders of the small Texas church where the abuse occurred all the way to the SBC president and the head of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

As I read this well-written, tragic story, I was reminded of Proverbs 17:15: "He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the just are both an abomination to the Lord."

As a Southern Baptist and Christian, I was outraged and ashamed that an innocent child experienced such horror at the hands of a Scripture-quoting children's minister with a twisted understanding of God, His love, salvation, the Bible, and every other aspect of faith. But sick predators infiltrate Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, and other places where they can locate prey. What's truly offensive is that Southern Baptists obviously don't care that predators are active without their churches.

Southern Baptists pride themselves on their organization and partnership, and national leaders are more than happy to take responsibility for national and international missions leadership, scurrying to spend Southern Baptists' cooperative dollars. But when it comes to protecting innocent children from predators, they throw up their hands and claim local church autonomy.

Southern Baptists owe Christa Brown and all the other clergy-abuse survivors acknowledgment of the crimes committed against them and an apology for their part in these innocents' suffering. Since that apparently will never happen, please accept the acknowledgement and apology of one very remorseful church member.