Another Trump Evangelical Charged With Sex Crimes, And The Beat Goes On
Evangelicals who voted for trump in 2020 and who ignore or downplay trump’s sexual crimes shouldn’t be shocked at the latest child pornography allegations lodged against a pro-trump Michigan youth pastor.
While child pornography is not a partisan crime, many right-wing evangelicals place a great emphasis on the dominance of men and their immunity from criticism as they refuse to hold trump accountable. About 8 in 10 white evangelical Christians supported Trump in 2020, according to recent polls and a similar share supported him in 2016. Evangelicals make up about 25 percent of the U.S. population and including some Baptists and Lutheran sects as well as members of other Protestant denominations.
Baptistnews.com reported that “Now a convicted felon facing dozens of other criminal charges in other courts, Trump remains popular with Southern Baptists, who typically fall in the category of white evangelicals who are known to be Trump’s core supporters.”
In May, sociologist Samuel L. Perry, author of “Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants,” said that evangelicals can be suspicious of men who adhere too closely to the stated values of chastity and purity. Perry said that evangelical churches teach that “God gave men tremendous sexual appetites because he wanted them to be leaders and initiators and people who take charge.”
Mark DeVine, a Southern Baptist pastor and seminary professor from Birmingham, Ala., wrote in the online journal American Reformer that conservative Christians support trump because “elected Democrats and Democrat-serving, unelected bureaucrats” have an “evil” agenda on issues ranging from abortion to gender to the border to pandemic lockdowns that kept churches closed.
“Trumpers want to shield themselves, their children, their communities, and the nation they love from the woke, totalitarian onslaught now being unleashed upon them where they live, work, study, play, and worship,” DeVine wrote.
Samuel L. Perry who has written several books on conservative Christianity, said in an interview that “Trump’s sinful behavior may actually reinforce his support among at least some evangelicals.”
Perry said that trump’s sexual misdeeds “may break religious doctrine but they also affirm his masculinity — at least in the evangelical view. They demonstrate that Trump is a virile, red-blooded man, afflicted by God — like all ‘real men’ — with lust. Not just lust for sex, Perry said, but for power and that “much like Biblical warriors who themselves struggled with sexual temptation, Trump can wield that power to lead the faithful to glory.”
Nicole Russell, an evangelical Christian and columnist for USA Today, wrote that “there is a clear pattern of abusive and at times criminal behavior among pastors and other leaders in a growing list of evangelical congregations.”
Russell wrote that it is “particularly heinous that leaders of evangelical churches are vocal about abortion policy, elections and the LGBTQ+ community even as their congregations struggle with abuse. How can evangelical churches condemn drag queens when some of those churches have been led by pastors who sexually abused children?”
Amanda Marcotte wrote in Salon that the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention is “is one of the most virulently anti-choice religious groups in the country. Opposition to reproductive rights and tolerance for sexual abuse go together like peanut butter and jelly.”
Marcotte wrote that anti-choice and tolerance for sexual abuse are linked by a belief in male supremacy.
Laurie Penny wrote in her book “Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback,” that the evangelical culture of the Southern Baptist Convention is “comfortable letting men get away with sexual violence but determined not to let women get away with consensual sex.”
One unrepentant trump follower, Kimberly Vaughn of Florence, Ky., put it this way.
“Trump supports Jesus, and without Jesus, America will fall,” said Vaughn at a trump campaign rally in May near Dayton, Ohio. “We’ve all come from sinning. Jesus sat with sinners, so he’s going to sit with Trump. It’s not about where Trump came from, it’s about where he’s going and where he’s trying to take us.”
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the world’s largest Baptist organization, the largest Protestant, and the second-largest Christian body in the United States. During the 19th and most of the 20th century, the convention played a central role in Southern racial attitudes, supporting racial segregation and the debunked “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” while opposing interracial marriage. In 1995, the organization apologized for racial positions in its history. The association forbids women from becoming pastors.
In 2018, investigations showed that the Southern Baptist Convention suppressed reports of sexual abuse and protected more than 700 accused ministers and church workers. In 2022, a report indicated that church leaders had stonewalled and disparaged clergy sex abuse survivors for nearly two decades. This included reform efforts which had been met with criticism or dismissal from other organization leaders while known abusers had been allowed to keep their positions without informing their local churches.
A 2018 joint investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express found that there had been more than 700 victims of sexual abuse by nearly 400 Southern Baptist church leaders, pastors, and volunteers over the previous 20 years.
At the June 12, 2019, annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention messengers approved a resolution condemning sex abuse and establishing a special committee to investigate sex abuse. On August 12, 2022, the organization announced that it was facing a federal investigation into the sex abuse scandal.
This past May, federal prosecutors charged Matt Queen, a former professor and administrator at an SBC-affiliated seminary in Texas with providing a false document to federal investigators. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York alleged that the document, involving an alleged case of sexual abuse by a seminary student, was provided with the intent to impede their investigation into sexual abuse within the convention.
Paige Patterson, the former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, was forced into early retirement in 2018 after reports that he had told a rape victim to forgive her assailant rather than call the police.
Also in 2018, Illinois evangelical megachurch pastor Bill Hybels retired early after several women said he’d made lewd comments, unwanted kisses and invitations to hotel rooms. Hybels is the founding and former senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., one of the most attended churches in North America, with an average attendance of nearly 24,000 as of late 2018.
Trump was the virtual speaker at the SBC Life and Liberty Forum held on Monday, June 10, in Indianapolis, Ind. Publicity for the luncheon said it would “explore topics surrounding life and liberty and especially how churches can change the course of a country” by upholding “the Judeo-Christian values upon which our nation was built.”
In 2019, Oklahoma Pastor Wade Burleson called on the Southern Baptist Convention to create a database that would track church workers accused of sexual abuse. The list was later published not by Baptists but by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News. Burleson, 57, is pastor with the Emmanuel Enid Church in Enid, and said he plans to again call for having an independent nonprofit run and monitor a database of church predators.
Burleson first proposed creation of a registry in 2008 but it was rejected because the Baptist Convention deemed that it could not tell the 47,000 churches under its umbrella who they could hire or ordain. Burleson renewed his request amid accusations against several prominent Southern Baptist leaders.
“Southern Baptist pastors need to recognize that we have a responsibility to protect women and to protect children from men, particularly ministers, who move toward them in sexual or physical abuse,” Burleon said.
The convention passed a nonbinding resolution condemning all forms of abuse and supporting of victims.
The latest culprit affiliated with the Baptist Convention is Zachary Radcliff, 29, a MAGA youth pastor at Michigan church who is known for his ardent backing of trump.
Radcliff was arrested on Oct. 21 and is being held on a $3 million bond in the Washtenaw County Jail. Radcliff allegedly used his position of authority to coerce minors between 13 and 15 years old to have sex with him and send him more than 100 child sexual abuse images as far back as 2014, when Radcliff was 19. Radcliff worked as the music and youth director at Oakwood Church in Ypsilanti where his father is the senior pastor.
Oakwood Church, formed in 1997, issued a statement about the “very disturbing” allegations and said it first learned of the issue on Oct. 3. Church officials suspended Radcliff with pay and then fired him on Oct. 12.
“The information that we received was shocking. We were told that Zachary had been soliciting inappropriate photos and possibly videos from teens. We have also heard other stories. This information has ripped our hearts apart,” the statement said. “The safety and protection of the individuals in our church is what is paramount to us. We are devoted to doing what we can for the care of the victims of these crimes.”
Radcliff’s father, Frank Radcliff, originally from Texas, has been the Lead Pastor at Oakwood since it began in 1997. He and his wife, Robin, have started churches in Michigan and Illinois.
In 2019, the younger Radcliff performed at his alma mater, the private, evangelical Christian, Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., in a simulcast of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference. He debuted his single “I’ll Stand” to the delight of the school president at the time, Jerry Falwell Jr.
“I believe this song will become to this generation what Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA’ was during the Reagan years,” Falwell said.
In late 2019, Radcliff performed at Liberty’s convocation, which was attended by Trump Jr. and his wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
“I will never forget this moment!” Radcliff captioned his photo with Trump Jr., Guilfoyle and Falwell Jr. on Instagram. “Sharing the stage with these truly amazing people was an absolute honor! Tears!”
On Instagram, Radcliff’s profile picture is the infamous photo of the bleeding Trump with fist raised after the July 13 assassination attempt. He also shared images of himself in “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) gear.
The lyrics of “I’ll Stand” are:
“I still stand for the flag
When I see Old Glory flying.
I still fall apart
At every moment of silence.
For the moms and dads,
For sons and daughters
For the brave who aren’t coming home.
For their honor and for this land
I’ll stand.”
Liberty University is one of the world’s largest evangelical Christian colleges. Radcliff graduated in 2017, majoring in “worship studies with a songwriting specialization.”
Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty University, is a leading evangelical supporter of trump. Falwell Jr. was appointed president of the conservative university in 2007 after the death of his father, televangelist and conservative activist, Jerry Falwell Sr. Falwell Jr. resigned in August 2020 amid a sex scandal.
Among Falwell Jr.’s improprieties, he posted an Instagram photo of himself with his trousers unzipped. The photo showed Falwell Jr. with his arm around a woman who was not his wife. Her shorts also appeared to be unbuttoned. His other hand was holding a glass of dark-colored liquid.
“More vacation shots. Lots of good friends visited us on the yacht,” the accompanying caption read. Falwell later said the woman in the photo was his wife’s assistant.
“Yeah, it was weird. She’s pregnant. She couldn’t get her pants zipped and I was like trying to like… I had on a pair of jeans I haven’t worn in a long time and couldn’t get zipped either. So, I just put my belly out like hers,” Falwell Jr. said.
In May 2020, Falwell Jr. tweeted a photo of a face mask decorated with one person in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan robe, a reference to a racism scandal that had engulfed the Democratic governor of Virginia. In 2019, the former editor of the school’s student newspaper wrote an op-ed accusing Falwell Jr. of silencing students and professors “who reject his pro-Trump politics.”
Falwell Jr. was among trump’s earliest evangelical supporters, often credited for helping delivery the constituency to then-candidate trump in 2016. Trump attended the Liberty University commencement in 2017.
Falwell Jr. also became the focus of criticism after it was reported that his wife had an affair with a Miami man that went on for eight years.
Liberty University is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia also known as the Southern Baptist Convention.
In 2024, the Rev. Robert Morris, the prominent pastor and founder of the evangelical Gateway Church in Dallas, was accused by a woman who said he first molested her when she was 12 years old. The abuse continued for the next five years, she said, until she finally asked adults for help. At the time, Morris was a married man in his mid to late 20s.
Morris, a strong trump supporter, said his resignation was a planned retirement, not the result of the scandal. The pastor said the victim and her family “graciously forgave” him in 1989. The church claims that its internal concerns were settled with a “two-year restoration process” led by religious counselors.
Morris’s accuser wrote that she and her family “forgive because we are called to biblically forgive” but that her “father never ever gave his blessing on Robert returning to ministry.”
Morris served on trump’s Evangelical Executive Advisory Board during the 2016 campaign and has remained an unbending MAGA backer. Gateway hosted trump during the 2020 campaign, where Morris explicitly offered thanks to God “for this administration.”
Morris has been an outspoken supporter of the right-wing assault on school curriculums that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people and classroom discussions about social inequality. Morris has railed against “what Satan has been trying to do even in our school systems.”
Gateway’s services draw 25,000 people a week and is the ninth-largest church in the country. The church has nearly half a million YouTube subscribers, and is famous for its worship music, which was streamed over 300 million times last year.
Gateway has reached a legal settlement in a case that accused five church pastors and a youth leader of covering up a child sexual assault committed by another church member. The pastors allegedly didn’t report the assault to the police or the child’s mother; delayed an investigation into the incident; and punished the victim and her mother, who were both devoted church members.
“None filed a formal complaint with the necessary child protective agencies, law enforcement agencies, or even alerted … [the victim’s] mother, to the existence of the alleged assault,” the lawsuit said.
When the mother learned of the assault, she reported it to the Haltom City Police Department. The pastors then allegedly “embarked on a concerted campaign to conceal, misconstrue, and discredit the assault accusations” during the police investigation, the lawsuit added. “Due to the weeks of active concealment by defendants, significant evidence of the alleged criminal assault was allowed to waste and degrade, further hindering law enforcement’s ability to accurately investigate the original assault.”
A number of evangelical churches, mostly in Texas, have recently lost pastors because of alleged sexual misconduct.
In June, Pastor Tony Evans stepped down from the pulpit at Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship over an undisclosed “sin.” Evans’s predominantly Black church in South Dallas, claims a membership of about 10,000 people.
Pastor Josiah Anthony resigned as the lead pastor of Cross Timbers Church with 5,000 attendees in Argyle, Texas, over “inappropriate and hurtful” actions.
Tony Cammarota, an associate pastor at Stonebriar Community Church with 3,700 members in Frisco, Texas, was fired in July for a “moral failure.” According to a letter to members, Cammarota “confessed to church leadership of a moral failure. He is deeply remorseful but his sin disqualifies him from serving on our staff as a pastor.” The letter doesn’t describe the nature of the ”moral failure.” Cammarota was an associate pastor who worked at Stonebriar for 17 years.
Last month, the elders at Trinity Bible Church of Dallas announced that lead preacher Steven J. Lawson had been removed from all ministry responsibilities after he confessed to having an “inappropriate relationship” with a woman.
“The elders have met with Steve and will continue to come alongside him and pray for him with the ultimate goal of his personal repentance,” the church said in a statement
Eternal Church in Fort Mill, S.C., fired its pastor, Dan Logan, in July after it became widely known that he is a registered sex offender. Church elders said that some of them knew Logan had been convicted ibn 1997 of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old. However, not all of the voting members of the board were informed prior to Logan being hired as the church’s pastor in 2014. Logan was pastor since 2015.
Terren L. Dames, a former pastor at a church in Plano, Texas, was charged in July with soliciting prostitution after being caught in a sting operation. Dames was fired in May from his post as senior pastor of North Dallas Community Bible Fellowship for his “moral failure,” according to a fellowship statement.
Texas pastor Ronnie Goines turned himself in to police in July after an arrest warrant was filed against him in connection with a sexual assault investigation. Goines, lead pastor of Koinonia Christian Church in Arlington, was charged with one count of indecent assault and one count of sexual assault. Goines, 51, previously served on Arlington’s Unity Council, a group formed in 2020 to “promote and encourage greater equality.” Goines is a former member of the Arlington Police Department’s clergy and police partnership program.
Johnny M. Hunt, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, resigned in May 2022 from the North American Mission Board after a report investigating the Southern Baptist Convention’s handling of sex abuse cases was released.
The report included an accusation that Hunt had sexually assaulted another pastor’s wife in 2010. Hunt denied the accusation but the Guidepost Solutions report concluded, “We include this sexual assault allegation in the report because our investigators found the pastor and his wife to be credible; their report was corroborated in part by a counseling minister and three other credible witnesses; and our investigators did not find Dr. Hunt’s statements related to the sexual assault allegation to be credible.”
The Guidepost Solutions report investigated how the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee has handled sexual abuse allegations. It concluded that over the course of two decades, the Southern Baptist Convention systematically and consistently ignored, silenced, and at times even ostracized survivors of sexual abuse. Goines was formerly senior pastor of First Baptist Church Woodstock, in Woodstock, Ga.
Zachary King, 47, former executive pastor of LexCity Church in Lexington, Kent., was charged in July with the rape and sexual abuse of a minor. King also was a former youth minister at Craig Groeschel’s Life.Church based in Oklahoma and Metropolitan Baptist Church in Houston, Texas.
King said he had “sexual intercourse with the minor starting at age 15 in January 2023, continuing until April 2024.” He said he had “sexual intercourse in the minor’s home, at his residence, and at the church where he was a former pastor.”
A week after King’s arrest, the church announced it was permanently closing.
Aaron Ivey, a worship pastor at Austin Stone Community Church, an evangelical congregation in Austin, Texas, was fired in February over explicit text messages sent to at least one underage male. A church leadership statement said that Ivey engaged in “predatory manipulation, sexual exploitation, and abuse of influence” with adult males and a minor male. The church said the alleged sexual activity included three instances with adult males and one instance of “inappropriate and explicit communications, indecent exposure, and the use of alcohol and illegal substances” with a teenage male.
Ivey, with his wife, had co-authored a book on marriage.
In 2018, several women accused Bill Hybels, former lead pastor of Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, of sexually harassing them. Hybels, 66, is known as the father of the modern megachurch movement. As many as nine other women have accused Hybels of sexually harassing them with prolonged hugs, inappropriate comments about their looks or invitations to his hotel rooms. Hybels denied allegations and announced that he would retire six months earlier than planned.