A former Southern Baptist deacon is harassing those exposing sexual assault

A former deacon at a Southern Baptist megachurch is peddling a false narrative about the scandal rocking the SBC and has no qualms about harassing those turning the hot lights on the scandal.

A Sunday service at Prestonwood Baptist Church (courtesy Prestonwood’s Facebook)

I’ve been blogging in one form or another on various platforms for some two decades, most notably as one of the longer-tenured posters at Daily Kos (member ID 18,332). Almost 10 years ago, my girlfriend at the time suggested I ought to try opening my big mouth for pay in order to keep my journalistic chops fresh. In all of that time, I’ve seen a lot.

But nothing compares to something that happened in early February. I found myself dealing with a man who has taken it upon himself to prove that there is no sexual assault scandal in the Southern Baptist Convention. Unfortunately, his idea of proving that there is no scandal has crossed the line into behavior that any reasonable person would consider to be criminal harassment. It turns out said harassment has continued almost unabated for almost two months—and serves as a sobering reminder of why survivors of sexual assault often don’t come forward for years if they do so at all.

You may recall that in my last longform series at Daily Kos, I delved heavily into how much of the evangelical world has its collective head up its collective butt on sexual assault. It centered around the massive sexual assault scandal that has engulfed the SBC, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. One of the worst cases involved one of the SBC’s biggest churches, Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas.

In 1989, when current pastor Jack Graham took over as pastor, he discovered that youth minister John Langworthy had been molesting boys. Although Texas law even then required Graham to report Langworthy to the police, Graham simply told Langworthy to leave and never come back. There matters stood until 2010, when one of Langworthy’s former students, Amy Smith, discovered that Langworthy had somehow made his way to Mississippi, where he was working as a high school choir director and a Baptist youth minister. After a year of phone calls and instant messages, Langworthy was all but forced to publicly confess to molesting boys in both Mississippi and Texas. Facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, Langworthy accepted a suspended sentence of 50 years in prison, five years’ probation and a lifetime on Mississippi’s sex offender registry. He died in 2019. Smith has since branched out into advocating for victims of abuse in the church under the moniker “Watchkeep.”

Through all of this, Graham hasn’t even made a peep about this matter in public. Not to the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News when they researched a series on the scandal, “Abuse of Faith.” Not to Guidepost Solutions when it investigated the cover-up. Not to anyone. You would think that if you stood accused of breaching your basic duty as a pastor and every standard of behavior that is known, you’d be pounding at the door to defend yourself. Not Graham.

But one person has taken it upon himself to ostensibly speak for Graham—Smith’s father, Allen Jordan, a former deacon at Prestonwood. He has spent the better part of the last two years trying to prove that Graham and Langworthy were the victims of a colossal railroad job. This is part of a larger effort to claim the entire SBC sexual assault scandal only exists in the minds of “bloggers who have an axe to grind with the SBC”—including his own daughter.

On Jan. 29, a few days after the first part of my Daily Kos series dropped, Jordan himself irately messaged me demanding to know why I ran this without contacting him, Graham, or anyone at Prestonwood. He offered to show me “detailed research” to prove that the accusations against Graham were false. But Jordan needn’t have bothered; Smith got her hands on a copy of her dad’s dossier and posted it herself for all to see.

The bulk of Jordan’s assertions blatantly misrepresent the record. He claims that the 700 cases listed in an SBC database are only a fraction of a denomination that numbered 15 million members at its height—forgetting that even SBC leaders admit that these are just the cases we know about. He also leaves out that the series relied heavily on those pastors who actually saw the inside of a courtroom; the rampant victim-blaming and victim-shaming in the evangelical world prevents many of these incidents from ever getting that far. But most comical of all, he claimed that Langworthy never assaulted anyone. Never mind that Langworthy not only publicly confessed, but pleaded guilty.

I wasn’t about to let Jordan think I was just some hack librul blogger. So after doing some digging of my own, I emailed Jordan some pointed questions—why Graham declined to speak with Guideposts, whether Jordan himself reported Langworthy to the police and spoke with Guideposts, why Prestonwood found the time to call lawyers rather than the police, and why neither Graham nor Langworthy pursued legal action.

Jordan promised to provide “extensive research” to back up his claims. What he actually delivered was a Trumpian stew of alternative facts that didn’t even begin to explain Jordan’s silence on the matter. Nor did it even begin to square his claim that Langworthy was innocent with the fact that he accepted the opprobrium of being a convicted felon and sex offender.

It turned out, however, that was the least of my concerns. Jordan had cut off contact with Smith in 2012 when—wait for it—she refused to apologize to Graham and Langworthy. He was also angered that Smith had uncovered evidence that he had not only helped hustle Langworthy out of town, but had intimidated one of his victims into keeping quiet. Suddenly, out of nowhere he began carpetbombing Smith with emails about his “research,” and continued doing so even when Smith told him to stop. Jordan claimed that he would only let up if Smith told her daughters “the truth about why your mother and I have not been part of their lives for 14 years.” If that wasn’t creepy enough, Jordan warned Smith that if she didn’t tell her daughters “the truth,” he would find a way to do so himself.

Any mother would be alarmed at such a demand, regardless of who sent it. Smith told me that less than 24 hours after Jordan reached out to me on Daily Kos, she told him never to contact her again. Jordan blatantly flouted this demand by copying her in his emails to me.

As I chewed on it that night, I realized that Jordan was asking me to do something that I could not in good conscience do as a journalist—and more importantly, as a Christian. He apparently felt that proving that Graham and Langworthy had been railroaded was so important that it justified behavior any reasonable person would consider to be criminal harassment.

That would have been true even in the remote possibility that Jordan was telling the truth. On paper, I should have been receptive to such a prospect given that I had been falsely accused by my first wife not long after I left her. But was proving that Graham and Langworthy so important that it required turning a blind eye to harassment? Not just no, but hell no. With this in mind, I preemptively blocked Jordan’s cell number, as well as the Twitter handle he occasionally uses, and sent him a strongly-worded email telling him not to contact me on any platform again.

This has weighed heavily on me for some time. Every time I mulled whether I realized that I would have gone down the same path as that Caleb Hannan went when he was reporting for ESPN’s Grantland on Essay Anne Vanderbilt, a physicist who had invented a revolutionary putter. However, while researching an article about the putter, Hannan discovered that Vanderbilt had lied about her background. She wasn’t related to the Vanderbilt family, she never worked on the B-2 stealth bomber, she never did undergrad work at MIT or Penn, and didn’t have an MBA from Penn’s Wharton School. When he revealed this to Vanderbilt’s investors, he also revealed that he’d also discovered Vanderbilt was trans. Even worse, he wrote the story in a manner that conflated Vanderbilt’s embellishment of her credentials with her decision to stay in the closet. Vanderbilt committed suicide shortly before the article went live.

Hannan’s actions likely sunk any chance of Vanderbilt’s investors winning any lawsuit for securities fraud. Even with the damning evidence, a verdict in their favor would have effectively sent a message that outing people is acceptable. This would have been no different. Even if Jordan were telling the truth, would it have been worth condoning his harassment of his own daughter and granddaughters? Hell no!

This has been weighing on me for two months. I was itching to speak out about it sooner, if only to warn other journalists that they could not ethically use Jordan as a source. However, just when I felt able to write about it without cussing too much, my mom took a nasty fall in her bathtub, and we spent the better part of March tending to her. In that time, any doubt that disengaging from Jordan was the right course. He has turned his attention to Christa Brown, one of the earliest survivors of sexual assault in the SBC to come forward. He has also targeted prominent victim advocate and blogger Dee Parsons of Wartburg Watch.

According to Smith, Jordan has tried to bully Parsons into retracting her posts about Smith from 2012. Never mind that the one-year statute of limitations for filing a defamation action in Texas has long since run out. He has also threatened to send things to Smith’s family and friends unless Parsons retracts her previous stories. He has also targeted Brown with Trumpian smears about her character.

If you’re wondering why survivors of sexual assault don’t come forward, this campaign of smears and harassment by Jordan is part infinity.

If there was any doubt that disengaging with Jordan was the only option, his recent behavior put it beyond any doubt. How could I defend relying on a source who engaged in such outrageous and potentially criminal tactics? As someone who considers himself a muckraker of the old school, I could not in conscience do so. And even if I accepted his argument that Graham and Langworthy deserved justice, how would I have explained to a jury that I was okay with his tactics? And how would I have been able to explain that to Smith and her family? No journalist with an iota of decency would be able to do so. And that’s why no journalist with an iota of decency should deal with Jordan. Criminal charges for this clown are long overdue.