A victim advocate has to fend off below-the-belt attacks from her own father

The woman who was largely responsible for exposing a megachurch's cover-up of sexual assault is being attacked by her own father in a manner that crosses lines that should never be crossed.

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

Being an advocate for victims of sexual assault in evangelical churches is, by definition, a tough job. After all, until very recently, it was standard operating procedure to sweep these matters under the rug. The reason? Wait for it—exposing such matters could potentially harm the cause of Christ by keeping people from hearing about him. Worse, those who turned the hot lights on abusers risked being held responsible for sending them to hell.

That didn’t deter one woman from speaking out when she learned that the pastor of her childhood church, a pillar of the Southern Baptist Convention, was involved in hushing up sexual assault by the church’s youth pastor. Even worse, her own father, a deacon at the time, was apparently involved in said cover-up. In the midst of turning the hot lights on this depravity, she has found herself having to deal with vicious attacks. Some of those attacks have come from an unlikely quarter—her own father. And in the process, her father has crossed a number of lines that should never, ever, ever be crossed.

In February 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News collaborated on “Abuse of Faith,” which exposed a massive cover-up of sexual assault in the SBC. To put it mildly, this was a massive black eye for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. After numerous pastors demanded answers, the SBC tasked investigative firm Guidepost Solutions with investigating all aspects of the cover-up since the turn of the millennium.

Guidepost released its report in May 2022. It revealed a ghastly litany of child sexual abuse, sexual assaults of adults, grooming, and cover-ups going all the way back to the 1960s. For some time, a database of sexual assault cases had been maintained at SBC headquarters in Nashville; by 2022, it had grown to over 700 cases.

One of the most outrageous cases highlighted in the report involved one of the SBC’s largest churches, Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas—the fourth city in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Its pastor, Jack Graham, has long been one of the SBC’s titans; he served as the SBC’s president in 2002 and 2003.

However, in 2011, Prestonwood was rocked when a former youth minister, John Langworthy, was exposed as a serial child molester. He told a shocked audience at Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, Mississippi—a suburb of Jackson—that he had molested several boys in Mississippi and Texas over the years. Watch coverage from WAPT in Jackson here.

Langworthy admitted his confession came after a lot of prodding. Most of that prodding came from Amy Smith, a Dallas-area nurse turned victim advocate under the handle “Watchkeep.” Prestonwood had been Smith’s home church as a girl, when it was located in north Dallas; it moved to Plano in 1999. She was working there as an intern when Langworthy abruptly left his post as youth pastor in 1989. Around that time, according to a 2015 interview with the Dallas Observer, Smith started hearing rumblings that Langworthy had been pushed out due to an inappropriate relationship with at least one teenage boy.

When the rumblings became too loud to ignore, she looked up Langworthy online and discovered he was still working as a youth minister in Mississippi, and was also a choir director at Clinton High School. This hit Smith on a personal level. Langworthy had been Smith’s youth pastor; she had been close friends with a number of boys wom she now knew had been Langworthy’s victims. Langworthy had even boarded with Smith’s family while he was studying at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth—a common practice in Baptist churches at the time.

A blizzard of phone calls and instant messages over the next year led to Langworthy resigning from his posts at both the school and the church. As 2011 wore on, prosecutors in Mississippi found five adult victims in Mississippi, as well as an adult victim from Prestonwood, who were willing to testify against Langworthy. However, due to concerns about the language in Mississippi’s statute of limitations, prosecutors accepted a plea deal in which Langworthy pleaded guilty to molesting five boys between 1980 and 1984, and received a suspended sentence of 50 years in prison, five years’ probation, and a lifetime on Mississippi’s sex offender registry. He died in 2019.

Now here’s where this gets hideous. It turns out that Langworthy would have been and should have been taken off the streets years earlier. Smith discovered that shortly after Graham became Prestonwood’s pastor in 1989, he had learned Langworthy had been molesting boys. Graham’s next move should have been to call the police. Then as now, pastors were mandated reporters in Texas. However, Smith found out that Graham simply told Langworthy to leave town and never come back. Smith was equally horrified to learn that her father, Allen Jordan, a longtime deacon at Prestonwood, had not only played a role in hustling Langworthy out of Dallas, but went as far as to strongarm at least one victim’s parents into not calling the police.

Graham doesn’t look very good at all in the Guidepost report. Not only does it mention his decision to push Langworthy out without calling the police, but it also notes that he rebuffed Guidepost’s request for an interview. So let’s see if we’ve got this straight. There is strong circumstantial evidence that a child predator was allowed to remain at large for over 20 years because Graham failed to do what he should have done, what he was legally required to do. Most of us would be pounding on the door demanding to give their side of the story. But in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, Graham hasn’t done so.

I’d met Smith in 2022, when she and other victim advocates expressed concern over ethical lapses by Christian investigative journalist Julie Roys. Specifically, they were concerned about Roys’ discussion of her relationship with a girl from her days as a church youth pastor in her 2016 book, “Redeeming the Feminine Soul.” They believed Roys wasn’t just recounting what she described as a “dysfunctional relationship,” but minimizing spiritual abuse on her part.

When I first heard about the Guidepost case, my research turned up Smith’s posts about her role in bringing down Langworthy. I also discovered that her advocacy has come at the expense of her relationship with her parents. They have gone as far as to demand that Smith apologize to Langworthy and Graham.

Yep, you read that right. In the absence of something we haven’t heard or seen, Graham has made no public comments about the events of 1989. Not to Guidepost, not to the Chronicle or Express-News, not to anyone. And yet, he’s the one who should get an apology from Smith? Smith’s parents also want her to apologize to a man who publicly confessed his misdeeds and accepted the opprobrium of being a convicted felon and registered sex offender.

I mentioned Langworthy’s depravities and Graham’s utter failure of leadership in a three-part series on sexual assault in the evangelical world at Daily Kos. The first part finally dropped after numerous delays on Jan. 26. A few days later, on Jan. 29, I opened my Daily Kos messages to discover a message from, of all people, Allen Jordan. He irately demanded to know why I ran this series without contacting him, Graham, or anyone at Prestonwood.

I did a little digging, and discovered that Jordan has spent the better part of the last two-plus years on a crusade to prove the Guidepost report is a sham. More specifically, he has tried to prove that Graham and Langworthy have been the victims of a massive railroad job. According to a 2022 profile in Baptist News Global, Jordan has bombarded numerous outlets—including his present hometown paper, the Chronicle (he has retired to Katy, a Houston suburb)—with numerous materials that argue the Guidepost investigation made a lot of fuss over nothing, and the “Abuse of Faith” series was a hatchet job sparked by “bloggers who have an axe to grind with the SBC”—including his own daughter. Smith was also kind enough to provide a copy of his magnum opus; you can read it here.

However, some of Jordan’s claims makes him sound like a Peanuts adult. “Articles of Faith” harped on 700 cases of sexual assault and sexual abuse over the years. To Jordan’s mind, that barely represents a fraction of a denomination that counted 15 million members at its height. What he leaves out is that even SBC officials acknowledged that figure only represents the cases that we know about. He also ignores that the report’s data relied heavily on pastors who were either convicted or plead guilty. As anyone who has delved into sexual assault knows, most of these incidents never make it to trial—in large part because of the culture of victim shaming and victim blaming that is still all too common in the evangelical world. He has also gone as far as to claim that Langworthy never assaulted anyone—ignoring that he publicly confessed and that he pleaded guilty.

Nevertheless, since Jordan was a private person, I knew I couldn’t blow him off altogether. Plus, I suspected that he saw my work at Daily Kos and thought I was just another librul hack. After looking at his dossier and doing some more digging, I decided to disabuse him of that notion. I emailed Jordan some pointed questions—why Graham 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.

Apparently that put Jordan back on his heels, because he offered to send me his “extensive research” into the entire sexual assault issue. Over the next few hours, he sent me a blizzard of material that claimed the Chronicle, Dallas Observer, Guidepost, Baptist News Global, and others hadn’t done their jobs and ignored evidence that showed there really was no sexual assault scandal.

A quick perusal of that material revealed nothing that explained the deafening silence from Graham on the matter. Maybe it’s just me, but if were one of America’s most prominent pastors and I stood accused of breaching my most basic duty not just as a pastor, but as a human being, I would find a way to get my side of the story on the record. But nothing Jordan sent began to explain why he didn’t do that. Nor did he attempt to square his claim that Langworthy had gotten one of the legal screwings of the century with the fact that he pleaded guilty. Instead, all I was getting was a stew of “alternative facts” that would put Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and Kayleigh McEnany to shame.

I’d initially planned to read a little more before drilling him. Smith had told me that her father had a habit of threatening female bloggers, so I suspected that it wouldn’t have been too big of a leap for him to bully and intimidate a black man—especially one young enough to be his son. I was preparing to show him that if he thought he could bulldoze me, he had another think coming.

But, believe it or not, the lack of extraordinary evidence to back up Jordan’s extraordinary claims was the least of my concerns. After not speaking to Smith at all since 2012, Jordan had begun carpetbombing Smith with emails detailing his research. When Smith told him to stop, Jordan made it clear that he was not willing to do so until she told her daughters “the truth about why your mother and I have not been part of their lives for 14 years”—and if she didn’t do so, he would find a way to tell them himself. Smith told me that less than 24 hours after Jordan reached out to me on Daily Kos, she told him not to contact her again. And yet, he copied her and several others on his emails to me.

There is a name for this—harassment. And that would be true even in the extremely remote chance that he was telling the truth, and Graham and Langworthy really had been railroaded. The more I thought about it, I realized that I would be going down the same path as Michael Gallagher, The Cincinnati Enquirer reporter whose investigation into Chiquita was based largely on hacking into Chiquita’s voicemail system despite being repeatedly warned not to do so. Even though the voicemails revealed damning evidence of corporate malfeasance, it did not even begin to justify the invasion of privacy, and The Enquirer had no choice but to renounce Gallagher’s reporting.

This would have been no different. Even if Jordan was telling the truth, proving it would have made me an accomplice to harassment. As a journalist and as a Christian, this I could not do. The only way out was to disengage. 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.

When I hit the send button on that email, I found myself thinking back to my time in a hypercharismatic campus ministry in my freshman year at Carolina. The guys and gals in that bunch believed “bringing the good news of Jesus to UNC” was so important that it justified all manner of despicable tactics—lying about who they really were, guilt-tripping, the lot. I’ve spent the last quarter-century wondering why I went through that chamber of horrors. It has become more apparent to me that it was to see what happens when your cause becomes so important that basic standards of decency have to be thrown out to further it.

What Jordan is doing here is no different. He believes that debunking the claims of a massive sexual assault scandal in the SBC, as well as exonerating Graham and Langworthy, are so important that he must engage in behavior that any reasonable person would consider to be harassment. Even without his almost Trumpian misrepresentation of the facts, the fact that he has no qualms about harassing his own daughter is enough that no responsible journalist should engage with him.