Trigger warning: discussion of sexual assault
There’s a big reason survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault often go years before coming forward, if they come forward at all. When they do so, they often face smearing, shaming and blaming of the worst type. This is especially true among evangelicals; for years, sweeping this under the rug has been standard operating procedure in this world. Why? Wait for it—bringing such matters to light could potentially keep people from being saved.
But even by that standard, what victim advocate Amy Smith—better known as “Watchkeep”—has endured since unearthing one of the most ghastly examples of sexual assault in the Southern Baptist Convention is outrageous. More than a decade ago, she discovered that former SBC president Jack Graham, the pastor of her former childhood church, Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, failed in his legal and moral duty to bring a sexual predator to justice. In so doing, he may have allowed said predator to remain at large for two decades. This was one of the worst episodes in the larger sexual assault scandal that has rocked the SBC in recent years.
Since then, Smith has faced vicious attacks for her work from an unlikely quarter—her own father, a former deacon at Prestonwood. As I note at my Substack, those attacks have crossed the line into outright criminal harassment. Lately, another victim advocate and one of the more vocal survivors of sexual assault in the SBC have become the targets of his attacks as well.
Earlier this year, as part of a three-part series on how the evangelical world has its collective head up its collective butt on sexual assault, I chronicled Smith’s role in exposing her former youth pastor at Prestonwood, John Langworthy, as a serial child molester.
As early as 1989, Smith had heard rumors that Langworthy had been busted for an inappropriate relationship with a teenage boy. By 2010, the rumblings had become too loud to ignore, leading Smith to search for Langworthy online. She discovered that he was working as a youth pastor in Clinton, Mississippi, and was also the choir director at Clinton High School. In part due to Smith bird-dogging him for a year, Langworthy publicly confessed his misdeeds in 2011. Facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, Langworthy took a plea deal that called for him to serve five years of probation and register as a sex offender in Mississippi for life.
In the course of her research, Smith learned something that was at least as hideous as the discovery that her former youth pastor was a predator. When Graham learned about Langworthy’s depravities shortly after becoming Prestonwood’s pastor in 1989, he was legally required to report it to police; even then, pastors were mandated reporters in Texas. Instead, he simply told Langworthy to leave town and never come back—something subsequently corroborated by Guidepost Solutions’ investigation into sexual assault in the SBC.
And yet, in the absence of something we haven’t heard or seen, Graham hasn’t made any public comment on the matter. One person connected to Prestonwood, however, has been very vocal on the matter—Smith’s own father, Allen Jordan, a longtime deacon at the church. It turns out that Smith’s efforts to bring Langworthy to justice came at the expense of her relationship with her parents. They actually broke off contact with her for several years when she refused to apologize to Langworthy and Graham. Earlier, Smith had discovered that Jordan had not only helped hustle Langworthy out of Dallas, but strongarmed at least one victim’s parents into not calling the police.
A few days after the first part of my series went live, I opened up my Daily Kos inbox to find a message from none other than Allen Jordan. He irately demanded to know why I ran this piece without contacting him, Graham, or anyone at Prestonwood. Never mind that I relied heavily on coverage of the matter in local and national media.
According to Baptist News Global, Jordan has spent the better part of the last two years trying to prove that Graham and Langworthy have been the victims of a massive railroad job. This is part of a larger effort to argue that the sexual assault scandal only exists in the minds of “bloggers who have an axe to grind with the SBC”—including his own daughter, Smith.
Jordan offered to provide “detailed research” to back up his claims. However, Smith saved us the trouble; she got her hands on her father’s “research” and posted it here. It grossly distorts and misrepresents the record. For instance, he ignores that the cases in a database of sexual assault cases only represent those that we know about; most never came to light because of rampant victim-blaming and victim shaming. But most comical of all, he claims Langworthy never assaulted anyone even though he confessed knowing full well he would have to bear the opprobrium of being a convicted felon and registered sex offender.
I emailed him with 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. He responded with a Trumpesque stew of alternative facts that failed to explain Graham’s radio silence or reconcile his claim that Langworthy was innocent with the fact that Langworthy had confessed.
But there was something more problematic in his response, if possible. Earlier, he’d begun carpet-bombing Smith’s inbox with his “research,” and continued doing so even after Smith told him to stop. Jordan replied that he would only stop if Smith told her daughters “the truth about why your mother and I have not been part of their lives for 14 years”—and threatened to do so himself if Smith wouldn’t. Smith finally told Jordan not to contact her again, but Jordan flagrantly ignored that demand by copying Smith on his emails to me.
It soon became clear to me that Jordan was so determined to clear Graham and Langworthy’s names that he was willing to stoop to behavior that the rest of us would consider to be criminal harassment. If he thought that I had the time or the lack of decency to go along with this, he was sadly mistaken. I blocked his cell phone number and his sleeper Twitter handle, and sent him a strongly-worded email telling him to never contact me again.
I’d meant to speak up on this sooner, if only to warn journalists that Jordan could no longer be ethically used as a source. But by the time I’d calmed down enough to do so without making every other word a cussword, I had to help tend to my mother after she took a nasty fall. In the two months since then, Jordan’s outrageous and criminal conduct has continued unabated. He has demanded that Dee Parsons of Wartburg Watch, retract her earlier stories about Smith. Parsons has refused to do so even though Jordan has threatened to send unsavory information to Smith’s family and friends.
Jordan has also turned his attention to Christa Brown, who was one of the first survivors of sexual assault in the SBC to come forward. She has faced a smear campaign that would do Trump proud.
If I had any doubt that I had to disengage from Jordan, this tweet from Brown erased it. How could I defend relying on a source who engaged in such outrageous and potentially criminal tactics? 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? No journalist with an iota of decency can do so. By all rights, Jordan shouldn’t be worrying about getting someone to listen. He should be worrying about facing lawsuits and criminal charges.
This is but the tip of a very large iceberg. For more, check out my Substack at Loud, Liberal, Christian. A subscription would be much appreciated, especially a paid one; it helps support my work.