Weekly Roundup: 10 Commandments in Classrooms, Another Megachurch Sex Abuse Scandal, and the Trump Revenge Train
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Brad Onishi and Dan Miller delve into several critical issues in this week's Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup. They start with a vigorous discussion on the constitutionality of Louisiana's new law mandating the Ten Commandments in classrooms, highlighting the religious and historical contradictions in the proponents' arguments. They move on to address the disturbing allegations against Robert Morris, former pastor of Gateway Church, scrutinizing the broader systemic issues within Christian evangelical circles. Finally, they examine recent incendiary comments by Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, exposing plans for revenge and grievance should Trump secure a second term. The episode concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of these events on the American socio-political landscape.
On the SBC with Robert Downen: https://www.straightwhiteamericanjesus.com/episodes/special-episode-the-southern-baptist-conventions-apocalypse-with-robert-downen/
00:00 Founding Fathers and Secularism
00:39 The Debate on 'In God We Trust'
01:00 Introduction to House Bill 71
01:40 Historical vs. Moral Significance of the Ten Commandments
01:50 Christian Nationalism and Legal Contradictions
02:31 Robert Morris Scandal
02:47 Steve Bannon and Roger Stone's Vision for a Second Trump Term
03:00 Introduction and Casual Banter
04:25 Louisiana's Ten Commandments Law
06:34 Legal and Theological Implications
11:05 Evangelical Perspectives on the Ten Commandments
23:46 Symbolism and Authority of the Ten Commandments
26:56 Historical Injustices in Plain View
27:30 Robert Morris and Gateway Church Scandal
31:48 The Rot of Patriarchy in Religious Culture
35:36 Political Hypocrisy and Abuse in Evangelical Circles
45:47 Roger Stone's Chilling Election Strategy
48:17 Steve Bannon's Call for Retribution
53:38 Reasons for Hope Amidst Political Turmoil
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Axis Mundi You also recognize that the Constitution of this country, its founding document, doesn't include the word God, or Jesus, or Christianity.
And that's for a reason, because the founding fathers founded this country as a secular one.
You don't see that?
I bet you CNN pays you a lot of money.
I bet you got a bunch of dollars.
What does this have to do with the network that I work for or what I'm getting paid?
Don't make this about that.
Answer the question.
Why did the Founding Fathers not include God in the Constitution if they wanted this country to be the way that you see it?
Let me finish my statement.
Answer the question and don't make this about me.
In God We Trust.
Don't make it about me.
I got a dollar bill in my wallet.
In God We Trust is written on that dollar.
It is not forcing anybody to believe one viewpoint.
It's merely posting a historical reference on the wall for students to read and interpret it if they choose.
That's Representative Lauren Ventrella, one of the co-authors of House Bill 71 in Louisiana, the bill that mandates that a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments be placed in every classroom.
In her contentious interview with Boris Sanchez on CNN, Ventrella employs a strategy that has been popular among those who have pushed the Ten Commandments bills in Texas and Louisiana and other places.
In certain locations, they tout the need for the moral code and backbone of our country, the Ten Commandments.
When pressed in public, however, they talk about the Ten Commandments as historically important, as a matter of reference to our past and something that's been important to the United States.
So which is it?
Is it a matter of history or morality?
Is it a matter of historical importance or religious conversion and imposition?
We talked today about the ways that Christian nationalists in one hand will say that it's impossible to use laws to prevent people from committing gun violence, that there's no way that systemic racism can be rooted out through new policies, but instead must be left up to the individual and their commitment to God.
In these times, they say, religion is about the heart, about the individual, about what's inside.
And yet, in times when they want to impose order on society, to have privilege, to have dominance, well then it's about laws and policies.
Then it's about government and control.
We'll also talk about Robert Morris, the now-resigned pastor of Gateway Church in South Lake, Texas, who departed his position this week after allegations of sexual abuse involving a 12-year-old girl.
Finally, we'll turn to inflammatory comments by Steve Bannon and Roger Stone about what a second Trump term will look like, and how it will be based on revenge and grievance, and a chance to do things right the next time around.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Good morning, Dan.
Good to see you, and welcome to summer.
It is summer.
It's been, like, almost 100 degrees in Massachusetts, so, you know, feels like a real summer for those of us who aren't used to it.
But yeah, it's very early Brad's time, Brad, so Brad's bright and early and has that, like, you know, pretty attractive Bradley Onishi gravel voice going, so that's pretty awesome.
It's the, uh, Barry White slash Bradley Onishi.
Yeah.
Morning voice.
That's what I'm sure people are thinking right now.
Yeah.
That's exactly what they're thinking.
Well, exactly what they're thinking.
It's like, wow, I thought I was going to hear Bradley.
It sounds like Barry White.
And yeah, so.
Yeah.
No, I get that a lot.
I've gotten, I don't know, in the six years we've done this show, Dan, I've gotten maybe zero or zero emails that have ever mentioned that.
So.
You're going to say probably slightly less than the outrage about your abortion piece.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes, that's right.
All right.
So, Ten Commandments, Robert Morris, Steve Bannon.
It's quite a day, but there's a lot here and a lot to jump into.
So, Louisiana, first state in the nation to require the Ten Commandments be placed on every classroom wall, HB 71.
And I want to play a clip right now of Chris Landry, who is the governor of Louisiana.
Proclaiming loudly and gladly about this bill and the Ten Commandments and what he calls the first law being displayed in the classrooms around his state.
This bill mandates the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in public, elementary, secondary, and post-education schools in the state of Louisiana.
Because if you want to respect the rule of law, you've got to start from the original law given, which was Moses.
He can't wait to be sued.
Landry later said, Dan, that he is so looking forward to being sued.
He can't wait to be sued.
Yep.
Take it away.
What else do we need to know about what happened here?
Yeah, so we'll start with what the law is and kind of work toward, obviously, why he's going to be sued.
And then I've got some takeaways and thoughts, some of which are kind of old saws every time this comes up, but I think they're worth repeating.
So yeah, as you said, this week, Louisiana became the first state in the nation to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
And I read that it was in kindergarten through college.
It is all of education if they receive state funds.
So, as I understand it, any educational institution that receives state funds, starting, I think, 2025, will have to display them on a poster-sized display with, quote, large, easily readable font.
It essentially has to be, I guess, prominently displayed or visible or whatever.
As you said, Jeff Landry's statements about this, putting up the original law that was given by Moses and all of this.
It's kind of interesting, though, the move.
And so why is he saying, I'm looking forward to getting sued?
Because obviously people are going to sue and say that this violates separation of church and state, that you have state-funded institutions endorsing a particular religious perspective, a statement of moral codes endorsed by particular religious traditions and not others.
And so obviously to preempt that, the language of the statute or the bill puts it forward as non-religious in nature.
And this is typical.
So if people follow arguments about Ten Commandments in courthouses or like the nativity scene on the courthouse lawn or things like that, this is kind of a move.
And so they say that they are there because of their historical role in law and society, historical significance.
And it goes on to say, the Bill's text says, quote, including the Ten Commandments in the education of our children is part of our state and national history, culture, and tradition, end quote.
Notice, no reference to religion.
That's the argument that's put forward.
So that's the long and short of it.
They've got to post it and so on.
Some takeaways from this.
One is like, and people have probably heard us talk about things like this.
I know some of our listeners know this.
The first one is that Christians, conservative Christians in particular, talk about the Ten Commandments.
But I remember doing this, Brad, when I was in like, I don't know, high school or something.
And so I go to look up the Ten Commandments, and it turns out they're actually kind of hard to find in the Hebrew Bible.
And there's like three different versions, and two are the same, but one is like pretty different.
But I remember trying to count them.
And I was like, there are like maybe 12 here, or maybe there are like 9.
It turns out that counting to 10 is hard.
And so I was looking this up today, and it turns out that the church has always had trouble counting to 10.
I found this.
This is on the website.
Let me make sure I give the credit here.
Lexham Press had this just thing.
But that's what it's noting.
It's saying it's actually hard to find them.
Here's what it says.
It says, the Bible doesn't give a decisive answer.
There are 12 negative imperatives in Exodus 20, that's one of the places.
In other words, the thou shalt nots, the traditional thou shalt nots, there are 12 of them.
But one of the commandments, which is honor your father and your mother, doesn't include any negatives.
And it says, to make ten, St.
Augustine combined the prohibition of images with that of idolatry and argued that there were two commandments against covenants.
He had to kind of add two together and separate two to come up with ten.
Another early church leader named Origen separated the prohibition of false gods from the command against images.
The point is, there's long been this Christian story of like the Ten Commandments as this kind of distillation of the moral teaching of Christianity and so forth.
And number one, like we don't even kind of know what they are and you have to like play with the numbers and so on.
Whatever.
That's fine.
The other one is this claim that it's the historical basis of U.S. law.
And people, constitutional scholars, legal scholars and others have long hit the issue that if you look at the actual development of U.S. Constitution, constitutionalism and before that British common law and so forth, you just can't make this argument that there was like a straight line from the Christian or Jewish scriptures to the law and so forth.
But again, in addition to that, and this again is kind of an old saw, but I want to go through it, we also know that even those who affirm the so-called Ten Commandments, they don't put them all in law, right?
Remembering the Sabbath, right?
Christians don't observe the Sabbath.
I'll just remind people there that the Sabbath is Saturday, not Sunday, and Christians explicitly in early Christian history stopped observing the Sabbath because of their views of Jesus and so forth.
Dan, unless you consider going to Cheesecake Factory after church, not observing the Sabbath, then you're a liar.
For us, it was always like the Pizza Hut pizza buffet.
That was like the church place to go.
And yeah, you get into that, right?
The Sabbath, not only the Sabbath, but the prohibitions against working and anybody working and animals working and farm animals and so forth.
It prohibits coveting your neighbor's house or their possessions.
So if you're like looking over your neighbor's fence and you're like, man, his lawnmower is like way better than mine.
I really wish I had his lawnmower or I just wish my lawn didn't suck.
My lawn sucks, right?
So I look at my neighbors and I'm like, wow, their lawn is really nice.
So I guess the police should come rushing in because I'm coveting my neighbor's possessions.
The point is, again, that we get this facile sort of, this is the basis of law and it's not actually how it works.
Here's the more substantive things that I think are with this.
It has always fascinated me, going all the way back to my undergraduate days, that to argue or to try to say that we need to honor the Christian basis of the nation and have nativity scenes on the lawn or the Ten Commandments, advocates have to deny their religious significance.
So there's this sense that it's really important that we affirm our Christian identity, but we're not actually affirming our Christian identity because we're going to argue that these aren't about being Christian or Jewish or anything else.
So regardless of the content of it...
It's been reduced to, eh, it's part of our culture.
It's part of our heritage.
It's part of, you know, whatever.
It's part of our history.
And so I think that that ties into that.
I think tied in with it as well.
And this is why, going back to my evangelical days, when I opposed posting things like the Ten Commandments in courthouses and so forth, I did so because of my Christian convictions.
They were, for me, religious documents.
And so I agreed that I had no business imposing those legally on others.
But also, it's bad theology.
So for all the Christians who want to do this, it borders on what sociologists and others might call sort of magical thinking, right?
There's this sense that simply having this thing present in the room will somehow, what?
It will magically transform society.
It will, I don't know, maybe stop school shootings.
We've heard this.
Every time there's a mass shooting at a school, you get the advocates who say, we need to post the Ten Commandments.
But I just want to think about the argument here, right?
Or I want folks to think about this, because the rationale would be, these are good, important religious moral teachings and we need to keep them in front of people and shape people.
Except you just argued, advocates of this, that they're not there because they're moral teachings or they're religious.
They're there because of their historical or vague cultural significance and so forth.
And then the other one is, folks hear me talk about this a lot, the people who want to say that they're being biblical or so forth.
This guy in the Bible, his name is, what was it?
Oh, it was Jesus, that guy.
At one point, famously, he is asked, what are the most important commandments?
And he doesn't point to the Ten Commandments or what's known as the Decalogue, right?
He doesn't point to the hundreds of other commandments that are also part of the Jewish religious law.
He boils it down to two and says, love the Lord your God and love your neighbor.
That's what it all boils down to.
If I look at this, I look at, yes, the fact, and people note this, that, you know, honoring your father and mother is not normally something that we punish criminally and so forth.
And so that argument doesn't work.
Historically, no, the Ten Commandments are not the basis of U.S.
constitutional law.
It just doesn't work.
And Andrew Seidel and others that we talked to have done great work, you know, in painstaking detail to show this.
But I think for me, maybe from a more philosophical or sort of cultural perspective, the evacuation of the religious meaning to justify the presence of this religious document undermines everything that they ostensibly say that we need in culture and the Christian influence and so forth.
That's all there.
Never mind, I think it is clearly unconstitutional.
We'll see what happens.
Again, the suits will come, if they haven't already.
I'm sure the ACLU has one just kind of, you know, ready to file for any given state that does this.
And the defense, people can watch this, they're going to argue that it's not a religious document, that it has no religious significance, that it's not an imposition of religious values.
So let's remember that the next time there's a mass shooting and we're told that it's because the Ten Commandments weren't posted on the wall somewhere.
Some of my thoughts, quick rundown, over to you.
I want to stay on this, what you said there about the religious meaning versus the historical meaning and the talking out of two sides of their mouth.
And I want to zoom out and add one or two more dimensions to it.
I think Americans United is already preparing their suit.
I know Freedom from Religion Foundation has already got it in the works.
So you're going to see it.
And in many ways, part of why they did this is because they want the suits and they want to have something that's like, you know, once again, divide the nation.
Those who want God in our schools and those who hate God and hate America and are all for globalist, woke, Marxism orgies and sex parties.
You know, that's gonna be the argument, right?
Okay.
So, I want to zoom out and add one more dimension, and then I'm going to come back to what you just said about the historical versus the religious.
I want to add in this theme of the individual and the collective.
Yeah.
So, Dan, you and I were evangelicals.
We were ministers.
We were leaders.
We went to seminary.
Correct me here and tell me if I've forgotten or if I've got this wrong, but one of the overriding themes of my evangelical experience was that it is about a personal relationship with God, that your heart must be converted, that one of the reasons we were suspicious as evangelicals of Catholics is that because
There's a lot of Catholic rituals, baptism and communion, that are kind of performances that don't require a devotion of your inner sanctum, that you don't have to be personally pious in order to go through the motions of ritual and performance, and therefore some Catholics Are quite religious, but many are just part of the family.
Just to jump in that, Protestants for years, going all the way back to like Catholic persecutions in England and places, dismissed it as being what?
As being magical, right?
That they were affirming magic because there was no personal sort of piety involved.
There was no personal feeling.
I referenced magical thinking earlier, and that is exactly the critique that you're saying has been leveled against more, let's say, collective or ritualistic Christian expressions.
Now, where else do we hear about the individual in the heart?
We hear about it when...
You ask evangelicals and others who would like to not upset a social order that largely benefits them or is built in a way that they think privileges them.
What does that mean?
It means when there is a mass shooting and you talk about gun control, they say, no, no, no, this is guns don't kill people.
People kill people.
We need to fix mental health.
We need to fix the lone wolf problem.
We need to help these isolated people with no community, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so you're telling me it's an individual heart issue, just like my relationship with God.
Yes.
Okay, so don't upset the social order by enacting new gun reform.
No.
Systemic racism.
Murder of George Floyd, other instances of police brutality, you know, 12-year-old black child is arrested for a minor, you know, thing that they did.
We can go on and on and list it.
What's the point?
Well, racism's a heart problem.
It's a heart problem.
You got to convert the heart and then that person will not be racist anymore.
That's how it works.
And on down the line, Dan.
And in my mind, the individual heart issue comes out when you're asking them to reform or reshape a social order that they have largely built and do not want disturbed.
And yet, what happens when they want to impose order on everyone else?
When they want to impose their worldview on everyone else?
It is laws, policies, book bans, school curricula overrides and reshaping and transformation.
It goes corporate.
All of a sudden, Dan, it is about everybody.
So I spent part of this week, I worked with a journalist on a story where they were analyzing all the prayers given at Trump rallies.
It's really interesting reading these prayers all together, like in one document, because one of the themes that's present in almost every prayer, from Georgia to California to Texas, with people from various kind of Protestant backgrounds, is that they almost all pray for what?
A nation that's departed from God.
And what they mean by that are what?
Gay fam, you know, families with queer parents, queer families.
What they mean by that is the rise of the nuns.
What they, honestly, what they meant by that, if you read the prayers, is like immigration.
Somehow, like, people coming into the country means the country's lost its covenant, has abandoned its covenant with God.
Here's my point.
When you look at the prayers from Trump rallies, the prayer is for corporate repentance.
And Trump is the man that will deliver the United States from our waywardness.
OK.
Let's go back to the Ten Commandments.
So you're telling me.
That religion's a heart issue.
The only way you can know God is through a personal relationship.
The only way that you can achieve salvation is by accepting Jesus into your heart.
But you think that putting the Ten Commandments in every classroom will fix something about our country that's ailing it.
That doesn't feel to me like you're doing that in good religious faith.
It feels like that to me, like you want to impose order on everyone.
You want to remind everyone of who's in charge and who's not, of who's legitimate and who's not, who's a real American and who's not.
You want to create a social order by way of a religious maxim or set of maxims, whether they be 10 or 12 or however you want to count them.
And so you want to tell me now that this is about, you know, the religious backbone or heart of the country?
Okay.
And that's what, if you listen to Chris Landry, that's what he's saying.
I mean, he's saying like, this is the original law for Moses who got it from God, right?
He's doing the religious version.
Okay.
And then Dan, and then I'll throw it back to you.
Here's the last piece of my little puzzle.
When pressed on this in a setting out in open water, in non-friendly water, Lauren Ventrella, one of the people who co-sponsored this, or anyone else, they do exactly what you said.
Oh, it's about history.
It's about history.
So now we've got a third element.
So we started with, well, it's about your heart.
Okay.
But no, it's actually about everybody because I want to impose a certain order on you and tell you who's a real American and who's not by way of the Ten Commandments.
If you're a brown kid with South Asian heritage and you don't worship Yahweh or Jesus, And you don't have the Ten Commandments in your home and abide by those?
If you are somebody who has idols in your home because you are Buddhist or Hindu or any other faith that involves reverence or veneration or anything involving idols, well, you're obviously a sinner.
Not just according to your Christian preacher next door, but according to the classroom where you read every day and I have to go out and ask your mom in second grade, like, why are we not doing it right?
Because there's a sign in my classroom that says, we're doing something wrong, mom.
What should we do?
Okay.
So we've got the individual, we've got the corporate, you want to impose order on everybody.
But then when you're pressed on it, you're like, it's historical.
Oh, no, this is about history.
This is about like, you know, just a tradition in our country.
Well, which one is it?
And here's the thing, and I'll just reiterate what you said and I'll throw it back to you.
If you are Dan Miller of 1994 and you know that the only way you can save people is through knowing Jesus, then the Ten Commandments isn't going to do jack squat in a classroom.
So you're doing it because you want to create something else, a social hierarchy.
And then when you're pressed on it, you're willing to be, and Dan, this is part of why I got fed up with evangelicalism, you're willing to liquidate the theological import and just tell everybody, oh, no, no, it's about history and it's about tradition.
So on one hand, I think you're being dishonest because you're trying to create social order and not something else.
On the other hand, theologically, you're a wimp.
You're a wimp because you're not willing to say, this is about the almighty God, creator of the universe.
So you, you, you, you got three lanes and you're swerving amongst all three people who want the 10 commandments in a classroom.
And it's incoherent from a legal perspective.
It's weak from a Christian perspective.
And it's completely prejudiced from an American perspective.
So just picking up on some of those themes, when I was an evangelical, when I was an evangelical pastor, and you would talk to people, and you did have this kind of core piece of theological worldview, which was that people can only become Christians, can only be saved, they have this personal salvation encounter, With Jesus.
And I remember, and I know you had these conversations, you talk about standing outside the movie theater and proselytizing, and I'm sure you had this conversation where you would ask somebody, do you think you're a good person?
Or if you died today, what do you think would happen?
Whatever.
It's like, I don't know, I guess I think I'd go to a better place.
And you'd say, well, why do you think that?
And I remember people would say, well, I try to do my best.
I try to be a good person.
I follow the Ten Commandments.
And what would the response be?
You can follow any commandments you want, but if you don't have a personal relationship with Jesus, it's irrelevant.
The Ten Commandments don't bring salvation from within an evangelical or theologically conservative Christian worldview.
So yeah, that drove me nuts then, the inconsistency drives me nuts now.
Another piece is, This makes me think of, you know, you drive around Fourth of July weekend, you drive around Memorial Day, you'll see those big signs on the side of the road that are like, don't drink and drive, and, you know, the Department of Transportation will roll these out.
I'm pretty convinced that probably never in the history of the world has anybody who's, like, hammered and behind the wheel been, like, cruising down the road, they see that sign, they're like, oh my God, what am I doing?
I better pull over and call an Uber.
Right?
It's symbolic.
It's not for effect.
It's not going to do anything.
It is the state demonstrating that it's opposed to drunk driving.
It's the state, I think, communicating to people that they're going to be on alert for this and the state patrol is going to be out, whatever.
But but here's what you're saying.
That doesn't change hearts.
You know what it does?
It puts fear.
It's a reminder.
Oh, you know what?
Like it's there are people who might be like, you know what?
I am going to a barbecue.
Who's driving?
Because you know what?
You know why?
Because there's cops all over Southern Boulevard.
Hey, my buddy said there's going to be a lot of checkpoints along, you know, the the parkway there.
So we better be like it's fear, which is what the Ten Commandments is.
Anyway, that's yeah, that's that's that's exactly it is that its purpose on that wall is not.
To change minds, it is to demonstrate authority, it is to be symbolic.
And symbolic of what?
Exactly what you're describing.
Of whose country this is, of who is in charge, of what matters.
And again, if somebody says, well, it's just history, it's like, cool, let's talk about the slavery stuff you won't talk about in schools.
Conservatives in states like Louisiana, If it's just history, if that doesn't matter, let's talk about Stonewall.
Let's talk about the American Civil Rights Movement more.
Let's talk about slavery.
Let's talk about all these things that you have decided don't have historical value on the basis of being too divisive or whatever.
So Yeah, I think we can both rant about this forever, but it's full of holes everywhere.
And of course, I think, as I say on It's in the Code, it's sort of the code that's out in the open.
It's the secret that's not a secret.
Everybody knows this isn't really about historical significance, it's about Christian dominance, and it's just right there in plain view.
I mean, yeah, I'm into history.
So let's put Executive Order 9066 on the, on the wall next to the Ten Commandments.
Just all there about putting Japanese people in camp.
Let's put the Chinese Exclusion Act up there.
Just let folks read that one.
You know, maybe Dred Scott decision.
I don't know.
That, that seems like maybe one we could put up, but there's a lot, there's a lot we could put up if we want to do history in our classrooms.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about Robert Morris and Gateway Church.
Be right back.
So, Robert Morris is, or was, the leader of Gateway Church.
It's based in Southlake, Texas.
Southlake, Texas, for some of you will remember, is the place where Mike Higsonbaugh did his interviews and fieldwork for his book They Came for the Schools.
I just interviewed Mike about a month ago.
And Southlake is one of these places that has had its school curricula and its school board transformed over the last few years.
And there's been a strong Christian nationalist element to that.
And Robert Morris is a key player in that story.
So here's somebody, Dan, who has had a key role over the last few years.
In arguing to protect the children by way of school curricula that excludes things like gay characters in literature and other materials in the library and everything else.
He was also spiritual advisor to Donald Trump.
Chris Hayes had a good segment the other night with Mike Hicks and Boss showing that he was sitting like in the third row of one of Trump's Supreme Court nominee ceremonies.
All that to say, not a run-of-the-mill evangelical.
Not a somewhat prominent evangelical.
This is an evangelical of the highest influence.
Tell us more about what happened here.
Yeah.
And so, as you say, everything about Robert Morris, big, mega church pastor.
We should say that, too, that the church he pastors is massive, right?
It's one of these massive, influential... It's like the ninth largest church in America.
Yeah, it's huge.
And he was accused of sexual molestation of a minor.
It came out this week.
And so, this is from NBC News, their sort of summary of this.
The woman involved is a woman named Cindy Klemischer, I believe is how you say her name.
And she said that in 1982, starting in 1982, Morris, who was then 21, she was 12, so she was a minor, he was an adult, and a good stretch between the two, you know, a nine-year age gap.
We're not talking like an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old or something like that, was staying with her family.
And there's some sensitive information here.
Klemenshire, who's now 54, said that he invited her to his room where he instructed her to lie on her back.
And this was the first of several encounters that would span the next four and a half years.
So this occurred over a period of time.
So that's the accusation.
And they were made public, and I want to give props to them, by the organization Wartburg Watch, which is a website that seeks to expose stories of abuse in churches and sort of bring them to the light.
And this is what sort of blew this up.
Morris, when confronted with the accusations, he appeared to acknowledge the events in a statement for the evangelical news site The Christian Post.
Among other things, this is what he said.
He acknowledged what he called, quote, an inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady.
Does not say with a minor, doesn't say with a child, says with a young lady.
He goes on to say it was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong.
He doesn't mention her by name, but he mentions that the encounters happened on, quote, several occasions over the next few years until, quote, the situation was brought to light in March of 1987, which broadly corresponds to the timeline that Klemenshire is putting forward here.
Other things, he said that we had not all privy to how the situation was brought to light in March 1987, but he said that he confessed it to church leaders at that time and sought forgiveness.
And he continues, I'm going to come back to this, he says, "...since that time I have walked in purity and accountability in this area.
The sin was dealt with correctly by confession and repentance." Right?
So this is what he said there.
Gateway, the church, initially did not respond to reporter comments and queries and so forth.
They did send a statement out to Gateway employees following the revelation of this, and they said that Morris had, quote, "...properly disclosed the matter to church leaders." And said, quote, since the resolution of this 35-year-old matter, there have been no other moral failures.
That was their sort of, it was not an official stance, but this became public.
And then three days later, as you indicated, he actually did step down as pastor of Gateway.
So that's the saga.
Here are kind of my takeaways from this, and I know that we could spend a lot of time on this.
One is just, for me, continue the rot of gender essentialism and patriarchy in high control religious culture in America.
And I know that there are people who will talk about a kinder patriarchy and like, what about patriarchy that's about, you know, protecting women?
And like, no, like this happens all the time.
I've talked about this more than I need to.
I'm not going to repeat it all here, but I think that this is a core component of or a core outcome that comes with the essentialism and patriarchy that structure these organizations.
The continued minimizing of the events, describing her as a young lady, not a child, not a minor.
The insistence that, as he said, the sin was, quote, dealt with correctly by confession and repentance.
I mean, dude, you still got to work at churches for the next 35 years.
You still got to work with churches and be a moral exemplar of other people, including minors, including children like the one that you had sexual relationships with.
I'd love to hear more.
I guess I wouldn't love to hear more, but I'd be curious for more exactly what the quote-unquote repentance Consisted of?
Did it involve anything with Klemisher at all?
Or was it just, as you say, a matter of the heart?
Here, it's a matter of the heart of this repentant man turning back to God, and so everything's fixed.
There's no reconciliation.
There's no recompense.
There's no cost of, sorry, there are some things that you do and you just don't get to be a pastor anymore or ever.
It's just not going to happen.
He—Gateway's response essentially said that he held the position, and it's ambiguous when he says it was properly disclosed.
To whom?
To those earlier church leaders?
To them?
To, like, you know, who knew about this?
But to me, the implication is that they had known about this.
At some point.
Did they know she was 12?
Or did they think she was of, you know, 18, 19, 20?
You know, there's questions there because... There's a lot of ambiguity about quote-unquote young lady, right?
And what that can mean.
And then minimizing the issue by referring to it as 35 years in the past.
That kind of throwaway statement of, you know, this incident 35 years ago.
We've heard this before.
We've heard this with Trump.
We've heard this with others.
We've heard this when men are credibly accused of sexual misconduct and it wasn't yesterday.
It's dismissed as irrelevant because it was a long time ago.
Here, as you were highlighting earlier, the convenience of appealing to a theology of the heart where it serves the interests of powerful men In a powerful church, a wealthy church, an influential church, a church for whom it's a stamp of approval that their pastor was one of Trump's spiritual advisors.
All of that outweighs what was done to a 12-year-old child by this man over a period of half a decade, right?
Four and a half to five years.
And I think the last one that ties in with this spiritual advisor piece is, we just see this over and over, right?
Trump's ongoing and consistent draw to just scummy male people, right?
Like every time you turn around, it feels like Trump is drawn to the worst, the worst examples, the most egregious examples of this kind of masculinity.
Why?
Because as we know, that's what Trump is.
That is how Trump defines masculinity.
That is how he has practiced his masculinity.
This has been demonstrated in court, and juries have agreed to this at this point.
So, sort of on and on, but I think it ties in with the themes you were highlighting of, you know, the convenience of appealing to religion of the heart.
I think there's a lot here about the ongoing conceptions of masculinity and the significance of masculinity and what that is within American evangelicalism.
Yeah, your thoughts on this really sordid and awful sort of story.
All right, so let's just start with the political.
So I want to give you a blast from the past, Dan.
You ready for a name?
I'm ready.
Jeremiah Wright.
Right.
Barack Obama's pastor, the Obama family's pastor in Chicago, who before the 2008 election, there was this huge controversy because there were these sermons unearthed where he uses the words, God damn America.
Now, if you read the sermons in context, and we've actually done this on the show way back when somewhere, I'd have to go dig out the episode.
He's talking about the, I don't know, the history that we just mentioned.
You know, not the Ten Commandments, but... And by the way, what's he doing?
He's talking.
He's talking to people.
That's his, you know, unforgivable sin on the right that you're coming to here.
He's just... things he said.
No.
Okay, man of influence, etc.
But I would say if you read all that in context, there's a reason he says goddamn America because it's all about the history of America's sins.
Okay, whatever.
We could go back to Jeremiah Wright, etc.
But here's the point.
Barack Obama had to publicly distance himself from Jeremiah Wright and that church.
There was a lot of hard feelings between the Obamas and Wright and that community and so on and so on and so on.
It was a big deal.
We've not really heard a big full-throated distancing from the entire GOP establishment yet, at least at the time of taping.
So that's one.
Number two, I want to just come back to the individual and the collective.
So what people like Morris do is they try to tell you That everyone who is gay, everyone who is trans, everyone who is queer are groomers and perverts who are trying to destroy your children.
That's the crusade in the classroom, at the PTA, at the school board meeting, and so on.
Okay?
And what they'll do, and you've seen this happen, Dan, whether it's a mass shooter or anyone else, they'll use some example of somebody who is queer in some way and say, they did this and that indicts the entire group of of these folks.
Right.
If you are non-binary, well, clearly you are dangerous and violent and everything else because of this one example we unearthed of somebody who may or may not actually be a non-binary and this and that.
But that's what we're going to do.
But I want to go back to when it comes to upending a social order that privileges them, that gives them power, that gives them dominance, it always becomes about the heart.
So let's just look at the facts.
I'm not going to go over all the specifics.
I'm not going to do all the data, but I will just say we all know.
About the thousands and thousands and thousands of cases of Catholic clergy abuse in this country, going back decades and decades and decades.
You know, that's an old story in the sense that I think most people listening know about that.
There are thousands of children who were abused by Catholic priests in this country.
OK.
Protestants are like, well, not us.
Well, actually, yes, you.
Yes, because in Texas, in the Southern Baptist Convention, there's been a big, big, big, big set of reporting by Robert Downen and colleagues at various newspapers that the Houston Chronicle in particular, going back to like 2019 and 20.
And you can read all those stories.
I've interviewed Robert about those stories.
You can search our website for my interview with Robert Downen and put it in the show notes.
Thousands of instances of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention alone.
Volunteers, pastors, ministers, elders, a list was kept at the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters of people they knew were abusers.
It's a massive, disgusting story.
But when you ask folks about that, it's like, well, no, we don't need to.
What is what is the SBC doing, Dan?
Right.
What is the SBC?
What did we talk about last week?
Did we talk about the SBC being like, you know, we just have an ongoing interior reflection as a community about the abuse problem and who we are, because somehow we have structured our churches in a way that That the bad actors are allowed into places where they can access vulnerable people whenever they... Nope, not... You know, what are they doing?
Condemning IVF.
Like Russell Moore, leader in the SBC, somebody who, you know, I'm sure if Russell and I talked for four or five hours, we wouldn't agree on a bunch of stuff.
Russell Moore stands up on issues like this.
Russell Moore is no longer part of that group.
Okay.
Here's my point, Dan, is Robert Morris is going to be explained over the next months as a lone wolf, bad actor, can't believe he failed, moral failing.
So sad to see a man of God sin like that instead of How does this keep happening?
How do we keep happening every week?
If you pay attention, you will find every week a person with religious authority in a Christian context abusing children, committing sexual assault, Now I'm not saying that's inherent to Christianity.
Don't get it wrong.
I am not saying that Christian equals sexual assault or pedophilia.
Not what I'm saying.
What I am saying is a lot of churches that are somehow structured in a way that people are able to be prayed upon by folks who would like to pray upon them will also say I'm just going to go out on a limb.
If we give this story a year or two years, I think what we're going to find now, I could be totally wrong about this.
So I'm just don't, don't, don't take it out of context.
This is probably not his only victim.
Now, who knows?
Who knows what's going to happen here?
But it's just a guess, because that's what the data says is probably true.
So those are my thoughts on Morristown.
This is one more instance of a class of people who continue to seem to fall into sexual assault, sexual abuse, pedophilia, etc.
And it's never, as a group, The denomination or the church or anyone else saying, we've got to interrogate ourselves.
We've got to root out the structural problems, the vulnerabilities.
We've got to do right by the children.
What does it mean to protect children?
It might mean making your churches safe and quit getting out here and labeling every queer person you can find a groomer and a pervert.
And it might just mean getting the groomers and the perverts out of your own community, because that is where we're actually seeing not phantom, not illusory, not fantastical instances of grooming.
We're actually seeing it happen in real life and there are real life consequences to it.
Yeah, if you want to point to the groomer, point to Morris, right?
There's your groomer, literal groomer who participated in this for years.
So I think a couple of things with this.
I agree with you about statistically speaking, probably other victims.
I'll go further out and say that, you know, three or four years from now, if anybody bothers to follow up, we'll keep a low profile, but there's a real high probability that he's not done in Christian ministry either.
He will be the pastor of some smaller, less known church.
There will have been some process of reconciliation or restoration or what have you.
New church in Arizona somehow.
Look at that.
Oh, okay.
Great job, Robert Morris.
Yep, I would bet money that that is something that we will see.
Quietly, out of the limelight, and so forth.
The other thing is, you know, you talk about this, and I pose the question on, it's in the code, sometimes, on episode one.
So people ask, like, you know, why don't well-meaning evangelicals just fix this?
This being whatever the problem is, but this being one of them.
And one of the issues is that, to use that tagline, it's in the code.
It is part of, or flows naturally from, The core of what we would call theological anthropology within evangelicalism.
To counter this, they are going to have to call into question their conceptions of what masculinity is, what authority is, and how it lies only with men, and so forth.
They are going to have to prioritize, I think, a different conception of communal life and family life and so forth.
It cuts to the heart of key theological elements of that tradition, and that is part of why one part Not the only part, but one part of why we're not likely to see this change.
Because, as you say, the Russell Moores of the world, the people that really want to change it, that say, we have to do whatever is necessary to change this, they're simply booted from the movement so that it can preserve its existing structures of authority, its existing communal structure, its existing male privilege.
So, last note on this, Mike Hicksonbot reports that when he would tell this story, and Morris would tell this story about a sin in his past, he would actually tell this from the pulpit, he would sometimes describe the young lady he called her involved as having a Jezebel spirit.
So once again, he's like sort of putting the blame on, in this case, a 12-year-old girl for tempting him.
And it goes back to not only what you said about patriarchy and authority, it goes back to purity culture and gender roles and the ways that women are taught.
To understand their bodies and their sexuality and the ways that gender is divided among men who are naturally supposedly aggressive and hypersexual and women who are supposed to protect society from those desires by taming them.
So, I've said it before, purity culture is rape culture and I stand by that.
And I take what you're saying too about patriarchy, authority, all that as part of that whole pie.
As you say, it's baked into the entire code of this whole algorithm.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about Steve Bannon and Roger Stone.
OK, Dan, so I'll just say look out for Lorne Windsor if you are a conservative who's got a big mouth.
So Lorne Windsor, we talked last week, caught Alito and Roberts and Martha Ann Alito on tape at the Supreme Court Historical Gala.
This week, it's tape of Roger Stone.
And Roger Stone, we'll just play it for you here, goes on to talk about what he sees as the strategy leading up to the election.
No.
I'm prepared to go back.
That may not be necessary.
Now that may not be necessary.
There are technical legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest action.
I'm not there yet, but there are things that can be done.
It's a long conversation.
I know people that... Changes in state law, real-time voting, monitoring, going to court as we just did to challenge some of the voters.
voting us, monitoring, voting to court as we just did, to challenge some of the voters.
The election's not tomorrow.
We challenged, we went into court to sue in Michigan over a few of the ballots, which we sued in half a dozen votes.
And then we were finally now on an offensive footing.
Remember, there's often, as a committee, there's $200,000 and they can spend any amount of it to try to get cleaner electrics.
We're looking for that one last time.
- So we have control of our communities.
- Go through the scores.
- So we're gonna spend, the RNC is gonna spend more money now. - So Dan, here's what catches my ear about this, Here's Roger Stone, a man you don't often find unguarded, seemingly caught in a kind of open big mouth moment.
And he openly says something that I think should be chilling to everybody and that is that last time around they really didn't know what they were doing.
That they were acting, excuse me, they were reacting.
And now what they're, what they have in place are the, all of these plans, like these preemptive plans for lawsuits, for challenges, they've already signaled or singled out, excuse me, the judges and the people that they think in the system will bend.
Like, Roger Stone is basically saying, we're preparing now to make sure that the 2024 election is not seen as legitimate, if and how we need that.
And that should be chilling, because it's something I've maintained for a long time on this show.
If you listen to Anne Nelson, if you listen to others who are talking about Project 2025, One of the things that we have to realize is that this Trump campaign is not like the others and a Trump administration from 2025 to 2020 whenever he decides to leave would not be the same as the first one because there are people around him.
Who saw the first Trump administration as a complete lost opportunity.
They bungled it.
They weren't prepared for it.
They didn't know what they were doing.
Jared Kushner was had like 88 jobs and whatever job he didn't have.
Mike Pence was like in charge of the pandemic response rather than, you know, a public health official.
Like it was just this.
Like really poorly managed family affair.
Well, guess what?
The people who know what they're doing.
From the Heritage Foundation and all around Trump, they're not going to let that happen again.
And I think when Stone says this stuff, it really sends a chill down my spine.
Let me give you one more thing, and that's Steve Bannon spoke at the TP Action Conference, which is not an extravaganza about toilet paper and innovations in the industry.
The TP Action Conference is a conservative conference.
Stop laughing, Dan.
It's not about toilet paper.
All right.
Grow up.
All right.
So, at the Turning Point, the TP Action Conference, sponsored by Charmin.
We're going to get in trouble.
We're going to get in trouble.
I might have to edit it.
I don't know.
We're going to see.
We'll see how dangerous I want to live.
A seasoned assist from Sharma.
Yeah.
Or free publicity.
Either way.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know what they're going to say.
But, you know.
Anyway.
Steve Bannon got on the stage and said, here's some things he said.
Talking about Democrats.
He said, the president's allies are going to get every single receipt.
And Democrats are going to be investigated, prosecuted and incarcerated.
This has nothing to do with retribution.
It has nothing to do with revenge because retribution and revenge might be another order of magnitude.
This has to do with justice.
Look, when this election is over, based on what they've done, excuse me, that was actually Trump.
I want to stay on Bannon though before I go to Trump.
Trump said victory or death when it came to 2020.
And he, yeah, it goes on.
We're going to run out of time.
Bannon is one more voice signaling that the next Trump term will be about revenge and retribution.
Now, he can say it's not.
It's not about that.
But Trump, the quote I was just going to read about Trump is basically saying, Trump says, sometimes revenge is justified.
Like, Trump says that.
When I say that Trump 2.0 will not be the same as Trump 1.0, it's because they want revenge.
They're talking openly about jailing political opponents.
They're talking about openly getting revenge on those who opposed them.
That sounds like authoritarianism.
And I want to say something.
There's people out there that are like, well, at least they're going to get the bad guys.
Fascism comes for everybody.
Fascism comes for everybody.
And so if you think that this is good for you because they're going to get the people you think need to get got and you're not going to fall into the crosshairs at some point of a fascist regime, history has something to tell you about that.
We got a few minutes here, Dan.
Any thoughts on Stone and Bannon and the ways that they're foreshadowing a Trump administration that Trump himself has been foreshadowing?
But I think sometimes people write Trump off because he's a buffoon.
But when you have these two, you know, incredibly vicious men on either side of him saying things he's been saying, it kind of reminds you, oh, yeah, this is what they're planning.
This is what they want.
Yeah, I mean, we've seen this for a while, and people have reported on this, that there are actual people who know what they're doing, who know how to pull all the levers and so forth, who are ready to step into those positions, that there are these blueprints.
You just mentioned Project 2025 again.
We've talked about that before.
So I think that part is there, and I think people need to listen to that.
I think a lot of these people probably still think Trump is a buffoon.
But they think he's a buffoon who can get in office, and they think that he's a buffoon that once he is in office will unleash them as kind of his dogs of war.
And he will.
He will happily do that.
If Bannon and Stone get to sit in the Oval Office and tell Trump, hey, sign on the dotted line and we will go after everybody you want us to go after, he'll do it.
And so that's out there.
I think the rhetoric is important.
When he says revenge is justified, note the equating of justice and vengeance.
And I think all of us, even in minor ways, have experienced times in life where that distinction is really not pleasant.
We want revenge.
We want the satisfaction of getting even, but recognizing that that doesn't make something right or what we ought to do.
This is something we all have to explain to children.
It's something we sometimes have to have people explain to us.
He's conflating those.
And I think the last one that we've heard, and if people hear you say something like, well, they're talking about jailing political opponents, well, that's what the Republicans have been saying about what they're doing to Trump.
It's what they've been saying about the Biden administration.
I've talked about this dynamic before.
The right sees all prosecutions of anybody on the right as political revenge because that is how they will operate.
What they see or the way that they perceive what is going on around them is conditioned by the fact that that is exactly what they will do when they are in power.
That is what they will use the Justice Department for.
So when we hear them say that about somebody on the left, and I've talked about all the difficulties of this, we're going to see the reason that they say that is because, well, yeah, that's it's like they're angry that the Democrats, in their view, got there first.
And it's exactly what they are going to do.
And they are going to use that.
And again, it's right out in the open that they are going to, as he said, be investigated, prosecuted, incarcerated, just very explicitly.
Opponents of Trump will be sought out, not because they broke the law, not because of novel legal interpretations, they will be sought out because they opposed Trump.
And as time comes, if that comes, we'll see what happens and how that actually plays out in courts and so forth, but that is their stated aim, right out in the open.
All right, let's go to Reasons for Hope.
Before we go to Reasons for Hope, I want to just say that if I ever go to TP Action, sponsored by Charmin, I'll be really disappointed if there's not, like, a little, like, booth in the exhibit hall, Dan, where, like, you can actually see which TP is best for, like, TPing houses.
Like, I want to, like, simulate throwing the toilet paper over the tree branch and on the roof shingles to see which one is best for TPing the house, you know?
That would be a very fun component to an otherwise very professional conference, don't you agree?
I think if you can do that in, like, a costume of that bear from the Charming commercial, I think you're there.
I think you're there.
This is gold is what this is.
Yeah.
Every week we come up with things, you know, shirts for Martha and Alito, TP action exhibits.
All right.
My good news, Dan, is Biden this week unveiled an executive action, offers protections to undocumented spouses and children.
All right.
My reason for hope is kind of strange.
anniversary of DACA and been through it.
Not always a fan of Biden and his decisions and a lot of things that are problematic.
This is good news, and I'm going to call it good news.
All right.
My reason for hope is kind of strange.
It actually comes from Amy and Coney Barrett this week.
Kind of made news in a weird exchange with SCOTUS.
There was a unanimous decision in SCOTUS.
Those happened.
But in her concurring statement, she lit into Clarence Thomas and really specifically was very critical about the way that he uses historical precedent and the form of originalism that he uses in his legal rationalizing.
I think this would connect to other justices as well.
Why do I think that's potentially significant?
Lots of SCOTUS observers really sat up with this because this represents perhaps, you know, some fragmentation within that originalist camp within SCOTUS.
I'm not suggesting, I don't think anybody's suggesting that Amy Coney Barrett is Suddenly become part of the progressive wing of the Supreme Court or something.
But a lot of people looked at this and she made what I think to most people sound like very reasonable criticisms of originalism and said things like, just because there's historical precedent doesn't always mean that it's relevant or that it should inform what we do.
And so forth.
So a sign of hope that perhaps what a lot of people on the right and the left have thought was this kind of unassailable block in the Supreme Court.
I think we've already seen some signs and some decisions that it's not as unified as it could be.
And this was a very interesting development that I think could be hopeful.
We'll see how it plays out, especially with some of the decisions that will be dropping here in the next couple of weeks.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for being here.
We're going to hopefully be releasing our bonus episode next week.
Just ongoing family stuff for both of us.
So stay tuned for that.
We'll be back with a great interview with It's In The Code and The Weekly Roundup next week.
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Thanks for being here, y'all.
We'll catch you next time.
I just want to add that I think for this episode, we should have the photo of you with the shirt that says, I agree with Biden on everything.
And that can be just front and center.
Because, yeah, we know who you are, Brad.
We know that you agree with Biden on everything.
I don't have that shirt, Dan.
And I don't have other shirts saying that I went to certain places across the country.
