SPECIAL EPISODE: Trump Spiritual Adviser Robert Morris Indicted for Molesting a Minor
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In this special episode of Straight White American Jesus' Brad and Dan delve into the recent indictment of Robert Morris, a former evangelical leader and advisor to Donald Trump. They discuss the intersection of patriarchy, purity culture, and the disturbing allegations against Morris, reflecting on previous coverage and interviews related to the case.
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Brad here with a special episode of Straight White American Jesus.
There's a story in the news that I just felt like we had to respond to, and in fact, we already had.
Many of you have read the headlines that Robert Morris, pastor from Southlake, Texas, somebody who once was the leader of the ninth or tenth largest church in the United States, and a spiritual advisor to Donald Trump, has been issued a multi-county grand jury.
It alleges that Morris was a traveling evangelist in Oklahoma in the early 1980s and that he sexually assaulted a 12-year-old girl.
We covered this last summer, and I want to play for you what we said because we go into the details of the story.
This is from one of our weekly roundups.
It was good timing because I had just interviewed Mike Hixenbaugh, who's the author of They Came for the Schools, which takes place in South Lake, Texas, where Morris was a pastor.
You'll hear us discussing the events surrounding the case.
We talk about the ways that patriarchy and purity culture play into these cases and how the label of groomer and sexual predator is often a projection coming from those who accuse members of the LGBTQ community or others of being perverts while covering up scandal after scandal after scandal of pastors like Morris.
What the Guardian says about the recent events and Morris' place in Trump's orbit.
Morris was a member of Donald Trump's Spiritual Advisory Committee and Evangelical Executive Advisory Board during his first presidential term.
He's also part of an effort to mobilize conservatives and evangelicals in support of Trump's 2024 presidential bid.
He even hosted an appearance by Trump at Gateway Church in June 2020. I want to thank Pastor Robert Morris and Steve Doolin.
They're great people.
Great people with a great reputation.
I have to say that.
Great reputation and Gateway Church.
The team has been incredible in hosting us.
Donald Trump.
In 2024, Morris resigned.
We talked about this.
But he, as we predicted, kind of hung around the orbit of power and other places.
Now we know that he's been indicted for his crimes.
So about eight months ago, we talked about this.
Play that tape and you'll hear the anger in our voice, myself and Dan, because this is one of those cases where somebody in power confessed to this crime, talked about it openly, explained that he had done this, but he had repented, so it was no big deal.
And the church allowed it.
Well, it seems that their consequences and justice are on the horizon.
We're not sure yet, but nonetheless, here is the story.
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 Hicksonbaugh 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...
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 Hickson-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.
The church he pastors is massive, right?
It's one of these massive...
It's like the ninth largest church in America.
Yeah, it's huge.
And he was accused of sexual molestation of a minor, came out this week.
And so this is from NBC News, their sort of summary of this.
The woman involved, there's a woman named Cindy Klemisher, 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, 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.
Clemish here, 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, you know, 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 Clemashier is putting forward here.
Other things, he said that I'm 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, and 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 what about patriarchy that's about, you know, protecting women?
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've 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 from Morris exactly what the quote-unquote repentance consisted of.
Did it involve anything with Clemeshire 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.
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, 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, you know, 18, 19, 20?
There's questions there.
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.
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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.
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 on Earth where he talks about, he uses the words, God damn America.
Now, if you read the sermons in context, and we've actually done this on this 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.
And by the way, what's he doing?
He's talking.
He's talking to people.
That's his unforgivable sin on the right that you're coming to here.
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.
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 these folks.
If you are non-binary, well, clearly you are dangerous and violent and everything else because of this one example we unearth of somebody who may or may not actually be 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.
Okay.
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, the Houston Chronicle in particular, going back to 2019 and 2020. 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 the SBC doing, Dan?
Right?
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 the bad actors are allowed into places where they can access vulnerable people whenever they...
Nope.
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.
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 preyed upon By folks who would like to prey upon that.
We'll 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 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 more, Stan.
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 Morse.
Yep.
I would bet money that that is something that we will see, quietly, out of the limelight, and so forth.
I pose the question on it's in the code sometimes in 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, 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 Kixenbaugh 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...
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.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for being so supportive of what we do here, and thanks for caring about stories like this.
I'm Brad Onishi.
We are an independent network at Access Moody Media, an independent show, and we do the best we can.
