Conservative Bible Teacher And Former Daily Wire/Federalist Writer Arrested For WHAAAAAAT?
Who Grooms And Abuses Kids? Conservative Christian Leaders Groom And Abuse Kids.
Hello, Moral High Grounders! If you love this newsletter and you haven’t done it yet, PLEASE upgrade your subscription to PAYING and/or founding subscriber! (And if you’re a new subscriber, click here to learn what this place is all about and why you belong here. Welcome to all new readers!)
Why become a paying subscriber? Because independent media is more important than ever in these dark days we’re heading into, and we need voices who aren’t afraid of calling the tyrants whatever mean and nasty names I want to call them. Help me remain one of those voices.
To celebrate 10,000 subscribers, subscriptions are 20% off for the next day and a half! It’s like, less than 5 bucks a month if you do it annually. It’s like buying me one domestic American beer per month! Or a coffee!
Now let’s get into it.
Last night, the Senate confirmed radicalized Christian extremist and Project 2025 author Russ Vought to head up the Office of Management and Budget. (He’s the one who wrote the 180-day plan to turn America into a Christian nationalist hellscape, much of whch we see being implemented right now.) No Democrat voted for him.
Vought is a Trump appointee who is so unhinged that he was willing to say “I believe the 2020 election was rigged” on a confirmation questionnaire, and who stated out loud in his confirmation hearing that he plans to break the law in service of Donald Trump.
He’s a known lawbreaker. Men like Vought break the law because they worship an imaginary god they’ve invented who’s just as much of an extremist menace to society as they are.
Vought is a Christian nationalist who thinks trans people are a “contagion,” the kind of extreme weirdo you wouldn’t leave your kids alone with for five seconds. He said last year that he wants to take civil servants — literally the backbone of this nation — and “put them in trauma.”
Just a complete fucking sicko.
So that happened.
In light of the bad guys taking control of absolutely everything — specifically the Christian nationalist extremist bad guys — it’s time for the first monthly update to the new project I announced last month, where, in this age of demonization of LGBTQ people by vile MAGA Christian extremists, I track who’s actually hurting and abusing kids. Is it transgender people? Nooooooooope. Is it drag queens? Noooooooope again.
Is it conservative Christian pastors and priests and youth group leaders and so forth? DING DING FUCKING DING!
The kinds of people who read Project 2025 and think it sounds like a cool plan for America? YEP YEP YEP FUCKING YEP!
If you weren’t around for the announcement of the new project, click here for an explanation of what I’m doing. Basically, with the help of some incredible resources that already exist, I’m compiling a list for the whole year of every time I can find that Christian leaders abusing kids makes the news. Spoiler: it happens a lot. I debuted the list last month with nine stories. Today I’ll add a whole bunch more.
As I explained last month, this is a bit like Dan Savage’s old Youth Pastor Watch, with some of my own twists. As Dan wrote in 2016, “If kids got raped at Denny's as often as they got raped at church, it would be illegal to take your kid to Denny's.”
TRIGGER WARNING: Some people may not want to actually read the list in detail, for obvious reasons. In that case, just consider it the resource it is. You can always just search keywords, like for instance to see how many times “Tennessee” or “independent Baptist” comes up.
Without further ado:
The List.
INITIAL LIST, JANUARY 17, 2025
Arturo Laguna Camas, a pastor at Iglesia Casa De Adoración in Phoenix, Arizona. Affiliated with the Disciples of Christ. Accused of recording women in the bathroom. Not about children, but related because of the war on trans people using the bathroom.
Jackson Gatlin, former young adult pastor at the Duluth Vineyard Church in Duluth, Minnesota, has been named in nine civil lawsuits over alleged sexual abuse of minors, aged 11 to 16 at the time. He pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault of a minor in 2023, while taking Alford pleas on four other counts. Also named in the suits are his parents, Michael and Brenda, who are respectively the former senior pastor of the church and a former church leader. Vineyard USA appears to be somewhere between evangelicals and Pentecostals.
Michael Ronald Goble, a 76-year-old retired pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Adrian, Michigan. Accused of molesting multiple young boys under 13. Various sources have listed the church as “Methodist” (but not United Methodist) and also Mennonite.
Michael Howard, a worship leader connected with Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. Confessed to sexually abusing a teenage boy over the course of several years, beginning when the victim was 15. Has been part of TrueSong, which is The Ark Encounter’s and the Creation Museum’s resident praise and worship band, because of course the Ark Encounter has one of those. Went to Florence Baptist Temple in Burlington, Kentucky, and was a worship leader there too. It appears to be an independent Baptist church, and is listed in this directory of KJV churches, AKA churches that are obsessed with the idea that the King James Bible is the only real Bible, because I guess God is only able to communicate in the King’s English, and cannot understand these newfangled slang Bibles like the NIV.
Frank Gough II, friar at the Resurrection Anglican Church in Shalimar, Florida, arrested for possession of child pornography. Resurrection is affiliated with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), which stomped away from the normal Episcopal church in a huff because the Episcopalians are too nice to gay people.
Rodolfo Martinez-Guevara, former priest associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic parish in Oxnard, California, among others. He “pleaded no contest to sodomy with a person under age 16 and a lewd act with a child age 14 or 15, according to court records,” and was sentenced to a year in jail. Also doing time concurrently for possession of child pornography.
Bernabe Leon-Alvarez, a former pastor in Racine, Wisconsin, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for “attempted sexual exploitation by a therapist and child enticement.” Groping two teenage girls, in layman’s terms. His church, which no longer exists, was called Esperanza en Cristo, and he also worked at other churches in the Milwaukee and Illinois. I am unclear on what kind of affiliation this church had, if any.
Bruce Hollen, 63, a former pastor in The Woodlands, Texas, sentenced to two years for possession of child pornography. His former church was a Calvary Chapel. These are charismatic evangelical churches.
Lindsey Whiteside, Hernando, Mississippi. The first woman on this list. Former youth leader and coach at the Getwell Church. Charged with sexually assaulting an underage girl. Getwell Church Hernando, which appears to be a campus of Getwell Church Southaven (both are suburbs of Memphis), is non-denominational, and its website says they believe in biblical infallibility and ascribe to “orthodox” beliefs in the Wesleyan tradition. So conservative, evangelical.
UPDATE, FEBRUARY 7, 2025
Thiensville, Wisconsin. Daniel Rick, 36, charged with sex crimes against children. Rick was a teacher and athletic director at Christ Alone Lutheran School. Excerpt: “A criminal complaint accuses Rick of picking ‘favorite’ boy students each year and having some of them sit on his lap, where he would touch their stomachs or rub their backs and kiss them.”
Here is an interesting one. Former New York Yankees Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera and his wife Clara are named in a lawsuit for “covering up the sexual abuse of a minor in their home and at a 2018 summer camp affiliated with an Assemblies of God church they founded in 2009 known as the Refugio De Esperanza (the Refuge of Hope),” per the Christian Post. The church is in New Rochelle, New York, and obviously the Assemblies of God are a whole tongue-speaking pentecostal situation. The lawsuit says there were multiple perpetrators, including, surprise, a youth pastor named Ruben Tavarez.
Cleveland County, Oklahoma. James McMillan, a former pastor, was arrested for the third time in as many months, for texting a nude to a teenager in Kansas, a classmate of his son’s. Previous arrests were for child sex crimes. KFOR in Oklahoma City says McMillan “was a former pastor at a minimum of two churches in Slaughterville and Konawa. [Sources] confirmed McMillan left both churches under strange circumstances several years ago, and hasn’t preached at either location since then.” They didn’t say which churches, but the Christian Post identified them as Slaughterville Baptist Church and First Baptist Church of Konawa, both of which I think are Southern Baptist Convention.
Tehachapi, California. Adrian Daugherty, 41-year-old youth pastor at the Tehachapi Church of the Nazarene, arrested for alleged sexual assault of a teenager.
Eric DeJaeger, 77, a former Catholic priest in Igloolik, Nunavut — that’s Canada — sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually abusing seven children between ages four and nine between 1978 and 1982.
Augusta Township/Ypsilanti, Michigan. Update on Zachary Radcliff, a former youth pastor who is charged with 33 felonies for sexually abusing kids. He’s been denied bond because apparently he kept harassing an alleged victim who spoke out. He told this victim to “keep his … mouth shut.” An alumnus of Liberty University, Radcliff was the worship director and interim youth pastor at Oakwood Baptist Church in Augusta Township, where his daddy is the pastor. Oakwood is a Southern Baptist congregation. The alleged victims: 10 boys, one girl, one under 13. According to one alleged victim, who was 15 at the time, Radcliff called it their “cute little secret.” Radcliff has performed at CPAC, and oh boy, he’s a big Trump supporter. For a picture of him with Donald Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle and Jerry Falwell Jr., click here. Hemant Mehta AKA The Friendly Atheist has so much more.
Jackson, Tennessee. Former youth pastor Ryan McElrath, age 40, has pleaded guilty after being charged with “statutory rape by an authority figure, sexual battery by an authority figure, and aggravated statutory rape.” The victim was 17, and it happened at Fellowship Bible Church, which appears to be a nondenominational and extremely conservative, mostly white burgeoning megachurch. All the elders and pastors are men, and it takes about one second to find something homophobic on their website.
Longview, Texas. A “faith-based gymnastics coach.” (For fuck's sake.) Matthew Orban, age 52. Indicted for sexually assaulting a minor. Says he “intentionally and knowingly caused the penetration of the sexual organ” of the victim “by defendant’s finger.” The website for “Faith Flip” — yeah, really — appears to be offline now — surprise! — but the news article says it used to say that “God has put on our heart to reach out to those that might not be able to afford a gymnastics lesson or get to hear the word of God.” You see, they didn’t charge the kids. At least they didn’t charge money. Allegedly.
Mineola, Texas, just down the road from Longview. Timothy Nall, a former pastor at Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church. Arrested for sexual assault of a child, and this is not the first time or the first reported victim. He was also charged with sexual battery against a teen girl in 2013, and indicted in 2014 for molesting a six-year-old girl. This happened when he was pastor at Farmington Baptist Church, in Corinth, Mississippi. Farmington brags on its website that it’s the oldest Baptist church in north Mississippi. It’s another independent Baptist/King James church. On the website for Mt. Pisgah in Texas, the church lists as its affiliations the Baptist Missionary Association of Texas and Jacksonville College, a Christian junior college. Private Christian junior colleges are big with homeschoolers in East Texas. Ask me how I know this.
Welcome the Mormons to the list. Washington, Utah. Mark Stevens, 68, a former LDS bishop, charged with “one count of forcible sodomy, a first-degree felony, and two counts second-degree of forcible sexual abuse.” The alleged victim was 16 at the time, in 2006 and 2007.
Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dwight Suttles, age 69, charged with rape of a child, plus five counts of sexual battery. Five alleged victims. All under 13. Suttles was the pastor of Liberty Baptist Church. This is another independent Baptist/King James church! Golly, at what point do we consider it endemic?
Troy, Alabama. Samuel McCall, a youth group volunteer, arrested for child porn. According to Beks, who monitors this stuff on Twitter and other places, the name of the church hasn’t been released.
Update on Mike Bickle, the predator founder of the Kansas City International House of Prayer, a pentecostal movement. A new 68-page report claims Bickle sexually abused “at least 17 females, including minors.” This reportedly started in the mid-1970s. One survivor says Bickle would make her read Psalm 51 after he abused her. (You have to read it to realize how fucked that is.)
Aaron Craig Gleason, Niceville, Florida, charged with “lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under 12.” He taught Bible and was the middle school soccer coach at Rocky Bayou Christian School, which is Southern Baptist. This one is just amazing, because Gleason has written for not only The Federalist but also Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, where Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles work and attack LGBTQ+ people daily. (For The Federalist, he wrote a review of The Sound Of Freedom, that total bullshit right-wing movie about, you guessed it, child sex trafficking.) Here is an archived version of Gleason’s author page at Daily Wire. Commenting on Twitter on a drag march in New York City in 2023, Gleason said, “No grooming going on here, they’re just coming for our children.” The marchers in the video were chanting that, but it was a joke making fun of right-wingers who say things like that. Gleason is apparently pretty big on accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” children. I have long hypothesized that Christian conservatives’ true objection to that is that it gets in the way of their own grooming, in all the forms that takes, including when it’s the Bible teacher at the Southern Baptist school. (Alongside that is my hypothesis that, to conservative Christians, LGBTQ+ “grooming” consists of any action that helps LGBTQ+ kids have access to information that will make them accept themselves and love themselves, rather than live in self-hatred or die by suicide.)
SO THAT HAPPENED.
This post may be updated, because after spending several hours compiling the update, I’m actually still not done scouring the sources I keep up with. So check back!
And again, if you think it’s important to call out these sick motherfuckers, and to have this kind of information at the ready every time one of them accuses an LGBTQ+ person of “grooming” or anything like that, then become a paying subscriber below!
Again, watch this space for updates! And follow this project all year long and the year after that and the year after that and …
Hello, lovely readers and subscribers! If you like this post and want more like it, please share, recommend this newsletter on your Substack, subscribe and most importantly become a paying subscriber if you can! (Or upgrade to Founding Member!)
Paying subscribers get access to a growing number of benefits, like audio versions of the weekly newsletter, plus the weekly live-chat, where you can ask me brilliant questions and we can just generally yap at each other.
Coming up? Exclusive interviews with other brilliant Substackers and more brilliant people who aren’t Substackers!
More features and benefits will come as the place grows. A more professional podcast is coming, but realistically I’ll need to be in the neighborhood of 15 or 20,000 total subscribers for that to happen. (We’re just over 10,000 now!) Book club? Recipe exchange? Bible study for complete heathens? COULD BE. One step at a time, though! So upgrade that subscription and SHARE, SHARE, SHARE this post everywhere you share things.
Bluesky? I’m there! Facebook! Reddit! ALL THE PLACES!
If you’re feeling limited by the subscription options and want to donate more like some kind of high roller big bucks luxury patron, use these Luxury Buttons! (PayPal and Venmo, respectively.)
Suggested donation: ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
Again, the Luxury Button is a PayPal link, and the Other Luxury Button is Venmo, so they won’t AUTOMATICALLY confer the benefits of subscriptions like above. Go ahead and put your email in the subscription box regardless, and if you ever don’t have access to something after you’ve subscribed/donated that way, gently nudge me to let me know, because I have to do those manually.
Thank you, love you all!
-Evan
Just so everyone knows, I quickly banned the MAGA rape apologist guy who just popped in here and started leaving all kinds of comments about how rape isn't rape and gays are the REAL problem.
Note to anyone who wants to leave similar comments -- this is not a free forum, and your "free speech" doesn't apply on the site I own, so GTFO.
Excellent work Evan.
Also just disgusting. But such important work you are doing, keep it up and take care of yourself - can’t be easy to look at this stuff every day.