AT LAST, THE PERVERT PASTOR PROJECT IS BACK ON TRACK. It’s taken me some time to get these updates done and kind of redo how I track these things, and also to decide exactly how often I want to update this project. (Answer: Twice a year.)
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I got accused of being “part of the problem” by a conservative man who was upset that I took the opportunity presented by the horrific story of what recently happened to Pete Buttigieg’s family to note — louder for those in the back — that yet again it’s not, as a rule, LGBTQ+ people or drag queens or people on the left in general who sexually abuse and exploit and rape kids. But it quite often is conservative Christian clergy and youth pastors and Christian school teachers. (Also cops and ICE agents, I added in a video version of the post.)
If you didn’t hear about the Pete story, it’s horrific. Somebody called in a bullshit anonymous tip to Child Protective Services, based on alleged hearsay that Pete had confessed horrible, abusive crimes to them, and CPS ended up coming to the Buttigieg household and forcing Pete to be apart from his children for 24 hours while they conducted their investigation, even as they eventually admitted that they were pretty sure the tip was politically motivated bullshit.
I was amused to hear which part of the problem I was, since the problem is people raping and abusing kids.
The answer that came was boring and predictable, if you know right-wing conservative Christian MAGA types. I’m part of the problem because I’m “politicizing” the issue by naming the places that serve as breeding grounds both for that kind of abuse, and in which people are most inclined to cover it up. Bad things can happen anywhere, to be sure, and nobody is denying that they do, but if you’re looking for patterns in these things, you can find them in authoritarian systems that attract and protect abusers, and if you’re looking for authoritarian systems, you tend to find them on the authoritarian side of the aisle.
It’s not that fuckin’ complicated.
But no, in the eyes of conservatives, to identify those structures, to actually name the issue out loud, is to politicize the issue. Conservative men in particular are so busy being deeply submissive to the conservative men they’ve been taught to obey, licking their various Daddies’ boots, that they’ll look the other way while their own kids are being abused rather than knock over the apple cart of everything they’ve ever been taught. To name it could force them to confront that their entire lives, the people they’ve been trained to respect, to honor and obey are actually the bad guys.
They have a psychological need to believe that it’s equally as likely to happen anywhere, “across the board issue from churches to mosques and synagogues and atheists and public schools,” as this person said. They desperately need to believe it’s more likely that a drag queen is abusing kids than a conservative youth group leader at a Southern Baptist or non-denominational megachurch. They think it’s “disgraceful and disgusting” to act like both sides don’t do it. To “ignore the many Dems/leftists abusing kids,” this person said, without citing anything beyond some unlinked story about two guys apparently adopting kids to abuse them that I’m sure he saw on Fox News or heard on right-wing talk radio. Awful, if true!
Show me the pattern, though. You show me your receipts and I’ll show you mine.
(Guessing the story he was referring to was this from 2024. Had to go back to 2024 to find one example, eh, mate?)
Today at long last comes out the long overdue wrap-up of the year 2025 in The Moral High Ground tracking Christian and other religious leaders who abuse kids. The project got away from me for a bit — there are just so many that I had to enlist help to track it, plus a bunch of other stuff has been going on in my life, blah blah, excuses. But it’s more than back on track now, and the mid-year 2026 update will be out sometime in July.
If you are not a new reader, you know how this works. If not, click here. But the short version is that I’m keeping a running list of each story I find that involves a Christian leader of any kind in a place of spiritual authority who’s been caught, accused, sued or convicted of abusing and/or exploiting kids. I don’t encourage you to read the entire list at this point — it’s getting long — but rather to use it as the resource it is. (Also, trigger warning for all the obvious reasons.)
Different people who do this tracking work are interested in specific aspects of it. Me, I’m particularly interested in tracking exactly which corners of Christendom these people are most likely to come out of, and translating for a wider audience what some of these discrete denominations and movements within the Christian church represent, what they believe, why they are the way they are. I also like to make note when it’s pertinent which famous Republicans come out of these movements, to help contextualize the strains of Christian nationalism trying to complete a hostile takeover of the United States government right now.
Like, for instance, at the mid-year tracking update that came out last summer, I was already able to see that an inordinate number of the stories were coming out of Southern Baptist congregations. You know, the same kinds of Southern Baptist congregations that produced vile creep Speaker Mike Johnson, among other Republican politicians.
Fully 39 out of the 125 stories I had tracked at that point in the year were some kind of Baptist perps. Out of those, 21 were Southern Baptist.
Again, today’s update wraps up 2025. In the end, I followed 215 separate stories — 215! — in 2025 that met the criteria. (You’ll be shocked to learn that for 2026, the numbers are basically the same.)
Out of 215, Baptists still easily took home the gold in the Pervert Pastor Olympics. Did anybody think they wouldn’t? Baptists of any kind accounted for 54 out of 215.
Of those, 33 were Southern Baptist, not the greatest single number, but a number of them were close together. Other kinds of Baptists, including creepyass independent fundamentalist Baptists and King-James-Only churches accounted for 21.
No, as you’ll see, the greatest single number is the catchall general conservative non-denominational evangelicals/Christian nationalists/megachurches, which shouldn’t be surprising, considering that as the American Christian church continues to get dumbed down, there is more and more movement away from books with big words and small print, which tends to translate to a movement away from historical denominations with actual theology.
Here are the final 2025 approximate counts when it comes to denominations and segments of the Christian world, though categorization is sometimes tough and not always exactly clean, which I explain in the bullet points:
General non-denominational evangelical/Christian nationalist/megachurches (this is a big tent, but there’s a lot of “undefined” out there in the world of evangelicalism) — 38
Assemblies of God/Holiness/Apostolic/generally otherwise pentecostal or charismatic (some of these might better belong in the regular nondenominational/megachurch category below or vice versa, or there might be overlap)— 28
Catholic — 16
Conservative Presbyterian (PCA, EPC, etc.) or anything calling itself “Reformed” (includes Pete Hegseth’s creep guru Doug Wilson’s outfit) — 10
Seventh Day Adventist — 4
Vineyard USA — 4
Methodist (the conservative, backwards sects, NOT the nice United Methodists) — 4
Nazarene — 3
United Methodist — 3
Lutheran (regular/Missouri Synod) — 3
Mormon (LDS) — 3
Evangelical Lutheran (these are the liberal Lutherans, despite what the name might sound like) — 2
Church of Christ — 2
Lutheran (other conservative sects) — 2
Anglican (NOT Episcopalian, these tend to be the ones that left the Episcopalians in a huff for being insufficiently gay-hating) — 1
Disciples of Christ — 1
Episcopalian — 1
Wesleyan — 1
Messianic Judaism — 1
Orthodox Judaism — 1
The link above is for last year’s mid-year update. The two links below cover the rest of the list. (I’m not reprinting all 215. Yes I know I’ve said I’m going to streamline it someday into one page/searchable database. It hasn’t happened yet. I still need more help with this project, DONATION LINK HERE.)
One final note. I mentioned above that in my video response to the Buttigieg story, I had mentioned that cops and ICE agents are also categories where you find kid abusers. (Again, authoritarian patriarchal systems!) Tracking the cops isn’t my focus here, but here’s a landmark investigation that found that at least 1,800 cops were criminally charged with child sex abuse between 2005 and 2022.
In case you’re curious.
Final update for 2025 starts here:
Chico, California. Roger Scalice, 75, pleaded guilty to molesting a child under 14. (He was subsequently sentenced to six years.) It appears Scalice was a pastor at Calvary Chapel Monterey at one point. Calvary Chapel is a conservative, charismatic denomination that’s shown up a few times on the list so far. More recently, he was the pastor of the Butte Bible Fellowship in Chico, a conservative nondenominational congregation.
Jackson, Tennessee. Andrew Ervin, 44, arrested for statutory rape of a minor by an authority figure. He was a pastor at Northside Church in Jackson, and according to BishopAccountability.org, has been affiliated with three other churches and served as a youth pastor. This line from their church website explains everything you need to know about their denomination: “For many years, Northside was part of the United Methodist Church. In 2020, after a season of prayerful discernment, the congregation voted overwhelmingly to become an independent, non-denominational church.” If you aren’t in the know, “season of prayer discernment” means they hate gays and the United Methodist Church doesn’t.
Bentonville, Arkansas. Daniel Williams Smathers, age 47, convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison for trafficking minor children across state lines for sex. He was previously a pastor at the Diamond First Baptist Church in Diamond, Missouri, a Southern Baptist congregation.
Coarsegold, California. Joshua David Kemper, 47, a youth pastor, arrested for sexually abusing a minor girl aged 15. You’ll be shocked to learn that he had -posted things on the internet to suggest kids aren’t safe around LGBTQ+ people. Not pastors! He was the lead pastor at Foothill Church, an Assemblies of God congregation.
Fort Collins, Colorado. Matthew McGinley, 30, a former worship pastor at Ascent Project Church, where his brother is the lead pastor, and teacher at the Resurrection Christian School. Charged with sexual assault of a minor child. He allegedly groomed a minor child he met while a teacher at the Resurrection Christian School in Loveland, Colorado. Ascent Project is one of those totally cool conservative evangelical non-denominational outfits with a totally cool name. They’re located in a downtown, so they must be cool! And their website says they believe scripture is “infallible, without error,” which is a pretty good indicator somebody on the pastoral staff will get arrested for sexually assaulting a kid, according to all the research we’ve done. Resurrection describes itself as a “Covenantal school,” which means in order to attend, at least one of a child’s parents must be able to tell a convincingly melodramatic story about getting saved.
Compton, California. Quintilo Sagrero, 68, arrested for sexually assaulting a minor child. Pastor of Templo Pentecostal El Camino Church, so pentecostal, Spanish-speaking, etc. When the arrest happened, authorities said they had reason to believe there might be more victims.
Star, Idaho. Ryan Stephen Patania, sentenced to 40 years in prison on child porn possession charges, “primarily involving young boys aged five to 10,” according to the Boise CBS station. The police said Patania “has been closely involved with several churches throughout the valley, specifically volunteering and working with church youth” and “has also worked closely with foster youth within the community.” Also was charged with sexual abuse of a child. Nothing real specific on the kinds of churches he liked to volunteer at, sounds like his main criteria is unfettered access to children. And guess what’s a pretty good place for that!
Excelsior Springs, Missouri. Associate youth pastor Donald Axtell, arrested on multiple charges, including sexual assault of a minor, child porn possession, giving porn to minors. “Lake trips” are mentioned, which sounds like a church youth group thing! He was affiliated with the Excelsior Springs Baptist Church, another Southern Baptist congregation.
St. Joseph, Michigan. Glen Rosenbaum arrested on multiple child sexual assault charges, some counts involving a child under 13, others a child between 13 and 16. He was a pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, affiliated with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which is not the same thing as the more liberal/mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA). This is conservatives, surprise.
Casper, Wyoming. John Byrum Dierenfeldt, 60, sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison under a plea deal for sexually abusing two girls starting at age eight. Dierenfeldt was a pastor. The judge at the sentencing said he had damaged the reputation of the Christian faith. All by himself? Gotta bone to pick with the shitty local news on this one, because it talks all about how he was a pastor, how his defense counsel said he had the support of church members, and does not name the church. This is fucking malpractice. Reading through comments sections on Facebook, we saw people mention Liberty Baptist and Lighthouse Baptist in Casper, both of which appear to be of the independent fundamentalist Baptist/King James weirdo sicko tradition. If accurate, that tracks!
Houston, Texas. Carter Thomas, 27, arrested for possession of child porn. The cops got a tip from somebody who said Thomas confessed to “struggling with viewing child pornography online.” (Such fundamentalist Christian language.) He was a volunteer youth pastor at Second Baptist Church, which insisted that there is no such title, which sounds to me like some hairsplitting. Second Baptist is a Southern Baptist congregation, try to contain your shock.
Mattoon, Illinois. Douglas Overmyer, age 51. Charged with sharing of a video of a grown man abusing an underage girl. He was the pastor of Zion Hill Church, part of the Great Lakes Conference of the Global Methodist Church. Though the Global Methodist Church’s website goes to great pains to make them look like just some good old Christ-centered Methodists with a global, multicultural focus, some quick googling reveals that they were the destination for many of the churches that left the United Methodist Church because it doesn’t hate gays enough. Try to contain your shock.
Jacksonville, Florida. Jerome Teschendorf, 70, sentenced at last to 20 years in prison on a very old case, “a saga investigators say involved multiple victims alleging abuse as far back as 1970.” One of the victims was Teschendorf’s former stepdaughter, who testified that he abused her throughout her childhood. “"He would sit at the end of my bed and cry and ask me to forgive him, then repeat the acts again," she said. He was a church leader at the Jacksonville Assembly of the Body of Christ, which no longer exists. Two other men, including the pastor, were also charged and convicted in the investigation. The church sounds like one of those very culty, very conservative situations, AKA an obvious breeding ground for predators.
Chalmette, Louisiana. Milton Martin, found guilty on child sex crimes charges. “'[Accused] of having sex with juveniles on multiple occasions etween 1991 and 2013.” Lord. Not the first time he had been arrested, but oh boy, he just got to keep pastorin’, specifically at the First Pentecostal Church of Chalmette. “Old time religion for the modern man,” it says on their website. Uh huh.
Placentia, California. (Orange County.) Cameron Heath, 39, arrested for alleged sexual abuse of a young boy, when the boy was 12-13, and was the bible study group leader for the boy’s family. He also ran a youth fitness center called Action Kids, his Bible study was called The Branch, and he even had a “ministry” called Deed and Truth that worked with orphanages in Baja California, Mexico. His church: Generations Church in Costa Mesa, which appears to be one of those non-demoninational, multi-culti evangelical conservative outfits with flashy lights and other things that amuse idiots. Far from the only church calling itself “Generations,” must be some kind of evangelical thing.
Tiro, Ohio. Hunter Hickman, 33. Arrested for retaliation, after he had been arrested for felony voyeurism in 2024. The local news accounts about this were cagey, but as Beks/Antifa Operative, a masterful tracker of these things, pointed out at the time of the original arrest, the statement from the North Central Ohio District of the Church of the Nazarene released a statement saying he had been removed as a youth pastor at Galion Real Life Church, and that “the safety and care of youth is among [the church’s] most sacred responsibilities.” So Occam’s Razor would suggest …
Peoria, Illinois. Michael Ritchason, 48, charged with sending sexual pics to a minor child. He was the pastor of the Riverside Community Church, and also taught elementary school! Riverside’s website gives the feeling of a city church, but evangelical and conservative, but tries to look like it’s hip and part of the city, meeting the people where they are, for Jesus. (This is a whole genre, see: Redeemer Presbyterian.) This one, though? Fucking Assembly of God. Find that on their website, I dare you.
Tarrant County, Texas. Matthew Cretzman, 39. A missionary who had an outfit called Rooftop Missions, worked with an orphanage. Christian motivational speaker. Sounds like a whole lotta kinds of creep, but for our purposes, he was arrested for continuous sex abuse of a child under 14. That story broke on the Preacher Boys Substack, and the writer knew the guy personally. A report on the Twitter account of another tracker/watcher of these bastards suggests a connection to the Milestone Church in Keller, Texas, one of those conservative non-denominational outfits.
Vian, Oklahoma. Michael Martin, 74. Charged with “lewd molestation” of a child under 16. Pastor at the Vian Baptist Church, where the incident allegedly happened. A Southern Baptist congregation, try to contain your shock.
Southaven, Mississippi. The Memphis metropolitan area strikes again! Jonathan Colvin, 38, arrested for failing to report a child sex crime. He was/is the youth minister at the Goodman Oaks Church of Christ, which is Church of Christ, obviously. Know how we talk about how conservative churches encourage the kind of environment that protects this sort of abuse? Well.
Surrey, England. International! Anthony White, 67, at last sentenced over the sexual assault of a boy under 14 he committed in the 1980s. Former Catholic priest.
Baguio, Philippines. International! Fr. Mark Batolne, convicted and sentenced to 120 years for raping a 16-year-old. Catholic priest.
Brampton, Ontario. International! Father James Cherickal, 60, a former priest of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in Kerala, India, arrested in Canada for sex crimes against a child under 16. He was serving as the priest of St. Jerome Catholic Church at the time.
Duluth, Minnesota. Just a horrific story about institutional sexual abuse in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church (surprise, a super-conservative ultra creepy denomination that has nothing to do with the normal Lutherans). “Young girls were sexually abused by a church member. They were told to forgive and forget.” That’s the headline. The story starts with one of the victims praying with the pastor, her abuser, AND HER FATHER, and then being forced to HUG HER ABUSER.
Huntington, Indiana. Because sometimes the anti-LGBTQ+ writer bigots are also abusing kids, not just the youth pastors! Gerald Korson, a Catholic writer, charged with child porn possession and “enticing a minor to create such child sexual abuse material,” says the Catholic site OSV News. Multiple victims alleged. He worked as an editor for Legatus, a super-anti-gay Catholic group, because of course.
Tampa, Florida. Tyrone Lee Cliff, 38, taught middle school at the Bayshore Christian School. Arrested for possessing child sex abuse material. It calls itself the “premier private Christian school” in Greater Tampa, and drops lots of words like “Christ-centered” and “Biblical values.” You can buy a t-shirt in its “spirit store” that says “FAITH WARRIOR IN TRAINING.” Yeah, it’s that kind of place.
Columbus, Ohio. George Bell, 73. Sentenced to a couple decades in prison after pleading guilty to raping a young child for years. He was the pastor of the Anchor Baptist Church, which is an “independent, fundamental Baptist, soul-winning, Bible believing church that uses the KJV Bible as its only Scripture,” according to its website. So they’re that kind of freak.
And that, long overdue, is the end of the 2025 list. On our first full year of tracking this, we covered 215 separate Christian leaders and authority figures investigated, charged, accused, caught, sued, sentenced, and/or imprisoned for sexually abusing children in some way, shape or form.
That’s, um, a lot.
The great supermajority of them: men. Also a supermajority: conservative.
Don’t you think if there were 215 cases making the news last year of drag queens or trans people or LGBTQ+ folks or atheists or literally anybody on the Left accused of doing the same, we’d never hear the end of it? Hell, that’s part of how you know there aren’t, because instead of that, sick fucks are trying to create news by tricking Child Protective Services into going on a fishing expedition for secrets at Pete Buttigieg’s house, and of course coming up with nothing.
Again, I am already hard at work on the 2026 list, which will come out in a huge mid-year update in the next few weeks, but I have a spoiler alert for you, are you ready? Conservative Christian leaders haven’t stopped punching WAY above their weight when it comes to sexually abusing kids.
Sorry if you were hoping for a different outcome on that one.
Few quick updates on the list:
Jacob Barnett, #140, pleaded guilty. update (#140)
Elmer Baca-Flores, #62, more accusations of human trafficking and sexual abuse of underage church members accusations
Andrew Apple, #42, sentenced to 32 years.
Joe Campbell, #92, officially charged with child rape.
Richard Adamsky, #119, found guilty and later sentenced to prison.
David McKeown, #104, sentenced to 135 years in prison.
Additionally, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel released in December a report naming 51 priests in alleged sexual abuse of minors over the years in the Diocese of Grand Rapids, Catholic obviously.
And then there’s another thing related to #37, where a former leader in the uber-creepy Royal Rangers, the Pentecostals’ version of the Boy Scouts, had been sentenced for making and transporting child porn. Welllll, NBC News came out with a huge story in December that detailed how 29 Royal Rangers leaders have been accused of sexually abusing at least 83 young boys over the decades. So there’s that.
Finally, the Archdiocese of New York had to pay out a $300 million settlement, a day after a $230 million settlement from the New Orleans Archdiocese was approved. You can guess why.
Stay tuned for the 2026 mid-year report.
I’m so divisive, I just can’t stop myself.
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