This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
I was sitting in church, scrolling Twitter before Sunday school began, when a headline from a local reporter I followed splashed across my feed: “20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.”
The 2019 investigative report was part of the Houston Chronicle’s “Abuse of Faith,” which uncovered a system of sexual abuse, cover-up, and corruption that permeated through the Southern Baptist Convention. The Chronicle’s reporting has reverberated through all of American Christianity, from abuse reforms to expanded investigations to reshaped denominational priorities and boundaries.
For me, however, the story was always a reminder of the necessity of a robust local news outlet. The Chronicle’s investigation began when city hall reporter Robert Downen sifted through federal court records.
Downen covered religion for the Chronicle before moving to The Texas Tribune to cover democracy and the threats to democracy. As a reporter, he takes seriously journalism’s role as an organ of accountability and a voice on behalf of the community.
What I’ve most appreciated about Downen is that investment in community. To report on abuse in the SBC, Downen had to earn the trust of everyone from powerful, complementarian pastors to radical, queer exvangelicals. His reporting, as we discussed below, is focused on impacts of power and policy instead of being driven by personalities.
In our interview, we discussed how anti-democracy organizing and Christian sex abuse overlap, what reporters need from their communities, and why he treats religious organizations as institutions with power.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio: How did you find your way into covering religion at the Houston Chronicle?
Robert Downen: It was a complete stroke of luck, to be honest. I always had an interest in religion — studied it in college and grew up in evangelicalism. But I was sifting through federal court records one night when I saw a new court filing in this case against a prominent Southern Baptist leader, accusing him of sexual abuse.
That case had been ignored for a while and people weren’t really paying attention to it, and I just happened to be at the right place at the right time when this new filing came in. It prompted us to start looking into it more, which led to developing cases and the framework for what became our “Abuse of Faith” series a year later.
How did being raised in conservative evangelical churches influence your becoming a journalist?
Some of my earliest memories are being in the high school cafeteria where the first dozen or so families that became this very large church in the Chicago area were gathering.
Two things that influenced me: One, my church always seemed to prioritize serving others — we would do evangelism, but it had much more of a sense of, “We’re going to help other people because that is what we’re commanded to do. And if that brings people to Jesus, then that is good too.”
My church upbringing was actually really instructive for what I cover now — a lot of parts of it were markedly different from stuff I cover for my job. Having that reference point of a very good experience with religion growing up, I think was very helpful in being able to see when people are having bad [experiences] and helped my understanding exvangelicals and all this other stuff. I think that’s very helpful as a lens for reporting.
You covered religion under the metro desk rather than the features desk at the Chronicle, which means you were treating religion news as if it were akin to the machinations of business and politics, not just the human-interest stories. How did that come to be?
That actually was my decision. I pushed for that. And the reason being, there was a time when there were enough religion journalists that you had someone covering the community: potlucks and events and features stuff. And you also had a reporter who could treat it with a little bit more teeth. And religion journalism has been among the hardest hit areas of the broader collapse of many newsrooms. There just really hasn’t been room for either of those types of reporting. So when I was at the Chronicle, we were coming off of a year of doing Southern Baptist sex abuse coverage and had really cultivated a lot of trust and respect within religious communities broadly.
From the Houston Chronicle newsroom, we can see Joel Osteen’s church, we can see a billboard of Ed Young from Second Baptist Church outside, and these are people who are really shaping society. They have way more influence than a lot of people realize. Moving religion under metro allowed us to think about stories the way we would [think about] traditional news coverage. I wrote a number of stories about Joel Osteen getting PPP loans. I was covering Jerry Falwell Jr.’s yacht scandal and doing a lot more coverage than if we were approaching it from this mind of being a feature. It would have been more personality or character focused.
We should cover these people and the institutions that they are at with the understanding that they are as influential as any politician in the city, in many cases.
Obviously, there’s space to do both. You don’t treat people like they’re a zoo animal just because they happen to believe in XYZ religion. You can incorporate their faith into a story that also holds them accountable — if they need to be held accountable — or explains their influence.
Were there challenges in gaining trust of communities that are increasingly viewing journalism and media with a critical lens, if not an outright oppositional lens?
It definitely helps to be able to point to a year-plus of really hard-hitting investigations into the Southern Baptist Convention. But I don’t think it’s really any different from how you gain trust of other people: Even if they believe that you fundamentally disagree with them, you need to be able to show them that you understand where they’re coming from, and that your pushback is coming from a place of sincerity.
And now at The Texas Tribune you cover democracy and the threats to democracy. What’s the overlap between these two beats?
It was really helpful to spend as much time as I did in the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s a fascinating cultural place. On the one hand, all of these churches are autonomous and there is a very real rejection of any kind of serious hierarchy; at the same time, you can see how an entire culture can permeate through 47,000 individual churches scattered across the nation. And that’s a really fascinating insight into culture, if that makes sense.
From early on in our Southern Baptist reporting, we started to see a kind of foray into the denomination by right-wing political actors. In part, I believe, that was because — in addition to the sex abuse scandal — the SBC was dealing with questions about gender roles, its history of racism, and support for Trump. There was clearly a concerted effort by some very financed political actors to come into the denomination, muddy the waters and keep the SBC reliably voting Republican.
The thing that I took away from that is that some of these people — and I’m not saying all — are willing to muddy the waters on children being raped in order to pursue a political agenda.
Once you see that, it’s very hard to unsee that some people really will go to any length needed to preserve or gain power.
As we’ve seen this broader rise in Christian nationalism, it really weaponizes a lot of the existential language that was used to fight against doing anything on the sex-abuse crisis. It really does use a lot of the same tactics. Some of the leaders of the SBC that turned the convention toward conservatism in the 1990s were also major actors in the political sphere. I’m specifically thinking of Paul Pressler.
The playbook that was used to draw moderates out of the SBC and purge it of any quote-unquote liberals, was the model used by groups like Council for National Policy as the driving force of this lurch towards Christian nationalism.
Is it also fair to say that the tactics Pressler tried to purge liberals and moderates are the same ways that people have tried to purge those who have concerns about sexual abuse or improper authority?
Yeah, exactly. It is a constant purity test.
The Southern Baptist Convention right now is a denomination that is as politically and theologically conservative as it’s ever been. There’s plenty of study to show that. But because its culture is wrapped up in the idea that they have to be more conservative than everyone else … it becomes this area where Russell Moore is seen as liberal. Come on. You can be with someone 99.8% of the time, but that 0.2% is proof that you’ve been “coopted by the libs.”
All it really takes is being accused of “cooptation” a bunch of times by enough powerful people in the SBC and it’s hard not to immediately be on the outs.
What is it like covering democracy for a state paper?
In Texas there’s plenty to write about. It’s a massive state, both geographically and in terms of population, but also there’s a ton of stuff that happens here locally — I like to think of Texas as an incubator for political stuff that eventually goes national. And we’re seeing a lot of that right now.
There’s a lot of crossover between the big think tank here and the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. We’re increasingly seeing a lot of billionaires who fund the groups that I write about taking on a much more active role at the national level.
But it is much different than national. We are much less personality driven; we are much less reactive in our coverage. We really strive to relate policy to people’s lives and the outcomes of those policies, which I think is a little bit different than a lot of national political coverage.
The phrase coming to mind is that states are laboratories of democracy, and they can also be laboratories of anti-democracy work. What’s the impact of this work?
We had a pretty huge story last year where we caught Nick Fuentes, who’s a very infamous antisemite, Holocaust denier, et cetera, meeting with the leader of the most powerful political action committee in the state. That PAC is funded by West Texas billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks and Tim Dunn, who have sunk tens of millions of dollars over the last 15 years into perpetually pulling the state further right.
That turned into us finding quite a few more people within that orbit who were either openly open antisemitic or espoused white nationalist rhetoric or had other ties to Fuentes. That led the Texas GOP to pass a very soft ban on the party from working with antisemites.
We also did a story during Ken Paxton’s impeachment about this company that was paying young Generation Z conservative influencers to basically defend Paxton and parrot pro-Paxton talking points. And that reporting led to new campaign disclosure requirements this year. It remains to be seen how well the Texas Ethics Commission will be able to track relatively small payments to influencers who don’t disclose that they’re doing political advertising when they’re doing political advertising, but it’s a step in the right direction.
When I think of impact, I tend to think about tangible policy that was passed as a result. But arguably the coverage I’m most proud of is — I’ve been shocked how many few people know who David Barton is. There are people like you and I that are very familiar with Barton. We’ve probably had nights of talking about David Barton while drinking at the bar or something. And then you find out there all of these people who have no idea who this person is. There’s so much more ground for us to cover than I even thought.
So, some of the things I’m most proud of is being able to get people to know that this whole “church-state separation is a myth” movement is real and it’s more powerful than ever.
Barton’s been doing this for 40 years. A lot of people thought it was ridiculous when he started. A lot of people still think it’s ridiculous. But his movement is linking up nicely with other Christian nationalist movements that are happy to do a lot of things to get power.
All to say, I’ve been a little bit concerned by how few people really understand what’s going on with Christian nationalism. I take a lot of pride in helping people get to a better place of understanding.
In 2019, you told The Daily Eastern News that while reporting “Abuses of Faith” your way of dealing with the trauma of reporting on sexual abuse — while also reporting on murders and school shootings — was “to continue working to exhaustion.” I can relate to that. Is this still prevalent in journalism?
Journalism is such a competitive industry and an industry that people are very passionate about. Those two things set people up to overwork themselves.
But also, go back and watch any journalism movie. Every single one has the trope of a journalist working in a dark newsroom at 3 a.m. or falling asleep at their desk. And that’s real, that’s something I’ve done many times! But the movies make heroic something that is actually quite destructive.
The other piece of this is that, unfortunately, if you’re a young journalist you just understand intuitively that at some point there’s going to be a mass shooting near you and you’re going to have to cover it.
We as an industry have been very bad, for a long time, about talking about trauma. The first time someone told me what vicarious trauma was, it was the most revelatory day of my life. I had been covering sexual abuse, murders, and school shootings for two years by then.
Being a good journalist takes a lot of empathy. Sometimes the empathy that makes someone a good journalist can also be their undoing. When you go to a murder scene, you have to compartmentalize. You can’t be overwhelmed. One of the ways that I would do that is to think about all of the people who should be in line before me to feel bad about this: I’m not the victim, I’m not the victim’s family, I’m not the cop who got called and had to be the first one here, I’m not the neighbor.
When you do that on a daily basis, it just compounds and compounds things that can really come out in bad ways later down the line.
How can people support local journalists? Especially beyond reading and subscribing?
One of the things that is top of mind for a lot of us right now, specifically in the nonprofit journalism world, is we are seeing an increasing amount of legislation that may not be tailor-made to undermine or attack the press, but certainly provides those powers to people who have been very open about their desire to attack the press.
Press freedom groups are good to be checking in on. There are probably things that are happening in your state that you can actually support that would make things better for us.
Do you like it when people email you to say they liked an article?
Yeah!
How often does that sort of email come across your desk?
Honestly, we deal with so much hate on a daily basis that even just having someone tell you, “Hey, good job, I don’t think you’re fake news or that you should be put in jail,” that can be exactly what a journalist needs to hear.
It’s so important to share and subscribe and pay for good journalism, but it’s also important to remember that we are also humans. The reader response that always gets to me are the “it made me feel.” Beyond liking my story, the stories that made readers feel empowered or more seen in society, that’s the thing that’s really invaluable as far as helping me.
That said, they don’t pay the bills, so don’t do that in lieu of financial support if possible, but we always like kind emails.
There’s so much research on this: If you look at places where there’s a vibrant local newspaper, government waste goes down significantly, straight-ticket voting goes down, people feel connected to the community and there is a sense of local responsibility. And that’s fueled by everything from hard-hitting exposés to stories about the new bowling alley that opened up.
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