Devil in the Baptist Church: Eight Years Later

Why What Happened at Trinity Baptist Church and Trinity Christian Academy Continues to Be Important

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The need to revisit my 2016 book Devil in the Baptist Church: Bob Gray’s Unholy Trinity has crept up on me repeatedly the last couple of years. For several reasons, which I’ll (mostly) go into below, I’ve decided it’s time. Even as I work on several other projects and plan to see The Wilderness and Willie Browne out later this year, I plan to make some minor (yet major) changes to Devil in the Baptist Church and release a 2024 edition. I need to say why.

You can order the 2016 edition here.

For readers who may not be familiar with the book, here’s the publication overview: “Bob Gray built Trinity Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida from a minuscule congregation to what once was the largest Baptist church in Florida. As he became a national leader of Baptist fundamentalism, he also sexually abused children for more than 50 years. This book tells the story of the rise of Southern fundamentalism and the lengths to which one church went to cover up its pastor's crimes.” Gray died in 2007, in jail, awaiting trial.

Bob Gray, ca. 1974

The book’s topic is personal to me. I attended Trinity Christian Academy from junior high through the first half of my first year of high school. My parents met at Trinity Baptist Church. When my mother decided to divorce her abusive first husband (my father was her second), she was required to get permission from Bob Gray himself. Growing up fundamentalist, I was taught that the end of the world was nigh, that everything happening now could be deciphered through The Book of Revelation, that it was sinful to listen to rock music and for women to wear pants instead of dresses, that wives should always obey their husbands, that the Devil was everywhere, literally, that evolution was a hoax, that civil rights and feminism and environmentalism were satanic communist plots. The list goes on.

image from an infamous Jack T. Chick tract

Hard to believe it’s been eight years already since the book came out. The audience at the book launch at the University of North Florida in 2016 ranged from LGBT activists to churchgoers who’d switched congregations and wanted to see Trinity’s and Bob Gray’s crimes accounted for. It felt, to me, like a greater and certainly more diverse coming together than I’d ever experienced in my fundamentalist upbringing.

Trinity Baptist Church

Today, the church and school prosper. In 2023, Daniel Davis, a lifelong member and current board member of Trinity Baptist Church and someone with whom I attended Trinity Christian Academy, became the Republican candidate for mayor of Jacksonville. It surprised me that no public media sources asked Davis about his affiliation with an institution infamous for its coverup of child sexual abuse. Indeed, however, the infamy seems partly to have dissipated. I see TCA bumper stickers everywhere. All over Jax, I see yard signs advertising TCA enrollment. It’s ironic that Trinity may be known most for its football team, when Dennis Cassell, the team’s first coach, ended up calling the school “the perfect pedophile paradise.”

Dennis Cassell, from the 1988 Trinity Christian Academy yearbook

The story of Trinity is much more than the story of Trinity though. It’s the story of a very powerful entity in Southern culture and politics. It’s the story of Southern fundamentalism, of the rise of IFB (Independent Fundamental Baptist) churches, of how that fundamentalism has tried to resuscitate its reputation by mutating into evangelicalism. It’s the story of how the Lost Cause and Jim Crow gave rise to Southern fundamentalism. It’s the story of how this brand of fundamentalism plays an outsized role in American politics. Gray’s longtime friend, Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University, called the abuse, when it came to light shortly before Gray’s death, “just a bump in the road.”

Falwell after introducing President Reagan at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in 1987. Photo by Barry Thumma/Associated Press

So I’m updating Devil in the Baptist Church for three main reasons.

1)     Much bigger than a mere Florida story or Southern story, the story of the rise of and misuse of power by an entity like Trinity helps explain our current national politics. New York may (or may not be) be the cultural capital of this country, but as the Georgia-born Black writer John Oliver Killens wrote in his 1965 essay “Downsouth-Upsouth,” — “We are a Southern country, fundamentally.” New York gave America Trump, but doesn’t understand why America accepted the gift. Without the fundamentalist / evangelical vote, there would never have been a President Trump, abortion would still be protected by the Constitution and the State of Florida would be working to fix its housing crisis instead of emptying out school libraries and picking fights with Disney.

2)     On a personal level, this subject is integral to who I am, part of my childhood, part of adolescent rebellion, part of the dialectic of my adulthood, and there are things in the book I’d like to do better than what I did eight years ago.

my mom, working with three year olds in the Trinity Christian Academy nursery, 1971, three years before I was born

3)     And finally, when the book came out in 2016, it kept hidden a central fact. My father, who idolized Bob Gray almost until the day of his death, was still alive. I quote him extensively in the book, but I gave him a pseudonym. My father was a “captain” in Trinity Baptist Church’s “bus ministry” for years, and in that role, brought children who never otherwise would have set foot on Trinity’s campuses to an institution my father did not know was systemically designed to protect predators. I need now to remove the pseudonym.

Bob Gray, from the 1989 Trinity Christian Academy yearbook

So I’ll be revising and posting sections of the book here, at my substack, over the next several months. I’ll keep doing everything else I’ve been doing with my substack newsletter, but substack seems a good place to revise the book a piece at a time. I’ll follow this post, later this week, with a slight revision and republication of the preface, which concerns my 2016 meeting with current Trinity Pastor Tom Messer, who helped orchestrate the coverup in the final decade of Gray’s life. I interviewed Messer in the same office where Bob Gray had given my mother permission to divorce her abusive first husband, the same office where Gray had sexually abused dozens (at the very least) of children for decades.