MAGA pastor’s sexual abuse scandal underscores the right’s hypocrisy on LGBTQ people

UPDATE (June 18, 10:09 p.m. ET): Texas megachurch pastor Robert Morris has resigned, Gateway Church leaders announced Tuesday.

Take that mask off, I wanna see what’s under them achievements

Why believe you? You never gave us nothing to believe in

’Cause you lied about religious views, you lied about your surgery 

You lied about your accent and your past tense — all is perjury. 

Shoutout to Kendrick Lamar for giving us all some Pulitzer-worthy words we can use to condemn blatant hypocrisy. I thought about these bars over the weekend as I read about MAGA megachurch pastor Robert Morris’ sexual abuse scandal.

Morris, who has served as a religious adviser to Donald Trump, is the founding pastor of Gateway Church in the Dallas area. And as a true MAGA movement acolyte, he has used his platform to support the right-wing assault on school learning plans that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people and classroom discussions about social inequality.

Morris has railed against “what Satan has been trying to do even in our school systems,” and the NBC News podcast “Grapevine” has detailed how his church is aligned with the bigoted portrayal of LGBTQ people as being part of societal decay.

On Saturday, The Christian Post reported that Morris had a confession to make. According to the outlet:

Robert Morris, founding pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, which attracts an estimated 100,000 worshipers weekly, has confessed to “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady” more than 35 years ago while he was a young pastor after a woman accused him of sexually abusing her over multiple years beginning when she was 12. “When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying. It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years,” Morris said in a statement to The Christian Post after Gateway Church was asked about the allegations. “In March of 1987, this situation was brought to light, and it was confessed and repented of. I submitted myself to the Elders of Shady Grove Church and the young lady’s father. They asked me to step out of ministry and receive counseling and freedom ministry, which I did. Since that time, I have walked in purity and accountability in this area,” Morris added.

According to the report, Gateway Church elders agreed that Morris is on the straight and narrow now, citing a “two-year restoration process” he went through after “a moral failure.”

The elders said in a statement:

“Pastor Robert has been open and forthright about a moral failure he had over 35 years ago when he was in his twenties and prior to him starting Gateway Church. He has shared publicly from the pulpit the proper biblical steps he took in his lengthy restoration process,” they said. “The two-year restoration process was closely administered by the Elders at Shady Grove Church and included him stepping out of the ministry during that period while receiving professional counseling and freedom ministry counseling,” they said. “Since the resolution of this 35-year-old matter, there have been no other moral failures. Pastor Robert has walked in purity, and he has placed accountability measures and people in his life. The matter has been properly disclosed to church leadership.”

I’m not so sure that a two-year hiatus settles it.

Morris is far from the only church leader to be exposed for such predation. In 2022, it was revealed that the ultraconservative Southern Baptist Convention had been keeping a secret list of hundreds of church figures who had been accused of sexual abuse. A similar report out of Illinois detailed rampant sexual abuse of children within the conservative-leaning Catholic Church.

I’m including the Morris story in my ongoing series on “MAGA masculinity” because he — and other faith leaders like him — is a prime example of the fraudulence I see in the conservative movement’s hypermasculine projections. (Read my previous “This Week in MAGA masculinity” posts here and here.)

Despite lacking evidence, Trump and his followers would have you believe that perhaps the greatest threats to human decency — and children’s innocence, in particular — are drag performers or LGBTQ people as a whole.

But too often, it’s right-wing Christian men who are the ones being exposed as a true danger.