Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn was closely involved in one of the harrowing stories featured in an explosive investigation into the mishandling of sexual abuse within Southern Baptist Convention churches.
The 300-page report, made public by the nation’s largest Protestant denomination this week, reveals that top Southern Baptist leaders across the nation systemically mishandled sexual abuse claims, often working to cover them up and suppress victims and their families. The report was compiled by a third-party firm, which scrutinized more than 20 years of sexual abuse accusations in Southern Baptist churches across the nation.
A Mississippi case involving a decades-long coverup and high-ranking Baptist officials defending an abuser was highlighted in the report. Though Gunn is not named in the report, his involvement as an attorney in the case was scrutinized broadly by the state and national press and even Southern Baptist-focused and other religious news outlets.
John Langworthy, a former music Church in Clinton, resigned from the church in 2011 after admitting that he sexually abused young boys when he worked at two Mississippi Baptist churches in the 1980s and then in a Texas Baptist church.
Gunn, who has served in leadership roles at Morrison Heights, was the church’s attorney as Langworthy’s case played out in the courts and in the public sphere. The speaker was unable to be reached for comment regarding this article.
Langworthy was first accused of abusing a teenage boy at a Texas Baptist megachurch in 1989. But that church’s pastor, Jack Graham, who once served a stint as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, allowed Langworthy to be dismissed quietly and did not report the abuse to police at the time, the report said.
Langworthy immediately moved back to Mississippi, where he landed a job in 1990 as music minister at Morrison Heights and later as a choir teacher at Clinton High School. Langworthy held those jobs until 2011, when details of his abuse were first made public.
Amy Smith, an advocate for child abuse survivors who had worked in 1989 at the Texas church where Langworthy was first accused, worked for months starting in 2010 to get Morrison Heights church leaders — and really anyone else — to hear her story about the Texas accusations of Langworthy. Smith told a blogger the story about Langworthy’s Texas abuse allegation and the ensuing coverup at the Texas church, and the blog published that information in June 2011.
With the accusations made public via the blog, Langworthy confessed to the Morrison Heights congregation in August 2011 that he abused children during his time in Texas and while he was in Mississippi before that. Smith then shared video of Langworthy’s confession with journalists in Texas and Mississippi, and the story was broadcast. Several victims of Langworthy’s saw those news reports and alerted authorities. In September 2011, he was indicted in Hinds County on charges of sexually abusing five boys ages 6-13 in Jackson and Clinton between 1980 and 1984.
When Langworthy confessed to the abuse in 2011, Gunn was set to become speaker of the House. But that same year, Gunn had become ensnared in the church scandal.
Gunn was publicly accused of trying to cover up Langworthy’s abuse before the minister’s confession and indictment. Amy Smith, the Texas church staffer who first disclosed details of Langworthy’s earlier abuse to the blogger, told Mississippi reporters in 2011 that she heard from Gunn three months before Langworthy publicly admitted to the abuse and four months before he was indicted.
Gunn emailed Smith in May 2011 “to discuss a resolution,” he wrote. Smith declined to speak with Gunn and perceived his email as an effort to sweep the allegations under the rug.
“Seems to me like he was asking to offer me something to go away to be quiet and that was not acceptable to me, that’s not protecting children and I simply said no,” Smith told WJTV at the time.
