Instead of being honest, Southern Baptists are whitewashing the bigoted legacy of Wiley Drake
As Southern Baptist leaders honor the controversial pastor, their refusal to confront his extremism exposes a deeper institutional rot
This newsletter is free and goes out to over 23,000 subscribers, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe or use my usual Patreon page!
In 2009, Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who provided abortion care, was assassinated outside his church in Wichita, Kansas. Shortly after that, Pastor Wiley Drake of First Southern Baptist Church in California celebrated the murder:
“I am glad George Tiller is dead,” Wiley Drake, the SBC’s former second vice president, said on his Crusade Radio program June 1.
…
Drake, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif., called Tiller “a brutal, murdering monster” and said he is “grateful to God” that the physician is no longer around.
“There may be a lot who would say, ‘Oh that is mean. You shouldn’t be that way,’” Drake said. “Well, no, it’s an answer to prayer.”
Drake said he prayed nearly 10 years for the salvation of Tiller, medical director of the Women’s Health Care Services clinic and an outspoken advocate for abortion rights. About a year ago, Drake said, he switched to what he called “imprecatory prayer.”
“I said to the Lord, ‘Lord I pray back to you the Psalms, where it says that they are to become widowers and their children are to become orphans and so forth.’ And we began calling for those imprecatory prayers, because he had obviously turned his back on God again and again and again,” Drake said.
…
“Would you have rejoiced when Adolf Hitler died during the war?” Drake asked. “Or would you have said, ‘Oh that is terrible for him to be killed’? No, I would have said, ‘Amen, praise the Lord, hallelujah, I’m glad he’s dead.’”
“This man, George Tiller, was far greater in his atrocities than Adolf Hitler,” Drake said. “So I am happy. I am glad that he is dead. Now I am sad that he went to hell, because he had a choice just like everybody else did. He could have chosen Jesus Christ and when he died went to heaven. But he chose the devil. He chose to neglect, he chose to reject Jesus Christ. And therefore on Sunday morning when he breathed his last breath there in the Lutheran church, he breathed his last breath, and he slipped into the presence of the devil. And I have a strange hunch and a strange feeling that there is a special, superheated, super-hot place in hell for people like George Tiller.”
In 2010, a Democratic congressman named John Murtha died. He had been a staunch opponent of the War in Iraq and frequently butted heads with the Religious Right. And wouldn’t you know it, Drake once again celebrated his death in an email to supporters.
“Maybe God took him out,” Drake wrote. “Maybe God Answered our IMPRECATORY prayer that we prayed every 30 days.”
…
“It’s not distasteful to pray the word of God and include somebody’s name,” he said. “I didn’t celebrate his death. I said maybe it was God’s answer to our imprecatory prayer.”
…
Drake said he and his prayer warriors had been praying for Murtha’s death for four or five months. Among other things, Drake said Murtha’s use of profanity and his use of God’s name in vain. Beside praying for the death of specific politicians, he said they pray for “politicians in general who are taking unrighteous stands.”
Drake did this sort of thing a lot. He wished for the death of Barry Lynn, the former president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, as well as Barack Obama. But after widespread condemnation—or at least one pastor’s advice—he backed off of that one… only to insist it was because he wanted to see Obama live long enough to be tried for treason and executed by the state. Drake also claimed he was personally responsible for starting the whole “birther” movement—the racist claim that Obama wasn’t born in America.
Totally normal pastor stuff.
Even when he did something nominally decent, like helping unhoused people, he refused to get proper authorization from local government—a move that could have put the people he claimed to help in even more danger. (In 2017, officials in Buena Park said his makeshift shelter had a “hazardous electrical system,” lacked proper emergency exits, and didn’t use certified fire alarms or smoke detectors.)
But Drake wasn’t just a horrible person. He was a powerful horrible person.
At one point, he was “second vice president” of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was also Alan Keyes’ running mate during the 2008 presidential election… at least for one hot minute in California. (The ticket never got any traction.)
He also launched a boycott against Disney in 1996—one that the entire Southern Baptist Convention agreed to—because the company had committed the indefensible crimes of extending benefits to same-sex partners of employees and releasing R-rated films. (Disney’s doing better than ever today. The Southern Baptists are losing members every year.)
And he endorsed Mike Huckabee for president using church letterhead, an act that violated the Johnson Amendment back when anyone pretended to care about such a thing. (The violation, as you’d expect, resulted in no consequences whatsoever.)
This is who Wiley Drake was: A bigot who believed the rules never applied to him, the sort of “pro-life” activist who actively wished death upon his perceived enemies, and a man who held an influential position within the largest Christian denomination in the country.
I say all this because Drake died a couple of weeks ago. (No one prayed for it; he was just old.) The SBC announced his death on February 10.
It would have been a perfect time to condemn his actions and remind people that, whatever you do in life, your legacy should never be filled with as much hate as this man had.
Instead, all we heard from SBC leaders was how amazing Drake was.
The official Baptist Press obituary waited until midway through the obit to inform readers about anything bad Drake did. In one paragraph that simply says he “sparked controversy,” it isn’t until the final line that we hear “Drake also said he prayed imprecatory prayers against Obama.” And then they move on from it.
They also quoted recent SBC president Bart Barber saying in 2020 (after Drake suffered a stroke and caught COVID) that Drake “IS the SBC” and someone “who is passionate about the convention and wants it to be the best that it can be.” Barber added that even though he didn’t always agree with Drake, “I respect him.”
But that was 2020. What does Barber say now?
“Wiley Drake rightly believed that any simple, faithful messenger could go to the microphone at the Southern Baptist Convention and do something that made an eternal difference,” Barber, a Texas pastor, told RNS. “In a nonhierarchical family of churches like the Southern Baptist Convention, that confidence, exemplified by Wiley Drake, makes everything run.”
That might be a way to avoid saying anything controversial, but it’s telling that Barber couldn’t even bring himself to condemn Drake’s obvious racism and hate. Instead, he implied that the SBC would be much better off if more members were like him.
What about other SBC leaders? Former SBC President Ronnie Floyd offered nothing but praise, saying, “Southern Baptists will miss Wiley Drake. I loved Wiley and he was one of a kind in SBC life. Thank God for pastors like Wiley Drake.”
Another former SBC president, J.D. Greear, did the same thing, writing, “We grieve the passing of a Southern Baptist icon and open mic legend. Wiley and I had some wonderful (and a few interesting) interactions. To note, he defeated me for 2nd Vice President of the SBC in 2006. Praying for his family. You will be missed, Wiley. You were loved.”
This is how you know the SBC’s moral compass is broken: The people with the biggest voices within the denomination can’t even criticize Drake’s cruelty after he’s dead. And it’s not like they did it when he was alive, either.
The institution that elevated him, empowered him, and benefited from his influence still can’t bring itself to plainly say Drake’s worst moments—and there were so many of them—were wrong.
His death didn’t erase that record. It should have given Southern Baptist Convention leaders a clean, consequence-free opportunity to draw a moral line—to tell SBC members and the wider public that celebrating murder, invoking divine violence against your political opponents, and trafficking in racist conspiracy theories are incompatible with the gospel they claims to represent.
Instead, they chose to whitewash his legacy because honesty might have made them all look bad.
Silence isn’t neutral, though. These people are showing us where their morality lies. Apparently, there’s no depth to the hatred they’ll tolerate from a member of their own tribe. There’s nothing Drake did to disqualify himself from receiving praise.
What does that say about Southern Baptists?
There’s only a small window of time left when anyone will still remember Drake. This is the perfect time, then, to condemn his life’s work. That’s not cruel. That’s just accountability. To sanitize his record now isn’t an act of grace. It’s just historical revisionism.
Drake taught Southern Baptists that their faith could easily be weaponized to justify bigotry, and he wielded that weapon to oppose human rights and doctors who dared to help women and a charismatic Black president. He is proof that power without accountability just leads to moral rot.
No one should live their lives like Wiley Drake. Not because he was controversial, but because he was wrong. He was repeatedly, fundamentally, demonstrably wrong. And no one in his life ever had the decency to talk sense into him—at least not to the point that he listened. It’s too bad he’s dead, honestly, because he deserved to know just how much of a monster he was. But I’m less concerned about him—he was a lost cause—and more concerned about the people who now lead the organization he helped run.
Because their refusal to address his behavior shows how Drake wasn’t just a bad apple. He was just one piece of a rotten orchard.
This is the church of slavery, Klansmen, lynch mobs, and bigots.
They haven't changed.
"I'm glad George Tiller is dead."
Christian love. Thus was it ever. And atheists are the immoral ones according to the sect built on slavery and racism.