Multiple decades late has come a new report that adds a critical layer to earlier reports of many Falls Church youth who at the time, in the 1990s, attested to a divisive and toxic role played by the then white, right-wing, evangelical leadership (since gone) of the then over 2,000-member Falls Church Episcopal Church and its Cornerstone teen program, which attracted from 300 to 500 youth at its height from within the small, close-knit teen community in the City of Falls Church, population a the time barely 10,000.
This spring the leadership of the Falls Church Anglican Church, which arose out of its congregation’s noisy defection from the Falls Church Episcopal Church almost 20 years ago — after the Episcopal Church allowed a gay man in New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, to be ordained as bishop — has begun to come clean with the release of an 86-page report by an independent legal firm whose six-month investigation centered on interviews with scores of former Cornerstone participants. The report is filled with documentation of alleged sexual abuse perpetrated on many Falls Church teenage boys by youth minister Jeffrey T. Taylor for much of the 1990s. Taylor had founded and led the youth group known as Cornerstone, which gained wide popularity among teens in Falls Church for a good portion of that decade.
The report, entitled “Report on the Independent Investigation of Allegations of Sexual Abuse by a Staff Member of The Falls Church Between May 1990 and January 2002,” was authored by Edward Lee Isler of Isler Dare P.C.
Ironically, though it was not widely known at the time, Taylor’s group was apparently centered on advancing a national initiative among youth launched by white, rightwing evangelical churches called the “Purity” movement, advocating total abstinence from sex before marriage. While the bulk of the focus of that movement was on young women, as documented in Linda Kay Klein’s 2016 book “Pure, Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free,” in Taylor’s case the focus was on teenage boys who, as the Isler report documents, frequently became the subject of Taylor’s interest in their habits of masturbation (as the Isner report put it, Taylor “was known, in part, for his focus on disciplining young men on the sexual challenges that young men face with lust and sexual desire”).
The F.C. Anglican congregation commissioned the report last year as ordered by the bishop of the Mid-Atlantic region of its denomination and following renewed pressure from at least one family of an alleged victim of Taylor’s. Last month it was released to current and former members of the church and its youth program. Copies of it have since been forwarded to the News-Press from multiple anonymous sources.
As compelling as the Isler report’s evidence, based on scores of interviews of alleged victims, appears to be of its broad interpretation of sexual abuse, the report also documents that it is matched by the church’s efforts to look the other way and cover up the evidence, especially when it began to come to light in 2007.
While, at that time, a former participant in Cornerstone told Reverend John Yates that he had been subjected to “overt sexual abuse” by Taylor, “no formal investigation was undertaken at that time, meaning there was no structured effort to systematically reach out to other Cornerstone participants.”
In 2007, the bulk of the membership of the F.C. Episcopal, having defected a year earlier, was continuing to occupy the historic church grounds in downtown F.C. under the leadership of Yates. Having led the defection himself, in a reaction against the national Episcopal Church’s election of an openly-gay priest to become a bishop, Yates, who was responsible for the hiring and ongoing role of Taylor in the church from 1991 to 2002, was formally defrocked by the Episcopal Church, but led the defectors under a new Anglican church denomination, and they held onto the church property until finally being forced by court order to leave in 2012. The congregation, under his leadership, then acquired property on Route 50 about a mile outside of Falls Church and constructed a new church there.
Then in 2019, as the Isler report documents, Yates, who had left the leadership of the Anglican congregation in 2019, was approached by “the parents whose two sons had participated in the Cornerstone program” who “reached out to Rev. Yates to express that before their eldest son had unexpectedly passed away, he informed them that he had been sexually abused by Taylor.” While Yates informed the church leadership of the allegations, again no investigation or attempt to reach out to other former Cornerstone participants occurred. It was not until the Bishop of the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic of the Anglican Church in North America became aware of the allegations in 2023 that he directed the Falls Church Anglican church to undertake the investigation resulting in the Isner report.
The executive summary of the report noted it found, based on 94 interviews with 82 witnesses, including 34 former Cornerstone participants, 19 parents and 20 current or former church clergy, staff or volunteers, ample evidence of Taylor’s engaging in what it called “conduct that was inappropriate and would fall within the definitions of sexual grooming or sexual abuse, especially when read in the context of the relationship and standing of Taylor and the male students in his ministry, with three incidents of that abuse being significantly more overt than the others.”
The Isler report stopped short of claiming that the behavior of Taylor was criminal in nature. It cited numerous definitions of what constitutes “sexual abuse,” including a broad one by Dan Allender in his book, “The Wounded Heart,” which states that “sexual abuse is any contact or interaction (visual, verbal or psychological) between a child/adolescent and an adult when the child/adolescent is being used for the sexual stimulation of the perpetrator or any other person.” The Isner report cites definitions which distinguish between “overt sexual abuse” and “covert sexual abuse,” and “sexual grooming.”
Most of the cases included in the report involved matters subsumed under categories in the Isler report: One-on-One Time With Male Students, Preference for Male Students, Discussions About Masturbation With Male Students, Discussions About Penis Size, Discussions About Sex, Comments About the Physical Appearance of Male Students, Attempts to Induce Male Students to Share Private Information, Other Sexualized Conversations of Conduct, Acts of Physical Contact by Taylor With Male Students, and finally Allegations of Overt Sexual Abuse at the Church. The latter involved three incidents that might have involved drugging.
The immediate reaction to the report by many of the young men who participated in Taylor’s ministry, who have subsequently posted on social media in the last weeks, has been strong, using language such as “nauseating,” “utterly disgusting,” and “simply the antithesis of the image of loving caring pastoral care,” while being equally critical of the church leadership’s failure to act.
One commentary by Talley Cross posted on the Patheos website and entitled, “The Jeff Taylor Scandal: Bad Theology and Sexual Abuse Collide,” notes that in addition to the accounts of abuse, Taylor inflicted a damaging burden on them in the form of preaching and advocating a negative view of sex overall commensurate with what was a fad among rightwing evangelicals in that era known as the “Purity Movement.”
“Taylor’s most egregious act was the alleged overt and covert sexual abuse of these boys, as described in the investigator’s report, …but there are many wrongs in this tragedy, and one of them is the untruths Taylor apparently told about the ‘sin’ of masturbation, untruths than continue to plague the evangelical church,” Cross wrote, and he cited the Klein book.
Indeed, others have reported over the years of the toxic impact of the Cornerstone youth program, including a commentary that Taylor authored published in the News-Press in the summer of 1991 following the tragic car accident that resulted in the death Mary Lee Tatum, a popular family life teacher at the George Mason (now Meridian) High School.
Also, a loud protest was unleashed at the high school in 1992 following the decision of the student editorial board of the school newspaper, The Lasso, to publish an advertisement by SMYAL (Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League) that led to a public forum in the Council chambers at City Hall and threats against the faculty adviser to the school paper, popular English teacher Michael Hoover.
Hoover, who wrote a weekly column in the News-Press in that era, said he was dismayed by the growing number of his students who dedicated their English literature homework assignment to “testimonials” about evangelical religious beliefs, and Jewish parents expressed concern that their children were being recruited into Cornerstone.
It was particularly ironic, given the nature of the allegations in the Isner report, that same-sex attraction and behavior issues were singled out for intense criticism in the Cornerstone group at the time even as Taylor was engaging in what the report cites as many cases of his alleged sexual abuse of teenage young men. Moreover, there is no shortage of irony that it was a same-sex issue, the election of an openly-gay priest to standing as a bishop, which led Rev. Yates to conduct the defection of the large majority of his church membership in 2006 out of the Episcopal Church.
While all these developments have rocked the small Falls Church community for decades, its resilience has prevailed. Those faithful who did not go along with the defection of 2006 persisted during six long years when the defectors illegally occupied the historic Falls Church property, being welcomed to worship and conduct their ministries by the nearby Falls Church Presbyterian Church, and since reclaiming their property, those “continuing Episcopalians” have grown their ranks, now thriving under the ministry of an openly-gay rector, the Rev. Burl Salmon.
