The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
Jason Yates, the former CEO of My Faith Votes –an Evangelical voter ministry that supported Donald Trump in the last election — has been charged with eight counts of possessing child pornography.
Religion News Service reports:
The former president of an evangelical get-out-the-vote nonprofit, which seeks to motivate Christian voters to promote family values and “biblical truth” in the public square, was charged Monday (Nov. 4) with eight counts of possessing child pornography.
Jason Yates, former CEO of My Faith Votes, was charged during a video court hearing in the District Court of McLeod County, Minnesota. State officials allege that from February 2023 to July 2024, Yates possessed a hard drive with digital pornographic images of minors under 14 years of age.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began investigating the 55-year-old Yates at the end of July after a relative, identified in court documents as “Witness #2,” accidentally discovered a hard drive containing over 100 images of child porn in Yates’ office, according to a statement of probable cause filed in the case. That relative told a second relative, identified as “Witness #1,” who turned the hard drive over to law enforcement. According to court documents, the hard drive allegedly contains both still images and videos of pornography involving minors under 14.
During an interview on Sept. 13, Yates allegedly confirmed that the hard drive did not belong to Witness #2 but declined to give law enforcement a password for encrypted files on the hard drive.
“Defendant stated that he had a prior conviction, which had been expunged, related to CSAM/child pornography,” the complaint filed against Yates alleges.
An attorney for Yates declined to comment.
For much of its history, Jason Yates was the CEO and president of My Faith Votes. He was still listed as CEO on the group’s website as of Aug. 19 but his name and image were removed sometime after that date.
“In early August 2024, the My Faith Votes board of directors separated Jason Yates from My Faith Votes and board member Chris Sadler assumed the position of Acting CEO. Over the last three months Chris has been working with the dedicated My Faith Votes team to encourage millions of Christians to vote, pray and think biblically about this election in America,” a spokesperson for My Faith Votes told RNS in an email.
The group’s website blames Christians for failing to stand up against “secular progressives” — which the group faults for a host of social ills.
“As a result of apathy at the voting booth and in public life, we’ve suffered devastating moral decay, declining religious freedom, immoral national debt, and the erosion of traditional family values,” the group’s website reads.
In early July, a few weeks before the hard drive allegedly containing child porn was turned over to police, Yates wrote an op-ed for The Washington Times, urging Christians to fight “sexually deviant” messages aimed at children, mainly about LGTB issues.
“This infernal programming is being downloaded into our children, and it becomes far easier when it finds no resistance in our public square — when it is allowed to fill the void left by the absence of our faith,” he wrote.
A biography of Jason Yates from April 2024 describes him as having left a corporate career in 2015 to become CEO of My Faith Votes. Along with promoting voting among Christians, he served on the board of several other ministries.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I wish Fox News would do a series on a regular basis like your series here Bruce. It’s just so pathetically rampant the abuse inside church-based, religious-based systems. I wish this stuff would be pushed in front of the faces of those who think none of this is true. I remember one woman, a fellow parishioner saying to me: Who? The Pastor? But he’s such a nice guy.
There’s so much hypocrisy among Christians, especially when wrapped up in right-wing politics. They talk about “family values” and decry “sexual deviance” yet so many in their ranks – often the most vocal among them – exhibit anything but “family values” and many are sexual predators or at least are cheating on their spouse. I want to make a joke about how it tracks that some of the heroes Christian Nationalists follow are the worst sexual predators – like Trump, Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, I could go on and on.
After reading this article,and kudos to the relatives of this guy for deciding to stop him on their own – I’m put in mind of the early leadership of the Bolsheviks, and how they were always harping about the decadent West, but most of them had double lives, and were hypocrites big time. Tyrants often have this dynamic going on. Yates is no different. I wonder if his relatives already suspected something was off about him, and that’s why they were rummaging through his desk. I hope that the police will go through those hard drives and see if they can rescue at least some of those kids on film !
It’s no wonder that Evangelicals love Trump. They have so much in common in their degeneracy.