The Talented Mr. Meeks

No.244: January 17, 2025

Jan 16, 2025

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is normally a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, but today’s is a day early and free of charge. Please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

Since 2020, J. Brandon Meeks has developed a robust following as a writer and public intellectual, publishing well-regarded essays at places like First Things, MereOrthodoxy, The North American Anglican, Ad Fontes, The American Conservative, and others. His “X” account (@nojesuittricks a/k/a “Shelby Foote Appreciator”) boasted 37,000 followers and he regularly carried on conversations with highly respected academics. His lively and sometimes incredible stories about life in the American South were shared widely, to critical acclaim. His popular Substack was, for a time, the sole “recommended” publication of the newsletter you are currently reading.

If one wondered who J. Brandon Meeks is, the Internet would—in bio after bio in the aforementioned publications—inform that he is a “theologian-in-residence” at his local Anglican (ACNA) parish, and that he received a PhD from the University of Aberdeen.

The former was at least at one time true. The latter is a lie.

This is not speculation or a baseless accusation. Confronted with his deception, he admitted to it. After knowing for nearly two months that this would have to be made public, he has not made any public statement or confession of any kind. There is no visible evidence that he has taken steps to remedy or rectify the lie. No online bio has been corrected or altered. His only public action has been to shutter his X account completely and disappear from the Internet.

The person to whom Brandon Meeks conceded these charges, Warren Cole Smith at MinistryWatch, breaks the story here.

The origin and reasons for the fabrication of his academic credentials is presumably known only to Brandon Meeks, but this is the story of how this lie and, along the way, another troubling fact about his biography were discovered.

Malice is the usual motivation to search someone’s deepest and darkest secrets. In this case, the motivation began as something more like respect and admiration. Over the years I had read Brandon Meeks’s work with profit and appreciation. I knew a few things about him: musician, literature lover, Anglican, excellent writer, with a doctorate from my very own alma mater: King’s College, Aberdeen. Aside from obvious physical differences, it was almost like we were twins separated at birth. I do not know Brandon, and assumed that we did not overlap during our times in Aberdeen.

In the fall of 2024 I found myself wanting to read Brandon’s theological writing—the academic kind. That is when problems began to emerge.

Brandon’s academic theological writing does not seem to exist. Moreover, there is not a word anywhere on the entire Internet about what J. Brandon Meeks studied during his time in Aberdeen: research area, focus, interest, thesis topic, nor even who his supervisor was. That is highly unusual for a postgraduate student. Somewhat exasperated, I decided to go to the source and find his actual thesis in the University of Aberdeen library’s online catalogue. It doesn’t exist. To ensure that I was searching properly, I searched for the names of some of my friends and colleagues from our Aberdeen days. One by one, our theses all showed up in the search results. This was very odd.

I looked for published academic journal articles and found none. Academia-dot-com lists three papers: one is just an essay published on an obscure, not peer-reviewed website. About the other two, with very distinguished academic-sounding titles, the website reads: “J. Brandon Meeks has not uploaded this article.”

I had always presumed that Brandon Meeks must have not overlapped with me in Aberdeen. Surely, he was a few years ahead of me or a few years behind. I’d never given it a second thought—why would I? Until now. I found his LinkedIn page. He claims that he attended the University of Aberdeen during the years 2005-2008.

There is more than one odd thing about that LinkedIn page, but the dates made me think that I am going crazy. That is an exact overlap with my time in Aberdeen. But from his photos, and even more, his videos displaying a shockingly deep, Southern baritone with an exaggerated drawl, I can swear that I have never seen the man in my life. Certainly not in Aberdeen. He was never present at postgraduate seminars or our annual retreats. I never heard that voice present a paper or speak during a roundtable discussion.

So I reached out to someone who was there with me. Did you ever know a Brandon Meeks when you were in Aberdeen? “Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?” He reached out to a man who was a faculty member in those days, a guy with an impeccable memory: “Doesn’t ring a bell.” I reached out to my closest friend and confidante in those days, a New Testament postgrad who spent five years in Aberdeen and was more connected in the community than most. In the end, I tracked down five people who were all in the Aberdeen community during that time frame. No one has any recollection whatsoever of Brandon Meeks.

Aberdeen Divinity is a small community. My friends and I wracked our brains trying to come up with some explanation. Maybe he was a loner who lived outside of town and never showed up to weekly seminars? Maybe he was ahead of the rest of us and was just quietly finishing his thesis? Maybe he returned the states to finish writing before we all got to Aberdeen? All the explanations ran into a simple problem, aptly summarized by one of my friends: “Bro, not in the library catalogue. Straightforward.”

It seemed highly unlikely to me that an Anglican minister (of some sort) and theologian would be making all this up. From time to time on his X feed he talks about his time in Aberdeen, and some of it (though not all) seems perfectly credible. This must be some sort of mistake. A bureaucratic snafu. The Registrar’s office and the Library got their wires crossed and his thesis just never made it into the catalogue.

The University turned out to be of little help. I reached out to a faculty member who was very interested to learn that someone was claiming a degree from his institution who may not, in fact, have earned said degree. In the end, however, lawyers prevailed. Due to “UK privacy laws,” he could neither confirm nor deny anything about J. Brandon Meeks. He could inform me, however, that he was “instructed” to "encourage” me to reach out to so-and-so at such-and-such office and file a request of some sort so that the University could properly undertake their own investigation of the matter. I took that to mean he was telling me to go see “Norma Wilcox.”

In the meantime, I settled into my own investigation, mostly for my own sanity. If Brandon Meeks was a peer and colleague of mine and I have no recollection then I feel a need to know, perhaps to seek professional help for amnesia. When was Brandon Meeks in Aberdeen? LinkedIn says 2005-2008. But then:

Another Tweet claims he lived there “for a bit.” Another says, “a couple years.” Which is it? Three years? A couple? A “bit”? Five years? When was this?

That can be no later than around 2007 (when Gathercole left for Cambridge, followed by Watson for Durham), and his knowledge of the place and names seems legitimate. But then he tells another person that he was in Aberdeen in the “early 2000s,” which is a strange way of describing 2005-08. It is bizarre that somebody would have such difficulty being consistent about when and for how long he lived abroad. Something is not adding up.

Back to the LinkedIn page. The Aberdeen dates intersecting with mine are not the only odd things. His education as a whole raises a number of red flags. First, where is his graduate degree? One cannot be accepted into the research postgraduate program at the University of Aberdeen without a master’s degree. The exception is that some students are accepted into a master’s program and later transition into a PhD program. That is a possibility.

But in Brandon’s case he records four years of (clearly undergraduate) study spread between two institutions. The first, Southeastern Freewill Baptist College, does not even offer degrees. The second, Tennessee Temple University, no longer exists, and in its time did not exactly have the sterling academic reputation of the sort that would ordinarily get you into the University of Aberdeen. And immediately after study at these two middling (to put it kindly) institutions, he is off to Scotland to do a research PhD? This does not add up.

I then discover Brandon’s birthday: December of 1983. This raises further problems. If he was in Aberdeen in the fall of 2005 working on a PhD, he would have been twenty-one years old—unusually young. If John Webster or some other professor had a 21-year-old wunderkind (recruited from Tennessee Temple?) secretly stashed away somewhere writing a PhD thesis—one with an unforgettable Southern drawl, no less—it would not escape everybody’s notice. It is well-nigh impossible.

And then I stumble across a smoking gun:

This is Brandon bragging that his “doktorvater” (a term not used in UK academia) used to write him handwritten letters. And the man he claims was his supervisor is I. Howard Marshall.

Now I am completely convinced that Brandon Meeks is lying. Howard Marshall went to Emeritus status in 1999. From that time on he was unable to accept new doctoral students, though it is true that he remained a vibrant presence around the school all the way up until his death in 2015. He frequently examined doctoral students, but he couldn’t have supervised them. And if Brandon were to claim that he got in just “under the wire” before Howard’s retirement, that would push him back to 1998. Then we would have to believe that fourteen-year-old Brandon from the trailer park in Arkansas was winging his way to Scotland to write a PhD thesis. This is patently ridiculous, and it rather inconveniently conflicts with the LinkedIn claim that he was in college from 2002 through 2005.

Additionally, it appears from my research that the very first instance of Brandon Meeks being described as a PhD from the University of Aberdeen is on the back of a self-published book in 2016:

Howard Marshall passed away in 2015, and the very next year Brandon Meeks is abruptly a PhD, having gone to Scotland “for a bit” in the “early 2000s” for the purpose of studying under him. Conveniently for Meeks, Professor Marshall was now unavailable for comment.

For reasons that will become clear, a point arrived in my personal investigation of this matter when I felt very ill-equipped. I reached out to long-time investigative journalist Warren Cole Smith, now President of MinistryWatch. Smith aided me and, after repeated attempts, persuaded Meeks to agree to a telephone call. Smith put him on the spot and asked the simple question: “Do you have a PhD from the University of Aberdeen?” Following a pregnant pause, Meeks answered, “No.” He elaborated: “I never finished my dissertation.”

That is plausible on the surface (leaving aside that UK postgrads do not write “dissertations.” They write theses). But he also chose the least damning explanation of his behavior. There is no shame in “not completing” a PhD thesis. It happens to many people.

But when one has admitted to the big lie, all lesser claims become suspect. A reasonable person may give him the benefit of the doubt and take his explanation at face value. However, given the ever-shifting time frame, the paucity of prior education and apparent lack of a graduate degree, the sheer fact of his age, the fact that no one thus far has any recollection of him, and the incredible claim that I. Howard Marshall was his supervisor, the explanation that he simply “didn’t finish his thesis” stretches credulity.

Unless contradicted with evidence, one is warranted to maintain, as I do, that J. Brandon Meeks was never a postgraduate student at the University of Aberdeen. Maybe he once visited the city and the college; he may have even taken undergraduate classes there for a time—maybe a college “semester abroad”; he may have corresponded with the late I. Howard Marshall; he may have personally kept up on the academic debates Simon Gathercole and Francis Watson were having with everyone about Paul (which only involves picking up a book or two). Or he might have just once had a beer with a real Aberdeen PhD and picked up enough lingo to fake it. But it is highly unlikely that he was ever part of a postgraduate research program in the Divinity school. And posts like this one look a lot different in the cold light of the truth:

He posted that arrogant boast almost the very day I discovered his lie. It does have the virtue of being true: he didn’t get his doctorate from a dime-store diploma mill. He didn’t earn one at all.

This is not a victimless offense. Brandon Meeks gained a great deal of reputational currency with his fraudulent credentials. Undoubtedly it went a long way to paving the way for publication in myriad online magazines and journals. It gave him “peer” status on X with many legitimate academics and scholars. Brandon Meeks stole prestige and credibility from the University of Aberdeen, stole a seal of approval from the late and beloved Howard Marshall, and thoroughly disrespected the many who invested great toil to obtain the privilege of a Doctor of Philosophy degree from an elite and storied institution founded in 1495.

And now he is himself the victim of his own devices. Are we to believe anything else? Are we to believe his wonderful and outlandish stories of life in the American South? Did he really shoot at his own shadow one dark night? Did he really once show up unannounced to Harper Lee’s nursing home and charm his way in to bring her lunch? Mileage may vary for others, but I once believed these stories and no longer do.

He is very talented, but his talents appear to be in the realm of fiction.

At the outset, I said that one aspect of his biography is partially true. At one time Brandon Meeks did serve his local parish in a teaching capacity (i.e., “theologian-in-residence”), they being presumably under the deception that he was qualified for such a position. Brandon, in his telling, has been removed (or has removed himself) from any position of authority because of something else my investigation uncovered, much to my extreme dismay.

In 2017 a “James Meeks” was charged and convicted of a crime in the State of Louisiana. Few details are available, but the crime is a serious one.

The “J” in J. Brandon Meeks stands for James. The birthdate and physical description matches. The (redacted by me) address is, in fact, his. And he admitted to being the defendant to Warren Cole Smith.

“Carnal knowledge of a juvenile” can indicate a wide spectrum of offenses, and since the records are difficult or impossible to obtain, only Brandon Meeks can provide any insight. It is unknown whether this conviction resulted in any incarceration, but he did, in fact, all but vanish online between the “conviction” and “release” dates indicated in the image above (the search below conducted prior to the deletion of his X account):

He also vanished from his (now-inaccessible) blog between September of 2017 to March of 2019 (screenshot from a Goodreads XML feed):

This criminal record is obviously public, though it took accidentally stumbling across it and required piecing together several puzzle pieces to identify the defendant as James Brandon Meeks.

I do not make it more public here out of animosity or desire to humiliate; I do so because it remains unclear whether Mr. Meeks has adequately disclosed matters to his church leadership. Two dozen of his preaching and teaching videos remain accessible on their YouTube channel, and all of them show him preaching and teaching subsequent to this criminal conviction (even occasionally wearing vestments), causing one to wonder if they knew about it at all. As I understand it, Brandon assured Warren Smith in their conversation that he was no longer in any ministry role due to these criminal matters, but it seems that all of his ministry in his church has occurred after these criminal matters. He was preaching as recently as September. If there is any backing away from ministry it is recent and hard to explain as a consequence of his criminal past—his ministry appears to have begun subsequent to the crime. Regardless, his inclusion on a public sex offender registry alone likely warrants wider exposure with respect to a man so recently active in a ministry capacity in the Anglican Church of North America.

Brandon Meeks is talented, and therein lies the tragedy. It appears that he was not content with his talents and sought to gild them with ill-gotten gains. My earnest hope and prayer is that Brandon would fully repent, both privately and publicly as appropriate, and seek the path of righteousness and, eventually, restoration. He possesses literary gifts such that he could become a wonderful practitioner of American literature, in the long line of Southern greats like O’Connor or Percy. My prayer is that he would abandon academic pretensions and stick with fiction. He is clearly very good at it.

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