On January 17, Mike Winger released a nearly six-hour-long video about the Shawn Bolz scandal erupting in Bethel Church right now. Winger thinks that the Bolz scandal indicates huge problems within Charismatic evangelical culture. But he’s wrong. The rot goes completely to the core of hardline, right-wing conservative Christianity itself—including the flavor Winger likes best. Today, let’s go over the scandals in Mike Winger’s own denominational backyard—and begin asking why his entire end of Christianity keeps having these scandals.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 2/6/2026. They’re both available now! Also, a note: I capitalize the “C” in “Charismatic” to differentiate it from the personal quality of charisma. Series tag for Bethel Church, which has all the recent Shawn Bolz posts.)
SITUATION REPORT: This ain’t just a Charismatic thing, Mike Winger
At the end of Mike Winger’s huge video, he offers a “call for extreme action from Charismatic leaders.”
He wants Charismatic leaders to call out fake prophets and other grifters taking advantage of their flocks. Winger also wants Charismatic leaders to “excommunicate” Shawn Bolz by not allowing him into any of their churches until he “publicly repents and confesses.” He also demands Bolz name and shame the other grifters in the movement.
None of this is a surprise. It’s the usual non-solution we get from that end of Christianity. But Winger wants something that fundamentally cannot happen. It’s like wanting a ship that travels faster than light: matter cannot go that fast without infinite energy, and infinite energy can’t exist in matter.
The very nature of conservative Christianity itself makes Winger’s desires impossible. Their entire system revolves around gaining power over others. If power is the “matter” in the equation, then “proper accountability and no scandals” is the energy they can never capture.
What’s more, his own preferred flavor of conservative Christianity suffers similar issues as Bethel.
Today, I’ll show you what I mean.
Everyone, meet Mike Winger
I put this introduction off before, but now it’s time to meet the man behind the video.
Mike Winger belongs to Calvary Chapel (CC). I saw someone on Reddit riff on the denomination by saying that Calvinists accuse these guys of being Arminian, and Arminians accuse them of being Calvinists. That sounds about right. They really do sit right in the uncanny valley between two extremes. The CC denomination was founded by Chuck Smith. Yes, the same guy who started the Jesus People movement with Lonnie Frisbee!
(Calvinism: Utterly evil worldview that insists Yahweh predestines some humans for Heaven and others for Hell. Arminian: Slightly less evil worldview insisting that people choose to accept salvation, while those who don’t go to Hell.)
Winger graduated from the School of Ministry at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in the early 2000s. This is a tiny, denominational school. This school sounds like a Pentecostal “Bible College,” one geared for training laypeople for ministry, and as such provides no in-depth training in biblical criticism (as any proper, reputable seminary would do). If it’s similar to other CC “schools of ministry,” it might be even less rigorous than I first assumed. At least the one in Escondido has a website!
The upshot: Mike Winger is not a trained apologist or theologist. In fact, he’s attracted a great deal of criticism from people who do have that training, particularly regarding his frequent discussions on complementarianism.
Nobody likes actual theology, but a lot of people really love vibes theology
After whatever his school considers graduation and accreditation, Winger became a youth pastor. In 2011 and while working his day job, he began his YouTube channel “Bible Thinker.” It grew popular enough to require his full-time attention. Now, he has almost a million subscribers. One interviewer at the official CC website describes his channel as being about “theology and apologetics.” Winger himself has this to say on his YouTube description page:
I have a heavy burden on my heart to get REAL Bible teaching and knowledge into the lives of others. I want to give you the teaching I’ve been craving for my whole Christian life. I want you to be able to hear me make the case for my views and to be able to reason it through for yourself.
Most of his videos get between 100k and 300k views, but his Bethel videos do considerably better. The really long one has 1.4M views so far, and two associated videos have racked up over 500k and 700k respectively.
As well, he’s fond of Christianese like “biblical,” an adjective meaning “compliant with ultraconservative Christian beliefs.” It’s a way to slam other Christian beliefs. He also mistakes his chosen flavor of Christianity as “biblical Christianity.” Incidentally, “burden” is also Christianese. It means he thinks Jesus ordered him to run a YouTube channel. A “heavy burden” means Jesus was very insistent on that point.
In every substantial way, then, what Winger buys into is just bog-standard evangelicalism: inerrancy, women subjugated to men, Trinitarianism (ooh, so very pagan and Catholic, so very ironic), a thoroughly modern notion of the Crucifixion and belief in a literal Resurrection, miracles being possible, and slamming major Christian groups like Catholicism and Mormons as not real Christians at all.
Consequently, he’s completely incapable of perceiving that his flavor of Christianity isn’t markedly different from Bethel’s in any way. That assessment most especially includes how it allows abusers in through the front door and protects them.
Conservative theo-bros vs Bethel and Charismatic Christianity in general
For years now, other hardline theo-bros have absolutely despised Bethel (as we discussed a while back). Bethel people do a lot of things they don’t like besides pretending to perform miracles. Back in 2016, Pulpit & Pen asserted that the church is “pimping heresy.” Pretty much all hardliners hate Bethel.
So as you can guess, they’ve leaped on this Shawn Bolz story. Premier Christianity, a site that once boosted Shawn Bolz, now speculates that the scandal “may run deeper in the charismatic movement than many want to admit.” And Protestia, a hardline Calvinist site, even asks “Why does the charismatic movement keep producing men like Shawn Bolz in the first place?”
Moreover, evangelicals are warring against each other both for and against the leaders of Bethel. On their social media, I see them arguing about how to deal with humongous breaches of trust.
Today, I’ll helpfully and gently answer both those questions:
- Because that’s how conservative Christianity in general operates. Yes, that includes all conservative Christian flavors.
- To fix this rot, they need to take off and nuke the worldview from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
And to prove my points, let’s briefly swing through the scandals that have hit Calvary Chapel lately.
Mike Winger’s denomination ain’t clean by any stretch
In 2014, Bob Coy resigned very suddenly from the huge megachurch he’d started, Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale. He cited a “grave moral failing,” which one newspaper described as “multiple affairs and a pornography addiction.” But the next year, a mother accused him of molesting her daughter, saying the abuse began when she was only four years old.
That same newspaper describes another half-dozen CC pastors who were accused of molesting children. One of the biggest scandals involved Anthony Iglesias, a missionary who allegedly molested boys in both America and Thailand. In 2011, four of his American victims filed a lawsuit against him and against Winger’s alma mater church in Costa Mesa for knowingly allowing Iglesias to come into contact with kids. They likely thought Costa Mesa had known because Iglesias had actually been convicted in 2004 for molestation.
In 2018, a CC pastor, Matthew Tague, was convicted of repeatedly molesting a little girl. He turned himself in and pleaded guilty because his wife had caught him red-handed.
In January 2025, CC pastor Bruce Hollen was convicted of possession of child sex abuse materials (CSAM). He got caught in a sting operation.
In February 2025, Rodney Finch made the news after he tried to put his CC church up for sale without informing the congregation. His church leaders also accused him of misusing church funds. (We even talked about it!) At least this story involves no children, though.
In December 2025, Ministry Watch reported that a dozen sex abuse lawsuits were pending against Greg Laurie, a pastor whose church affiliates with CC. He stands accused of molesting children in Romania. (His church is nondenominational but loosely affiliates with both CC and the Southern Baptist Convention—which should not surprise anybody.)
Lawyers’ sites are currently investigating a former CC Costa Mesa youth pastor, Clive Welsh, for molesting children during his time there in the 1980s-1990s.
I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made my point. Abuse runs through all of these conservative Christian groups.
The signs of a healthy system (are not found in Mike Winger’s denomination)
Conservative Christian leaders teach their flocks a defanged view of accountability. This defanged view allows predators in through the front door and also makes it almost impossible to eject any who eventually get discovered. Conservative Christian leaders need this defanged accountability to make their system work as they wish.
Proper accountability involves the following elements:
- Bad-faith actors caught very early and prevented from achieving power—and ejected immediately if caught after rising to power
- Leaders must obey their own rules; if they refuse to do that, leadership is removed from them
- Nobody can protect a leader caught breaking rules; favoritism doesn’t exist in the group
- People promoted on the basis of skills and aptitude, not loyalty to any particular leader
- The group’s rules always apply to every leader at every level
- Third-party watchdogs have access to accountability processes at all times and at all levels
- Nobody needs to fear retaliation in alerting the group to bad-faith actors in their midst
- Group is open about its problems and refuses to silence victims or downplay the severity of abuse situations, nor to attack critics
None of this exists in any conservative Christian group. In the case of Calvary Chapel itself, its “Moses Model” of leadership guarantees that its groups enable abusers to find prey, then enjoy leaders’ protection as a matter of course.
A Theory of Relative Accountability
In functional authoritarian systems, proper accountability scales inversely with absolute power. As absolute power grows, accountability shrinks—just like we see in the Theory of Relativity, which tells us that as something’s speed grows, its mass must shrink. The only way for that thing to achieve lightspeed is to have no mass, at which point it’s not matter anymore anyway.
Similarly, conservative Christian leaders hold and cultivate personal power over others. They pick favorites and advance people based on loyalty, demand that loyalty no matter the secret, refuse to be transparent about anything, attack and silence their critics and the victims of their abuse, and flout their own rules whenever they can.
But as their power grows, their accountability shrinks. They may become leaders with the very best of intentions, but power corrupts. Either they’ll be forced to protect their power and income by becoming complicit in some other leader’s abuse and hypocrisy, or they’ll discover that they themselves can’t live up to their own hype. The only way to avoid this outcome is dramatically increasing accountability. And just as Bethel refuses to do that, so too does Calvary Chapel.
Chuck Smith, the founder of the entire CC denomination, was definitely one of those dysfunctional authoritarians. So are all of the pastors associating with him and his denomination. He craved absolute power with no accountability, and the Moses Model he created provided just that—both to him and the many abusers operating freely within Mike Winger’s “biblical Christianity.”
Bethel, whose many miracle-workers claim Jesus himself has told them prophecies and given them magic healing powers, is no different. The rot all comes from the same source, and it manifests in the same ways for the same reasons. It’s just a shame that Mike Winger has such an easy time spotting it in other religious groups, but such a hard time seeing it in his own.
NEXT UP: Borrowed authority is the basis of dysfunctional authoritarianism—as we see in conservative Christianity. See you soon! <3
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