If it’s a day ending in -Y, then we have a new sex abuse scandal erupting out of evangelicalism. This time, it involves Wheaton College—one of the biggest names around in evangelical education—and a former high-ranking admin there named Dennis Massaro. According to various reports, for decades this college protected a predator in their administrative ranks. Protests have even broken out at the school over this abuse shielding. Today, let me show you what’s happening there, and then let’s explore the reasons why it’s happening.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 10/20/2026. They’re both available there now. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! From introduction: Dolmathes recipe, and yes, ground beef is fine. Don’t use anything but beef or lamb though.)
SITUATION REPORT: Wheaton College protests over school’s shielding of a sex abuser
Back in April, the Roys Report covered a bombshell sex abuse story: For decades, Wheaton College had protected a high-ranked administrator who sexually preyed upon the school’s students. This administrator, Dennis Massaro, was the director of the Office of Christian Outreach from 1979-1998. During that time, he sexually abused numerous students. Three of his victims separately contacted Sam Shellhamer, the school’s dean at the time. In response, the dean promptly fired him for “Other Improper Conduct.”
Publicly, though, the school’s story was that Massaro had resigned. The admins didn’t even ban Massaro from the campus. The conditions of the termination also protected Massaro’s secret—which then became Wheaton’s secret as well.
Over the years, Wheaton continued to protect Massaro. Meanwhile, Massaro hopped from ministry to ministry and eventually to a pastor gig in Turkey, where he allegedly demanded sex in exchange for help with amnesty claims. This entire time, Wheaton’s admins didn’t breathe a word to warn anybody about what he’d done. They helped his then-wife Kathy Gallagher in a custody battle over the couple’s two daughters, but demanded she keep quiet about details, which she says only caused further damage to the girls.
In fact, the school’s leaders wouldn’t even begin to reveal their long-protected secret until 2024. Even then, the information they provided amounted to a trickle-truthing—like one hears out of cheating spouses.
In early October, protesters began demonstrating on the Wheaton campus. The dozens of protesters include Kathy Gallagher. They appear to want the college to change how it responds to sex abuse allegations on campus and how it protects students and others going forward. At least some of them also want the college’s current president, Philip Ryken, to resign.
Today, I want to show you just why Wheaton College felt it was more important to hide Massaro’s abuse than to alert possible victims and get justice for existing ones. It’s the same reason why the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) refused to act on its leaders’ knowledge of sex abusers in SBC churches. It’s also the same reason why nobody tried to stop Paige Patterson from silencing sex abuse victims, why Ravi Zacharias never got stopped in his lifetime, and why administrators at other evangelical colleges have lied about abusers on their own respective campuses.
Functional vs dysfunctional authoritarianism
Everything begins with the structure of the groups involved in today’s story.
An authoritarian group is one where leaders hold most of the group’s available power. Followers have little to no power within the group. If a leader tells a follower to jump, as the joke goes, the follower asks “How high?” That power is the answer to the “riddle of steel” in the Conan mythos:
Not all authoritarian groups are bad, however. Some operate with strict checks and balances on leaders, which leads to real accountability for any bad-faith actors who somehow weasel their way into positions of power. External watchdogs, accountability measures like reporting requirements, adherence to the group’s chain of command, and no real way for top leaders to protect lower-level favorites from any of it. These groups run as functional authoritarian groups.
Instead, everything ties back to leaders’ approval and whims. The groups’ top leaders dole out positions to their favorites—and then protect them from accountability. In turn, those leaders expect their underlings to keep their secrets and protect them in turn. (That’s what Matt Queen was doing when he lied to the feds about a sexual assault at his SBC college. Same for the closed ranks around Ravi Zacharias during his lifetime.)
Evangelical churches, colleges, small groups, parachurch orgs, missionary outfits, and everything else all operate as dysfunctional authoritarian groups. I have never once encountered a single evangelical group of any size or kind that actually managed to achieve functional-authoritarian status. Not once, not ever. They all operate as crony networks instead. Their leaders form alliances with other leaders and protect themselves and their institutions against any attempts at imposed accountability.
Here’s the worst part: I’ve also never seen any dysfunctional-authoritarian group reform into a functional one. It’s why the SBC initially made mouth-noises in 2019 about caring about sex abuse and the many victims of SBC ministers, but eventually dropped the entire problem without any progress being made. Whether we’re talking about a free-to-play online game or a vast denomination, reform remains impossible.
So it doesn’t matter if the school’s current president resigns. Without a complete replacement of all administrative ranks, a sea change in culture, addition of external overseers, and lots of formal rule changes, Ryken’s resignation would be little more than an empty gesture. (That’s why none of these groups have ever managed to reform. They’re not willing to go that far. They usually reject even the empty gestures.)
Patterns of dysfunctional authoritarianism in the Wheaton scandal
Now, let’s turn our attention to the red flags of dysfunctional authoritarianism in this current scandal.
When students first reported Massaro’s abuse to the Dean of Wheaton College, Sam Shellhamer, his immediate go-to response was to fire Massaro, but then allow him to publicly say he resigned. He very obviously focused on keeping this abuse out of the public eye. He didn’t insist on a police report. In fact, he even made Massaro sign a statement saying he’d never talk about what had really happened.
Compare and contrast with the USN/USMC Commander’s Quick Reference Legal Handbook (2025 edition). Page 4 lists what reports must be passed on to NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service). Page 5 outlines what crime victims need referral to the military’s VWAP (Victim and Witness Assistance Program). Further in, we see how far up and down the chain of command reports must go. We also learn how victims of sexual assault must be treated. This document explicitly rules out neglecting to give appropriate care. When these rules aren’t followed, accountability requirements step in—as happened in 2021 when the Navy relieved two officers of command.
Obviously, none of this happened for Dennis Massaro or any of his victims.
Similarly, universities receiving federal money must follow Title IX rules. Its rules even apply to religious schools, as long as they don’t conflict specifically with the religious practices of the schools. Title IX officially concerns sex-based discrimination, but it considers sexual harassment and assault as a kind of discrimination.
Most schools appear to take Title IX very seriously. The University of Minnesota printed an entire full-color handbook outlining how it responds to accusations and reports. Vanderbilt has Emergency Removal rules for the accused. Syracuse University has 15 steps their Title IX department takes when receiving a report. These include checking for “evidence of a pattern or other similar conduct by the Respondent.”
These universities’ policies would have stopped Dennis Massaro in his tracks. And yes, Wheaton is a Title IX school. But the policies weren’t quite as set in stone or as well-enforced then as they are now. Either way, Wheaton did none of these things. That was just how they rolled.
So when reports of sex abuse crossed the desk of Sam Shellhamer, he and the perpetrator agreed to a termination of employment. Shellhamer allowed Massaro to say he’d resigned for personal reasons. He also made Massaro sign a non-disclosure agreement. Nobody at Wheaton filed police reports. And I wonder if the students would even have known it was an option.
Segue: Whither Dennis Massaro now?
Dennis Massaro is currently in his early 70s. He lives in Florida. Because not one criminal charge ever got filed and no formal authorities ever got alerted, he escaped justice completely.
Oh sure, Turkey’s authorities might like to get their hands on him. His offenses there occurred between 2015-2018. But he left the country before anything could happen legally. America shares an extradition treaty with Turkey, but it’s a complicated process. I don’t know if Turkey will invoke it (or even if it would be approved by our government).
Other than that, Massaro is keeping a low profile—and not answering any questions from anyone. It seems likely he will never be held to accountability for anything he’s done.
This lack of repercussions is, itself, an expected part of the overall pattern of dysfunctional authoritarianism.
Why this kind of scandal keeps cropping up in evangelicalism, and why nobody who cares can stop it
Evangelical colleges don’t just sell a basic education to students and their families. They sell a nice evangelical worldview taught within a safe evangelical bubble for the younglings to inhabit away from home. In this way, they’re not dissimilar from evangelical youth programs at churches—or even churches themselves. These schools tend to be more expensive than regular public universities, so parents need a good reason to send the younglings there.
If those schools turn out to be unsafe, or their leaders not nice evangelicals at all, then parents don’t have much reason to shell out the big bucks for the worldview-and-bubble package. They might as well send the younglings to worldly secular colleges.
Reputation is everything in evangelicalism. From the biggest-name leaders on down to the worship ministers and volunteers, evangelicals have a well-defined lexicon of symbolic ways to communicate fervor and obedience to the group’s rules. These symbolic displays function as substitutes for the real thing. The symbols are all that matter.
Reputation is how evangelicals make money. So anything threatening those reputations must be eliminated. And since they’ll never eliminate their own hypocrisy, they must look to eliminate reports of that hypocrisy. That means silencing victims and shuffling predators around.
Faking sincerity for fun and profit
Unfortunately, it’s extremely easy for a bad-faith actor to fake both fervor and obedience. The group has forgotten how to assess the real thing. So they miss any subtle signs that a bad-faith actor is faking. Then they get one-shotted by news of predators within their flocks. They have no idea how that could possibly have happened! (See also: Dennis Hastert.)
That’s why Benjamin Cole was so confused and shocked by the news of Matt Queen’s lies to the feds—but I sure wasn’t. I’d already pegged Queen as a liar-for-Jesus from his very own words and behavior from a story published back in 2021. But the flocks never noticed his blatant opportunistic dishonesty. They’ve been trained not to notice. All they saw was a brilliant evangelist with a serious burden for soulwinning, as the Christianese goes.
Evangelical reputations are built on shifting sand and based on illusions. Evangelicals themselves judge reputations by substitutes instead of solid standards. And hypocrites join crony networks to protect those reputations. That’s the system their leaders built—because that’s the system that serves them best. And by now, nobody who cares to do otherwise can change it, because all the power in this system rests only with leaders, and the leaders profiting from this system aren’t about to make changes to it.
For everyone else, there’s only one approach that works to dealing with this kind of mess, and that’s to walk away from it while shouting as loudly as possible about what it’s done now.
NEXT UP: Christianity is the one product that absolutely everyone needs—or so Christians think. But do we? (Spoiler: Nope!) See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
