Because this is a day ending in Y, evangelicals have recently sprouted a bunch more sex scandals. Yet again, these scandals involve the loudest-braying leaders of the tribe. And yet again, evangelicals were the ones to elevate these newest abusers to leadership and give them nearly unlimited power over those with none.
They apparently expected those powerful leaders to stay in check through their superior Jesusing. But I suppose Jesus was deep in thought, or on a voyage, or sleeping. Perhaps he was simply using the potty (1 Kings 18:27), even. Whatever is keeping him so busy, he’s once again done nothing to protect his sheep from these predators.
Once again, I am struck by how little evangelicals understand about why their leaders keep sexually abusing those under their care. Today, let’s see how a few of them have recently diagnosed their constant stream of sex scandals—and see how those misdiagnoses influence the solutions they recommend.
(This post went live on Patreon on 9/24/2024. Its audio should be available by the time you see this!)
A diagnosis is only as good as the information available
Recently, the Roll to Disbelieve A/V Club watched Out of Africa (1985). It’s the gorgeous, incredible story of Isak Dinesen, one of the best writers to soar out of the mid-1900s. A big part of the movie centers on her fight with syphilis starting in 1915. She thought she’d caught it from her philandering husband. In the movie, doctors treat her with the pre-antibiotic regimen of the time: Arsenic and mercury. According to the movie, these treatments worked. Tests revealed no traces of syphilis left. However, the same treatments rendered her infertile. Worse, she began showing symptoms of possible heavy metal poisoning.
Worse still, the specter of syphilis hangs over Dinesen for the whole rest of the movie. In the real world, she blamed syphilis for her ongoing health problems. Eventually, she died at 77 in 1962 after a long period of being unable to eat.
Long ago in the late 80s/early 90s, I worked for a special-collections library. It had a nice collection of Dinesen’s work, which I read in bits and pieces like a medieval server sneaking sips of wine during a noble’s banquet. I always wondered how she stayed so incredibly sharp-minded even after apparently dealing with late-stage syphilis for decades before antibiotics could help her. At the time, even someone as disconnected as I was from the world of literature knew of her constant, serious health problems.
As it turns out, though, the movie left something out of Dinesen’s story that changes everything:
Isak Dinesen suffered from an eating disorder. She purged with strong laxatives.
Suddenly, everything becomes clear
For most of her adult life, Isak Dinesen purged to maintain a low weight. Sure, she still got the syphilis treatment, but her many serious symptoms continued without improvement.
Tests for syphilis kept coming back negative after that first one in 1915, but she still insisted syphilis was the problem here. She didn’t tell her doctors about her laxative abuse until almost the end of her life. By then, it was far too late to do much of anything about her ailments.
See how one little bit of information changes so much? How it completely shifts one’s perspective, how it snaps a picture into sharp focus?
The series House, MD bases most episodes on this exact concept. For example, here House berates a boy’s parents for not telling him their son is adopted.
That’s basically the situation evangelicals face right now. They’re trying to diagnose the cause of their constant sex scandals. But they’re missing a very important piece of the diagnostic puzzle. Without that missing piece, their chances of lucking into the true solution are slim to none.
Not that evangelicals don’t constantly try to diagnose the tribe’s problems and offer solutions.
When part of the problem involves being unable to confront the truth about the problem, things can really get thorny.
Diagnosis and solution set #1 for sex scandals: Become more Catholic!
In 2019, Joseph D’Souza realized what has caused evangelicals’ constant sex scandals. To this Anglican archbishop who doesn’t appear to be evangelical at all, it all seemed so simple! All evangelicals need to do is start performing “the sacrament of confession” again! As he wrote for Christian Post:
The Protestant church could gain much from developing a culture and discipline of confessing our sins to one another. Imagine a church where everyone, including the senior pastor, was required to have a person they confessed to. For one, it would help avoid some of the major crises in the failures of leadership. [. . .]
The confessor’s role would not be to simply hear confessions in privacy, but to counsel and exhort when a serious sin pattern is developing. This should all happen within the context of love, prayer and careful self-examination, which is the model Paul sets in his Letter to the Galatians:
He’s forgetting one simple fact, however:
The Catholic church never stopped performing the sacrament of confession, and yet somehow they’ve been sexually abusing children for centuries.
D’Souza’s suggestion takes for granted that ending any particular Christian devotional practices is the cause of a breakdown of accountability. Since his model includes a particular practice and he knows of no sex abuse in his social sphere, obviously that practice is the key to everything. In truth, Anglicans don’t seem to have nearly as many sex scandals as evangelicals do. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t have any at all. They most certainly do.
Worse, though, D’Souza’s suggestion requires and expects every single person involved here to tell the truth, to be open to correction and be able to meaningfully make it, and to offer correction only with the proper motivations. If even one person in the equation chooses not to do that, or is incapable of doing it, then his suggestion falls apart.
Always look for ways that bad-faith actors can take advantage of a proposed idea. Pattern this process after expectant parents, who actively try to select a name that won’t be used to bully their incoming child. (“Amber?” “No way! My best friend got called “Amberger” all through school.”)
Diagnosis and solution set #2 for sex scandals: Hypocrites just need to be criticized for ‘false holiness’!
In 2021, Hedieh Mirahmadi came to a similar realization about evangelicals. To this former Muslim and now-evangelical ministry leader, the solution was so simple! All evangelical pew-warmers need to do is start judging and criticizing any leaders exhibiting “false holiness!” As she wrote for Christian Post:
The Lord warns, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” Being aware means the onus is on us to safeguard the community against people who could harm the body of believers with false doctrine. [. . .]
In contrast, the Lord tells us, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” Though tension exists between these two concepts, many other tenets of the Gospel warn that teachers will be held to a higher standard and encourage the body of believers to confess their sins to one another and to admonish fellow believers who are stuck in sin.
I saw that and smiled sadly. I thought, Oh, if only it really were that simple. It would make so many things so much easier for evangelicals. It’d prevent so many problems.
She’s forgetting a lot of things about evangelical social systems. Any one of them would short-circuit her entire solution. But combined, they make it impossible for evangelical pew-warmers to do much of anything about particularly powerful leaders. Even criticizing them in the mildest, nicest ways can get the pew-warmers into hot water.
There exists no way to force accountability on any powerful leader within evangelicalism. For lower-level leaders, like young, new, small-time pastors, church hiring committees can rein them in or even fire them. But once a leaders starts ingratiating himself with the evangelical crony network and climbing up that ladder, it becomes harder and harder to deny him anything he wants. (Yes, I’m using male references on purpose. Very few women ever get that far.)
This happens at smaller scales within even small churches, of course, in the same way that it happens within the larger context of evangelicalism. Beware the retiree in charge of the holiday decoration committee! Their word is law around here!
As above, so below. The pew-warmers have very little power within evangelicalism. Their leaders have ensured it.
Diagnosis and solution set #3 for sex scandals: SPEERCHUL WARFARE
Also in 2021, Karen Swallow Prior described how grievous injury gave her some insight about evangelicals’ sex abuse—specifically, about how evangelical leaders covered up that abuse for decades. Her injuries (from being hit by a bus) seemed, to her, to be similar to those suffered by sex abuse victims themselves. The bus felt like the trauma those victims experienced. The pain that still lingers reminds her of that felt by “the body of Christ” on behalf of victims who have not yet found justice.
And the process of finding justice seems to involve “wrestling,” in the sense that some Bible myths depict:
Like Jacob, I don’t know if I am — or we in the church are — wrestling with man, with angels or with demons. Or all three.
But the wrestling gives me hope. As hard as it is to see the deeds of darkness come to light, there is solace in knowing that these secret sins are being revealed and that in being revealed are losing some of their power. The wrestling reveals, too, who is for the victims and who is not, who is being deceived and who is doing the deceiving.
A god who requires his followers to “wrestle” with him or anyone else to get justice for decades of sex abuse committed by his own priests is not a god worth following. Sex abuse is a gross violation of innocence on all levels. I find it grotesque to try to link such violations to the supernatural as if imaginary people had anything to do with it or its solution.
More than that, as a proposed solution to the Problem of Suffering as it relates to evangelicals’ ongoing sex abuse crisis, it’s an especially piss-poor one. It’s a waste of time and mental masturbation to even dwell upon the supernatural as a cause or solution to any problem. Actual real social dynamics caused the sex abuse crisis. Changes to those dynamics will be its solution—provided evangelicals can ever make those changes.
Let me reiterate: The only possible agents of both damage and change within evangelicalism are entirely human. No gods, angels, or demons have ever been involved with any humans. And that is the best news we could ever have, though I doubt evangelicals will ever be able to understand, much less cope with that truth.
And the usual diagnosis and solution set for sex scandals: JESUSING HARDER
Over the years, we’ve examined and discussed a lot of evangelical leaders’ diagnoses and solutions to sex abuse of all kinds. And they’ve always followed a particular pattern:
- “Just Pray NO” to solve America’s drug problem
- Ben Jack has finally solved evangelicals’ hypocrisy problem
- J.D. Greear’s astonishing solution to the SBC’s misogyny problem
- Russell Moore solves evangelical decline forever
- New evangelical demands to Jesus harder to reverse the decline
- “Weird Christianity” will reverse the decline for sure
And so on, and so forth.
‘Jesus harder’ is my shorthand for doing whatever practices and devotions a given Christian considers central to Christianity. These vary wildly from group to group and Christian to Christian. One Christian might think proper Jesusing involves working up a sweat and speaking in tongues at every church service—or even snake handling! Another might think Jesusing involves reciting the rosary every day and attending Latin Mass every Sunday. Since no real standards exist for Christian orthopraxy (much less orthodoxy), there’s no point in describing these devotions further than just calling them Jesusing.
‘The Big Problem Here’ is just my shorthand for that exact kind of overly-simplistic, nuance-divorced, reality-disconnected diagnosis that we see in right-wing Christianity so often. In this case, evangelicals think The Big Problem Here is a lack of sufficient, correct Jesusing. So obviously, the solution centers on somehow convincing all Christians to Jesus harder and more correctly.
But as I just said, no standard exists for Jesusing. Nor does any governing body have to power to judge or change another group’s Jesusing. Within a single church congregation, nobody even has the power to force individual pew-warmers to honestly and accurately describe the frequency, duration, or even form of their Jesusing while away from the church. All any church leader can do to gauge a sheep’s Jesusing is personally observe them—or rely on hopefully-accurate reports from happy little spies eager to curry favor.
Evangelicals would rather exhort the flocks to Jesus harder than to do anything real to address their sex scandals
This topic has been on my mind this week because I found two reports from two evangelical leaders that exhorted everyone to just Jesus harder to fix sex scandals forever.
One comes to us from Russell Moore, who used to be a big name within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). For a while, he led their high-ranking Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). He also served as an informal leader of the SBC’s slightly-less-draconian Pretend Progressive faction. Unfortunately, he opposed and rejected Donald Trump, so the tribe had to drive him out. But he still holds a lot of SBC beliefs, for good and ill.
The other comes to us from Tom Ascol, who dearly wants to be a big name within the SBC. He leads the SBC’s incredibly-draconian Old Guard faction.
But they both offer the exact same diagnosis—and the same solution.
Tom Ascol wants everyone to Jesus harder to end sex scandals forever
In 2022, Tom Ascol criticized the entire idea of a database to track sex abusers. At the time, the SBC had just released a damning independent report about the sheer scope of their sex abuse crisis. Sex abuse reformers and advocates had long asked the denomination to create and maintain such a database, but the SBC’s leaders had long rejected the idea.
Well, officially, anyway. For many years, they’d maintained a secret database of SBC ministers caught or accused of committing sex abuse. They just didn’t want to be responsible for such a database officially.
(BTW: One of the leaders to reject the database idea, Frank Page, even accused reformers of being bad-faith opportunists. Years later, he resigned from his SBC leadership amid his own sex scandal.)
Tom Ascol, like the rest of the Old Guard, did not want a database. Instead, he wanted a solution more in line with his own diagnosis of the cause of all those sex scandals:
Tom Ascol, the pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, tells AFN says there is a major factor that, so far, hasn’t been raised by many.
“Well, we need to follow biblical principles,” Tascol [sic], a candidate for SBC president, says. “They’ve rushed to judgment and they violated biblical principles in doing so. The Bible talks about things being confirmed by two witnesses.”
Ascol refers here to evangelicals’ beloved Matthew 18 conflict resolution model. Especially in recent decades, this model has become evangelical leaders’ very favorite way to avoid accountability. It also allows those leaders to shield predators within their crony network. Of course, if “biblical principles” mattered at all to the leaders who engage in scandalous behavior, there’d be no need for a database at all, much less for avoidance of accountability.
Ascol also bleats out that whenever a church finds out about sex abuse, they should always call the cops. I’ve seen Old Guard leaders say the same thing many times. But again, evangelicalism itself prevents such a response. Evangelicals’ insistence on Jesusing as a solution to problems, as well as church leaders’ reluctance to tarnish their tribe’s already-terrible image, guarantees that anyone who even suggests calling law enforcement will regret it very quickly.
And Russell Moore’s recent endorsement of the same diagnosis and solution to sex scandals
In recent years, Russell Moore’s kept busy within his corner of evangelicalism. After leaving the SBC, he took up with a Calvinist nondenominational church called Immanuel Nashville. He’s their Minister-in-Residence. As most of these churches tend to be, its overall beliefs and doctrinal stances look exactly like the SBC’s. His culture-war opinions haven’t changed, either, from what I’ve read from him. In terms of employment, he writes for various publications and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today.
In the June 2024 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review, Daniel K. Williams reviewed Moore’s book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. This book shows readers Moore’s opinion about exvangelicals, who are former evangelicals who deconstructed and left the tribe. (They may fully deconvert, but many remain Christians.) Moore thinks these exvangelicals…
…are departing not because they don’t believe this message anymore but because they think the church doesn’t believe it. [. . .]
Moore’s remedy for all of this is therefore for evangelicals to return to the message of the gospel—the euangelion that gave them their name and original identity. Instead of defining “truth” by what people in our “tribe” proclaim, we need to return to biblical truth and the authority of Jesus Christ, which is the only authority that can save us from human authoritarianism. Instead of finding our identity in the culture wars, we need to find our identity in a genuine conversion to Christ. [. . .]
“The antidote to authoritarianism is authority itself, rightly defined,” Moore declares.
Of course, there is no standard for defining “the message of the gospel.” When evangelicals use that phrase, they mean only their own subjective interpretation of that message, nothing more. Anyone differing from that interpretation risks Jesusing all wrong, and there exists only one penalty for that: eternal torture in Hell.
Moore’s grand mistake is assuming that once someone embraces his quirky lil take on Christianity, meaning they now agree completely with him about whatever he defines as “the message of the gospel,” they’re magically immune to the flaws that lead evangelical leaders straight into sex scandals.
I guarantee you that if we could search sex scandals by church leaders’ interpretation of “the message of the gospel,” we would find many dozens of scandal-causing leaders who completely agree with Moore’s interpretation.
Without accountability, nothing else can stop evangelicals’ endless sex scandals
If Isak Dinesen’s doctors had known about her heavy laxative abuse, that would have changed everything in their diagnoses. Repeatedly, they kept misdiagnosing her because they simply didn’t know about it. Similarly, evangelicals’ lack of real accountability is the secret that changes everything. It is the one ingredient evangelicals cannot perceive.
When it comes to the prevention of sex scandals, the things evangelicals think matter simply don’t. A pastor’s embracing XYZ doctrinal stance doesn’t guarantee any pew-warmer safety. Nor does one’s take on “the message of the gospel,” or one’s allegiance to “biblical principles.”
Of course, I understand why evangelical leaders push hard on these misdiagnoses and non-solutions. After all, their jobs depend on people agreeing with them. But in truth, all these leaders are doing is delaying what is hopefully their tribe’s looming date with accountability—and exposing more innocents to harm.
The real solution to scandal prevention is one evangelicals can never adopt
What actually matters is a system built from the ground up to enforce accountability at all levels. That is the only system that can quickly identify bad-faith actors and eject them from whatever positions they’ve achieved by then. It’s also one that dismantles the crony network in favor of hiring and appointing people according to their skills.
Such a system ensures that charismatic narcissists, incompetent leaders, and the like can’t surround themselves with a fawning court of people jockeying for favor and plum positions within the organization. It ensures that if one of those poorly-suited leaders harms anybody, their victim can quickly find justice and the abuser can be removed.
But evangelical leaders do not want such a system. Not even Russell Moore and Karen Swallow Prior do, for all their sincerity. Tom Ascol definitely doesn’t. Instead, they want to pretend that Jesusing correctly will always deliver a harmonious, rule-following group that never hurts anyone or commits acts of shocking hypocrisy, that always calls the cops when abuse is discovered, that always ferrets out the truth of any sex scandal, that never has anything to hide.
They’ll never achieve that vision without real accountability. Jesus Power won’t ever make it work because there’s no Jesus behind the scenes doing anything. Only the real world can do that, but evangelicals don’t want to live in that world.
That’s why nothing in evangelicalism will change, why it can’t, and why evangelical leaders seem to like things much better this way.
NEXT UP: Gosh, yet another Calvinist leader has turned out to be a total hypocrite and abuser. What are the odds? Well, pretty high actually. We’ll check it out next time—see you then!
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