In the past few weeks, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this entire Shawn Bolz hypocrisy and harassment scandal. For years, I’ve known that dysfunctional authoritarian religious groups sprout way more hypocrisy than more functional groups can manage. I’ve also known that they tend to be way more high-control than their counterparts, and that they push doctrines (like inerrancy) that grant leaders an enormous amount of control over their followers.
But lately, I’ve been wrestling with the very core of that structure: the stated goals of it, and how those goals relate to the grabbing of power itself. I’ve identified a massive gap between the ideals of these high-control, dysfunctional authoritarian groups and their actual behavior. That very gap is what powers and fuels leaders’ control—and keeps all too many Christians’ butts in pews (BIPs).
Today, let me show you the font and wellspring of evangelical hypocrisy.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 3/6/2026. They’re both available now!)
Quick vocabulary
- Authoritarian: the group’s leader has all the power and orders followers around; power flows downward.
- Dysfunctional authoritarian: leader faces zero accountability for disobeying the group’s rules; leader appoints lieutenants based on loyalty and obedience rather than skills and aptitude; followers punished for disloyalty and disobedience—but only if they’re not favorites.
- High-control: extremely resource-intensive demands.
- Resources: time, money, effort.
- The one who’s really in charge: You, actually.
(I didn’t want to stop mid-post to explain these, so I stuck them here.)
SITUATION REPORT: A bar set so high it cannot be reached—for a reason
The Shawn Bolz/Bethel scandal erupted in mid-January. It began with a Mike Winger video on YouTube that exposed Bolz’ inept, embarrassingly-obvious hot-reading “prophecies,” his alleged years of sex abuse of his male employees, and how Bethel Church protected him and helped his career for years despite knowing about both.
Mike Winger, who’s a Calvary Chapel guy (hardline, sorta-Calvinist, but also sorta-Arminian), painted the entire scandal as a Charismatic Christian thing. It most definitely isn’t. He also made a strident call for accountability within Charismatic Christianity. But he ignored his own denomination’s scandals and utter lack of accountability.
I’ve been talking about this scandal for a while, but over the past couple weeks I’ve been thinking about the factor that may be the biggest red flag of them all, and one that both Calvary Chapel and Bethel Church impose upon their flocks:
A huge, easily-exploitable gap between the group’s stated ideals and its members’ behavior.
There’s so much going on with this gap. I want to show you what it is, why it exists, and how high-control religious leaders exploit their followers with it.
Creating the gap of hypocrisy
Not all high-control religious groups are dysfunctional authoritarian in nature. But all dysfunctional authoritarian groups are high-control. Indeed, they must be. Whatever the group claims its goals might be, its function is slicing power away from followers and funneling it all upward to leaders. The leaders in these groups tend to want levels of power over followers that they can’t get in legit, non-abusive ways. They’re here precisely because this is the easiest way to get the power they crave.
But no high-control religious leaders can outright state what they really want. It’s like that saying about cults never being straightforward. In both cases, such admissions quickly end the ride! Instead, then, they each start with small, reasonable-sounding control-grabs that escalate upward in resource demand.
That’s how I ended up in Pentecostalism being taught that Jesus’ yoke was easy and his burden light. Somehow, that became panic attacks, frequent blackout rages, anxiety through the roof, a ridiculous dress code that most Pentecostals ignore today, a marriage that even I knew in advance was a terrible idea, and religious activities literally every day of the week.
(Related: Don’t miss “Prayer Warriors for Jesus!”)
Where you won’t find high-control demands, and why
Evangelicals are uniquely vulnerable to the high resource demands of high-control religious groups. For decades now, almost a century even, their indoctrination has led them to pursue 24/7 fervor that goes to the fingertips, is resource-intensive (time, money, etc), and manifests as pedal-to-the-metal extremism. The movements within evangelicalism, from the Latter Rain in the 1950s to the various modern shepherding-style control grabs of evangelicalism, have only increased high-control leaders’ resource demands.
Of course, the promises leaders make to justify those demands escalate as well. These religious groups promise intense euphoric experiences, divine guidance and prophecies, growth toward 24/7 focus on Jesus, greater obedience to his commands, and safety from a variety of real and imaginary dangers. But only if followers obey.
What’s really striking here is that not only do low-control Christian groups never utilize these high-control leadership models, but their leaders almost never even talk about why they don’t. The silence here is certainly revealing, and not in the way high-control leaders would like.
How high-control leaders make use of the gap
I’m an optimistic person. So I’d really like to believe that most religious leaders in high-control groups are there because they really think that’s what Jesus wants for everyone. They don’t want to deliberately hurt people or cause drama. They don’t even abuse their powers overmuch.
Unfortunately, there’s no way for followers to tell which high-control leaders are sincere. Often, the most sincere ones turn out to be disgusting abusers in private—like Ravi Zacharias.
When we look at church congregations, we’re looking at a volunteer force. Nobody’s paying the BIPs to be there. Congregants attend churches on their own. They pay tithes (or not) as they please. Nobody holds any legal power over them. Even if they agree to a pastor’s particular requests, they can ignore those requests. The only way for leaders to gain real and unilateral power over volunteers is through the use of high-control manipulation tactics.
But in order to sell those tactics, leaders must offer quite a prize.
The top of the gap is the prize. Congregants’ ideal state is there, holding out a hand.
By promising all kinds of huge, tangible benefits to obedience, leaders can make huge, tangible demands. That’s how they sell high-control tactics to congregations. They make those tactics sound mandatory for anyone who wants to Jesus completely perfectly.
Here’s the kicker. Well, two kickers.
The first kicker:
There’s no real way for anyone to prevent high-control tactics from being exploited for abusive purposes. None. As I just pointed out, only dysfunctional authoritarian leaders make use of high-control tactics. And dysfunctional authoritarian leaders absolutely do not want accountability of any kind. They’ve surrounded themselves with baffles and blockers and shields to prevent exactly that. Not one high-control group I’ve ever examined was any different.
The second kicker is more subtle, but a dealbreaker all the same:
There’s absolutely no way for any regular person to actually achieve the promised state of 24/7 fervor, complete obedience to leaders and Jesus, constant devotions, and Jesus-focused everything.
The fervor is far more context and situational than believers would like to know. Obedience is all but impossible with the broken roadmap they’re given. Devotions are boring and don’t actually do anything supernatural (and very little natural, either), so even fervent believers tend to seriously slack off there. And focusing on a god who isn’t even there gets exhausting and keeps us from living in the real world, with the people we love, doing stuff we love.
How the flocks respond to the gap: hypocrisy and remorse
On the followers’ side, we have two groups who are extremely vulnerable to high-control tactics.
In the first group, we have very sincere Christians who just want to Jesus perfectly. That was me, long ago. All I wanted was a fervent, devoted group that Jesused 24/7 the right way. I thought once I found that group, I’d be fine forever. No truly Jesusy group could possibly turn abusive or hypocritical! So the bigger the promises, the more interested I was. I’d go through a couple of different, increasingly extreme groups before realizing nothing I believed was true anyway.
(Press F in chat for that sweet summer child…)
When believers like that utterly fail to achieve the promised endgame state, they’ll blame themselves. Or they’ll think they were just in the wrong group. Maybe they need a better one!
The second are hypocrites. They already know that these false promises mask a huge gap between ideals and behavior. They will find that gap very useful. They’ll use it as Shawn Bolz did: to climb the ladder, make contacts, ingratiate themselves, and slowly acquire dirt on others—along with a great deal of influence. Or they’ll use it as Mike Winger did, to highlight one high-control group’s hypocrisy while ignoring that of his own.
Hypocritical believers never expect to reach the promised state anyway, but they’re good at insisting it’s possible—through obedience!
Consider any large gap between ideals and behavior in a group to be a massive red flag
When I talk about hypocrisy as a red flag, I’m really highlighting the gap between a group’s stated ideals and the behavior of the group in the main.
Every single Christian alive, just like every person period alive, fails to live up to their ideals somehow. It’s a natural part of being sapient primates. The good we want to do often wars with the animal impulses we’ve carried in our genes since we were fish.
Hypocrisy goes deeper than that. It’s when someone claims to have more morality than others and to take their rules super-seriously, but fails utterly to act accordingly. It’s a particular kind of tedious insufferability, for sure. We know it when we smell it. And high-control groups are the very worst hypocrites ever that way.
Maybe the demands themselves aren’t meant to be something people can obey consistently. Maybe that’s the entire point of these high-control religious groups. They can pre-emptively set people up to fail, then only penalize the people they don’t personally like or find useful. If all of the congregants fail to meet their group’s ideals, if they’re all hypocrites to some extent, then favoritism becomes the only way to escape retaliation and punishment.
Don’t let salespeople set the Rules of Engagement about their own hypocrisy
Either way, yes, hypocrisy is 10000% a valid reason to reject religious recruitment attempts. It’s a completely valid reason to walk away from a religious group. Hypocrisy is more than just an individual problem if it’s happening across the board. Something else is going on besides 100% of the members somehow all individually failing to live up to their own ideals and that somehow not reflecting at all on the group itself. No, we’re right to hold the group itself responsible here.
Do not allow salespeople to set the Rules of Engagement. You’re the customer. You hold all the resources they desperately need, while they have next to nothing you need—and even then, probably nothing you can’t get elsewhere for less hassle.
So yes, they need you way more than you need them. Without them, you’ll be fine. But without you, they wither away. The only reason they evolved these high-control tactics is people’s increasing understanding of the superfluity of their groups. They can’t control you otherwise. And they know it.
Feel free to act accordingly.
NEXT UP: What does a god need with a starship—er, I mean, with expensive worship? See you soon! <3
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Evangelicals now trumpeting the value of 'costly worship' (for a reason) - Roll to Disbelieve · 03/13/2026 at 4:00 AM
[…] week, while researching the post about the gap between behavior and ideals, I ran across a whole slew of stuff online about costly worship. Evangelicals sell this kind of […]