SHOCKING: Another Reformed evangelical leader turns out to be a hypocrite

Reformed theology is an add-on to evangelicalism that amps up its already existing dysfunctional authoritarianism and power disparities. The people who belong to Reformed groups think that their ideology is far superior to base-model evangelicalism—that it produces Christians whose Jesusing is both more fervent and more correct. But Reformed groups suffer from the exact same drawbacks that base-model evangelical groups do—and more, and worse besides.

Today, we will check out yet another Reformed leader who turned out to be an abusive, control-hungry piece of shit. More importantly, we’ll explore what draws so many evangelicals into these groups—and why their hopes are dashed so often.

(In this post, I’m mostly using the term “Reformed” to mean “Reformed theology/Calvinism.” The two are generally interchangeable, though they do have subtle distinctions, as we’ll see. Usually, I just call all of them Calvinists. But since this story involves evangelicals who only seem to call themselves Reformed, that’s what we’ll do in this post, this one time.)

SITREP: A Reformed scandal that hits right at the highest levels of power

Last week, Julie Roys’ site reported on yet another sex scandal in evangelicalism. But it caught my eye because of just who’s involved in it.

A Reformed pastor named Steven Lawson just got fired from his Lead Pastor position at the impressively-large Trinity Bible Church in Dallas. Its board of elders put out a statement saying they’d found out about “an inappropriate relationship that he has had with a woman.”

According to Julie Roys, apparently both Lawson and the woman involved swore they had never had sex, but they were very romantically entangled at least.

Blah blah blah, another day, another evangelical who turned out to be a hypocrite. Right?

But Steven Lawson wasn’t just any Reformed evangelical pastor. In addition to pastoring his own church in Texas, he lectured at Reformed Theological Seminary. He also worked for The Master’s Seminary (TMS) as their Professor of Preaching & Dean of D.Min studies. Somehow, he also found the time to work with Ligonier, a big-name Reformed site, as a Teaching Fellow.

One of the biggest names in the Reformed movement, John MacArthur, seems to have been a good buddy of Lawson’s. MacArthur pastors Grace Community Church in California and runs an absolutely huge website called Grace to You. In 2021, Lawson updated his Facebook with a photo of the two of them at the golf course:

On the official Grace Community Church’s website, in fact, you used to be able to see a page of Lawson’s sermons that he gave to MacArthur’s church.

It’s gone now, of course. Yes, of course everything’s gone. In fact, the Christ-o-sphere seems to have memory holed everything related to Lawson’s employment and guest speaking appearances. He has been un-personed. It might take evangelicals of all kinds decades to admit they have a global sex-abuse crisis, but they tend to hop right on it when one of their own gets too embarrassing to keep around. When that happens, a Christian leader can kiss that crony network membership goodbye!

Lawson’s run to ground, it seems. His last Facebook update was on September 19, right before the scandal broke. It’s about “the tragedy of unbelief,” which means nobody has to feel even a little sorry for him after he blew up his entire life for a bit of strange. (It also means Reformed evangelicals haven’t changed a bit from my 2013 run-in with them.)

There’s a lot lurking underneath this story. As you’ll soon see, Steven Lawson’s specific scandal is more than just another hypocritical pastor story. I want to put it into context for you. I want to see how it fits into the greater Reformed movement that has swept across evangelicalism for decades now.

So we’re going to dive right in.

A very quick refresher about Calvinism and Reformed theology

Both Calvinism and Reformed theology are add-ons to evangelicalism. For the most part, the terms can be used interchangeably, since the one almost always entails the presence of the other. They are subtly different, however.

Reformed theology is often called by adherents “orthodox Christianity.” It isn’t orthodox, of course—even a little. But that’s the mindset we’re dealing with here: dysfunctional authoritarians who must believe their take on Christianity is the only valid one. As the name suggests, the Reformation in England has a lot to do with this movement. They believe in the “Five Solas.” Sola means “only,” roughly. Here they are:

• The Bible is their only authority: Sola Scriptura
• Believers’ entire lives should reflect Yahweh’s glory in every single way: Soli Deo Gloria
• Only Jesus can connect humans with Yahweh: Solo Christo
• As opposed to being a decent, generous, kind, loving human being, Jesus’ grace is the only thing that ensures safety from Hell: Sola Gratia
• The only way Christians can be justified, or kept safe from Hell, is through faith in Jesus: Sola Fide

Be aware that not every Reformed person buys into all five of these. Also, adherents do sometimes define the Solas in different ways.

Calvinism, created by John Calvin in the 1500s, centers on what he called the “five points of doctrine” that he considered essential to Christianity. Often, scholars regard it as a subset of Reformed theology. Its “five points” are sometimes called TULIP for reasons that will likely seem obvious in a second here:

• Total depravity: humans are utterly worthless and evil on their own, without even one spark of goodness anywhere within themselves
• Unconditional election: Yahweh has already decided who’s going to Heaven, and nobody can change his mind
• Limited atonement: Jesus died for everyone, but only the humans fated for Heaven are affected by his resurrection (and yes, that makes zero sense)
• Irresistible grace: Once Yahweh decides it’s time for someone to become a TRUE CHRISTIAN™, there is nothing that person can do to reject it (see also: Jesus roofies)
• Perseverance of the saints: TRUE CHRISTIANS™ always die in the traces, so if someone leaves the tribe it obviously means they were not really saved

As you might guess, these are two bad tastes that taste much, much worse together.

I never heard a word about Reformed/Calvinist ideology until the mid-1990s, when I first read about Mark Driscoll. At the time, he commanded Mars Hill as its eternal god-emperor, and everyone in Seattle and Portland combined seemed flabbergasted that this extremist-sounding, fuddy-duddy theology nobody had ever heard of, Calvinism, had somehow won Driscoll a megachurch with tens of thousands of Gen X and Millennial members.

Since it began exploding in popularity in the 2000s and 2010s, every time I’ve run across a truly control-hungry Protestant with anger-management problems and nothing but poisonous hatred for anyone who dares disagree with him, it’s been a Reformed guy. They are shockingly nasty and aggressive.

For years, Reformed Christians have been known as assholes who worship an asshole god

I’m not the first person to notice what Reformed/Calvinist evangelicals are like, either! Way back in 2009, Rachel Held Evans wrote movingly of the sheer evil she’d observed in that crowd (all emphases in original, and like me, she uses “Calvinist” as a catchall to indicate both Reformed and Calvinist evangelicals):

If Calvinism is true, it means that God creates disposable people, people without any hope. [. . .] It means that God does not love the world; he hates it. If Calvinism is true, it means that if that dying little girl that you held in your arms in India was not among the elect, then God did not love her. He never had any intention of loving her. She was nothing to Him. In fact, he would delight and find glory in her eternal torture in hell. [. . .]

And whenever I raise these points with Calvinists, all they can say is that I should be more grateful for my own salvation! It’s like, ‘as long as my eternal destiny is secure, as long as my life is all planned out and taken care of by God, who gives a damn about anyone else!’ How can you be okay with that?

On that note, it was a prolonged run-in with that crowd around 2013 that helped Roll to Disbelieve come to life. See, an ex-Christian, atheist friend of mine tried to talk with them on one of their blogs.

My friend tried to be nice. He tried to be the unity and peace he wanted to see in the world. I could not have maintained my chill for even one-tenth the amount of time he did.

But eventually, one of those TRUE CHRISTIANS™ told my friend that he might as well rape his wife as give her flowers. This TRUE CHRISTIAN™ insisted that ex-Christians entirely lose their entire moral compass upon deconverting. Therefore, rape and giving someone flowers had to live on the same moral level now for ex-Christians. Only TRUE CHRISTIANS™ like these folks understood morality and could live in a moral way.

At the time, it blew my mind that Christians could so completely miss the point of their entire religion.

But oh, honey. I had not seen anything yet out of the Reformed/Calvinist crowd.

John MacArthur is the perfect example of a corrupt, abuse-shielding Reformed pastor

John MacArthur himself is no stranger at all to controversy.

In the late 1970s, MacArthur shielded a guy sexually abusing his daughter and any other girls he could reach. The sex abuser, Paul Guay, confessed some of what he’d done to MacArthur. But somehow, Guay continued to pastor at Grace for three more years. He only got removed from his position after “sexual misconduct with a secretary.” Afterward, Guay just got hired at another church, then another, then another. He’d continue pastoring for another three decades!

Years later, Guay’s daughter reached out to MacArthur. She told him that she’d discovered other victims of her father’s abuse. In response, MacArthur claimed he didn’t remember anything about Guay. Then, he accused her of having an “obsession” with the case. The situation finally hit headlines in 2022.

In 2023, another serious scandal broke involving Grace Community Church. A fairly newly-hired church leader had found out that more than 20 years earlier, Grace had punished a woman for separating from her husband.

A quick segue about what we mean by punishment

Like all the really hardcore Reformed churches, MacArthur’s church leaders practice church discipline.

In fact, when Reformed ministers sold literalism to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) back in the 1970s-ish, they wanted way more than the Conservative Resurgence. No, they only sold literalism to plow the fields for church discipline. That was always the goal.

Church discipline is one of the biggest indicators of a dysfunctional authoritarian system. In such a system, the group can no longer work toward its official goals. Instead, the group becomes a conduit for unearned, unwarranted power for its incompetent leaders. Those leaders run the group like a Mean Girls clique from the 80s: assigning good roles to their favorites and driving away those who criticize them.

Abusive authoritarian leaders gravitate to dysfunctional groups because functional ones would never hire them or allow them to advance to positions of greater power.

If those leaders had earned their power through skill and leadership abilities, they would never need church discipline. If their end goal was anything but more power, they would regard church discipline with the revulsion it deserves. Only the power-hungry who cannot get power from any other source could ever love church discipline.

In church discipline, dysfunctional-authoritarian ministers use Jesus frosting and Bible verses to force congregants to accept a shocking level of control and overreach. If a sheep refuses to obey the shepherds, they have an arsenal of punishments at their fingertips. To perform church discipline, church leaders hammer Matthew 18 against abuse victims. In the world of church discipline, almost all church leaders use Matthew 18 to rationalize their overreach and abuse.

This beloved system also shields abusers from accountability. But it has so many Bible verses tied up with it that the sheep don’t usually realize what a critical danger it poses to them. It never occurs to them that their leaders might unfairly use these policies against them. They aren’t equipped to spot red flags within their own church.

Here’s how Grace’s church discipline works (relink; also here):

1. “[A]n individual believer is to go to a sinning brother privately and confront him in a spirit of humility and gentleness. This confrontation involves clearly exposing his sin so that he is aware of it and calling him to repentance.”
2. “[T]he next step in the discipline process is to take one or two more believers along to confront him again. [. . .] [T]he witnesses are present not only to confirm that the sin was committed but, in addition, to confirm that the sinning brother was properly rebuked and that he has or has not repented.”
3. “If the sinning brother refuses to listen and respond to the confrontation of the witnesses after a period of time, those witnesses are then to tell it to the church. [. . .] It has been the custom at Grace Community Church, upon enacting this third step, to clearly indicate to the congregation that they are to pursue the person aggressively and plead with him to repent before the fourth step becomes necessary.”
4. “If a sinning believer refuses to listen even to the church, he is to be ostracized from the fellowship. [. . .] The command not to have fellowship or even social contact with the unrepentant brother does not exclude all contact. When there is an opportunity to admonish him and try to call him back, the opportunity should be taken. In fact, such opportunities should be sought.”

I’m just aghast at reading this. It horrifies me to the bone. This is sheer evil waiting to spring forth. Nothing whatsoever ensures fairness, lack of bias, checks on church leaders’ power, or any kind of appeal process. Just gently smiling serial killers with knives in their hands, all murmuring Trust me, bro.

MacArthur and his church leaders utilized this process to respond to women who reported sexual abuse to them. To him and his cronies, THESE WOMEN were the bad guys here, not the men abusing them.

Back to this Reformed piece of total shit pastor

In that 2002 case, Eileen Gray’s church leaders at Grace slammed down as hard as they could. They demanded she lift the restraining order and move back home to reconcile with her husband.

She flat refused. Incidentally, MacArthur was involved at some level in this fiasco. We know this because he apparently criticized her recalcitrance during a church service.

(That’s Step 3 in their official bylaws, so they must have leaned on her twice beforehand in private and gotten nowhere. Or else MacArthur didn’t follow their bylaws in his rush to demonize a woman. Take your pick there. Feel free not to be overly generous. Also, my admiration for this woman’s courage is boundless.)

As it happens, Eileen’s then-husband, David Gray, was a seriously scary abuser who worked as a staff teacher at Grace. Grace’s leadership team defended him to the hilt, though numerous congregants had witnessed David’s behavior and confirmed Eileen’s claims. In 2005, David Gray was convicted of child abuse, injury of a child, and molestation—among other things. He remains imprisoned as of now, Christianity Today tells us.

Much later, a lawyer and member of Grace’s elder board, Hohn Cho, realized that this was not some isolated instance of poor judgment. In fact, an almost identical scenario played out at Grace just a couple of years previously.

The deeper Cho looked into the entire situation, the more he realized just how pervasive, entrenched, and most of all safe for abusers Grace’s culture was. Yep, no predators or abusers ever needed to worry about their futures at Grace! Nope, not a bit!

Grace’s response to Cho’s agitation was to force him to quit. Not only did the church’s leaders not want to examine any of the cases he found that clearly reflected poor judgment and overreach, but they wanted him to shut up NOW NOW NOW NOW.

Anyone who keeps up with Baptist News Global knows of that site’s opinion of MacArthur and his take on Jesusing. Last year, they published a great column containing dozens of links to similar things MacArthur has done or advised. Seriously, this guy is the worst.

So I’m sure Steven Lawson didn’t think he had a single thing to fear. He was in like Flynn! He was connected! No way would MacArthur ever hold King Him accountable!

Responses from fellow church leaders are not surprising

As of this writing, MacArthur has not issued any statements about his onetime pal’s fall from Grace (Community Church). But if you go look on his church website now to check out Lawson’s past guest sermons at Grace, you’ll just see a 404 Not Found error message! (Archive of how it looked till this past weekend.)

An elder from Lawson’s now-former church, Trinity Bible Church, made a statement this past Sunday, when Lawson would normally have appeared to lead the service. In his statement, Elder Mark Becker drilled down extra-hard on church discipline. Even when it repeatedly fails to produce less hypocritical Christians, even when it’s used against victims of abuse, even when it does nothing but shield abusers, the Reformed crowd can’t let it go.

One leader of both Grace and The Master’s Seminary has, however, made a bold statement about Lawson being “permanently disqualified” from ministry. That leader, Austin Duncan, added something I found extremely interesting:

“The integrity and trustworthiness of the church’s leadership is essential to the credibility of its witness.”

Without even realizing it, he just nailed exactly why evangelicals of all stripes respond to abuse reports the way they do:

They’re protecting their credibility as a “witness” of their faith. It’s more important to them to SEEM like they have integrity than to actually have it. Every abuse report represents a threat to their “witness.”

But do you know what’s even more essential? Addressing abuse reports in a way that reflects honesty, justice, and compassion for victims—and merciless accountability for abusers. They can’t address abuse that way. It would blow their witness. It would make their church look bad. That might impact recruitment and retention!

This is why dysfunctional authoritarians like the Reformed crowd will always prioritize preserving their church’s image above doing the right thing by abuse victims. They can’t do the right thing, so they do the controlling thing instead.

The tribe also reacted very predictably to Steven Lawson’s downfall

It’s very interesting to me that in several places in my research, I’ve seen Reformed evangelicals at all levels evading accountability in the same way. See if you can spot the similarity in these statements:

[M]ay we be reminded that we are ALL sinners, and Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners – and Christ remains Head of His Church, which is bigger than any fallen man. [Trinity Bible Church, Dallas]

I hate that you fell but there is no one that hasn’t fallen. God will restore you as He has all others who trust in Him. Blessings elder [Jaydarius Ross, some guy commending on Steven Lawson’s Facebook page]

Who are we to condemn. After all we’re all fallen, in need of the grace of God. [A “top fan” commenting on Lawson’s Facebook post]

Almost macabre humor. “we’re all sinners, but let’s nail this guy.” Nailing and restoring him is the duty of saints, not sinners. [Donald McKay, Christian Post commenter]

I hope he recovers and knows better not to fall into this sin again. Before we throw the condemnation hammer……we all have to remember, “take heed lest we fall”. [James Pursell, Christian Post commenter

The enemy continuously prowls the earth looking for all Christian ppl to tempt. How much harder does he focus on those in spiritual leadership? [Helene, Christian Post commenter]

However, I’m not counting this absolute weirdo, a real winner with a Revolutionary-era American flag as his profile picture, who thinks it would have been better had Lawson just kept quiet:

Why didn’t he just retire and let us all live in ignorance? He is 73! Yes, he would have had to live with hidden guilt, which would have taken its toll. But such suffering on his part would have been warranted to protect the name of Christ.

What a perfect example of evasion of responsibility! Outdated Flag Lad is fine with hypocrisy in his leaders. He just doesn’t want to know about it. Exposing hypocrisy threatens “the name of Christ,” after all! Not the hypocrisy itself, no. Just the exposure of it.

Yeah, that guy probably needs to be on a list somewhere.

And I do so hate to tell Outdated Flag Lad this, but when I heard the news I immediately doubted that Lawson confessed on his own out of some abundance of shame. That Christian Post piece does say he told Grace’s other leaders about his secret sin, yes, but I suspected right away that he was offering a trickle-truth: confessing jussssst enough to get oneself out of a jam.

And yes, in fact, Julie Roys’ report (relink) says exactly that. According to now-deleted tweets from Grace’s elder, Phil Johnson (screenshot archived here), the girl’s father found out about the situation and threatened to expose Lawson. That’s why Lawson ‘fessed up. As Johnson tweeted, “This was not a noble confession of sin.”

Along with Outdated Flag Lad, though, the sheep have very clearly learned to shield their shepherds from any trace of accountability. In fact, I only saw one guy demanding accountability. “Eric Bakunc” wrote this over at Julie Roys’ site:

Why is everyone asking for prayers for Lawson only, and almost no one asks prayers for Lawson’s wife and kids whom he broke, and also the woman, possibly the Christian wife with whom he had sex with, and her family ? Maybe they think it’s her fault, just like MacArthur’s church has been doing to women.

It’s downright remarkable that this comment was remarkable at all.

The Reformed tribe is having trouble these days

Right now, the entire Reformed movement is having some trouble. Two years ago, 43 congregations peeled away from the Reformed Churches of America (RCA) to form a new and more conservative denomination, Alliance of Reformed Churches (ARC). They left over differences of opinion regarding same-sex marriage and LGBT clergy ordination: ARC says no to both, while the RCA allows diverse opinions on the topic as it deliberates how they should address those situations.

Some of these departing congregations were quite large, representing a big chunk of donations to the mother ship. Christianity Today interviewed Steven Rodriguez, an RCA church planter, who told them:

“Realistically, it’s a large group of conservative churches that are also providing a lot of income to the denomination. I really think the mass exodus of all these conservative churches is going to throw the RCA into a really difficult financial situation,” said Steven Rodriguez, an RCA church planter in Brockport, New York. “I doubt the RCA will be financially sustainable for much longer.”

As of last year, ARC now boasts an astonishing 1000+ congregations. Dysfunctional authoritarianism simply appeals to the shrinking number of remaining evangelicals, it seems.

This scandal might impact ARC’s progress, though. Jon Harris, a leader within that end of evangelicalism, says Lawson’s hypocrisy has had a huge impact there:

This news has sent shockwaves through the Reformed evangelical community, particularly among those who have long appreciated the ministries of R.C. Sproul (Ligonier) and John MacArthur (Master’s). I’ve received numerous messages from friends expressing their astonishment, with one asking me if it was true. Sadly, it is. The reaction earlier this year when Alistair Begg affirmed his support for attending a same-sex wedding was similar. It raises a troubling question: 

How can someone who taught the Scriptures so effectively find themselves compromised on such fundamental moral issues?

We’ll talk more about the answer to his question next time. It’s not what Harris imagines, which is a very minor disagreement about what he calls “wokeness” and an accusation of Lawson having “overproduced” superficiality.

A call for more rules and precautions for Reformed ministers to flout

Additionally, the so-called “Billy Graham Rule” has seen a resurgence in popularity within Reformed circles. This rule, which is actually four rules, is supposed to super-cut down on sex scandals. Unfortunately, even Billy Graham’s website admits it didn’t do much to change anything in evangelical leadership.

Responding to the downfall of his “dear friend” Lawson, Al Mohler—a Southern Baptist seminary leader—suggested more ministers follow this rule. He’s ignoring the fact that Lawson’s five-year-long emotional affair seems to have involved very little direct contact.

He’s also ignoring the fact that setting up loads of precautionary rules only works if the leader obeys them. If nobody forces a dysfunctional-authoritarian leader to follow any rules, then he probably won’t. Indeed, such a leader wants power to avoid having to follow rules! Disobeying rules becomes the foremost indicator to other dysfunctional authoritarians—be they followers or other leaders—that this leader wields great power. That’s why they slam down so hard on disobedience with church discipline: The worst thing you can do in these groups is tell a powerful person “no.”

A decent hetero man can walk into a room full of naked women, then walk out flustered but without having laid an unwanted hand on any of those women. By contrast, the Duggar clown-car parents set up endless precautions (like locks on the outside of their many kids’ bedroom doors) to stop their eldest son Josh from molesting his little sisters. They called these precautions “safeguards,” as I recall, and yet that disgusting abuser still found a way to do what he wanted.

Mohler also marveled that yet again, he just had no clue Lawson was a filthy degenerate. This isn’t the first time Mohler has trotted out his surprised-Pikachu face in the wake of a scandal. It will not be the last, either. Somehow, Jesus never clues him in to serious problems in his cronies.

The value of literalism among terrible people

All Christians construct a version of Jesus, Yahweh, the Bible, doctrinal stances, and devotions that fit into a form that works best for their individual personality, goals, aspirations, and best-case vision for the future.

So sure, a real sweetheart could land in Reformed theology. I’ve known some and heard of others. Followers often land there for the same reason I once did: Taking the recruitment promises seriously, wanting safety and security, craving correctness, fearing incorrectness. So yes, obviously it can be done.

It just usually isn’t.

Literalism itself is a perfect substitute for being a decent human being. By embracing that one belief, power-hungry evangelicals can let themselves off the hook for everything else. No matter what they do, after all, Jesus has preordained them for Heaven. So why bother doing the stuff Jesus ordered his followers to do? Why bother even being kind or loving toward others, as he commanded?

When holding the very most correct beliefs matters more than how someone behaves and treats others, this is the inevitable result. And when that is combined with a priority given to image and reputation, we should expect abuse and hypocrisy from all such groups’ leaders.

I don’t see Reformed theology fading away any time soon. Far too many hypocritical, power-hungry evangelicals have embraced it for that. But I can and do hope that their echo chambers will shrink and shrink until their tin-pot dictator demands and screeches become wee shrill little cries that only Cocker Spaniels can detect.

It comes to this: If Reformed evangelicals are what Jesus really wants in his Heaven, I’m very glad I won’t be there. They remind me of that classic cartoon with the chimps:

Basically, they need to work on their threats.

NEXT UP: Some more bad tidings for the Southern Baptist Convention. We’ll also tackle the question of how increasingly male-dominated evangelical churches plan to deal with losing so many women (along with women’s volunteer labor), as well as exploring why heading into further extremism only led me into deeper and deeper trouble when I was Pentecostal. See you next week!

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