As I researched the Anglican Church’s ongoing sex abuse crisis, a secondary story about organizational power emerged. It illustrates the gulf between an organization’s leaders and its followers—and how those leaders must be much more careful than they think about how their behavior comes off to followers. This story pairs Read more…
Recently, we discussed an ongoing scandal within the UK’s Anglican Church (also called the Church of England). Its highest-ranking clergyman, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, had to resign after everyone discovered he’d egregiously mishandled sex abuse complaints and shielded a particularly-serious abuser from consequences for years. His last day Read more…
Of late, the Anglican Church has been exposed in yet another sex abuse cover-up scandal. Nobody should even be surprised at it, either. Over here in Freedom Land, we’re used to evangelicals being disgusting hypocrites. When an evangelical leader lands in the news, we already have a good idea of Read more…
A few months ago, we talked about how Matt Queen and some of his seminary associates outright lied to the feds about a sex assault on their campus, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). I suppose nobody told these Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) guys that the FBI’s investigators have zero chill Read more…
In Christianese, fallen pastors are pastors who have lost their pastoring jobs after causing a scandal. But even good, rules-abiding pastors have a tough time finding employment after leaving pastoring behind. The ones trailing scandals behind in their wake have an even harder time. And in the twilight of evangelicals’ Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
Frank Page has a decades-long and well-established history of not wanting to investigate sex abuse in Southern Baptist churches or holding sex abusers fully accountable for their crimes. Then he got himself embroiled in a scandal of his own.
But never fear: Almost immediately, Page got a pastoring job in an SBC church. But the story wasn’t over.
To save his job, Christian Watts clung hard to a time-tested, long-honored evangelical get-out-of-scandal-free card: calling upon Christianese to escape the writing on his wall.
In a very real sense, Gracepoint weaponized the deepest yearnings and aches of its prey, then played upon their deepest fears to gain their ongoing compliance.