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.
When I hear about evangelical sex scandals, I’m usually just relieved if everyone involved is of-age. But that’s about to change with this Ted Haggard story.
None of us thought Mark Driscoll would learn a thing after losing Mars Hill and Acts 29, the church-planting umbrella group he helped create, back in 2014. And nope, he sure hasn’t.
Today, let me show you what the evangelical crony network is saying (or rather, not saying) about the recent behavior of James MacDonald.
Could it be that what irks James MacDonald most about Julie Roys is that she identifies as a fervent evangelical culture-warrior but refuses to comply with his demands?
I had not yet learned that authoritarianism itself precludes sincerity or faithfulness in Christianity. Individual Christians might cultivate these traits, but there is no way to have a whole group of them reliably doing the same thing. Sooner or later, a bad-faith actor gets into that group — and wrecks it, often before it’s even really gotten off the ground.
One thing I noticed quickly was that nobody on Capitol Hill really seemed all that surprised that his time in the sun finally got here. Nobody should be surprised at all about this whole thing. After all, Matt Gaetz is an evangelical in a deeply dysfunctional religio-political tribe. Thus, he speaks the language of power in broken systems. Today, let me decode that language to show you how absolutely unsurprising his behavior really is.
Yesterday, Hillsong, a massive international megachurch complex, fired one of their lead pastors, Carl Lentz. They cited ‘moral failures’ as the reason for Lentz’ firing. The moment most of us heard that phrase, of course, we knew what it meant. And indeed, Lentz confirmed that suspicion in a follow-up Instagram post. Today, let’s check out the scandal and see where Carl Lentz laid his blame — because of course he did lay blame.