Recently, people have been talking about evangelism in crowded spaces with no way to exit—evangelism to captive audiences, in other words. The evangelists in question do it on purpose, of course. They even gloat about how much they love the fact that nobody can leave the venue. But their gloating hides the very dark reason they have for doing it. Today, I’ll show you what that reason is.
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SITUATION REPORT: The story that started the new discussion of captive audiences
On July 23, The Washington Post ran a story about evangelicals on plane flights who take the opportunity to preach at their fellow passengers. It particularly featured Whitney Lynn, an Orlando resident who says she “preaches on most flights she takes.” She films her exploits for her social media followers. She even captioned one such video: “I just love a captive audience. [smiling face emoticon].” (Local archive here.)
Whitney Lynn rationalizes her behavior easily using her tribe’s favorite playbook:
“They have no choice but to hear the truth,” said Whitney Lynn [. . .] “When I have a gift and I have a life raft, if you’re drowning, I want to give you that life raft so you can be saved.”
This behavior is apparently catching on with evangelicals desiring to evangelize without the risk of losing their own social connections and reputations. That lack of risk may be behind why they’re willing to evangelize captive audiences even if they get some pushback in the moment. What Whitney Lynn does is by far not unusual in her end of Christianity. I’ve been hearing about it for years now in various contexts: Captive audiences forced to listen to unwanted, unasked-for preaching by some self-important soulwinner intent on saving them from Hell.
A week after that article saw print, The Washington Post ran an interesting follow-up story. This time, Whitney Lynn got kicked off a flight for preaching. She got going before takeoff, telling passengers that it was okay to wait for takeoff because “maybe he’s [meaning Yahweh] sparing us from danger today.” After about one minute, attendants removed her from the plane. The airline, Alaska Airlines, has now banned her from travel on their flights.
Lynn always refers to any pushback as demonic interference and “spiritual warfare.” Of course, since all of that’s completely imaginary, she’s also thinking of lawsuits. The law is real. That’s why evangelicals love lawfare. Either way, her audience loves her. She’s busy readying for her new series about getting kicked off planes for preaching.
Since these stories broke, I’ve seen interesting responses to this kind of evangelism. Singing loudly to drown out the evangelist is one rapidly-coalescing response. I hope it normalizes, if only because I love a big impromptu group singalong. It works.
But I’ve seen few discussions about why evangelicals are like this. That’s where I want to go today. Christians like Whitney Lynn and her followers love captive audiences, and that’s a major red flag for her entire religion:
They want completely asymmetric power balances. For themselves, they want unlimited power without accountability, while their victims get zero power and no way to force accountability on them.
Captive audiences feed the asymmetrical power needs of modern fundagelicals
A certain type of evangelical has loved captive audiences since long before this new trend of preaching on planes, too.
Nowadays, it’s downright bizarre to think about, but many decades ago, evangelicals loved “lock-ins.” Evangelicals used them as teen evangelism and prayer events. The basic idea is simple: Get a bunch of teenagers, literally lock them into a church all night, and feature Christian music, basic food like pizza, and lots of fervent preaching. Exhausted attendees could crash on the pews or on the floor (often, they brought sleeping bags). Nobody was allowed to leave the building until morning. Fundamentalists did teens lock-ins too, but usually they were more prayer-forward events. Evangelicals liked to entice kids with teen-friendly activities.
Mostly, attendees were youth-group members. But often enough, normie kids attended as guests. They didn’t usually like that night much. I don’t remember ever hearing about any conversions resulting from these events.
I’ve never seen a young Millennial or Zoomer respond to a description of lock-ins with anything but complete horror. They grew up with a tighter understanding of boundaries and consent than Gen X did. And they recognize asymmetric power imbalances far more quickly than my crowd did at their age.
That’s why it was so striking when a young-adult character in Don’t Look Up (2021) asks if it’s okay if he prays before doing so, and he asks another character “Can I be vulnerable in your car?” before confessing his affection for another person there. From everything I’ve seen about Gen Z and Alpha, this portrayal is accurate.
I include myself in that assessment of boundary-stomping, of course. When I was evangelical way back in the 1980s and 1990s, I was no better. And I got even worse when I became a fundamentalist. My religious leaders taught that it was okay to trample other people’s boundaries and violate rules and etiquette if it meant saving souls from Hell. In fact, it was laudable. After the “seed” we planted grew into faith, our victims would totally thank us.
The conflicting needs of social capital, risk tolerance, and evangelism
Before the late 1990s, it would have been completely unthinkable for me to hear about evangelicals signing off on anything we’ve seen in recent weeks. They held their social connections in far greater esteem, and they generally didn’t like any stunt that could be seen as a stumbling block to their evangelism targets.
However, today’s evangelicals are fused evangelicals and fundamentalists—making them fundagelicals, so to speak. (For today, I’ll be calling the post-fusion evangelicals fundagelicals to avoid confusion with their prior nature.) They’re the worst of both possible worlds. They combine the evangelical need for the high social capital and low social risk tolerance with fundamentalists’ desire for 24/7 evangelism in every single possible situation.
Social capital is a measure of people’s standing with others in their group. If they act on behalf of others, they generally gain some capital, while if they ask things of others, they lose some. Group members will generally try to keep social capital even between themselves. When fundagelicals talk about “earning the right to speak” about their religion to their group members, this is what they’re talking about. Social capital is also the concept behind friendship evangelism, where fundagelicals pretend to befriend heathens for the purpose of converting them.
Risk tolerance in social situations looks at how willing group members are to do something socially risky: Asking to date another group member, expressing interest in something the group might not like, inviting strangers into the group, and more. Old-school evangelicals were fairly socially risk-averse, at least in the circles I ran in back then. But these newfangled post-fusion fundagelicals demand behavior that is extremely socially risky—which means evangelism in particular. Of course, most fundagelicals generally refuse to do any kind of evangelism, but they certainly admire any group members who can manage the trick.
For fundagelicals who feel guilted and shamed into evangelism, captive audiences present far fewer risks. The rewards are about the same, but there’s less concern about ostracism and loss of personal connections. For fundagelicals who get off on forcing evangelism on others, the practice provides even more benefits—which we’ll get into shortly.
So preaching at captive audiences is not only easy for this new fusion crowd, it’s far more desirable than preaching at people who can get up and leave at any time.
Now add in the fundamentalist brand of dysfunctional authoritarianism
The evangelicals I knew back in the 1980s/1990s were generally authoritarian, but they were more functional than fundamentalists could even dream about being. Their groups seemed to run pretty well, with little drama visible from the outside. Worse (from fundamentalists’ POV), their members seemed to be living out their faith fairly well.
No fundamentalist/fundagelical group ran that well, ever. Every group I knew and every group I joined was full of scandals, infighting, and hypocrisy. When you look at the history of groups like the Kansas City Prophets, International House of Prayer, and the Jesus Revolution’s leaders, you’ll find nothing but secrets, abuse, and closets full of skeletons. The only question is when we’ll find out about the scandals, not if there’ll be one.
And now, most—if not the vast majority—of evangelicals are fundagelical. Their leaders are almost all fundagelical as well. They are products of the fusion. I can’t even remember the last time I encountered an evangelical leader who completely rejected literalism and inerrancy, which are the core doctrinal stances of fundamentalists. The doctrines teach that the Bible is literally true in every particular and without error in any way. Back in my day, evangelicals considered this a childish fundamentalist stance that lacked nuance and any understanding of biblical analysis and criticism. And they were right.
The way pre-fusion evangelicals and fundamentalists practiced authoritarianism contains all the answers about why modern ones are the way they are. Fundamentalists were dysfunctional, while evangelicals were way more functional in their authoritarianism.
In functional authoritarianism, leaders face the same accountability as members do. Rules apply to everyone. The group won’t hesitate to throw out even a charismatic leader who breaks rules. Promotions accrue to people who deserve it and have demonstrated the skills and aptitude for their new roles.
None of what I’m describing can happen in a dysfunctional authoritarian group. Leaders have all of the power, with none of the accountability or enforced responsibilities their role should demand. Members have none of the power, and no way to force accountability on their leaders. Promotions get doled out according to how much favor the candidates have curried with leaders, with the new officers often having little to no experience or skills for the jobs.
In dysfunctional groups, personal power is measured by how effectively someone can force others to do things they don’t want to do. The more personal power someone has, the fewer people can order them around—and the more people they themselves can order around, and the more unwanted the acts their victims can be forced to endure.
Most of all, the more personal power a group member holds in these dysfunctional groups, the more rules they can break without worrying about consequences. Their fellow power-holders will protect them—and keep victims silent.
With that mindset, it’s not surprising that fundagelicals nowadays love captive audiences. They crave unilateral power, but they don’t have any legitimate way to get it. They want to feel important, but nothing about them can get them there in normal situations. Preaching at captive audiences makes them feel incredibly good. It also reinforces their self-perception as powerful and important people. If the effort fails or they get kicked off a plane, that, too, only serves their ultimate goal of feeling that way.
How captive audience solve all of problems fundagelicals have with evangelism and everything else
These post-fusion fundagelicals must see captive audiences as manna from heaven. They don’t know those other people at all, and they will likely never see them ever again. That one fact negates all the social risks and the potential loss of social capital that evangelists face in most other preaching situations.
The audiences are almost certainly heathens who are not the same flavor of Christianity as the evangelist. And best of all, they cannot do anything but listen. They can’t leave. That makes the evangelist feel good, because no bully likes it when their victims leave.
Also, it’s unlikely in already-stressful situations that the captives will break any social mores by complaining to the evangelist. The evangelist will, of course, take this lack of direct complaints as consent to evangelism. Even Whitney Lynn has implied that if nobody says anything to her personally, then she wasn’t really offending anybody.
(This reminds me. Does anyone remember when Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty said out loud that if no Black people directly complained about racism to him personally, then racism just wasn’t a problem in his Deep South hometown? We sure remember.)
Captive audiences were always the goal, even well before Christianity began its long slow decline in America
Sometimes, the captive audiences are literal slaves. Way back in 2013, Joe Morecraft (a fundagelical pastor of some renown at the time) said he wanted to enslave atheists to TRUE CHRISTIANS™ like himself. Like any leader in a dysfunctional authoritarian group, he knows quite well that he won’t get obedience from outsiders without compelling it. Almost nobody in the Christ-o-sphere raised a fuss about what he’d said, either. His shocking wish earned him a paragraph of tsk-tsking from another evangelical at the time. In 13 years, that’s all the pushback he’s gotten. He’s still in great standing with the tribe.
But usually, fundagelicals don’t go quite that far. Also in 2013, an older-school evangelical blogger, Diary of an Autodidact, wrote the seminal essay about Christian Reconstructionism. He links it to evangelicals’ post-WWII dreams of political dominance and their extreme hatred of feminism—both of which were already whittling away at the personal power levels of evangelicals even before they became fundagelicals. When evangelicals got in bed with Republicans to create the Red Scare and link American patriotism forever to evangelical Christian ideals, their eventual destination of fundagelicalism was all but guaranteed.
Interestingly, both factors were instrumental in dragging the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) into fundagelicalism between the 1970s-1990s. And both were important to the fundagelicals who engineered the anti-abortion culture war.
If someone like me could notice that Christianity itself doesn’t do well in a cultural environment treasuring human rights, one where religious participation is purely optional, we can bet these power-obsessed authoritarians noticed it too. That’s exactly why they want political power. It’s why they oppose abortion, which is the expression of a dozen+ different human rights. Why they want no-fault divorce repealed. Why they keep trying to sneak evangelism into public schools.
All of these things are done against consent and through the trampling other people’s rights and boundaries. Consent and rights and boundaries don’t matter when important things are on the line. And I’m not talking about imaginary stakes like Hell and soulwinning. No, I’m talking about something real: dysfunctional authoritarians’ need for personal power. That can’t survive in any culture that isn’t absolutely required to obey fundagelicals.
In dysfunctional authoritarianism, leaders need captive audiences the most
In functional authoritarianism, leaders hold the power that they deserve to have. They’ve earned that power through their own abilities and competence. If they misuse it, others can hold them accountable. Certainly, some leaders “fall upward” into positions that are beyond their capabilities, but a functional group reins them in eventually.
In its way, a functional authoritarian group operates a lot like the scientific community does in its grandest ideal form. Inadequate explanations get supplanted by better ones, and over time missteps get corrected by better data and better working models.
Dysfunctional groups cannot do any of that. Their leaders almost never deserve the power they hold. Their incompetence trickles down to the lieutenants they choose through favoritism. Nobody can hold any of these people truly accountable, because the system they inhabit has evolved specifically to grant huge amounts of power to people who cannot get it in any legitimate way—and then to help those people keep and grow that undeserved power.
That system doesn’t work if people can just walk away from the group. These days, more and more people rightly consider repeated victimizations and flagrant abuses of power to be dealbreakers. They’ll leave if mistreated enough. Most Christians don’t consider church membership to be mandatory, nor allegiance to their leaders to be a lifelong commitment.
So when you see these gloating Christians get up in front of passengers on a plane, when you see them preaching to people who can’t leave, see it for what it is. It is their expression of personal power over others, their need to feel powerful, their desire to feel in-control of others. They can’t get that rush in any other way. They’re in that phase of decline where they’re acting out more than usual to get it, that’s all. It’s a sign of decline more certain than a mostly-empty church parking lot on Sunday morning.
Really, complete irrelevance couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of people. It’s the fate they fear the most, and yet also the one they most deserve.
NEXT UP: Myths of modern revival still fuel many fundagelicals. In their dreams, they are free indeed. See you soon! <3
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