Evangelicals Behaving Badly and the Problem of ‘Silent Evidence’

Photo by Joel Reyer on Unsplash

Evangelicalism in a Crisis?

2021 ended with the final episode of Christianity Today’s popular podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill”—an in-depth analysis which thoughtfully documented the explosive boom and unsightly bust of the multi-campus megachurch led by pastor Mark Driscoll. The podcast, which was cautionary and measured in tone, was consistently one of the top shows on Apple’s platform over the last year. Among other things, it cast a light on the problematic power structure within Mars Hill, the savvy incorporation of media platforms, and the ecosystem organized around Driscoll’s complicated but charismatic personality.

While the show was intentionally focused on Mars Hill, the storyline mirrored the all-too-public and all-too-consistent display of moral failures and cultural faux pas among church and ministry leaders over the last several years. More and more, it seems that emerging stories of popular Christian personalities failing to act “above reproach” are depressingly common. Ministry scandals, and their public nature, are nothing new—but today’s elevated social consciousness in tandem with the dizzying velocity of real-time social media has created PR challenges unique to American evangelicalism. 

Indeed, one could point to recent church dismissals of Bill Hybels, Perry Noble, James McDonald, Darrin Patrick, or Carl Lentz (to name a few). Related, the revelations uncovered in an investigation of the late evangelist Ravi Zacharias were so staggering and unimaginable, some evangelicals could not bring themselves to believe the reports of his sexual misconduct.  Equally troubling, Vanity Fair recently published a salacious exposé detailing the sharp rise and  fall of Jerry Falwell Jr., former president of Liberty University.   

In addition to having their own #MeToo moment, in the last few years an array of evangelicals were embarrassed to find their names on the leaked Ashley Madision customer list—a web database created to facilitate discreet affairs. Related, it is hard not to blush when news outlets publicize a popular pastor “trusting in the Lord” for their congregants to provide them with a $50 million dollar private jet, or a missionary yelling racial slurs at the very people they are commissioned to minister to.  In sum, anecdotes of evangelical moral failures are frequent and ubiquitous—a blight on the witness of authentic Christian faith.

In 2018, during a private meeting of Evangelical leaders at Wheaton College, Fuller Seminary President Mark Labberton described Evangelicalism as being in a state of crisis. The expression is hardly unique to Labberton—and has become a general expression to communicate evangelical failures, dilution through politicization, or diminishing cultural influence. 

Given the alarming frequency of evangelical shortfalls over the last several years, Labberton appears to have it right. American evangelicalism is in crisis. 

Or is it? 

Evangelicalism and “Silent Evidence”

Headline grabbing stories regarding evangelicals behaving badly can loom large in our imaginations. “Things are getting worse”; “The church is becoming increasingly irrelevant”; “We are losing our witness”—all are common refrains when we are confronted with scandalous information about Christian institutions or their leaders. 

However, it may be helpful to assess this issue using some statistical logic. As statisticians often remind us, it is important to make a distinction between incidence and prevalence. The former speaks to something occurring; the latter speaks to something occurring in proportion to its non-occurrence. As an example, in 2015 there were a record number of shark attacks across the globe. However, researchers point to the fact that more people were swimming in the ocean that year. Thus, while incidents of attacks increased in 2015, data would not support the suggestion that shark attacks were prevalent during this same period (e.g., attacked swimmers relative to non-attacked swimmers).

This relates to what author Nassim Taleb calls silent evidence. “There is a difference between what you see and what is there,” he writes. In the case of ministry scandals, it is easy to pay attention to incidents of indiscretion among evangelicals; less clear, however, is the prevalence of abused power, sexual exploitation, or faith-threatening allegiances when we consider all Christian institutions, churches, congregants, and leaders. 

There are several reasons for this. For one, popular mediums have less incentive to document institutions of faith and the Christians who faithfully (yet mundanely) carry out the Great Commission, minister to their community, or serve the vulnerable among them. Faithful action is often, by its nature, unglamorous. In an “attention economy” where media business models are organized around clicks—the idea of what is “newsworthy” is redefined. Among other things, everyday acts of Christian faithfulness are far less likely to spread or gain traction within such an environment.  

Second, and related, much of the Christian faith life is constituted by quiet, unassuming practices. In addition to being unglamorous, many dimensions of the Christian faith are stealth. But that does not mean they are benign. There are an infinite number of social and cultural contributions originating from faithful, measured, no-fanfare Christian action. As I write this, I am imagining a friend who spent decades ministering to prisoners, another close friend who regularly serves food to an underserved area in her community, or the couple who makes significant, yet anonymous, donations to those in need. Imagine the thousands who are governed by daily disciplines of fasting, prayer, and scripture reading, or those who enter life-threatening parts of the world to share the Gospel message. It would be impossible to fully document the scope and depth of silent but potent contributions made by faithful men and women—past, present, and future.

Finally, our minds are hard-wired to process the world in ways that fail to account for silent evidence. Seldom do we evaluate phenomena in relation to its non-occurrence. For every inappropriate action or utterance committed by a popular pastor or ministry leader, there are tens of thousands of leaders who speak and act in a morally excellent and upright manner. Part of the problem, says Physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, is our innate proclivity toward hasty generalizations—taking small samples of data and generalizing to an entire population. He facetiously refers to this as “the law of small numbers”—the recognition that we mistakenly overestimate the representation of small data sets and samples (i.e., moral failures of a few must certainly mean moral failures of many). Importantly, these problems are reinforced by the human bias to unconsciously seek out data that confirms our preconceived beliefs and values—what is called confirmation bias (or motivated reasoning). In other words, we possess unconsciously motivated lenses that lead us to see what we want to see. 

Given these forces, it is easy to overlook “silent evidence” and make conclusions that may not necessarily represent evangelicalism or the state of Christian institutions. 

Faithful Followers

Over the last few years, I attended funeral services for my wife’s grandfather and grandmother—both within the same year. Much of their adult lives were spent as missionaries to a small Bolivian community, translating scripture to their native language and investing in the cultivation of the local church. Their respective funeral ceremonies spoke to the consistent, quiet, and faithful manner by which they lived their life. It was moving, and reminiscent of David Brooks’ distinction between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. 

Reflecting on the lives of my wife’s grandparents, it occurred to me that there are thousands upon thousands of silent, faithful, and effective Christ-followers like them. 

To be clear, this does not mean that evangelicalism and the Christian church are immune from concern.  In addition to the Mars Hill Podcast, 2021 also ended with a Pew Research poll describing the growing trend of “religiously unaffiliated” adults in the United States—particularly within Christianity. The largest decline was among Protestant Christians, a category dominated by self-described evangelicals. Moreover, there is no such thing as a statistically “negligible” failure of a Christian leader or layperson. Any incidents of evangelical impropriety are lamentable and, among other things, harmful to our witness. As “resident aliens” called to bear witness to God and Gospel, we must take such failures seriously, and humble ourselves before God and neighbor so that we may avoid stumbling ourselves. 

However, before we pull the “crisis” lever, it is important to remember the multitude of Christians—poor in spirit, mournful, meek, merciful, pure, peacemaking, and thirsty for righteousness—who, though silent in one regard, are strikingly audible in their witness. When assessing the state of evangelicalism at large, this is the population worthy of our attention.

Dr. Kevin Brown is President of Asbury University in Wilmore, Ky