The Danger of Christian Celebrity

Photo by Andrew Arrol on Unsplash

I recently interviewed Katelyn Beaty about her new book, Celebrities for Jesus. This interview has been edited and abridged for clarity and length.

MR: Katelyn, thank you so much for sitting down for this conversation today. Even though we’ve never spent time together I feel like I know you a bit because your family is a part of the church where I help pastor right now. I get to see your parents all the time. And I know, Katelyn, you've stopped in at this church from time to time when you're around Dayton. So maybe we'll start there. I've only been at this church about a year and a half or so in my current role. It's been interesting to observe the culture here, which was in many ways formed in the midst of the church-growth movement. As I was reading your book, I realized I was reading about the church where I was sitting. Could you share a little bit about your experience growing up in the church, both the good and the bad and how that culture shaped you?

KB: Well, I'm grateful for the church environment I grew up in because it's where I came to accept Christ. I was 13 or 14 and was going with our church's youth group to another church for a youth rally. The band “Geoff Moore and the Distance” was playing, and at the end of the performance, a pastor presented a very simple gospel invitation. I distinctly remember being worried that the guys in the youth group would think I was a dork, but I was going to push through that fear, and I stood and made a commitment to Jesus. To this day I think of that as a very genuine encounter with Jesus. So for that reason alone and for this emphasis on evangelism and bringing as many people as possible into the church, I am a grateful recipient of that emphasis.

This was arguably the height of nineties evangelical youth culture in terms of events like “Acquire the Fire” and purity culture. There was a distinct sense that this church that we both know wanted to become the “megachurch down the road.” We wanted to grow. Obviously, any effort to draw people to the Lord is good. Yet I wondered about that emphasis on growth without a deep rootedness in discipleship, in scripture, in worship. I never perceived that our pastor at the time thought of himself as a celebrity, but certainly the preaching was the main event and his oratory skills were the main event. And of course, [our church] was not alone in that. 

[In] the church growth movement a lot of churches were growing because of a very charismatic kind of celebrity figure at the center of the organization. I think we've come to see that the emphasis on that has borne some bad fruit in recent years. 

MR: That’s really interesting. What made you decide to write this book? I know you worked for Christianity Today for a number of years, are currently with Brazos Press, and work with Baker Books. You work in the publishing and editorial world. So, what did you see and experience that led you to take on a project like this? 

KB: The seeds for this book were really planted while I was at Christianity Today. I served there for almost a decade, and in that period of time, our staff received a number of tips about allegations involving famous Christian leaders. We now know those headlines and know those stories, but we were getting those tips years before anything was reported. Of course, a lot of people on staff had experienced this, but there was such a cognitive dissonance related to how I perceived these people to be—great Christian leaders, people of integrity. 

The disconnect was hard to process. I started to wonder if there was something about celebrity status that leads to abuses of power and allows someone to evade accountability and start believing their own hype.

I wrote the book to help the church start to identify celebrity dynamics. I think celebrity can be difficult to identify sometimes in terms of an interpersonal dynamic or a power dynamic. It’s important to identify those dynamics so that all of us can be wise about how we're organizing our spiritual lives together and be wise about how we relate to our leaders. The vast majority of Christians for the past 2000 years have not had platforms; they have no fame, no celebrity status. Ordinary people are how God has chosen to work, to heal, bless, restore, and to point people to his goodness and grace. You mentioned my parents. They are that vision for me. They're not fancy or impressive people. They're salt-of-the-earth people and yet their faithfulness to the Lord, to each other, to the church, to our family is so powerful to me. 

There is a diffuse effect to their faithfulness and goodness. We may not see the effect of that externally, but that's the kind of vision of a Christian life that I want us all to see and recover instead of the pedestal, platform, and spotlight.

MR: I love that. I would say my life is a walking testimony of that. One of the most shaping influences in my life was a guy who was a member at the church that I grew up in, and he asked me to breakfast one day when I was in ninth grade. He just started taking me to breakfast before school. He didn't have a platform. He was a leader in our church, but he's an engineer by trade, and he changed my life. He became like a spiritual father to me. I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now but for his ordinary faithfulness.

In your book you define what celebrity is and you talk about social power without proximity. How did you arrive at your definition of celebrity in the book and what are you hoping people take from that?

KB: I get asked a lot about the difference between celebrity and something like fame or renown. In the book, I'm not arguing that if you have a social media platform and you have followers, so to speak, that's bad per se. I think that’s something to discern. Sometimes people are known for acts of goodness and virtue. Maybe they have creative accomplishments and people begin to know them for their work. If fame comes to you, then you have to figure out how to steward it. Celebrity, by contrast, is something that is deliberately curated and sought using the tools of mass media to project an image of yourself as whatever it is that you want people to think about you and whatever you want to believe about yourself.  Technology, on one hand, allows people to connect across time and place like we're doing now, and also it has a distancing effect. That is what is dangerous or troubling about celebrity power. Celebrity creates distance from other people.

That distance from flesh-and-blood community, from accountability and from sometimes even the people you're trying to minister to or reach, can become a kind of hiddenness. There can be a disconnect between what you are presenting to the world using mass media and who you are behind closed doors. 

I believe we are all made for proximity. I believe we're all made for relationship, rootedness, stability, and being known. That's what we need in order to thrive and flourish—all of us. It doesn't matter if you're a very important leader or not. Celebrity shields us from that, because truthfully, sometimes it feels better to have a fan rather than a friend who knows our stuff. And you know, people who know us in real life know that we're all mixed bags. We have our strengths and weaknesses, we have our blind spots, we have wonderful skills and ways that we reflect Christ well, and ways in which we are still growing on the path of sanctification.

[As a celebrity] it can be easy to turn to your fans or your followers because they're usually only going to reflect back what you want to believe about yourself. People who really know you will say, I see more there and I still love you, and I'm still committed to you. I think we all need that. 

MR: [When a person begins] wading into corruption within the church, it's easy to become jaded about the church. How do we appropriately critique the church without getting jaded? How do we love the bride of Christ that Jesus loves sacrificially, despite her flaws?

KB: I think of this time actually—at least in the North American church—as a time of purification. Things are being exposed that run counter to the heart of Christ and what God wants for his church. And it's a painful thing to see those things come to light. But I am ultimately hopeful for the chance for all of us who are in the church to self-reflect and to repent if need be. We should accept that this purification is painful but necessary. I believe that after this process, we will be more beautiful than where we were before.

There's a way to critique elements of Christian culture and church culture while preserving the spiritual understanding of the bride of Christ. [We should acknowledge] that there are things that as humans we import into the church. We can't help doing that. Much of [what we do] is culture that we need to examine and perhaps change and repent of because it does not reflect the beauty of the bride of Christ in an eternal sense. That kind of thing can be hard to distinguish when maybe you've been hurt in a church context or you've been in one of these churches where you have faced scandal. But I think these distinctions are helpful because we are trying to live as the body of Christ, as flawed human beings, mortal human beings who are all on a path of sanctification, and we're not there yet, so of course we're going to get it wrong sometimes.

MR: Yeah, I think that's right.  Thank you for your willingness to have this conversation, and thank you for your work. I think this is a needed word in the life of the church right now, and I'm grateful for your boldness to deliver it, even though it may not be popular in some circles. I'm grateful for your faithfulness in that. 

Click here to watch the full interview, available on the Spirit & Truth website.

Katlyn Beaty is the editorial director for Brazos Press. Her book Celebrities for Jesus is available wherever books are sold.

Matt Reynolds is the president of Spirit & Truth and serves as one the pastors at Stillwater Church in Dayton, Ohio.