Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep931: Sexual Abuse Scandals and Power in the Church: Dr. Russell Moore

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

Dr. Russell Moore is Public Theologian at Christianity Today and Director of Christianity Today’s Public Theology Project. Dr. Moore is the author of several books, including The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear Without Losing Your Soul, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel and The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home. A native Mississippian, he and his wife Maria are the parents of five sons. Russ has been very public about addressing the crisis of sexual abuse scandals in the church. In this episode, we talk about what leads to such scandals, why and how they are covered up, how the church needs to move forward in addressing such scandals (and abuse in general), and how we should think about the otherwise good content produced by Christian leaders (books, sermons, music) who later come out as abusers. We also talk about the polarized cultural moment we’re living in and what the future holds. Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your democratic or republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

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lineup of speakers. We're going to engage all kinds of issues related to race, sexuality, gender, politics, hell, and women in the church, and so on and so forth. All the info is in the show notes, or you can just go to PrestonSprinkle.com and register sooner than later. My guest today is Dr. Russell Moore. Russell Moore is a public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. Let me start that over. Director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. Dr. Moore is the author of several books, including The Courage to Stand,

Facing Your Fear Without Losing Your Soul, Onward, Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, and The Storm-Tossed Family. Russ is from Mississippi, and he and his wife, Maria, are the parents of five kids. Russell Moore is one of my favorite public theologians. I'm so excited to have him on the show today. So please welcome to the show, hopefully not the last time, but definitely the first time, the one and only Dr. Russell Moore. all right hey friends i'm here with uh dr russell moore uh russ thanks so much for being on the show really appreciate it oh. Oh, thanks for having me. This has been long overdue. Probably not for you, but maybe for me.

I mean, I've been a huge fan of yours from a distance and just have loved. Well, likewise. Well, oh, goodness. I mean, obviously you've written a lot of books and you've made your stamp on evangelicalism, I would say, in incredibly healthy ways. on evangelicalism, I would say in incredibly healthy ways. But it's your posture and your humility in the midst of being wise and courageous that that combination is just, I don't know, it seems to be very rare to be both courageous and humble in our time. So I just thank you so much for being a model for us younger. Well, I think we're close to the same age, but you might be a couple of years on me. Well, thank you. I don't feel courageous

or humble, but thank you anyway. So obviously, you've been all across the evangelical news the last couple of years. I would love to hear just your story, like last few years, like what has life been like as a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention? And then now, you know, you're working for Christianity Today. You know, you read stuff on the internet and I'm like, yeah, I'm the type of person I'm always like, I want to talk to the person and hear what's going on, you know, because usually stuff is, I don't know, just not reported always with the most accuracy.

So, yeah, tell us about your journey the last few years. with the most accuracy. So yeah, tell us about your journey the last few years. Well, I mean, I've, uh, I served for, um, eight and a half years as a president of the, uh, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the moral and public policy, um, agency of Southern Baptist Convention. So I was, uh, I was there at a, at a really interesting time in American life when the difference between 2013 and, say, 2017 is light years. I mean, it's looking back to 2015 and thinking about what a completely different sort of cultural ecosystem we were in at the time that suddenly changed. I don't think that my last two years, I don't think that my experience has been all that different from most people that I talk to. So right now I'm talking to, I talk to. So right now I'm talking to, really, it doesn't matter whether they're pastors or members of Congress or principals. Almost everybody is living through the same thing,

which is often a majority of the people who are goodwilled and who are on the same page, and then a minority of people who are, as Jonathan Rauch puts it in his book, The Constitution of Knowledge, seeking to demoralize. I think everybody's going through that. And that's what, I'll have that conversation. It doesn't matter whether it's somebody who's pastoring a 20-person church plant or a megachurch or whatever realm of life they're in. It's the same sort of moment. So I kind of went through a time of just asking, what's the best way for me to be able to do what Jesus called me to do? And I'm very happy with how that turned out, but it took a while. Yeah, it does seem like the loudest voices are on the kind of fringe, whether it's the far left,

far right, in any kind of context. And it sounds like those voices are representing a larger number of people than they actually are. That's been my experience. Yeah. And they have inordinate power. I mean, one of the things I would often listen to my own counsel that I was giving to other people, and I remember talking one time to a pastor who said, you know, I'm just going to leave because I'm dealing with just this awful situation here. And I said, well, how many people are you talking about? And he said, it's 10 people. I said, well, you have 10 people in a congregation of 300. Why would you leave the 290 because of 10 people? And that makes sense mathematically,

but it doesn't take into account that 10 people can completely transform an ecosystem if the 290 don't understand what's going on. And often the people who are the healthiest are the least engaged in whatever the system or institution is for all kinds of good reasons. And the people who are the unhealthiest are the most engaged often. And so you end up with a situation, there's a new book, Brian Klaus, called Corrupted, where he's talking about how it's not so much that power corrupts as that corruptible people seek power. Oh, wow. And he gives the example of his mom who served on school board because she was – she cared about kids. She cared about education. So she ran for school board because she was, you know, she cared about kids, she cared about education. So she ran for school board. Now, he said, at a time when school board members are getting

screamed at and death threats and everything else, she wouldn't have run. So you just end up with the kind of people who don't mind being screamed at and death threats, which sometimes tends to be people who are kind of Machiavellian. That's a great, yeah. Corrupt people seek power. I haven't thought about it like that. That's crazy. I mean, that's frightening. But so at least there's two.

As I understand it, so I'm not in the Southern Baptist world. I've got friends that are. So I've only, and I don't Google evangelical stuff very often. So I only know vaguely kind of stuff going on for people like me that maybe are like, what's going on with the SBC? I know two of the issues, as I understand it, are the sexual abuse scandals or cover-ups. I don't even know what language to use. And then some discussions surrounding race. Would that be an accurate general picture?

And if so, I would love to get your take on each of those two. Yeah, I don't think it's limited to any one denomination or sector. I think that we see this manifesting itself in multiple different places at the same time. But they're often very connected sorts of issues. So racial justice and reconciliation issues would be one. The other would be sexual abuse. And then there are the issues that have sort of been presented to all kinds of evangelical spaces in the Trump years. And then after that, with the sort of conspiracy theories that have emerged, and not just with the election, but also with the pandemic and so forth. I mean, that's happening in many different places.

And so, you know, one of the things I've noticed is that, and I found myself doing this too, often thinking, okay, here's the stuff. If we can just, you know, Merle Haggard, if we can make it through December, we'll be fine. It's here's where this the stopping point of this is. So we said people, yeah, the 2016 election is so crazy. We just get past that. Then then we can move forward. And then it's, well, the 2020 election or then it's well the the uh development of the vaccine or then it's inauguration day or and and that just keeps moving out and it's not getting any saner so this is just the new reality that the i i when the when the pandemic started to

settle in i was like hey here's a thing that can unite, bring more unity. Yeah. Kind of like how 9-11 is tragic as that was or seemed to be in the wake of that. Some semblance of unity, you know. And I was like, oh, a pandemic. What else do we need to bring some kind of unity? Obviously, that didn't happen. Then, you know, yeah, you throw Trump into that. Then the election. I was one of those that was like, okay, the vaccines almost developed.

The election's here. And to me, I was like, whoever – I don't know. Let's just get past the election, vaccines, and it will be all fine. And it just seems like everything's more divided than ever. And it's one thing when our secular culture is divided there. It's kind of like, well, okay. I can live with that. But when the church plays in like mirrors

that and every single pastor i've talked to every single one says the last year was the hardest year of their life pastoring and it had to do not just with the pandemic per se not just with the elections but with the with the with the the stark, hostile divisions that existed in their church, not around people leaving the church, not over theological issues like, hey, we don't believe in Trinity anymore or something, but whether we are too strong or too light on masks or vaccines or how we even talk about this or that. Are you experiencing that as well? Because I know you get around a lot of it. Absolutely. It's every single day. To the point that I know I have a pastor friend who was contacted by a church saying, hey, would you be interested in talking to us? And he really

wasn't, but he asked me, what do you think? And I knew that he is the only, not just pastor, but the only leader of any sort that I know right now who would say, I have a great situation that I wouldn't change at all. And I just said, you would be insane to leave. You should just take this unicorn moment and live in it, which is what he did. But yeah, it's, it's, um, it, I think one of the problems is that previously there were some people who could kind of navigate around some of this stuff by as, as, as they might put it, staying in my lane. Uh, so if you, if you don't sort of engage those particular points that are really fiery at the moment, then you can do what you're called to do. But that doesn't work in a time where if you don't speak to these things, that's received as itself a kind of provocation. And so, you know, you have people who, one pastor said to me, he said, look, I trained to know the Bible, to preach the Bible, to counsel hurting people, to lead people to Christ.

Now I have to be a political pundit and elections, election law specialist and infectious disease expert. Yeah. And all of that. And he said, I just can't keep up with all of that. And who can? What's the – so are we moving out of it or just deeper into the vortex of this – everything we're talking about? And what – yeah i mean yeah yeah yeah and what would it take to get us to a place to where we can have a more unity around the gospel around

the authority of scripture around the things that really matter rather than getting mixed up and all this stuff do you see us moving deeper into it or moving or are we getting better are we getting better? Are we healing as a church? Well, I often think of Edward Abbey, the old writer and environmental activist who said that he was a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist, and he defined short-term as the next 5,000 years. I'm not quite that, but I do think that things are getting worse and will get worse before they get better. Now, that doesn't mean, though, that I think we're in an endless spiral downward for a number of reasons. I mean, one of them is Jesus made his promise at Caesarea Philippi, and that's going to be kept, whether the American church goes along with it or not. Church will be built. But also because there's just a, I think there is a limit to human exhaustion when it comes to this sort of just endless, as the Apostle Paul would put it, unhealthy craving for controversy. I do think that that leaves people burned out, and the question then is, well, what then?

Right. And so I think you just have to have people who are ready to be there when the question of what then is asked. I am a little nervous about the next election cycle because it could be – Oh, I am too. I thought this last one was going to be – and it was, I think, probably the most intense, the most volatile, the most sensitive. I think the next one is going to be even more, right? I mean you're more of an expert at this stuff than I am. I think the next one's going to be even more, right? I mean, you're more of an expert at this stuff than I am.

Yeah, I think it will be if for no other reason. If you think about, for instance, right after the election, when President Trump said that the election had been stolen from him, which it wasn't. I mean, we can verify what the election was and wasn't. But when he claimed that, you know, I thought at the time, well, you'll have a group of people who are just going to sort of work through their disappointment and they'll probably believe this for a while and then they'll move on. What you have seen, though, is that larger and larger numbers of people accepting that. So when you when we don't see just how close we came to the brink in in 2020. Yeah, it's it's really terrifying to think about what could be in store in 2024. could be in store in 2024.

And what sort of worries me is that we've gotten to the place where we've kind of normalized the things that previously would have shocked us to such a degree that we don't even recognize the peril that we're in. That's what I think is the real worry. So you said it's a lot larger than you thought. When I say it's a lot larger, things like QAnon, some of these conspiracy theories, not people supporting Trump per se, but people who are adamant that he's coming back or all these theories. Right, right, right. Is that a larger number? Because to me, it sounds like such a fringe

perspective, kind of that loud, tiny minority, but I could be totally wrong. I don't know. The circles I swim in, I don't deal with those kind of people. So is it a bigger number than we – look at the polling data, not in terms of the people who I think one of the mistakes people make is to say, well, who are the people who will say I'm a QAnon supporter and I'm accepting whatever Q says or whatever this particular conspiracy theory group says? that's not how it works. The way it works at a national level is really similar to how some unhealthy churches will operate, where there'll be a group of people who maybe they hate the pastor, but most people love the pastor, and so they can't take him on directly. So what they just start doing is saying, you know, I've heard a lot of people concerned about pastor so-and-so and, you know, what do you think? And then it eventually gets to the point where people think, well,

a lot of people are saying that the pastor's a crook. So, you know, maybe that's the case. That's sort of the way it works is where you have people who don't even know that what they're picking up is coming from some fringe conspiracy theory site. They're just saying, well, I don't know. It's a lot of people are saying that the vaccines will do bad things to you or a lot of people are saying that there's this satanic pedophile network running the government. I don't know. And that's what really moves, as they say, the Overton window on these issues. Well, part of that has to do with just the flurry of information on social media, the internet, people just spending two minutes on this and five minutes on this and 10 minutes on this and 30 seconds on this. And they just have things floating around.

They don't know where they got it. They haven't fact-checked. They haven't done deep research. And then they go have a conversation and spread that. And somebody else, it's impressionable. I mean, is that kind of how this is going on? There's just all these ideas kind of out there that people, whatever kind of sounds right, they kind of grab a hold of. Again, not like in their deep conviction,

but they're just like, yeah, I heard this or that. Yeah, that's part of it. And I think another part of it is there's a book that came out last year talking about how that came out last year talking about how the people who, that most people who are sort of on social media are kind of normal, balanced kinds of people, but they have the most to lose because they really want to have relationships with people in their life that would be imperiled by their just sort of ranting about something. Or they have jobs that wouldn't look kindly on that sort of thing. So they kind of self-censor and are silent, which means that the sort of fringy, ranting, trollish kinds of voices become amplified all the more. That's part of it. And then the other thing is just there's not time for things to really be thought through. I mean, for most things in life,

we actually don't have an immediate opinion on. Some things we do, but most things that we're not thinking about all the time, we sort of let sit there, or we're meant to kind of let it sit there and think about it and ponder it and maybe change our minds a few times. Now you're at a place where you not only should have an immediate opinion and broadcast that immediate opinion, but now you're kind of committed to that opinion. But now you're you're kind of committed to that opinion. And human nature being the way that it is says, you know, I'm I was just talking to somebody this morning about the sort of spiritual crisis that I went through as a 15 year old that was going on entirely without anybody knowing that it was happening. And I said, on the one hand, I really wish that I had had more people who were, you know, I felt safe enough to say I'm having these questions. But on the other hand, I'm really grateful that I didn't have social media channels. Because then what I would

have done is either to say, there's nothing to see here. We're awesome, onward Christian soldiers. Or I would have said, I'm questioning all of this. So I'm deconstructed and I'm leaving the faith. I mean, you would have really, I would have really been committed myself to one of those things when I had to just sort of sit in the wilderness for a little while until I was pulled through it. And we just don't have the option for that now most of the time. Can you imagine having a Twitter account at 15? No. Like this stuff I would have said.

The dirt people would have had on me. The world has been spared so much that 15-year-old Russell Moore did not have a Twitter account. We've told our – we have four kids. They're all teenagers. And we don't do – we tell them there's no social media until they're 18. And that was a hard decision for about a week and a half when they're like 13 years old and they're friends. But I'm like, I'm not going to give you a crack pipe. I'm not going to give you a loaded gun.

That's right. Like this is, I'm not going to give you a crack pipe. I'm not going to give you a loaded gun. And I'm not going to give you something that's worse than both of those combined. This access to bullying, to abuse, to loneliness, to all this stuff that you don't know how to manage a 13, 15 year old. And I think now they, yeah, they, they thank us later. Like, oh, you've saved us from, it's probably making a fool of ourselves on social media because when you're 13 14 15 years old you don't know how to use something so incredibly powerful like that but well and also what you're doing is you're you're at that age no matter what you're sort of um wondering what do other people think of me uh where where I fit? And so if you kind of have this ongoing sort of metric that you think tells you what people think of you immediately, it becomes an exhausting sort of life of just chasing that and constantly evaluating yourself. That's no way to live. It's a disaster. So yeah, I want to go back because with the sexual abuse stuff going on

in the church, is that getting addressed? Because again, I don't even know in my world, I don't really know what's going on. I just hear stuff going on. Is it a huge deal? Are there tons of abuse cases being covered up? Was it a few? Is it a mass? Is it is this a huge thing the church absolutely needs to address? And how are we doing with that? that predators are empowered and predatory behavior is empowered is that people sometimes get the mindset when something happens, even when they, you know, quote unquote, deal with it, to say, well, we have to keep this a secret. Otherwise, unbelievers are going to have a bad picture of Jesus. Of course, I mean, Jesus never asked us to preserve his reputation by covering things up. He does just the opposite and brings things into the light. And so I think there's a sense of – there has been a sense of that along with a sense of – for many people, a sense of kind of invulnerability

to say, well, we know that abuse happens, but it happens in Catholic churches, or it happens in some other churches. It doesn't happen in a church like mine, where we all know each other, and we all trust each other, and so forth. And that is exactly the sort of place where predatory behavior can happen and does happen. I remember at a point where several of these – there was a Houston Chronicle investigation of, at the time, 300 sexual abuse cover-up issues within churches just in that one investigation. Along with scandal after scandal after scandal that was emerging, a Ravi Zacharias situation and others. One of them said, I sense that when some of you men leaders are seeing some of these things, you're shocked and rattled by them. And I just want you to know none of us are. Wow. And I looked around the room and every head was nodding that this was not a shock to them. this was not a shock to them. They had seen or experienced or knew people who had experienced these things, but who didn't talk about them because they weren't allowed to talk about them,

or talking about them was seen as some sort of disloyalty. I mean, that's a huge, huge crisis for the church, and if we don't address it, we're going to be in serious trouble. Is that the motivation? You mentioned that people want to preserve the reputation of the church. Because to me, I'm like, who would cover something like that up? And also, there's two questions, I guess. What's the motivation? Is it to preserve the reputation?

And number two, when you say cover up, is it like, hey, let's deal with this internally, or is it let's just completely ignore it altogether? Well, in some cases, it's let's ignore it altogether. In some cases, it is someone who's been victimized to say, why are you bringing this up when so-and-so is a really beloved and important person in our congregation. I mean, there are many different ways that this happens. And for some people, it is, well, if we talk about this publicly. Now, I had a church call one time, very good pastor, who had a situation where something came to light that had happened previously in the life of that church that they didn't know about. And he said, what should I do? And I said, well, he was going to

meet with this congregation that night. And I said, call the newspapers and the television stations and invite them to be there. tell them what's going on. And he said, well, I don't want to do that because the people in our community will say, oh, that's the church that had a sexual abuse issue. I said, no, the people in your community will know that's the church that addressed a sexual abuse issue. I said that that that doesn't take away confidence when you deal with something and you do it in an accountable, transparent way.

It actually contributes to confidence. That's not why you do it. You do it because it's morally right and demanded by God. But this act of trying to project an image not only is wrong, but it also has the opposite sort of end result from what people think it will. No, that's a great point. And I mean, I think the main point is what you said in passing, that this is the morally right thing to do, even if people misunderstood and says, wow, that's a sexual—even if the church shrinks to 50 people, 10 people, you need to do the morally

right thing to do, you know? That's exactly right. You cannot advance good with evil. And so if what you have to do to carry out your mission is to affirm or to cover up something that's wicked and evil and harmful to vulnerable people, completely contrary to the teachings of Jesus, then that mission should suffer. Right, right. I mean, Rachel Denhollander asks the question, what is a little girl worth in that context? What is a little girl? What is a little boy? What is a man or a in that context? What is a little girl? What is a little boy? What is a man or a woman creating the image of God? What is that person worth infinitely more than institutional self-protection?

So you said that this isn't just – again, from my vague knowledge of what's going on, I just hear Catholic Church and then the SBC. You're saying this is just a church-wide issue. There's nothing particular in the SBC. It's not just a churchwide issue. There isn't a safe harbor from this in any aspect of life. So you would see people who would say, um, you know, Christians who would look at say the Harvey Weinstein, uh, scandal, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and say, uh, well, see, this is what happens, uh, when sort of secularism and sexual revolution, uh, libertinism, when this goes to full bore, uh, and then you turn around and say, well, what about what's taking place within the church?

And I think one of the problems is sometimes what we all want to do is to say, okay, what's the superficial thing that's causing this? And let's just fix that. So you'll have people who will say, well, the reason there's a problem in Southern Baptist life is because all of the churches are autonomous, so there's not an authority over them. And then some people will turn around and say, well, the problem with the Roman Catholic Church is that it's so hierarchical and there's so much authority that the bishops are able to cover things up. cover things up. Or, well, the problem with a Willow Creek is that it's egalitarian and doesn't call on men to be responsible enough. Well, the problem with some other group is because they're complementing. Well, actually, any system and any theology can be utilized for evil. theology can be utilized for evil. That doesn't mean that all those systems and theologies are all right or equal, but it does mean that I have to recognize even things that I believe are good and true, if I'm not constantly watching and holding accountable, can be used for devilish

purposes. That's good. That's a great point. It goes back to kind of the tribalism, like whatever tribe I don't like, I'm going to try to say, well, because they believe this, then it leads to all that. And we ignore kind of that this is a common human problem that, yeah, that any system left unchecked or any system that's just kind of broken could foster that. Are you... Yeah, and that leads you not to what you have to be saying is in whatever system you're in is to say, where are the weak points here that can be exploited? And so even in a local church situation, to stand up and to say to people, hey, here's what we're doing to try to support vulnerable people and to care for people who have been abused. What we want to know from you is where are the gaps? What are we not seeing? It's not an act of disloyalty to come and to say,

we think that we've got some major gaps here that could lead to problems. We want you to say that. And so if you're in a church context with bishops saying, what are the ways that our system could be exploited? If you're in a very loose, autonomous sort of situation, how could that be exploited? I mean, you just have to be watching that all the time. Are there some common gaps that you've seen kind of across all systems? Like what are some of the ingredients that are recipes for disaster as you can see them? One of those ingredients is – and a key one, I think, is the idea that this couldn't happen with people like us.

Okay. And so – and the other is when there's a deification of power so that you have people who are credible on the basis of how much power they have and other people who are incredible based upon the power that they lack. Then you're going to end up with a situation where people are hurt. Wow. Are things getting better? Because this has been so public now and such an issue. Do you feel like we're in a good spot? We're moving forward with addressing abuse cases in a healthy way? I think that there are some places where things are getting better, if only because people are starting to recognize this could happen here. And in that sense, it's getting better in those places. there are little things that start to happen that seem like innovations that then just become

replicated. So, for instance, I mean, there was a time when it would have been insulting if you visited a church and you went to go pick up your child from the nursery, and they said, do you have a tag or an ID? I mean, now that's almost typical because some people started seeing that problem, doing it, and then other people started to pay attention to it and say, well, these are some things that we can do. In those areas, I think things might be getting better. But in many other areas, there's almost a backlash to concern for vulnerable people, period, but the sexually abused too, with a sense of, well, this is the Me Too movement is some sort of secular kind of a culture that we as Christians need to stand against. And you can see the way that Scripture often can be weaponized against people. David is always—every predatory church leader that I've ever seen has someone saying,

this is King David. You need to just forgive and not hold accountable. And often you will have even the best things about the Christian gospel, grace and forgiveness, weaponized into where there are people who are told you need to forgive this, by which they mean you need to cover this up and not ask for accountability, or even sometimes in ways that further victimizes the victims by saying you need to. I've seen cases where people who have endured horrific sexual abuse have had to, in order to stay within their communities, actually apologize to their abusers. Uh, because I tempted you or I led you. I mean, this is just really twisted, uh, twisted and, and perverse stuff, but that goes on. Yeah. Gosh, that, that's, uh, that's overwhelming, actually. But wow. I just I feel I mean, yeah, there's there's such a high percentage, maybe four women have been involved in some kind of abusive situation.

And one out of six men, typically younger age, almost always, and he went into great detail about how this happens, almost always somebody who is close to them, is loving, is caring. This isn't like taking in a back alley out of nowhere or thrown into a white van or something that this is almost always somebody who is, I did not expect that, you know? And if, yeah, I mean, I, the cases I hear are just so, several cases of pastor kids, pastor's kids when they were like 10, 12 at a Bible study, like during the Bible study,

an odd high number of that kind of situation. I'm like, what? This is, man, this is... Well, and especially when, I mean, one of the things that many abusive people do is to use spiritual authority in order to carry out their abusive behavior. So that what you're saying is not only I'm overpowering you with my evil, but I'm overpowering you with my evil and it's because of Jesus. Jesus. And you have to go along with this, because if you don't, it means that you're being disloyal to spiritual authority, or you're being disloyal to the mission of this church or institution.

Why would you want to look at all the good things that are taking place? I mean, you know, when the Ravi Zacharias stuff first started coming out, I started asking questions. Now, wait a minute, what's going on here? And many people would say, well, look at all the good things that Ravi Zacharias Ministries, the things that they do and the unbelievers who hear the gospel. And of course, yeah, but is that true? Is this really what's happening? And if so, you can't say, well, why compromise the mission? But that happens in many situations where people feel as though I'm going to be disloyal to Christ or I'm going to lose my community. And that takes what's already a horrific act of abuse and just multiplies it.

So I got a question for you that people ask me all the time, and I don't know exactly how to answer it. It's kind of complex. But you mentioned Ravi, and we can mention many other people. Does their recent revelation of what was going on, does that invalidate the content, which we'd probably say is good content that they've put out over the years? Does that mean we should throw away our Zacharias books stop listening to previous sermons like and i think of like even like john howard yoder i'm a big fan and and yeah stuff surrounding him or even like carl bart had an affair probably and other people like does this invalidate the content of what they said well i think that you have to differentiate between – there are many people who have heard the gospel or who have had their faith strengthened by people who later turned out to be fraudulent in some way or the other.

And that's not a new thing. Paul talks about that and says whether out of pretense or in reality as the gospel is preached. Judas Iscariot presumably was out announcing the kingdom of God before he was revealed to be who he is. And what he was saying, if he's saying what's delivered to him by Jesus is true. So it doesn't mean that you say, well, that's all untrue because Judas is Judas. What it does mean, though, is that you evaluate carefully. OK, what are the things that I received on the basis of my trust in this person and making sure that I am not continuing that in some way. So if somebody said to me, look, I was an atheist. I heard Ravi Zacharias. I came to faith in Christ. Does that mean that my faith

is not genuine? No, that doesn't mean that at all. But I also wouldn't be giving out Ravi Zacharias books or sermons because that would then be communicating to people, well, this doesn't really matter. What matters is the content. You can still celebrate the impact that the content has made on the kingdom and in your personal life, and yet to continue to promote that content after the fact could be a little, I don't know, tone deaf or... Yeah. Well, yeah. And I think so you sometimes then

look back and say, well, what are the aspects of this teaching? Since this is coming from somebody that I can see has glaring, not just character issues, but misuse of power sorts of questions, you then go back and you re-evaluate things through that lens. In the same way that you would if you have somebody you work with that later you find out that person's embezzling money from your company, that doesn't mean that your company shouldn't have been selling widgets all along, but it does mean that you go back and look through those financial statements

and don't take them on face value right now. That's good. That's wise, yeah. Such a hard balance. I mean, even, you know, I'll sing a worship song in the church that might have been written by somebody where I'm like, I'm not even sure they're a Christian anymore balance you know i mean i even you know i'll sing a worship song in the church that might have been written by somebody where i'm like i'm not sure that a christian anymore you know um and that's it i don't know it's just kind of hard i just feel a little icky or just like

i don't know it's just odd you know even though the content of what they're saying might be good and beautiful and i could even rewrite the same content you know or somebody else write it and i'd be like yeah now it just feels better at the same content or somebody else write it. And I'd be like, yeah, now it just feels better. At the same time, I don't want to give the impression that you have to have some kind of impeccable moral character to write this stuff. I don't know. It's kind of like watching – I used to love to watch reruns of The Cosby Show. to love to watch reruns of the Cosby show. Um, because it was just a brilliantly written and acted, uh, comedy watching it now, uh, can be kind of chilling because you're looking at someone, you're saying, okay, Bill, the persona that Bill Cosby has here is one that he used in unspeakably horrific ways.

And so it sort of changes the when the humor is coming from that. I'm everybody's dad mentality. And then you see how he used that. I'm everybody's dad, uh, persona to hurt people. It, it just changes the experience of, of watching this. And, you know, there are going to be all sorts of, you don't have to go and investigate every worship song and to say, I mean, uh, God of grace and God of glory. One of my favorite, uh, old hymns written by Harry Emerson Fosdick, who's someone whose theology I would reject. Yeah.

But it's a great hymn. You don't have to go back and evaluate, well, is this person worth listening to? you also have to avoid the tendency of saying, well, as long as somebody is producing useful material, then that means it doesn't matter what sort of person we're, we're holding up. You know, they're,

they're the, both of those can lead to bad places. There is something beautiful when you get the sweet combo of somebody who has just a, just a truly genuine godly character and they're super wise. I'm thinking somebody like a Eugene Peterson or, I mean, gosh, there's many we can list. John Stott. John Stott. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And people that like... Or even, you know, I, Howard Marshall,

passed away a couple years, a few years ago. You know, one of the greatest New Testament scholars of the 20th century. I did my PhD at Aberdeen University and he was retired. He was emeritus there, but he had an office just down the hall from me. This was the sweetest, most humble, most church dedicated, meek, godly man I think I've ever met. I mean, just, yeah, he would go to church and just like serve the poor through his church and play the organ and a little tiny Methodist church and just, just a beautiful, I remember seeing, and then you read his stuff and it's just like so heavily footnoted and all just as, you know, oozes just scholarly response, responsible scholarship, you know? And I'm like,

man, it's just, I don't know. He was kind of an inspiration to me. I'm like, man, I would give anything to kind of have that combo. Um, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, it's just – I don't know. He was kind of an inspiration to me. I'm like, man, I would give anything to kind of have that combo. Yeah. I mean I remember talking to somebody who had served on staff with John Stott, a much younger person who had served with Stott. And he said, you know, John Stott was nothing in private like he was in public. And I thought, oh, no. I can't lose John Stott. And then he immediately said he was so much better. He said everything that you saw about Stott was even intensified. He was humble, servant leadership, genuine character and integrity.

leadership, genuine character and integrity. And when you can see that, that doesn't deify that person or their sinner, repentant sinner, but it's grace-giving to recognize when that does happen, when we see so much of the alternative. I would say the exact same thing of Francis Chan, like who he is on stage, just just madly passionate about Jesus. That's how he literally wakes up every day. Can't wait to spend hours with Jesus because that's where he gets his sheer delight. Like he it's I feel like I'm not a Christian when I'm around him. You know, it's just like, oh, can you dim it down just a little bit to make me feel a little more saved? But wouldn't people have said that about Ravi though? Ravi was a – that was a shocker a little bit.

I didn't know him personally. I hardly even knew him. Never read a book by him, so I don't even know. But people that I did know him, they saw him as kind of that godly, mature, spiritual leader. Like that one was a shock, the Ravi case, wasn't it? Or maybe – It was a shock, the Bobby case, wasn't it? Or maybe- It was a shock to some people. I think that, but if you go back

and you actually look at the reports that are done, there were so many warning signs that it appears to me were simply avoided and not looked at. And you can see that in a lot of these situations where people are saying, something's really wrong here at the character level, and we'll address that. But first, we have to get through this big evangelistic campaign or this building program or this whatever. And so they defer it, which means that by deferring it, there never comes a point where any institution can say,

oh, well, now we have the bandwidth for an existential crisis. That never happens. And so you just keep pushing that accountability out, um, until it's, until it's beyond, I mean, it would take not, not just talking about sort of fraudulent, um, kind of predatory people, but, but just dealing with sort of normal, um, vulnerability. Uh, I think about, um, I I've seen a lot of, uh, pastors and leaders over the past couple years just collapse with alcoholism or some form of substance abuse. there were points where this could have been addressed if the person had had the ability, like the person could have if he was, if he were working in a, you know, in a private company, come in and say, hey, I think I'm drinking too much. Or people say, okay, well, let's get you help. But when the person thinks, well, if I say, I think I might be drinking a little bit too much,

I'm going to lose my job and be exiled. And so it's not going to be then addressed. And so they just keep thinking, I'm going to have to fix this by myself. And eventually I will. And they end up being destroyed. That can even happen when we're talking about not frauds or wolves, but people who just are grappling with sin or frailty in a time when they can't afford for their image to suffer. I mean, I think that's a problem that we have as a church. that we have as a church. Yeah, like if a Christian was a CEO of a widget company and he said, man, I think I'm drinking way too much

or I'm addicted to this or whatever, like because his job isn't necessarily on the line, you know, but with ministry, yeah, there's certain socially unacceptable struggles or sins or whatever that make it hard to kind of bring to light. Russ, we only have a couple more minutes left. I want to be sensitive to your time.

Can you just give a few minutes of just speaking directly to kind of Christian leaders, pastors who are listening? You know, we began kind of talking about just our, it seems like our, you know, 2021 has not gotten much better than 2020. Any words of advice, hope, encouragement to people leading other people in this time? Well, I think one of our big problems is a captivity to fear

where what we sort of fall to is the idea that the audience I'm speaking to right now is the audience. And there's something about fallen human nature that tends to cower a little bit and to say, well, what kind of person do I have to be before them? Well, I mean, not only do we really need a sense of standing before the judgment seat of Christ, but also a sense of the fact that our audience is not just the audience in front of us. There are people overhearing us. And oftentimes, the decisions that we make right now to avoid some sort of discomfort will mean that we cannot speak to people. So if you look back and you see, I mean, you look back and you say, why were there

so few white Southern pastors who would speak out against Jim Crow? Well where you go back and you talk to them, and what they would say is, well, my people aren't ready for that. I'm just sort of conserving my influence, or we can't do that right now because we would lose people, or we would be distracted from what we're doing. I mean, all of those sorts of excuses. It's easy for us all to do that, which means not only do you end up being unfaithful to what Christ has called you to do, but you also can't speak to the people who are on the margins. And I mean, Paul says, I didn't yield to them, the Judaizers, for a moment so that the gospel would be preserved for you. I mean, it would be easy simply to say, well, I'm just, you know, okay, these people want to

demand circumcision. Okay. I mean, why am I going to fight that battle? Well, because there are Gentiles out there who aren't in the seat of power, but who are loved by Jesus and need to know Jesus. And if you don't stand up for them when they're absent in terms of power, you can't stand with them later when they're present. And so keeping that in mind, I think, is just sort of reframing your audience constantly is necessary. So don't – if I can boil it down, don't be scared to speak and embody the truth even if you might face some kind of backlash from people in power. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good word.

Well, Russ, thanks so much for this dialogue. I can keep going. But yeah, both of us probably have places we got to go and people to see. So thanks so much for this dialogue. I bet I can keep going. But yeah, both of us probably have places we got to go and people to see. So thanks so much for doing that, for being courageous and being a model for us to follow. Don't fall, man. Not a lot of pressure. You either. You either.

Yeah. All right, man. Thanks for having me. It's been good to be with you thank you you too you