Matt Chandler’s weird sexless sex scandal

A megachurch drama leaves Evangelicals confused

On Sunday, a star Evangelical megachurch pastor tearfully announced he was being put on a disciplinary leave of absence.

But what happened? All Matt Chandler confessed to his congregation at The Village Church in Texas is that some Instagram DM chats with a woman in the church had gotten a little personal. “I promise it wasn’t a big deal,” he assured.

But even Evangelicals noticed—the details were odd.

It hadn’t been Chandler’s idea to make the matter public.

Back in February, he was approached in the foyer by a woman in the church who was a friend of the woman he’d had been messaging. She said that she found the exchanges inappropriate.

The confrontation “disoriented” him, he says. He countered that his wife knew about the messages, as did the husband of the woman.

He said there was some “coarse and foolish joking” but there’s no other description of the content of the messages.

He went to his wife, and to the elders of his church.

The elders engaged a law firm.

As they reported in a separate statement, Chandler’s social media accounts, cell phone and email were all searched. The law firm was not named, but the New York Times reported it was Castañeda and Heidelman, which do “discreet internal” investigations, not independent ones.

The only problem identified was the Instagram messages, in which, the elders concluded, Chandler “did not use language appropriate for a pastor, and he did not model a behavior that we expect from him.”

He’d violated, they held, the church’s social media policy, as well as the standard in 1 Timothy 3:2 that a Christian leader be “above reproach.”

Chandler allows only that the relationship was “unguarded and unwise.”

His “inability” to see a problem, he says, is what resulted in his suspension. The elders felt this “revealed something not right, something unhealthy, in me.”

But it was being handled, he said, in the great Evangelical tradition of ‘discipline’ and ‘restoration’. He’d be back, he promised.

The church gave him a standing ovation.

Those were the ‘official’ details.

Typically, for Evangelicals, those go unquestioned. On cue, indeed, many were layering on the usual talk. As a great man of God, Chandler been targeted by Satan, i.e. a woman. As one woman puts it:

“The enemy is prowling like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour…”

Many started to mutter about the necessity of the ‘Billy Graham Rule’, i.e. for Christian men never to be alone with women not their wives—which was not even Chandler’s problem.

Less unobservant Evangelicals were asking questions. If Chandler’s DM messages were so innocent, why not release them?

Why weren’t the women involved making statements? The whole matter was being handled by church staff, all of them male.

If Chandler acknowledges wrongdoing, even if inadvertent, why had he not apologized to the women?

Why had Lauren Chandler, Matt’s wife and herself a national figure, not been by his side, or released a statement?

On July 31st, she’d posted an effusive Instagram post about their happy marriage, anticipating a long life together, etc. She had presumably known then about the DMs. Her later silence is odd.

There was little presumption he was innocent.

Evangelicals seemed to take in stride the possibility of a sex scandal. It would be, writes author Beth Allison Barr, “all too predictable.”

Boz Tchividjian, Billy Graham’s grandson and an activist for accountability on Evangelical sexual abuse, suspected “there is much more to this story…”

Among experienced churchgoers, that became a chorus. There was, many thought, a “sense of deception,” an “ambiguous” quality to the disclosures that hinted facts were being withheld.

Barbed suggestions were being made.

The church’s membership contract, some suggested, could be used as a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The women might be legally prevented from speaking—one of the perks of keeping wrongdoing within a church.

The matter being narrated by church staff seemed like a staged production. The well-known Anglican cleric Scot McKnight had a cynical reading:

“The one who tells the story controls the glory.”

And many recalled the church has been bad on scandals in the past. In 2015, the elders ‘disciplined’ a woman for leaving her pedophile husband. The guy had only looked at child porn, they held, not gotten sexual. Therefore, there was no “biblical grounds” for divorce.

The same year, Chandler was accused by staff of presiding over a workplace given to rampant bullying. The accusers then had been made to hand over their computers, and sign NDA’s to keep it quiet.

The Chandler marriage might bear scrutiny?

They’d seemed a “beautiful family”—white, affluent, outdoorsy, deeply committed to the idea of being God’s favorite people.

Matt and Lauren met in 1997, in the throes of the Evangelical “purity culture.” He was a pastor at a youth camp where she was a camper. Matt was 23, and Lauren was 17 and in high school.

“I can say with all integrity that everything was above board,” he assures in a 2015 video done to promote a product line of his “complementarian” thoughts on marriage, heavy with talk of female “submission.”

Their first seven years of marriage were “terrible.”

They fought frequently. He had “deeply embedded insecurities,” he says, and he read her as “careless” and “self-absorbed.” He explains:

“I had this over-romanticized view of what marriage was, and what Lauren was going to bring to my life, and what wounds she was going to heal…”

Lauren speaks of her efforts to please her husband, since “if he’s pleased with me, then I know I’m okay with God.” But he wasn’t pleased with her.

He claims their marriage rejuvenated when he gave up on being her ‘spiritual head’. The key realization, he recalls, was: “I need to work on me.”

Matt Chandler has no seminary education.

He tried twice, and quit twice. He dismisses the issue in a deleted 2009 blog post. He has an undergraduate degree with some classes on the Bible, and seems never to have studied biblical languages.

He had all the real requirements for being an Evangelical cleric. He’s tall and played football in school. He has a very pretty wife. He presents a highly self-serving theology that dignifies Evangelicals as divine.

His writings are shockingly inaccurate on biblical details. His 2015 book on marriage, The Mingling of Souls, claims the Hebrew word for ‘woman’ means “mine”—as if woman belongs to the man. It’s pure fantasy.

He writes in effusive praise of the penis:

“God put the penis on the man, and he put the testicles on the man, and he filled those testicles with sperm. He created all tissue — some that would expand, some that would secrete; he filled the man with testosterone that would drive much of his life.”

There is no similar treatment of the vulva and vagina.

Matt Chandler sees Christianity as a religion of his maleness, with the deity manifesting in his penis. His photo feed continues the suggestion.

Lauren sort of suggests she’s not exactly been in love with him.

In 2009 he had a cancer scare, and she talks about a fear coming over her of not being taken care of. While he was getting treated, she developed a fantasy life of being married to other men.

Chandler was cured, but the fantasy of being with another man, she says, “grew into this huge monster…”

Each kept performing their roles in public. They were the Evangelical stars, doing it “God’s way.”

For an Evangelical woman she took to wearing very heavy makeup.

I wonder if she’d believed him at first on the Instagram DM story. When he was forced to admit there’s “something not right, something unhealthy, in me,” she might have to re-think many of his statements, so often cloaking him in a ‘godly’ character.

But is the reality more earthly?

Matt Chandler likes pretty young blond women. As Lauren hits 42, his eye starts to wander.

It’s not a divine drama with God, the angels, Satan and ‘sin’. It’s just life. 🔶