Are Evangelicals close to outing their #1 musician?

Rich Mullins’ twisted story gets twistier

He may be the most significant musician in modern Evangelical Christianity—and a bizarre figure the religion has never been able to figure out.

Rich Mullins died on September 19, 1997 in a car accident. As Evangelicals marked the 25th anniversary, Mullins was trending on Twitter. My 2020 post “Was Rich Mullins Gay?” was getting a spike in views.

And there was a profile in the New York Times, where Mullins’ biographer is quoted. James Bryan Smith says he’d not mentioned Mullins having an “immensely difficult” history of “dark” sin.

Smith had known Mullins.

He was a professor at a Christian college that Mullins came to attend. After Rich’s death, the Mullins family asked Smith to write a biography.

It was quite a challenge. Close friends, like ‘Beaker’—the young man often seen in Mullins videos—didn’t want to talk. Amy Grant was only briefly quoted and it’s not clear she was interviewed.

Then Mullins himself had been given to telling multiple versions of events, discussing some vague inner tortures haunting his youth.

Smith’s 2000 book, An Arrow Pointing to Heaven—published by the Southern Baptist Convention—was labeled a ‘devotional biography’. Amid all the devotion, there was little sense of Mullins’ life. When researching my post on Mullins’ sexuality, I emailed Smith asking if he could cite any evidence that Mullins was not gay. I never heard back.

Was it a coincidence that my profile widely circulated and he now says more?

Maybe or maybe not. But a religion writer for the New York Times, Tish Harrison Warren, reached Smith for her piece of October 2, 2022, and he had something new. There’d been a scene, he said, where Mullins sat him down and said he had to confess “everything.”

This is full of Evangelical code.

First, the mention of a ‘distant father’. The religion reads this and understands that sexuality is now the subject. The typical reading of gay people is that they were created so by the lack of a strong father.

Then the talk of the ‘dark sin’ as nestled in ‘childhood trauma’ is another pointer to a gay context. As with Jonathan Merritt, the religious solution to dealing with gay people is also to say that the person had been sexually abused as a child.

Then the “dark seasons of sin” talk is really strong. An Evangelical mind would check the usual sources of ‘sin’: alcohol, drugs, masturbation, porn, sleeping with women.

But “dark seasons of sin” is really suggesting more. The one subject in view here is homosexuality. 🔶