Top 10 Evangelical Sex Scandals of the 2010s

It’s hard to pick, but here’s my favorites

I’m looking back at the 2010s in Evangelical history, trying to find the big sex scandals—the ones that tell you something about the religion.

Though I must say, for me, it’s like going home. Here’s my top 10.

1. Donald J. Trump

Could it be that, for Evangelicals, it is really all about power? Are the “rules” just expedience? It began to seem so in the election cycle of 2016. To the dismay of even many prominent pastors, the religion went hard for Donald J. Trump, a man who wouldn’t be allowed into many churches.

The fallout from the Trump presidency prompted many new contentions in the religion. As in critiques from Beth Moore or the book Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the religion was now battling itself.

2. Bill Gothard’s sex factory goes public

In 2015, the TLC reality T.V. show 19 Kids and Counting, about the very reproductive Duggar family, was cancelled after only five molestations. Josh Duggar was then age 27 and working as the director of a Christian lobbyist group. At 15, he’d gotten gropey with four sisters and another girl. Then he was revealed as a member of the dating site Ashley Madison.

Some time after the molestations he’d been sent to the family’s Evangelical guru, Bill Gothard, who’d for decades run a seminar called “Basic Life Principles.” Unmarried and childless, Gothard saw the Bible as a guide to having a crazy number of kids.

In 2016, the accusations against Gothard went public. A lawsuit by ten girls was withdrawn owing to issues like the statute of limitations, but Patheos summarizes: girls as young as 13 were groomed for molestation, with allegations ranging from groping to rape by Gothard, as his organization overlooked reports of sex abuse by others.

3. Barnabas Piper gets a divorce

The well-known Evangelical pastor John Piper has had some trouble with sons. The only one who seemed to care about being an upstanding Christian was Barnabas, and in 2017, he announced he was divorcing.

The general Evangelical idea has been that divorced people are prohibited from ‘ministry’ and are often kicked out of churches. But not to worry. Keeping up the Piper brand, Barnabas managed to find a little workaround.

He decided to say his wife died…sort of. “It ended in death, though nobody died,” he writes of his marriage. He framed his divorce as her abandonment, saying it felt to him like a physical death, thus meeting Evangelical requirements for divorce. Barnabas remarried in 2020. The reality is that the Evangelical “rules” aren’t enforced on straight men.

4. Eugene Peterson goes off script

In 2017, religion journalist Jonathan Merritt heard that Eugene Peterson, the Presbyterian pastor revered for decades of sermons, essays, memoirs, and his Message Bible translation, wasn’t so anti-gay.

If Merritt (who is gay) hadn’t asked, nobody would’ve ever known. But in an interview published in Religion News on July 12, he pops the question. Peterson replies “they seem to have as good a spiritual life as I do,” that “we’re in a transition,” and “it’s not a right or wrong thing as far as I’m concerned.” Asked if he’d perform a same-sex marriage, he said yes.

The day the interview was released, Evangelicals went on the attack. The LifeWay chain of bookstores said it would “no longer sell his books.”

The next day, Peterson released a statement: “To clarify, I affirm a biblical view of marriage: one man to one woman. I affirm a biblical view of everything.”

A later biography claimed Peterson was suffering from dementia, though he seems lucid. A statement was drafted and Peterson signed it.

“To clarify, I affirm a biblical view of marriage: one man to one woman. I affirm a biblical view of everything.”

5. Bill Hybels gives a mean massage

Evangelicals didn’t weather #MeToo very well, as in a 2018 exposé in the New York Times of megachurch pastor Bill Hybels. His secretary in the 1980s said he’d hit her up for some sexy massages and hanky-panky.

That first back rub in 1986 led to multiple occasions over nearly two years in which he fondled her breasts and rubbed against her. The incidents later escalated to one occasion of oral sex. Ms. Baranowski said she was mortified and determined to stay silent.

More women came forward and Hybels, naturally, denied it all. His board believed him, so long as he accelerated his planned retirement. But with the accusations badly exposing them to the #MeToo’d public, they realized that wouldn’t cut it. The elder board announced a mass resignation — during a church service to a stunned congregation.

6. The Nashville Statement gets rained out

In August 2017, many of the most famous clerics of Evangelicalism, headed up by John Piper, gathered in Nashville to release the ‘Nashville Statement’, a declaration of holy war on feminists, gays, transgender people, etc.

As ThinkProgress noted, this was essentially “inventing a new kind of Christianity that’s all about sex…”

If a triumphant mood was hoped for, God didn’t supply one. At the time, much of the Houston area was underwater courtesy of Hurricane Harvey. And a picture went around on social media of Joel Osteen’s massive Lakewood Church closed while thousands of refugees were displaced.

Though nominally Evangelical, Osteen wasn’t part of the Nashville crowd. But for a moment he represented the church. The doors are closed.

7. The playboy of Liberty University

Liberty University isn’t that great of a name for the most restrictive place in the nation. Run by Jerry Falwell, Jr., the son of the dead titan of right-wing Evangelical politics, it’s been a beacon of Evangelical morality and politics. Sexual contact? Going to dances? R-rated movies? All banned.

Enter Brandon Ambrosino. The gay former student at Liberty (who’d written about his time there) decided to poke around. Politico ran his report of a sex-addled playboy ruling over a sex-punishing fiefdom, rife with mismanagement and back-biting, with a glimpse at the Falwell family’s alter egos as Miami nightclub-going sophisticates.

8. C.J. Mahaney vs. Rachael Denhollander

Like most megachurch pastors, C.J. Mahaney (a signatory of the Nashville Statement) had almost no theological education, but an ability to convince people he was tight with God. Running an expanding network of churches called Sovereign Grace Ministries, centered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, he seemed to be giving the Pope a run for his money.

Then in 2011, word got out that his church community had been a child rape factory, of boys and girls, and Mahaney and his staff were accused of covering it up. A lawsuit by 11 child victims against 13 accused rapists came after the statue of limitations had expired. All the enabling clerics got off, and the church continues to refuse an outside investigation.

Mahaney went to Kentucky to pursue new church projects, as many vouched for his “personal integrity.” Enter Rachael Denhollander, the gymnast turned lawyer who in 2016 had been the first accuser of Larry Nassar, the Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor and sexual predator. After her, some 250 women and a young man came forward.

Denhollander and her family attended a church in Louisville that had worked to enable Mahaney to come back into public life. She was asked to leave when she protested. She started a public campaign to advocate for sexual abuse victims within Evangelicalism, with Mahaney in her sights. Owing to the resulting pressure, he was disinvited from the conference — the most accountability he’d ever receive.

In an interview in Christianity Today, Denhollander describes how, in the Evangelical world, “a lot of predators go unchecked, often for decades.”

9. Joshua Harris divorces Evangelicalism

At age 21, Joshua Harris wrote a book that became, in 1997, a big bestseller: I Kissed Dating Goodbye. It was given to many an Evangelical teenager, as he promises a future for Evangelicalism that was focused on sexual “purity.”

He became a pastor under C.J. Mahaney. Re-located to Maryland, Harris kept his show going: in books, speeches, blog posts, playing the part of a married pastor, perpetually tempted by sex.

When the church’s child abuse scandal broke, he broke with it. Amid the scandal, he made his own headlines, in 2013, commenting on himself being a victim of sexual abuse. He was realizing the church didn’t deal with the issue very well.

His wife asked for a divorce, and Joshua leaned into his situation. He kissed Christianity goodbye.

10. Beth Moore vs. John MacArthur

Evangelicals aren’t too keen on women and even less so on women teachers. But a few had been queasily allowed, like Beth Moore. That owed largely to her insisting she’d been sexually molested, and just being really canny about the strange status of a Southern Baptist female teacher.

But the religion didn’t really like it. She got on the nerves of John MacArthur, the reigning patriarch of Evangelicalism. At a celebration of his 50th year of pastoring his church, he was asked about women doing the same. “There’s no case that can be made biblically for a woman preacher,” he thunders. Asked to sum up his view of Beth Moore, he said: “Go home!”

Social media lit up, as Christians seem to realize this was a bad look. Even Erick Erickson, the right-wing pundit and MacArthur fan, had problems. Male clerics taking this approach, he notes, are “speaking only to themselves and convincing hardly anyone.”

But the reality is that it played very well. Evangelicals like a belligerant man, and thinks of women as flighty and unreliable. Not long after, on cue, Beth Moore left the religion. 🔶