The Sexual Abuse Scandal That’s Engulfed the Evangelical Movement

Whenever Missouri megapreacher Mike Bickle received prophecies from God, he tended to shout the good news from the rooftops. But there was one recurring vision that he only shared with a few people. In the early 1980s, Bickle—who would go on to found International House of Prayer in Kansas City—confided in Tammy Woods, the 14-year-old who was babysitting his children, that his wife Diane would die and “that we could be together,” a prelude to his repeatedly sexually abusing her. The founder of the outrageously successful church certainly felt that God had his back. He had the same vision over a decade later, when he told his 19-year-old female intern that his wife would die and that they would get married.

But maybe God had other plans. Thanks to these two women and their willingness to come forward to attest to Bickle’s misdeeds, a larger crisis of sexual abuse in evangelical Christianity has been exposed, and countless more allegations have followed. In June, Trump spiritual adviser Robert Morris resigned from his Dallas-based Gateway megachurch after he was accused of abusing a 12-year-old girl. Last month, his successor was fired for undisclosed “moral issues.”

That two towering figures of the charismatic evangelical movement have faced such serious allegations ought to lead to soul searching, and more importantly, a rush to ensure better safeguards so that pastors cannot abuse their authority. If the past is any guide, there’s little hope that any kind of reckoning is at hand. As we’ve seen with a series of similar scandals and a damning report into sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s evangelical leaders have made failing to act responsibly into an art form.

Sexual abuse in churches has long been thought of as a “Catholic disease,” but as recent events have shown, it is unchecked power and authority, not celibacy, that is the root of the problem. It is also very much a crisis of the evangelical movement’s own making; in this milieu, commercial incentives have produced a culture where the more charismatic and authoritarian the leader, the more successful the church. The widespread culture of abuse, cover-up, and denial has been exacerbated by the kind of corruption that arises when friends appoint friends to positions of authority, tamping down any incentives toward transparency and accountability.

A big reason the problem has gotten out of control is the growing trend among evangelical churches of all stripes to label themselves “nondenominational.” According to religious data cruncher Ryan Burge, nearly 13 percent of all adults in the United States now identify as nondenominational Protestant Christians, and there are now more nondenominationals in the U.S. than mainline Protestants.

While largely driven by branding—why label yourself a Baptist or Pentecostal and risk turning souls away?—the temptation to be free of any form of oversight, and anyone to answer to, has also proven powerful. Churches traditionally have boards of elders, but time and time again we see these evangelical organizations cage the watchdogs by stacking their governing bodies with fellow travelers and people that church leaders have appointed to positions of authority through insider promotions. What it means is that American Christianity is now filled with thousands of autonomous pastors with no accountability, oversight, or hierarchies to answer to.

Matthew D. Taylor, a religious studies scholar and author of The Violent Take It by Force, says that the relative lack of accountability in these structures is attractive to certain personality types. “There’s a lot more free rein in a nondenominational space for them to build their own empire,” he says. While there are many fine leaders in such churches, Taylor says that “people who are more megalomaniacal and authoritarian in their personality” are understandably drawn to spaces where they can have more control and structures that can enshrine their own power.

In the fivefold apostolic and prophetic model, which emerged in Pentecostal congregations and is flourishing among nondenominational churches, Taylor says, “there’s rarely more than two degrees of separation between any of these leaders.” Preachers say that they have oversight from their boards and mentorship from “spiritual parents,” but these are usually people whom they know from the church conference and speaking circuit, where healthy honorariums are the name of the game—fostering a culture where good judgment is clouded and the reining in of abusive pastors hits institutional roadblocks.

“They’re incentivized to protect their friends and protect the oligarchy,” Taylor says. “They all have a stake in it, and none of them have personal incentives other than principled theological convictions to actually hold their friends accountable, so that the incentives all push in the direction of abuse and cover-up rather than in the direction of accountability and exposure.”

Beyond the structural issues, there are cultural and theological trends on the rise that only help to expose congregations to potential suffering. “So much of a charismatic leader’s authority is attached to gifting, and not to training or education,” Taylor says. “Their authority is in their charisma, in a quite literal sense, and that creates a permission structure for wielding that authority in ways that can abuse or harm their followers.”

As the Bickle scandal highlighted, it’s not just sexual abuse but spiritual abuse that is occurring through manipulative prophecy. So-called revelations from God effectively license abusive behaviors, as direct messages from the big man upstairs are forefronted by the movement, which only compounds the trauma on victims.

And while nondenominational churches are revealing the harms perpetrated by a lack of oversight, the crisis of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC, shows that there is a cultural rot in the heart of American evangelism. The SBC is known as a “low touch” denomination, meaning that it’s not particularly hierarchically rigid. But these churches still have some organizational structures in place. And time and time again, SBC-affiliated organizations have shown that their priority is protecting the institution rather than victims—hence a a recent checkered history of sins getting swept under the rug.

In 2022, an external report exposed the extent of sexual abuse in the SBC’s ranks. It found that between 2000 and 2019, some 380 SBC clergy, lay leaders, and volunteers faced allegations of sexual misconduct from more than 700 victims. Too often, when senior leaders were made aware of allegations, they chose to hush them up. The report also found that survivors faced “resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” from some members of the Convention’s executive committee.

The report is the kind of thing that the SBC might reasonably want to address during its annual gathering. It’s proven to be deft at avoiding the issue roiling its ranks. Earlier this summer, the SBC chose to issue resolutions condemning in vitro fertilization and supporting Israel at its annual conference, prioritizing culture-war issues over proposed reforms to the way the denomination deals with sexual abuse. (The 2023 gathering issued decrees on gender transitioning and artificial intelligence, but nothing about abuse.)

In a turn of events that could be farcical if it wasn’t so serious, Jonathan Elwing, a Florida pastor who opposed the implementation of reforms that might help curb the rampant sexual abuse in the organization’s ranks, which he contended would mean “the end of the SBC,” has since been charged with sexually abusing a 2-year-old after explicit photos were found on his phone.

No one expects the SBC or any other denomination to be omnipotent, but religious studies scholar Julie Ingersoll says that unlike denominations such as the Presbyterians, the SBC has no hierarchical authority structure over its congregations—and is using the congregational structure to shield itself from accusations that it is failing to address the 2022 report.

“It’s a good old boy network,” she says, where “the structure, by design, is intended to protect people in authority.” Traditionally, many Baptists haven’t even understood the SBC as a denomination, but a cooperative effort that pools resources for everything from overseas missions to exerting political influence.

“Preservation of the patriarchal structure underneath it creates a culture that is ripe for abuse,” Ingersoll says. “It’s a place where men are in charge and women are in submission.” Just as with nondenominational evangelical churches, cultural issues are also to blame. The purity culture that has long been a mainstay of the movement “puts the weight of men’s sexual sin on women,” Ingersoll says, with people in positions of power asking women what type of clothes they were wearing when they were abused.

The SBC’s teachings on sin are impeding meaningful reform as well. “At the very core of how evangelicalism works is a conception of sin that brings somebody to the point of repentance, and the repentance is followed by an official kind of forgiveness,” Ingersoll says. “That forgiveness has come to mean that, particularly with powerful men, anything that they are guilty of should be put aside and forgotten. That kind of forgiveness doesn’t apply to women.”

Another important characteristic affecting churches adequately dealing with abuse in their ranks is influencer and celebrity culture, which transcends denominations. “People who find themselves in positions of authority in these kinds of churches are usually highly charismatic, not in the biblical sense, but in that people are drawn to them,” she says. “Those folks bring in church members, and that means money, and that means power.”

Influencer culture, where superstar preachers are worshipped in their own right, further lends itself to abusers having tremendous power over their victims. No one wants to kill the golden goose; all too often, people who might be in a position to do something have been promoted and enriched by a person perpetrating abuse.

For Ingersoll, all the lip service and repentance in the world cannot fix a broken culture that has allowed sexual abuse to flourish in America’s evangelical churches. “Unless they address the underlying patriarchal structure of the way the whole institution works, the problem of abuse is going to continue,” she says.