One Eye Squinted
The church has a Cambridge problem
(RNS) — Fake testimony. Inflated credentials. Fabricated personal history. Embellished resume. Incompetent scholarship. Blatant, repeated and rampant plagiarism.
I’m not talking about Cambridge University and the recent tragedy involving Jason Arday, a professor who was accused of all these things, subsequently resigned and was found dead just a few days later, presumably by suicide.
No, I’m not talking about Cambridge. I’m talking about the church and Christian leaders.
The problems I list above are far more common and overlooked or excused than they should be among those who claim the Christian faith.
To be sure, charlatans and cheaters are everywhere. But Christians would do well to examine how the church attracts and fails to prevent these forms of fraudulent behavior, especially among leaders. Christians can criticize affirmative action and DEI hires all they want (and they do), but the continued employment of disqualified pastors in the pulpit — whether disqualified by sexual abuse, cover up of abuse, plagiarism or not upholding the character requirements of 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9 — is the church’s own form of an employment program.
This is partly why “fallen pastors so rarely walk away.” Church institutions have their own boxes to check when it comes to hiring (as they should), but having some boxes checked should not cancel out the other boxes that list the most essential qualifications. As I’ve written before, the church is not a sugar daddy.
Many forms of dishonesty have made church headlines in recent years, and these forms range in severity and impact. Yet each form occurs within a culture, and that culture likewise exhibits degrees of tolerance or intolerance for such dishonesty. A culture that overlooks the little things is a culture that more easily overlooks the big things.
Perhaps the most seemingly harmless form of deceit in Christian ministries and institutions is the insistence by some on using the title of “Doctor” when a doctoral degree is honorary rather than earned. For example, I worked at an evangelical university for years before I learned that the university’s founder and president — whom everyone referred to as “Doctor” — had only earned an undergraduate degree from a Bible college. But long-held rules of etiquette and academic standards say that honorary doctorates do not confer the privilege of being addressed by the title of “Doctor” beyond use by the institution conferring the honor. (The same rules say that people like me with an earned Ph.D. are not to be referred to as “Doctor” outside an academic or professional setting.)
On the surface, this may seem like merely an etiquette question and not an ethical or moral one. But when you stop to ask why someone would want to appear to have more credentials than they do, moral and ethical questions come up fast. An institution that puffs up the credentials of its president is less likely to closely examine the credentials of a celebrity hire — or to hold that celebrity sufficiently to account when discrepancies in his life story emerge that cannot be explained away.
One of the earliest red flags around the once-beloved apologist Ravi Zacharias was his faked academic credentials. Later, more serious revelations of serial sexual misconduct emerged, more proof that institutional accountability must happen early and often.
But the modern American church has a celebrity problem, a topic RNS podcast host Katelyn Beaty addresses compellingly in her 2022 book “Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church.”
Celebrity status covers a multitude of sins. Pastors of national renown, in presidential positions or in high-profile churches plagiarize, sometimes repeatedly, with near immunity. But Christians of all people should recognize and respect the connection between authorship and authority. One becomes an authority not through originality alone but through the study of reliable, trustworthy sources. Showing that one has done such study increases one’s authority rather than diminishing it. But celebrity status blinds us to false authorities and those who would tickle our ears by telling us the stories we want to hear, whether about themselves or ourselves.
This lack of robustness leads inevitably to an inferiority complex, one that seems to be growing among Christians now that we live in a time when to be a Christian will almost certainly bring skepticism or disdain from the rest of the world (as if the Bible hadn’t told us it would), a context one writer calls a “negative world.”
One way of being shielded from that sense of inferiority is to create one’s own schools, seminaries, publishers and businesses that mirror what the secular world does but keeps it all “in house,” thereby eliminating, or at least mitigating, the competition. Of course, there are very good reasons for building these institutions. However, what may begin as a desire for purity and biblical fidelity can end up constructing an echo chamber, an intellectual and cultural ghetto, a closed system in which those inside are cut off not only from what is bad in the world but also from what is good. (As someone who has lived and worked most of my adult life in such institutions, I know of what I speak.)
This echo chamber effect is exactly what many critics point to as the problem that is the undoing of higher education.
A recent study from Yale University warns that the ideological echo chamber that has been cultivated in institutions of higher education over the past few decades is bringing about their own “irrelevance” as colleges and universities become increasingly “disconnected from mainstream American life.”
Inasmuch as this has been increasingly evident in academia, it also can be true of the church and its institutions.
But it’s not merely irrelevance at stake. It’s integrity. It’s our testimony to the world and each other of whether or not we really believe what we say we believe.
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