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.
Hellbound and Down 