From “The Soulwork of Justice: Four Movements for Contemplative Action” by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson
For Catholics, that longing for certitude found expression in papal infallibility and hierarchical authority. For some whose understanding of the church and authority was transformed by the Protestant Reformation, words from the pulpit, confessions, and texts became truth, instead of the Word becoming flesh. For many evangelicals this “lust for certitude” found expression in airtight doctrines of biblical inerrancy, a “tightening of the screws.”
For some of us, rational certainty about faith may have been annihilated by the moral inconsistencies of the church and its leaders rather than the intellectual inconsistencies of its belief system. Tragic stories of hypocrisy, failure, and psychological destructiveness flow across denominational lines, filling podcasts and generating devastating headlines. Sexual abuse and its coverup in the Catholic Church have been revealed in the heartbreaking witness of the wounded, causing hundreds of thousands to leave the church, and often leave behind the earlier certainty of the their faith.
The headline-grabbing scandals in Protestantism have often come from the public moral and spiritual disintegration of prominent leaders. Exposes, like The Secrets of Hillsong on Hulu, describe how a charismatic pastor like Carl Lentz descended into a publicized sexual scandal in a toxic organizational culture with no moral accountability. Or Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets on Amazon Prime, revealing the internal wounds, alienation, and disillusionment within the story of the fundamentalist family. Or the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, chronicling Marc Driscoll’s toxic leadership style with its masculine authoritarianism, led to the collapse of the fifteen-thousand megachurch.