While Caitlin Beatty was working at the evangelical publication Christianity Today, she noticed an unfortunate trend. Through her work as an editor, she would hear scandalous rumors about powerful, influential Christian pastors—and encounter great fear and reluctance to claim any responsibility.
In several high-profile cases, those rumors turned out to be credible, and the aftermath left its mark on Beata. She began to wonder why we even bother to put these Christians on pedestals that eventually become so high that they are hard to knock down. As she puts it, “Is celebrity itself working to shield leaders from appropriate accountability because we’re really afraid to ask the hard questions about heroes of the faith?”
Beata’s thoughts led to her forthcoming book, Celebrities for Jesus: How Personalities, Platforms, and Profits Are Harming the Church. The book not only seeks to answer how the American church has succumbed to the celebrity mentality, but also how we emerge from it and what might be next.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
We’re so immersed in celebrity culture that it’s a little hard to recognize it when we see it, but you feel like we’re in a unique moment right now, as the American church, right?
There are two lines of answer. One is that I believe that especially evangelicalism, in the last 100, 150 years, has valued individuals over institutions. The most famous evangelist of the last century, Billy Graham, was never formally associated with a local church. He helped establish many ministries and institutions, but most of his ministry was lived on the road, before crowds of millions, broadcasting his messages using mass media such as radio and television. That’s how most people know about him, to hear something he said on the radio or on television.
Because of the spiritual emphasis of the evangelical movement, there is a tendency to distrust institutions. The idea is that institutions are dead or broken or dusty, or “just because you go to church doesn’t mean you’re a real Christian.” You have to have this born-again, highly individualistic experience of salvation, and that often comes through the preaching of a particular evangelist or writer. So I think there’s something about American evangelicalism, that we’re suspicious of institutions because we don’t believe they’re doing dynamic work for the Kingdom.
But also, the privileging of individuals over institutions can be seen in all segments of society in the last 50 years. Even in contemporary politics, the work of Congress is often subsumed by individual political leaders’ thinking of Congress as a platform for their personal brand and their personality. We see this on the left and right. The boring, nitty-gritty details of legislating are a lot less sexy than tweeting something worthy of a fire emoji.
So, it is obvious that there has been a significant drop in trust in institutions. And instead, I think many Americans are predisposed to attach themselves to individual personalities, most of whom they have never met in any personal way. But these individuals not only symbolize some kind of value or aspiration or political ideology, but also a theological flavor.
When I became an evangelical Christian as a young teenager, I was never told anything about what it meant to be a Methodist or about the history of this denomination going back to Wesley. My own understanding of myself as a Christian was related to the music I listened to, the books I read and associated with certain figures in the evangelical world as a way to reinforce my own Christian identity.
This is the culture that raised me. This is the religious orientation in which I grew up. This is not a removal. This is a really deep diagnosis of something that seems sick in the Church, so that the Church can recover and be made whole.
Your book highlights some early examples of “Christian celebrities” such as Billy Sunday, DL Moody, and Billy Graham, and what I admire is that you illustrate why the decisions they made that led to their fame made sense. Roughly speaking, they weren’t necessarily trying to rise above the local church. They simply recognized what - to them - seemed to be an effective strategy for spreading the gospel.
All three men—Moody, Sunday, and Graham—took a very pragmatic, and some would say naïve, approach to the use of mass media. Obviously with Moody and Nedelja, it was mostly newspapers. But with Graham, any new medium was seen as a neutral tool to be used to share the gospel with as many people as possible. So there was a very pragmatic embrace of mass media, without questioning how the medium affects how people receive the message.
The fact that most Americans would hear Graham preach on a television special and then be able to turn to the next channel and watch The price is right — how does that change the way we receive the gospel message as a form of consumption and entertainment primarily received in a very individualistic context, apart from the larger community?
All of them, to one degree or another, considered the media to be neutral tools that could maximize the number of people who could receive this message without thinking about how the medium changes the message, and whether true discipleship is lived in individualistic contexts. , or whether it only makes sense in a local group of believers.
And we see this most clearly with Graham, he tried to befriend the main celebrities. Billy Sunday was a popular baseball player before he entered the service. So he came in already having some celebrity popularity. Graham was very adept at establishing relationships with Hollywood stars and political leaders, and planted himself among celebrities as a form of credibility. For example, “If even this evangelical Christian, who actually believes in a literal hell, can be friends with Katharine Hepburn, maybe this belief isn’t so strange after all.” He’s so likable, he’s so engaging, he’s so easy to listen to.” So many Christians attached themselves to the Billy Graham brand because he seemed to give cultural credibility to a faith that many evangelicals felt was increasingly misunderstood either out of political favor or marginalized in mainstream society.
Obviously, the pastoral friendship with celebrities is the subject of much discussion and debate in certain church cultures today. And certain non-church cultures.
Yes. And I do not mean to say that there was nothing pure in these ministerial intentions. Celebrities need Jesus too, so I’m sure there’s some really good stuff in these friendships.
For example, you have Chris Pratt, who became famous by acting on TV and in movies, and then publicly speaking about his faith. But it is interesting to see how then everyday Christians attached themselves to him and to other famous people who publicly profess their faith in Christ, such as cultural win. For example, “Isn’t it significant that we have someone who believes that Jesus is Lord and believes that the Scriptures are inerrant, also makes multi-million dollar movies and appears on the red carpet and is married to very hot women?” We are attached to them, in part because we like that it lends credibility to a religion that seems strange to many of our neighbors.
Well, the pushback is: Isn’t it good that these people are using their huge platforms to talk about God in ways that are engaging, attractive, and hopefully biblical?
Of course. It’s not a bad thing for celebrities with huge platforms to speak authentically about their faith. I think there should be room for anyone with that level of platform to speak personally about their faith. I love that Chance the Rapper is a Christian who is open about his faith.
But I also want to ask, at what point is it dangerous for me to get overly attached to someone I don’t really know? Am I attached to them more than normal Christians, who I actually know quite well and have a relationship with and adore? Do I prioritize someone who has the power of a celebrity to have a higher spiritual status than I do as an everyday Christian, and what does that reveal about what I think is important? Am I just accepting the world’s understanding of power?
So what is the solution? I think we’ve seen the fruits of this thinking in various scandals — especially in the Hillsong sphere. What do we replace this kind of “worldly understanding of power” with?
I would challenge the notion that bigger is better. So much of the American church has imitated secular business principles to measure success. And what we are looking for, as people who bear witness to the reality of God in our lives, is not the number of stocks in the pews. The metric of discipleship is that you actually become a community where people are formed into the image of Christ. We need to get out of the metrics of numbers. I absolutely believe that it is not true that what it means to be blessed by God is to grow in numbers. You can grow in numbers for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with God or blessing.
I wonder if we are actually in a time when the Church will have to accept that it is becoming smaller and more obscure. They won’t feel successful. It will be scary and like maybe God won’t bless us. But what if a smaller church and a more localized understanding of Christian discipleship is how we perfect ourselves, so that the gospel we witness truly has lasting power and real credibility among our neighbors?