Celebrity Pastors and the Roots of American Evangelical Dysfunction

by Phil Johnson





everal weeks before the Shepherds' Conference, all the plenary speakers were sent a sheet of survey questions. Their replies were excerpted and published in the Official Conference Guide.

The first question was, "What books have you read recently and how have they made an impact on your thinking?" The answer I gave was wordy and my reading list was—let's say "eclectic." (Some would say "motley.") So—no real surprise to me—my answer to that question didn't get published in the Guide. But I wanted to mention part of my answer here, because it prompted an interesting observation.

In answering that first question, I divided the lists of books I've been reading into "Biography & History; Theology; Commentaries; and Biblical Subjects." I didn't plan this, but the first three volumes I listed in the "Biography & History" category revealed an intriguing pattern:

The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, by Kenneth Silverman

The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, by Debby Applegate

Apparent Danger: [J. Frank Norris,] The Pastor of America's First Megachurch and the Murder Trial of the Decade in the 1920s, (also published under the title The Shooting Salvationist) by David Stokes

The first two books on that list won Pulitzer Prizes. The third one is as compelling as any Pulitzer winner—a pastoral biography in classic true-crime genre. All three are books I would highly recommend.

The subjects of all three books are celebrity pastors—Cotton Mather, Henry Ward Beecher, and J. Frank Norris—three very different men whose ministries left indelible imprints on three successive centuries of American history. They represent three vastly different strains of evangelical Protestantism. At the peak of their ministries, each of these three men could have legitimately claimed to be the most famous pastor in the country. All three were too enthralled with their own celebrity status. And all three were at the center of scandals that diminished their reputations.

Consequently, all three books are instructive about the various dangers of evangelical mass movements and man-centered leadership models. Large personalities often have large character flaws. Celebrity leaders and the personality cults they tend to cultivate are fraught with danger. Sycophants and simpletons tend to mimic and exaggerate the shortcomings of men with big egos while spurning the lessons of their failures. The aftermath leaves a long wake. It's my belief that ripples of the various errors made by these three men are still reverberating on the surface of American evangelicalism.

Mather

Cotton Mather is the most likable of these three superstar historical figures. Two of his grandfathers (John Cotton and Richard Mather) were respected and respectable Puritan pastors who came to America with some of the first settlers. Their goal was to found a Puritan society. Cotton's father, Increase Mather, was also an excellent pastor and an influential political leader in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So the heavy mantle of two previous generations fell on Cotton Mather.

The controversy for which Cotton Mather is remembered—and the episode that tainted his reputation in American history—was of course the Salem Witchcraft crisis. Mather chronicled the events of that catastrophe in a manner calculated to put himself in the hero's role, but when the witch trials were discredited and even one of the leading judges, Samuel Sewell, publicly repented for his part in condemning people to death who turned out to be innocent, Mather became the main target of critics and satirists. His sometimes pompous, overbearing demeanor made him an easy mark for ridicule.

In later years Cotton Mather became intrigued with German pietism. The virile, gospel-centered Reformed teaching he had learned from his grandfathers slowly, almost imperceptibly became mixed and diluted with whiny moralism and pious-sounding platitudes. Mather was satirized by young Benjamin Franklin, whose imaginary alter-ego, a cranky, outspoken, holier-than-thou woman named Silence Dogood, was based on Mather's personality. (Mather had written a famous book titled Essays to Do Good.) It's my conviction that Mather's moralistic shift unwittingly helped open the door for Socinianism and Deism in the generation that followed him.

Beecher

Henry Ward Beecher was likewise the son of a very famous preacher, Lyman Beecher. (The whole Beecher family were famous. One of Henry's sisters, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Another sister was an influential women's-rights activist. A niece was married to Edward Everett Hale.) The elder Beecher was originally a strict subscriptionist to the Westminster Confession. At first he opposed the doctrines and methodologies ("new measures") that Charles Finney made popular. But Lyman Beecher later softened his stance against Finney and he himself began to advocate the "new measures." The famous patriarch of the Beecher family was subsequently charged with heresy and tried by his session, but he was acquitted.

The son, Henry Ward Beecher, a young, struggling pastor at the time, seemed to take his father's shift (and acquittal) as permission to throw off the shackles of orthodoxy completely. He began to employ methodologies and teach doctrines that were novel at the time but have become standard fare for today's seeker-sensitive and highly-contextualized ministry styles. Beecher was openly and proudly devoted to worldly values and stylish causes. He reveled in his celebrity status and the petty scandals his lifestyle provoked.

Then a major scandal broke when a parishioner (the wife of one of Beecher's assistants) admitted to her husband that she had engaged in an adulterous affair with Beecher. In those days adultery was a criminal offense, and Beecher was formally charged. After a scandalous public trial, which was played out on the front pages of every newspaper in America, the jury was unable to reach a decision, and Beecher returned to ministry. In my judgment Henry Ward Beecher bears as much responsibility as (perhaps more than) Charles Finney for the pragmatism that dominates evangelical ministry philosophy today.

Norris

Frank Norris had a decidedly different style and he was a classic fundamentalist with regard to doctrine, but he shared Beecher's love of celebrity and his penchant for scandal. Norris pastored two churches concurrently—one in Detroit and one in Ft. Worth, TX. Before the era of jet travel, he would fly back and forth between the two cities, preaching on alternate weeks at one location, then the other.

Norris's most notorious scandal occurred when he shot a man to death in the pastor's study in Ft. Worth. He claimed it was self-defense, but there were no witnesses, and he was charged with murder. Norris's trial was also meticulously covered by every newspaper in America. Ultimately, he was acquitted, but he incurred the contempt and distrust of many, including a number of his own former followers.

That wasn't even Norris's only criminal trial. He was charged on another occasion with arson when the Ft. Worth Church burned under highy questionable circumstances, but Norris was acquitted of that charge as well. The various trials and acquittals seemed to make Norris more brash and pugnacious. He epitomized the "fighting fundamentalist" style. Later fundamentalists, including Jack Hyles and Peter Ruckman, openly revered and imitated him. The Bible Baptist Fellowship considers Norris a founder, and his controversial style is definitely still alive in that group.

Three centuries. Three celebrity pastors. Three completely different ministry philosophies. And yet there are so many similarities. Reading these three books in relatively close succession drove home the point for me that evangelicals historically haven't been very good at differentiating between men who have character and men who merely are characters.

There's nothing inherently wrong with fame, of course. But a love of fame for fame's sake—the modern notion of celebrity—is deadly, especially in the church. We ought to learn the lessons of our own past, and we ought to heed the words of the Lord Jesus, who said, "Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:26-28).

---