On Ravi Zacharias (and one part about Marilyn Manson)

An organized series of grievances about mainstream theology and apologetics, in light of unspeakable things.

Content warning: multiple mentions of abuse and sexual violence

“If I believed in God, I would not have done the things you’ve done.”

—Now Now, “Giants"

Very shortly after his diagnosis, and in the hospital parking lot, Ravi Zacharias was on call for a short interview on The Ben Shapiro show. It was one of his last transmissions. It is a perturbing conversation to tune into, not just for the right-wing pundit on the mic, but for the thought that Zacharias must have contended in his heart whilst standing on death’s door everything he’s done, closer to his maker than ever, and spoken to Shapiro with a heart still harboring terrible secrets.

After his passing in May 2020, allegations of sexual misconduct arose against Zacharias in August later that year, prompting Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) to pursue the cases. They commissioned law firm Miller & Martin PLCC to pursue an independent investigation. What followed was a 12-page report published earlier this year outlining abuses, assaults and other violences Zacharias committed over the span of years. The grotesqueries detailed in the report are too much to succinctly summarize, but include: soliciting sexual pictures from multiple women (many of them massage therapists), promising women financial support through the use of ministry funds in exchange for sex, molestation, and threatening one witness never to speak out against him, lest she “be responsible for the ‘millions of souls’ whose salvation would be lost if [Zacharias’] reputation was damaged.”

This came at the heels of the allegations Lori Anne Thompson made in 2017. Zacharias groomed and exploited Thompson, weaponizing her traumas to build trust with her as some sort of spiritual confidante. Seeking accountability, Thompson confronted Zacharias with legal action, and in response, Zacharias accused her of extortion, and humiliated her and her husband in the extremely public setting of his ministry, even after making them sign an NDA. Zacharias washed his hands of the matter, and for a while was home free, backed by a community of staunch supporters and great institutional power.

When the evangelist passed, a community of believers and notable apologists heaped praises upon him. What is interesting to see, however, is how these believers and apologists reacted to these aforementioned revelations, of a man whose life ran despicably counter to what he preached. With new findings stacked on top of Thompson’s story, plus an official statement by RZIM, these people were cornered, and had to confront a fuller picture of a man who was not the Christian he presented himself to be.

What I’ve seen are misguided gestures, gross missteps, and vapid rhetorical ploys that underplay Zacharias’ actions and betray a broken theology. The cracks in this theology, these articulations of the Christian faith, are plain to see, and I want to take the time to explain why certain gestures, statements and retorts do more harm than good.

Quick aside: I myself am not a believer. I’ve been devout, an atheist, a wishy-washy agnostic, forwards and backwards. But I’m entirely uninterested in debating the existence of God, the issue of creationism, the value of science (which is different from scientism, but evangelists forget this), or the usual talking points that someone like Christopher Hitchens has bloviated about as a proud horseman. These talking points tend to take believers and skeptics everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I’m more interested in interrogating the theological tendencies I’ve seen exercised by Christians today, and how these tendencies have exposed themselves in the wake of Zacharias’ posthumous condemnation.

Doubling down on apologetics

I’ve given Zacharias the fair shake of reading a couple of his books after his passing. I’ve watched quite a few of his messages online to parse his theology. I’ve even seen the man up close. My family’s been attending Christ Commission Fellowship ever since I was in grade school, and I remember the apologist being invited to speak at the megachurch, his style and delivery on a totally different language register from Sunday service. His writing style is similar to Viktor Frankl’s, but more dense.

While there is obviously more to a man than what he puts to paper, it can’t be denied Zacharias’ works betray a great fixation on logic. Logic, logic, logic. Plus a disdainful attitude towards what he sees as the intellectual paradigm asserted by mainstream education, one that promotes “relativism” and “postmodernism.” He says in one message, “There is nothing so vulgar left in the human experience for which you cannot bring in some Ivy League professor from somewhere to justify it,” bolstering his apologetics with rhetorical plays peddled by the likes of PragerU. (Not a coincidence that Zacharias has cited Dennis Prager to bolster various arguments, and even called the man a friend.)

I have a few guesses as to where this sensibility comes from. At the start of his career in the 60s and 70s, ongoing in America was some sort of theological shift. Jo and Vince Vitale, authors of “History of Apologetics,” wrote that Zacharias noted a “‘big break’ taking place between liberal and conservative theology,” pervading “reactionary anti-intellectualism” in conservative circles, and the rising tide of televangelism. Zacharias’ work also placed him in close proximity with the likes of William Lane Craig and Billy Graham. Sociologist Eboo Patel, in one chapter of his book “The Fabulous Future?,” acknowledges that more developments of this strain took place in the 70s and 80s—the advent of megachurches, the prominence of conservative religious figureheads Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and the presidential victory of Ronald Reagan, spurred by the religious right. This isn’t to undercut the genuine spiritual encounters that Zacharias might have experienced over the course of his life, or his testimony, but to paint a picture of the milieu that shaped his apologetics.

I posit as well that Zacharias’ evangelist efforts must have been influenced as well by the New Atheist movement, which began gaining traction in the 2000s. I remember watching that shit unfold—the Rick Warren and Sam Harris debate on Newsweek; YouTube compilations of Hitchens dunking on creationists (a embarrassing amount of which I ate up); me lurking in the circle jerk pit of the /r/atheism subreddit and watching skeptics pivot towards anti-SJW discourse. Weird shit, to be sure. A movement formed from post 9/11 anxieties and the bullshit of the Bush era, New Atheism could have been a refreshing secular movement for people who felt suffocated by fundamentalism. Most of the movement would come to reek of reactionary politics.

Those were heady times. And while anybody with a social media account can sympathize with what it’s like to get lost in the discursive sauce, I believe Zacharias’ apologetics suffered from tunnel vision. Fixating too much on rationality, and steeling himself to fight the New Atheists on the grounds of logic, where too many blowhards have tread, Zacharias and the theology he preached could barely see the forest for the trees.

On an episode of Cross Examined, apologist Frank Turek exemplifies this tunnel vision by—in response to Zacharias’ actions—going the route of combatively asserting why such a case proves Christianity’s standing as an authority on moral truth, as if anticipating the atheists who might seek to weaponize Zacharias against his belief system. It’s pathetically defensive, and makes the blunder of implying that rape, and casual sex between consenting adults, stand next to each other in the same tier of immorality. It is argumentations like these that have turned the expression “Checkmate, atheists” into a meme. And I imagine there are other Christians who, fed on a steady diet of the apologetics of Zacharias and his contemporaries, might resort to just dispassionately intellectualizing the thing.

We all sin

Other rephrasings of this dictum include: “None of us are perfect” or “No one is beyond sin,” to quote the phrasing of Christ Commission Fellowship’s response to the Zacharias issue.

Ministry leaders put forward the statement of “We all sin” as a mere, guileless admission of our shared humanity, an affirmation of the fact that we all make mistakes, which is something that everybody already knows. It wants to be an inoffensive truth claim that doesn’t undercut the gravity of Zacharias’ violations.

There’s a pipeline from this way of thinking to the argument that Zacharias was nonetheless an instrument of God, so the sin barely matters if at all, and God is sovereign. There is also a theological tendency among mainstream evangelists to overplay God’s sovereignty, or abdicate the evils of others to the movements of a divine plan, which can be brushed off as mysterious. It never occurs to ministry leaders however that the sovereignty of God can—and does—show itself in Lori Anne Thompson, and any of the other brave women who, though unnamed by the investigation, were still immeasurably brave in coming forward, essentially confessing Zacharias’ sins on his behalf.

In the aforementioned statement, CCF expressed the following action point: “Avoid being alone with the opposite sex in a private place or room. Avoid going on domestic or foreign travel alone and if possible, bring your wife with you—she is your partner. It might be costly but falling to sin is costlier.” This drill sergeant approach to the compartmentalization of human relationships was echoed by apologist Josh McDowell in a conversation with his son: 

“I mean, just for example: I’ll never stand in a hotel lobby and talk to a woman for more than 3 minutes. I won’t get in a car alone with a woman, and this brings me a lot of criticism, because church’s conferences will send a woman driver to pick me up to bring me to the conference, and I tell them ahead of time ‘Do not send a woman.’ And they just think that’s so cheesy, they send a woman anyway. And I end up taking a taxi. And boy, they just criticise me for that. But I tell each one of ‘em, if I were to fall morally, it’s people like you [who’d] be the first one to criticise me.” 

Speaking as someone who spent his adolescence in the suffocating purity culture of youth ministry, where the term “backslide” is a thing, I understand the way of thinking here. These men see women as forces to guard themselves against. They think, oh, I take the endeavor of safeguarding my heart so seriously, I’ll put up a spiritual force field around myself to ward off specific moments and encounters, and be my own restraining order. 

Here we see the gendered charge of “We all sin,” a rhetorical safety net for the actions of (mostly) cis hetero men. It is a tragedy to see friendships between members of the opposite sex as natural breeding grounds for sin. “The unwillingness for us to have friendships […] of people of the opposite sex actually sexualizes the thing,” says Covenant College professor of theological studies Kelly Kapic, in an interview for Christianity Today’s podcast Quick to Listen. “We often solve the problem by running away from people rather than running to them in healthier ways.”

This leads to perhaps the most disturbing permutation of the “We all sin” excuse, which is when a believer or ministry leader looks at Zacharias, deceitful and unrepentant to the grave, and says, “That could be me.” Kyle J. Howard writes for Religion News: “It is deeply troubling to see so many men, especially in ministry leadership, find a more immediate connection with abusers rather than the abused. For many of God’s people, especially women, this creates real concerns for their own safety in religious environments.”

To ministry leaders, I’d like to ask: if a Lori Anne Thompson from your flock came forward, would you believe them? Can you honestly say that they trust you to stand by them?

Ideally, the impulse of identifying with abusers should spiritually disturb, instead of produce complacency. You treat a man’s actions as a dark mirror and catch the sobering sight of your vilest, cruellest self. This is usually what happens. In such a moment of clarity you can actually get close to comprehending, as a man, what makes the patriarchy so horrifying: the same social and systemic conditions that have bred and raised monsters are the same conditions that surround you, your friends, your male relatives, your male leaders. I believe this is one example of witness, of taking stock of what surrounds you and responding accordingly. In these moments of lucidity, when we get a flash of the monster that the patriarchy teaches us to become, we learn that the weakness of the flesh is not a curse of biology (to quote Zacharias himself “Can you imagine telling a raped woman that the rapist merely danced to his DNA?”), but a product of greater systemic issues.

And yet there are ministry leaders who say “we all sin,” and make no move to question the culture or institutional frameworks that allow this to happen. The real translation of “we all sin” claws out from the woodwork: “I will excuse this man, because I know that if I were caught red-handed doing the same thing, I would also like to be excused.” This also holds in secular settings. Empathy mutates into actual malice. Shouldn’t this produce in us indignation? Where is the conviction?

This is cancel culture

Let’s preface this by saying that RZIM certainly had no problem throwing Thompson to the wolves when she first came forward in 2017. Her impact statement speaks for itself: “The consequences of trying to hold RZ to account for his abusive and predatory behaviour was that my husband and I not only had to endure endless interpersonal atrocities — we were also widely publicly humiliated and vilified.” The simultaneous hesitation to hold a ministry leader accountable, and the trigger-happy itch to blame and draw and quarter a victim, reveals a double standard grossly unaligned with gospel teaching. Thankfully, RZIM seems to have held themselves accountable for this, not just with their official statement, but also with their theological statement, which cites from scripture why sometimes it is necessary to hold people accountable in public. All these should be enough to call out Zacharias’ staunchest defenders’ BS, but we can unpack this more.

There are church leaders who, whether due to their friendship with Ravi, or a theological posturing that desperately aspires to grace, profess to forgive Zacharias. Reverend Edmund Chan, leadership mentor at Covenant Evangelical Free Church, says as much in a piece for Salt & Light (which seems to have been deleted, but an excerpt of which can be found in the CCF position paper): “I have sincerely, unreservedly and completely forgiven Ravi Zacharias.”

I see no solidarity in these words. Far too frequently, I’ve gotten to know and befriended men who turned out to be predators, manipulators, rapists. And I’ve tried so many different ways to engage these men and their acts, whether it was by speaking to them face to face, or blasting them in the court of public opinion, or cutting them off quietly. I haven’t seen those men come clean in any way that matters, so I don’t know what works. Sometimes I try to commit to the idea of transformative justice, other times I just want to make these people pay.

But I have never been interested in forgiving these men. It is absolutely not my place.

Mike Winger, an associate pastor at Hosanna Christian Fellowship and founder of Bible Thinker states in a video: “To say, let him who is without sin, cast the first stone, this is like saying you can’t ever convict anybody of anything. To take it like that, out of context, and abuse the text like that.” Part of what makes Winger’s words so striking is the context of the passage he refers to, the story of the adulterous woman. Even though the law against adultery the Pharisees invoked calls for the persecution of both parties, notice that the man is not dragged out. He got away scot-free, while the Pharisees blamed the woman. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

When we are called to emulate grace, it doesn’t mean that we should close our hearts to outrage. Where is the scriptural mandate that commands us to swallow our righteous anger and let it sit heavy in the backs of our throats? Rage is not the wrong response. Sometimes it is in fact that the most appropriate response. It might sound counterintuitive to the believer who was raised in a hush-hush culture and taught to settle differences with polite civility. But I believe that responding to evil with vitriol and disgust can be restorative. To sympathize with those victims whose dignities were violated, it only makes sense to meet them where they are with a heart full of indignation. The love of God has always been clearest to me under the light of rage.

Should we burn his books?

This phrasing is comically strong and isn’t even mine, but comes from an article published by Eternity News. Good question.

I’m aware that the validity of a belief system isn’t necessarily proved or disproven by fiendish, jackass proponents. (I’m leftist, I see this shit everyday.) It’s only fair to extend the same leeway to the Christian faith, and one fraud—and there have been many—isn’t enough to demolish the gospel. That’s fine. However it’s still concerning that there are believers who might be content to keep Zacharias’ books, without question, as if the work can be separated from the author.

In the Eternity News piece, Simon Smart, Executive Director of the Centre for Public Christianity, says simply: “Congruence between what we say and how we live is vital, and even more so in a leader of such influence and power.” It’s a solid paraphrase of James 3:1: “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.”

It’s also actually possible to dispute Zacharias’ brand of apologetics without bringing up the disconnect between his written works and his lived experiences. Such a disagreement deserves its own piece, in respect not just to Zacharias but also the rhetorical tendencies of other apologists, but I’ll elucidate just a little while we’re here. Zacharias and other thinkers like him—as much as they like to pride themselves as stewards of logic—tend to conflate schools of thought like postmodernism, atheism, Marxism, pluralism, secularism, relativism and scientism with each other, and lump them into one single profane biomass of sacrilege. They think agents and proponents of these different schools of thought coordinate with each other, as if Deepak Chopra and Bertrand Russell were in cahoots in the same God-Killing Committee. An allergy to nuance breeds lazy thinking, and perhaps even an unrefined moral compass.

In a way, this is related to the “doubling down on apologetics” portion of this piece. Believers like Turek or Winger can make the well-intentioned case that it was not Zacharias who brought you to Christ but Christ himself, that we come to God not through intellectual formulations but by faith, and the gospel is still the gospel no matter what. I agree. Still, given the problematic aspects of Zacharias’ apologetics, and its incongruence with the way he lived, shouldn’t all these allegations call for new articulations of the gospel, and the amplification of disenfranchised perspectives? Wouldn’t it be productive, and inspiring, to study and express God’s grace in different frameworks, to hear it from marginalized people, from survivors of abuse? If a sea change were to occur in the field of apologetics, I imagine it would look like a sharp steer away from the political right, more class analysis, and the retiring of tired talking points like Kalam’s Cosmological Argument or Pascal’s Wager.

All that being said, shit is still tricky. Whether or not it’s right to take Zacharias’ bibliography off the shelves isn’t easily answerable, no matter how you spin it. Winger threw all copies of his Zacharias books into the waste bin, on camera, and called for his books to be pulled out in solidarity with the victims. I saw a believer who was very strongly convicted and felt the need to respond with urgency, and I commend it. But not everybody can rip the band-aid off just like that, and I’m pretty sure if I tell anybody to chuck their Zacharias books into the trash, especially while they’re still processing the shock of his crimes, they’re only going to feel harangued and strong-armed.

I think of the way I, and many of my friends, have had to mentally “cancel” so many people that we used to look up to—musicians, actors, filmmakers, and other influential cultural figures who turned out to be sex offenders. Here’s the blacklist of my heart: Michael Jackson, Jesse Lacey of Brand New, Jonny Craig formerly of Dance Gavin Dance, to name a few. I don’t think the things they’ve made (or Zacharias’ books, to be clear) should be permanently erased from the library of human history, but I made the personal decision to never re-consume any of their music, even if their work forms a part of me. I take solace in the fact that my letting them go also forms a part of me.

Maybe that way of thinking can also apply here. The question of whether to renounce or not to renounce is already serious when it comes to rockstars—the stakes are much higher if we’re talking about an apologist, an ethicist. But while we’re on the topic of rockstars, let’s name-check one more fiend in my blacklist.

Rockstar

It must be some incredible cosmic joke that the allegations against Zacharias were verified at roughly the same time Marilyn Manson’s abuses were thrown into the light. Marilyn Manson is well-known, whether you grew up an atheist, or a Christian in a household wary of MTV. Rapist, shock rocker, theatrical figurehead of the 2000s nu metal scene. Really leaned hard into the Satanic panic aesthetic and took great pleasure in pissing off conservatives and fundamentalists with his music and larger-than-life presence in the media. I used to be a fan. A timeline of abuses and allegations connected to Manson, so gruesome that the details could read like the diary of a school-shooting edgelord, can be found here.

I see Marilyn Manson as, in many ways, another pulpit-hog in logic’s ill-sewn pockets. While Manson predated the New Atheist movement, I think he in many ways embodied the anxieties that propelled the movement to the mainstream. “Fuck all your protests and put ‘em to bed / God is in the TV,” goes his single “Rock Is Dead,” an industrial rock curb stomper about the subjugating powers of media and organized religion. I and many of his fans back in the day misconstrued his artistic propensity to offend for the sake of offense as a radical thing, and writer Jude Ellison Sady Doyle speaks to this misread on a piece for Medium: “He was the go-to signifier of edginess for suburban white kids, a man who embodied all that was ugliest in the world, but who did it, like, ironically.”Utilizing blasphemous imagery to attract clout, Manson fashioned himself as a magnet of controversy, and used his influence to dunk on Christianity, as if he could honestly claim his beliefs to be more radical or emancipatory (they weren’t.) He also used that influence to prey on multiple young women.

The critical gestures in Manson’s lyrics over the years suggested an antipathy towards what he saw as the ills of his milieu—celebrity worship, deification, the trickery of mass media, The Man, the power of the corrupt—wearing the persona of the villain to lambast the conditions that make villains. We know now what he really is: an exact picture of the same shit he tried to parody. The butt of his own joke.

The parallels between apologetics and Manson’s brand of “anti-establishment” (big air quotes on that one) shock rock are so apparent it’s actually kinda crazy. Both put on subversive airs. Both blow up the significance of their roles in the “culture war” (an insipid euphemism). Both suffer from a tragic lack of class analysis, which prevents them from disrupting the status quo in any meaningful way. And both sides are patriarchally dominated, and enjoyed a disturbing amount of power and protection pre-#MeToo. I’m not suggesting a centrist, feckless stance that calls for heavily tattooed rockstars and modern evangelists to meet each other in the middle (I believe that’s how we got jagoffs like Carl Lentz).

But the question I pose, for either side, or those outside of it is: what are you fighting for, really? What are you changing, if anything? And now that your idols have been utterly denounced and dissected, what will you do?

One can’t help but think of James 2:19: “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.”

This is in many ways an issue of hypocrisy, but that’s already painfully obvious. There are people in this world who believe in the “right” things and still go around wreaking destruction. This could also be a critique of celebrity culture, but that just seems moot, considering the fact that there are influential people who use their following for good, and that younger people of this generation are more critical and nuanced in their participation in fandom culture. Believers with good sense will say not to put one’s faith in men, but to leave it at that would be a waste.

Personally, I believe the crux of all this is putting Ravi Zacharias and Marilyn Manson—two diametric opposites by any stretch—and seeing, through the parallels of their crimes, that something is deeply wrong. Something is deeply wrong in mainstream theological postures, in the way many churches and ministries are run, in the western tradition of apologetics, in the infrastructures of soul-saving, in how believers are taught to approach sin and redemption and grace and accountability. So many of you claim to believe in God. So many of you are doing it wrong.