Recently, in hard (but friendly) dialog with some non-theists, I was reminded how small the atheist media world is and how large the Christian enterprise must seem. The biggest problem with our Christian witness will never be atheism. Atheism is a small minority movement in any part of the world where it is not imposed by force.
All the atheist media produced this year will do less harm than the toxic and shoddy stuff produced by the Christian industry.
The biggest problem for our Christian religion is not our errors. Nobody is perfect. Open a ministry and bad people will attempt to use it for bad ends. Reasonable people get this fact. Our problem is when we tolerate evil or wrong, because the person doing it is on “our team.” We should never cut a Christian slack for behavior we would criticize in an atheist.
This does not have to be legalistic. People err and any big organization will do foolish things . . . intended or not, but there is a difference between doing a wrong thing and repenting and doing a wrong thing as a matter of policy. Let’s call this particular manner of running a ministry: to Brocklehurst. 
The Reverend Brocklehurst was a character in the novel Jane Eyre who preached simple living for the students and staff of his school while living in luxury himself. To Brocklehurst is to demand “modesty” and “simplicity” in the students while eschewing it at home. To Brocklehurst is to rage against the speck of sin in a student (Jane Eyre is a naughty child!) while instituting polices that would lead to an epidemic killing several students.
I got thinking about Brocklehursting because of Terry Mattingly, no Brocklehurst he.
The always provocative Terry Mattingly just sent out a column regarding the late, great Robert Briner, an Evangelical with competence and success in producing media. Briner wisely stayed out of “professional Christian” enterprises. Listen to Mattingly on what Briner experienced as he stepped out of “secular” media:
But Briner kept hearing one awkward question over and
over, after the release of his book “Roaring Lambs,” a bestseller
urging believers to get more involved in mass culture. People kept
asking if he was going to start producing “Christian media.”Briner always tried to change the subject. Truth is, he
once told me, most of his fellow evangelicals would not appreciate his
answer. Many would be offended.“I decided I wasn’t tough enough to work in Christian
media,” he said, a few weeks before he died of cancer in 1999.“You see, it never offended me when secular people acted
like secular people,” he explained. “What I couldn’t understand was
why so many Christians I did business with didn’t act like Christians.
I found that things were actually worse — in terms of basic ethics —
in the Christian media than in the mainstream. That really hurt. So I
decided I wasn’t tough enough for Christian media.”
After decades of scandal in Christian media, does anyone doubt the truth of Briner’s experience? Why do we tolerate books by people ignorant of the topics about which they write, but with bigger names to sell the product than the actual experts? Why does the church tolerate healing evangelists who are frauds, but keep getting contracts with” respectable” publishers or media groups? Why do we tolerate fund raising practices that would be banned at any ethical organization, let alone a Christian one? My fellow Patheos writer Warren Throckmorton does a thankless and important job exposing the chicanery of men like David Barton or groups like Gospel for Asia. Briner saw Christian groups doing the full Brocklehurst in his era and Throckmorton exposes Brocklehurst behavior daily.
Wise woman Charlotte Bronte understood the nature of the Brocklehurst and can help us avoid this shameful behavior in our own lives and in our ministries.
The Brocklehurst strains on a gnat for others, but swallows a camel for self. The Brocklehurst family lived very comfortable lives while urging simplicity, poverty, and suffering on the staff and students of their school. If a group goes full Brocklehurst, they do well by doing good.
If anybody outside the Brocklehurst group visited the school, changes would be made. After an epidemic swept through the school, outsiders came to find out what was happening. The ministry mission was good, but they found the implementation was horrid. Big changes resulted. To Brocklehurst will also come with a culture of secrecy.
The first concern of a Brocklehurst will be the letter of the law not the spirit. Bill Clinton is an outstanding Brocklehurst while HRC tries the tactic, but fails. Bill never lies . . . if you read the contract, parse his grammar, or examine the nuances of his body language. HRC never received secret data (insert several qualifiers here) on her private server and so did nothing illegal.
The Brocklehurst ministry will do a great deal of good despite Brocklehurst. Better to get sent with Jane Eyre to school, where there were some fine teachers, than tossed to the streets. French was taught and learned. Students made friendships that lasted for years. All of this good could be used to justify Brocklehurst. Few ministries are so corrupted that their staff cannot do great good, especially if the rot is at the top.
A Brocklehurst generally will be unctuous and consumed with money, power, or position. Brocklehurst discovered that an extra meal (with cheese!) had been ordered without authority. This set him off. The fact that students were freezing was a fact never noticed because cold is cheap in England.
The prime example of going the full Brocklehurst in terms of unctuous behavior is Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, though Trollope’s Rev. Slope gives him a run for it. Collins cannot stop talking about the merits of his excellent benefactress, praise one suspects would disappear if her wealth and ability to fund his living disappeared! A Brocklehurst cares about the opinions and favor of the rich (or at least the Christian rich) more than the workers and is most impressed by knowing them.
To be full Brocklehurst will leave the Brocklehurst making decisions outside his ken. The full Brocklehurst happens when ministry decisions are made by Brocklehurst, not the people doing the work. In Jane Eyre, the teachers do the work and Brocklehurst gets the credit for the charity.
Briner was right to stay out of the racket and as a result he inspired a generation of Christians in media. Let’s not get discouraged: for every Brocklehurst there are one hundred great servants of good like Miss Temple, the inspirational teacher in the Brocklehurst school, who serve God, not money. Miss Temple was self-effacing, charitable, kind, and worked for love and not profit. If she had been a film maker, and her students did learn visual arts, she would have made the best movie possible. Not everyone is called to work in a Christian ministry, but if we are, then we must double down on following the example of Saint Paul who would not use all his rights to avoid any hint of Brocklehurst.
God help us all to avoid the Brocklehurst and live like Temple if our calling is ministry.
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