The shock jocks are in charge now

Harvest Bible Chapel is/was “one of the 50 largest churches in America.”

That’s an impressive-sounding category until you stop to think about it. Take a moment, though, and you’ll realize that most of the familiar names on such a list are recognizable because of their notoriety. “Church growth” is a popular topic in religious publishing, but the list of “the 50 largest churches in America” seems to offer more cautionary tales than it does models that other congregations would want to emulate.

We could almost divide that list of mega-churches into two categories: Scandal-plagued and Not-Yet-Revealed-to-Be Scandal-Plagued.

Anyway, Harvest Bible Chapel near Chicago has recently moved from the latter category into the former. Ruth “No Relation” Graham — one of the better religion reporters covering American Christianity — details that story for Slate: “How a Radio Shock Jock Helped Bring Down a Megachurch Pastor.”

Other reporting I’d seen on this story had misled me by delicately referring to the shock-jock in question — one Eric “Mancow” Muller — as a “talk radio host.” I should have picked up on that sooner since most of those reports also generously categorized Julie Roys as an “investigative journalist” rather than as the scalp-seeking right-wing gadfly I first encountered when she went after Moody Bible Institute for wavering from what she saw as “biblical” white supremacy. (I said there that Roys was part of a group of Moody critics who seemed like they were writing for the old segregationist Southern Presbyterian Journal. Roys is now writing for World — the Southern Gothic Presbyterian magazine founded to replace that old segregationist rag for readers nostalgic for its toxic perspective. So OK, then.)

I’m a long way from Chicago, so that Moody connection misled me into thinking that “talk radio host” Muller was a part of the white evangelical/fundamentalist radio world that has long thrived out of that city. (Unshackled! — the old-time radio drama produced by Chicago’s old-time Pacific Garden Mission is, like Coast-to-Coast Live, one of my favorite AM-radio guilty pleasures on late-night road trips.) That seemed to make sense. After all, when you come across a “syndicated talk-radio host” in stories about a big white evangelical mega-church, it seems obvious that you’re reading about some syndicated Christian-talk-radio host.

But, nope, that’s not what we’re dealing with here. Muller is, as Graham says, a “shock-jock.” He calls his show “Mancow’s Morning Madhouse” and wants to be known as “the wild man of Chicago radio.” Etc., etc. You know the type. Peter-Pan complex. An “edgy, equal-opportunity offender.” Trying very hard to “shock” listeners with his “outrageous antics” and bold, “politically incorrect” pronouncements. That sort of thing. The same hackneyed shtick we get from all the wanna-be Howard Sterns who function mostly as a helpful red flag for single women trying to date men in any American city. (“How’d it go?” “He told me I had to hear the latest Joe Rogan podcast.” “Eww, sorry.”)

Muller is a part of this story, though, because he was a part of the church. He helped “bring down” Harvest Bible Chapel’s pastor, James MacDonald, because he knew MacDonald — he was even baptized by the pastor in the Jordan River during a church-sponsored trip to the West Bank and Israel. (Although I doubt the church ever allowed the words “West Bank” to be used in reference to that trip.)

The earlier friendship between a white-evangelical mega-church pastor and a “Morning Madhouse” shock-jock might seem surprising until you realize that MacDonald is the author of books with titles like “40 Days to Biblical Manhood” and “Act Like Men: The Bible Study.” So, you know, they’ve got that shared resentful fear that patriarchy might be losing its grip. Toxic masculinity makes strange bedfellows.

Anyway, Muller and MacDonald fell out, and the radio host eventually played recordings on his show of Pastor MacDonald describing his critics and perceived enemies in terms that sound like, well, the way a third-rate radio shock-jock would talk:

In February, Muller escalated his crusade by airing clips on his show that seemed to capture MacDonald privately insulting his perceived enemies in terms that would be shocking to his followers — though not, perhaps, to Muller’s own listeners. The voice in the clips refers to the idea of planting child pornography on the computer of Christianity Today CEO Harold Smith in retaliation for the magazine’s coverage of him. It calls the magazine’s editor in chief, Mark Galli, a “certifiable prick,” and jokes that Galli and Julie Roys had an affair. (Roys firmly denies this on her blog and calls the joke “disgusting.”) It calls the magazine an “Anglican, pseudo-dignity, high church, symphony-adoring, pipe organ-protecting, musty, mild smell of urine, blue-haired Methodist-loving, mainline-dying, women preacher-championing, emerging church-adoring, almost good with all gays and closet Palestine-promoting Christianity.” Parsing those epithets would make a decent master’s thesis on contemporary American evangelicalism.

Is it transparently disingenuous for a “shock jock” to feign indignation at such “politically incorrect” language? Yes, obviously. Is it nakedly bogus for the sometime star of a D-level reality TV show called God, Guns & Automobiles to express a sense of betrayal over learning that his pastor wants to own a bigger, shinier motorcycle? Of course. “But that’s not the most blatantly disingenuous part of this story.

While I can’t begin to parse all of those epithets, let’s just boil them down to the main points. MacDonald thinks that so-called “mainstream” white evangelicals represented by Christianity Today are indistinguishable from the mainline Protestants he considers liberal apostates. He says they are insufficiently harsh in their opposition to “gays” and insufficiently dismissive of the concerns of Palestinians.

These are all sentiments that World magazine and its “investigative journalists” agree with completely. They might never use language like “certifiable prick,” but they wholeheartedly agree with MacDonald’s belief that Christianity Today and all of its writers and editors are a bunch of squishy liberals whose “biblical manhood” isn’t as firm as their own. (Ahem.) They will frame this in more sanctimoniously pious language than MacDonald did, with heapings of performative faux lamentation, but it really wouldn’t take much editing to turn his rant into an otherwise unremarkable World-magazine op-ed piece.

We should note here, as we always do, that Christianity Today is a publication that wants you to know it believes gay and lesbian couples are “destructive to society.” That was a phrase written four years ago by its editor, Mark Galli, in response to critics like MacDonald who were then suggesting that — secretly, imperceptibly somehow — the magazine was “almost good with all gays.” It’s typical of the way CT always responds to its critics from the far-right — by reciting a categorical affirmation of whatever “stance” the right-wingers have accused them of being squishy on, accompanied by a not always convincing “Grrr! Argh! So there!”

And like most of the white-evangelical “mainstream” establishment, CT spends probably about a third of its time and energy responding to such far-right critics. This must surely be as frustrating for them as it is for their readers, since I can’t think of anything more pointlessly futile than spending so much time and energy trying to appease people who will, by definition, never be appeased, or trying to win the approval of people whose whole purpose, identity, and business model is based on never approving of you.

One consequence of that is that you wind up spending so much time saying what you weren’t saying that you no longer have time to say anything else. You spend so much time saying what you’re not that everyone — including you — starts to forget what you are. And so you cease to be anything other than a perpetual target of, and response to, bad-faith right-wing critics.

All of which is why I’ve been using those quotation marks around the word “mainstream” — as in Christianity Today and the “mainstream” white-evangelical establishment. These days, the mainstream of white evangelicalism is no longer represented by graying institutions like CT. It’s represented by right-wing bloggers, corrupt mega-church pastors, radio hosts, and thoroughly politicized rags like World and Charisma.

The shock jocks are in charge now and the “mainstream” is whatever they say it is.

If you want to understand the current role and state of the former white evangelical “mainstream,” look again at that photo above from the late Billy Graham’s 95th birthday “celebration.” Graham is the old guy in the middle, the one whose confused scowl almost seems to recognize that he has been replaced and eclipsed by the smiling faces that surround him.

Just look at that photo. It’s all right there.