The New York Times recently reported on a spate of scandals to have hit Dallas-area churches. A nationally-known evangelical pastor stepped away from the pulpit at his megachurch upon admitting to an unspecified “sin.” An associate pastor at another church was dismissed for “moral failure.” The head pastor of a congregation of 5,000 resigned due to “inappropriate” actions.
The subtext to all these indiscretions is sex.
“It’s like the unbuckling of the Bible Belt,” one local pastor told the Times.
“There’s no clear pattern to the scandals, which range widely,” the article reports. “The churches are all Protestant but belong to different denominations — or none at all — and have different theological beliefs and worship styles.”
Sexual indiscretion is an ecumenical matter. A spry escort (and convert to Catholicism) I visited in Manhattan claimed to have bedded priests serving at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (“They’re just guys,” she told me.) Erasmus complained at the time of the Reformation, “[T]here is a horde of priests among whom chastity is rare.” Nor were the priests in ancient Israel averse to fleshly delights: “[Eli] kept hearing all that his sons were doing to all Israel, and how they lay with the women who were serving at the entrance to the tent of meeting” (1 Sam 2:22).
As one whose belt has been unbuckled in preparation for conduct unbecoming of a minister in the church, I cannot avoid comment on this. In Tim Alberta’s book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, it was reported that the stress of having to navigate congregational political tensions in the age of Trump have driven more than one pastor into adultery. But there’s more to it than that.
Ministers can make for tempting targets. One pastor’s wife, who admits to having sinned sexually with ministers in the church, confesses to enjoying the “wickedness” of getting “into a pastor’s pants” and fucking a putative “saint” on the communion table.
Looking back, a strong impetus to enrolling in divinity school and entering into ministry was my desperation to control my lust. I tried to compensate for my sexual guilt through my religious activities. The church proved to be no sanctuary from lust. My sins only grew darker. In The Scarlet Letter, Rev. Dimmesdale laments, “I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am! And Satan laughs at it!” The fissure between who he is expected to be and who he is generates excruciating doubt. “What can a ruined soul like mine, effect the redemption of other souls?-or a polluted soul towards their purification?”
“As the man thinketh in his heart, so he is” (Prov 23:7). Upon first laying eyes on “Rachel,” an astonishingly pretty divinity student with long brown hair and pale skin, my first thought was, I wonder what she tastes like. I had succumbed to the “lusts of the flesh and the eyes” (1 Jn 2:16). As I proved incapable of metanoia, my personality splintered. So I compartmentalized my academic pursuits and ministry from my sex life, although the lines were blurry. (On more than one occasion, minutes after wrapping up a Bible study I was banging the Deaconess.) According to my synod, my failure as a rostered minister “to lead a chaste and decent life in word and deed” as evidenced by my many promiscuities makes me guilty of sexual misconduct. Still, my teaching and pastoral activities have coexisted with my sexual promiscuity.
Lutheran Guilt 