The Hypocrisy

In the past few months an increasingly large amount of dirt has been revealed about the sexual assaults committed by singer Michael Taitt over the course of 20 years or more, particularly when he was the lead singer of the Newsboys (which he stepped down from just as the allegations started appearing). The most full accounts of these incidents have been reported at the Roys Report. From the way in which the people who were his victims or those who held the victims' confidence, it sounds like this was an "open secret" that many people near Taitt knew about, but it was kept from the public.

And that's... depressingly familiar. So often when a Christian leader of any type (singer, pastor, etc.) has their scandals made public, we find out there was some kind of cover-up going on. Sometimes the victims themselves don't want the incidents to be made public or the leader's entourage/ministry board work hard to keep the allegations from coming to light for fear of what it would do to the leader's ministry; despite the obvious hypocrisy at play, it's seen as better to accept and conceal the leader's sins rather than confess their sins and repent.

It reminded me of Michael English. Back when I was obsessed with Christian music, watching Christian music videos nearly all day long (back when there was the 24-hour Christian 'Z' music channel) and reading every magazine with at the very least a column on the subject, I absorbed a lot in those pre-internet days. Yet I didn't know what went on to Michael English; for a while, he was a really big rising name in Christian music, his video played all the time, he won four Dove Awards, then he disappeared in 1994.

I didn't find out what had happened to him until he popped up on an episode of Entertainment Tonight in 1996; while promoting his new career as a "secular" music artist, ET went over his past and I learned for the first time that in 1994 - just a week after he won all those Dove Awards - he returned the awards and revealed he'd been having an extra-marital affair.

What amazed me was that it was like a different kind of cover-up took effect; he was basically erased from Christian music. I didn't read so much as an angry editorial denouncing him (though I'm certain many must have been written at the time). Instead, his music and videos were taken out of circulation and no one talked about him.

All of which makes me think, we Christians are the worst at talking about sin. We might be willing to concede that, "oh, yeah, we're all sinners." But if you're a sinner - and a very public figure in the church - then your choice seems to either take the English path-- be "ghosted" by your fellow Christians -- or take the Taitt path-- widen the circle of sinners by enlisting conspirators to cover-up for you until it's inevitably made public.

Maybe if we didn't "ghost" people who own up publicly about their sins, we wouldn't think it necessary to form vast conspiracies to "protect" the public from learning about popular people's frailties. But as it is, these cover-ups do real harm to the mission of the church by taking one man's sin and expanding it to corporate size. To an outsider, it must seem that we're all hypocrites who claim to be sinless, yet full of leaders who are constantly being exposed as having committed acts that anyone else would be prosecuted for.