Why has evangelical culture been so bad at detecting unhealthy leadership patterns?

The following extracts give a flavour of Marcus Honeysett’s new book Powerful Leaders which Glen Scrivener reviews here.

The author has chosen not to name the many high-profile leaders accused in the past year of damaging leadership styles. This is not motivated by a desire to deflect from the severity of these actions, nor is it intended to minimise the suffering of the victims. It is rather an attempt at exploring why our evangelical culture has been ill-prepared to detect unhealthy leadership patterns and has not done enough to promote healthy ones. The first two extracts show how the author engages with this theme.

The final extract deals with the decision not to use the term spiritual abuse in the main body of this book. Marcus Honeysett makes it plain that this book is not the definitive last word on this issue.

1. What next for cultures and tribes?

Everyone in a culture knows how the narratives and codes work, and how they shape what is expected, said, done and thought. Everyone knows who is at the top table, even though they may have no formal position or title. Adherence to the narrative is the price of entry; promoting the narrative is the membership fee for continuing to belong. Hence those who identify with a culture define it according to features they appreciate and relate to, while dismissing those aspects that don’t sit quite right as an aberration or not foundational to what the culture is like. Shared values and narratives create a high degree of social cohesiveness, but these can turn into groupthink that results in a deterioration in critical examination. Of course, this doesn’t have to be the case. A main difference between healthy, shared cultural values and groupthink is the ability to listen and a desire for reformability, which internally embeds self-examination and externally welcomes outside critical friends…

2. Group mentality

The central conforming feature is not some grand structure that can be held to account, regularly evaluated and reviewed, but rather the narrative, group mentality and not wanting to forsake its benefits or longstanding friendship with those who hold to it unquestioningly. This explains why cultures can be incredibly powerful and intangible at one and the same time. If a culture also becomes inseparable from unaccountable main leaders, such that they promote it and it provides cover for them, it is next to impossible to correct, for that would require insight from outside the culture, which is deemed inadmissible by the very fact that it is external. In ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, the reason the townspeople self-censored and refused to call time on the fraud was that the wilfully blind, self-evidently naked and foolish person was the emperor. You don’t question or embarrass the emperor! He doesn’t have to force individuals to comply – they will do so anyway, because everyone does.

As we have seen in the case of individual leaders, the more power a culture acquires, and the more apparently successful it becomes, the harder it is for anyone to dissent, regardless of how obvious the faults and failings are. And the apparent successes may be considerable. A church or movement may experience many people being converted, baptised and discipled. This genuine spiritual fruit can continue for a time within a culture that is becoming toxic in other ways. However, we must never downplay, ignore or excuse coercive patterns of leadership by pointing to the good that particular leaders or ministries have done. It may be the case, but that is beside the point. Where too much is at stake to allow something to fail, cultural self-regulation, if it exists at all, is unlikely to be self-critical. Challenge the narrative, codes or doctrines of your tribe and you probably won’t be able to lead or remain in it anymore. Groupthink culture shuts dissenters down. Hence cultures become impervious to change and reform until something terrible becomes unavoidably public – for example, the exposure of the moral failing or coercive practice of a high-profile leader. By which point there may have been years of abuse and trauma behind the scenes, and other stories and victims that will never come to light because they don’t involve someone famous. Cultures can be tremendously effective refuges for denialists, because they transfer responsibility from specific issues and identifiable individuals on to the collective mass. When disaster strikes and obvious questions are asked about whether the culture or culture leaders have been an enabling factor, everyone can claim plausible deniability: maybe the culture has gone wrong, but in ways that could only be seen with hindsight; unless specific individual sins can be pointed out, for which specific leaders or groups may repent, there isn’t a case to answer. Nobody takes responsibility and no-one is specifically held responsible. However, neither is the culture or narrative, because to blame the collective would be to tarnish innocent people, and the good achieved by the culture, along with the guilty. This is to entirely miss the point. Cultural degeneracy isn’t just about specific sins or specific false teachings, but about attitudes, narratives and self-perpetuating hegemony, which are themselves corrupted and corrupting, but less easy to identify.

3. Appendix: A note on the termin-ology of ‘spiritual abuse’

However, keen-eyed readers will have spotted that I haven’t used this term (spiritual abuse) in the book. I remain personally cautious about it, without wanting to undermine the reality of the phenomena it is trying to describe. My concern centres around the danger of the term being used as a broad catch-all shorthand that conflates a wide range of possible issues. Some of these may constitute abuse, others might not, the only uniting factor being some claim about spiritual authority in a religious setting. I believe that where there are claims of abuse, the categories under which they are investigated need to be as clear as possible, especially in legal contexts. Respected bodies who are all deeply concerned about abuse find they cannot agree on definitions in this case. There is a risk that anything someone doesn’t like or strongly disagrees with in a Christian context can be labelled spiritual abuse – for example, teaching on sin, repentance, hell or the need for salvation, or demonstrably non-abusive use of leadership authority and pastoral practices. Moreover, it potentially becomes a tool for labelling such things in the very worst possible terms. For example, at the time of writing there are moves in the UK to criminalise orthodox teaching on sexuality, and even pastoral prayer, by calling it a safeguarding issue.