Celebrities for Jesus

Starred review from May 9, 2022
Celebrity worship has inundated the evangelical church, journalist Beaty (A Woman’s Place) warns in this biting critique. Using case studies of scandal-ridden celebrity pastors—including Bill Hybels, Ravi Zacharias, Mark Driscoll, and Carl Lentz—Beaty suggests that wealth and narcissism are “tearing up the house of God from the inside out.” Starting with Dwight L. Moody and Billy Graham, she looks at the history of “megapastors,” chronicling, for example, how Bill Hybels built the “most influential” megachurch in the U.S. only to be forced out after allegations of sexual misconduct made national news in 2018. The author points to three temptations that lead pastors astray—abusing power, chasing platforms, and cultivating a persona—and argues that church leaders who fall into these traps are effectively turning themselves into idols who compete with God as the object of followers’ devotion. To end the obsession with celebrity, Beaty recommends that evangelicals emulate Jesus’s humbleness and “return to the small, the quiet, the uncool, and the ordinary.” Her trenchant analysis expertly lays out how greed has plagued the evangelical church and offers hope and guidance on how it might mend. This is a must-read for anyone invested in the fate of evangelicalism.