Televangelist sex scandals discredited evangelical celebrity heroes in the 1980s

Evidence

The televangelist soap operas of the 1980s were catnip for a national media that seemed to delight in the hypocrisy of conservative Christians. Sex, church secretaries, fraud, intrigue, prostitution, conspicuous consumption of the most tawdry sort—the revelations tarnished the image of evangelicalism generally, revealing the dark side of a religious movement driven by celebrity. Evangelicals had long framed sexual immorality as a worldly sin, the product of secularism, liberalism, feminism—that is, as something that happened outside the Christian fold. Yet the televangelist sex scandals revealed that their own religious heroes had feet of clay. If Christians needed manly heroes, Christian broadcasting was coming up short. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 302

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the hero vacuum later filled by military and Trump-style figures; connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of moral hypocrisy among religious authorities.