Still reeling from the jab of Joshua Harris’ recent deconversion, unsuspecting evangelicals got another quick cross a few days ago. Marty Sampson—a praise and worship songwriter you might know from Hillsong—posted to Instagram that he was “genuinely losing his faith.” Uh-oh. Then, before anyone could say “30 to 50 feral hogs,” hot takes and news breaks had already fired off from every available digital missive silo on both sides of the Culture War. And the backlash triggered a whiplash the very next day when Sampson deleted his original post and issued a “clarification.” But the toothpaste had already exited the tube.
“Relevant” headlines from two consecutive days
Some, like the satirical Babylon Bee, cast a mercenary light over Sampson’s career, clarification included. Others ignored Sampson’s clarification, still insisting that he represented just another Christian celebrity casualty in the epidemic of apostasy infecting the church.1 A crowd of Christians, many of whom had never heard of Skillet outside of breakfast, quickly viralized lead singer John Cooper’s rebuke of Sampson, which Cooper used to diagnose an apparently Christianity-wide problem. Bringing us up nearly to the present, a clearly beleaguered Sampson posted pained responses to Cooper and all those faceless thousands parroting him.
