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.

So, to recap: Finger-pointing and hand-wringing mingled with “high-fiving and back-slapping” (in Sampson’s words) have produced a cacophony of polarization. Most Christians in the West have become deaf and numb to such a cacophony at this point. While Cooper’s words have articulated much of the evangelical view on this, I cannot agree with him on the practical implications of what he says. And though I sympathize with Sampson’s anxieties and doubts, I don’t share them, nor do I recommend his way of airing them. Perhaps on that point, we can all agree.

Out of the Frying Pan, into the Skillet

John Cooper’s response to Sampson, “What is Happening in Christianity?”, has a number of problems. First, it illustrates the central trouble it attempts to address. At the beginning, Cooper writes: “We must STOP making worship leaders and thought leaders or influencers or cool people or ‘relevant’ people the most influential people in Christendom.” Amen and amen, say about 39,000 eager co-signers doing to Cooper exactly what he says needs to “STOP.” Now certainly, he attempts to sidestep this criticism in the next parenthetical. But his post illustrates why a minority of leaders have the majority of influence in the church. And his post also reinforces this outsize influence.

I agree that celebrity Christianity (and even movement Christianity) poses a threat to humble Christian piety. But viral posts won’t fix it. They feed it. Fixing it will take an individual recommitment to the local church. Every church in the West should not sing all the same ten songs. Or hear the same ten preachers. Many of us have abandoned the realities of our local church to fight for and about national and global abstractions. That should stop.

Furthermore, we shouldn’t call it “Christianity” when we talk about what’s happening with a few Christian celebrities or even with the Western (often just American) institutional church. That also feeds the problem, as if we need a high-profile solution for this dire, high-profile problem. Christianity embraces a much larger (and also much smaller) reality than that.

It seems Cooper thinks that if we can’t stop celebrity Christianity in the West, we should at least try to fix it. Beyond the fact that this contradicts his stated complaint, his solution looks an awful lot like the problem.

The Anti-Biblical Dichotomy of Truth and Feeling

Throughout his piece, Cooper assumes art can do nothing more than provide a vague, emotional canvas to get people in the right mood to receive the “truth.” He writes:

. . . singers and musicians are good at communicating emotion and feeling. We create a moment and a vehicle for God to speak. However, singers are not always the best people to write solid bible truth and doctrine.

His solution for this? Reject ignorant emotional cheerleaders as your biblical truth quarterbacks. In other words: Switch out your celebrities from emotion celebrities to truth celebrities. He promotes the exclusive primacy of intellect. His opponents promote the exclusive primacy of feelings. Both assume the Bible, or at least Jesus, agrees with their side. No side of this debate seems to understand that we will not solve our problem by championing one faculty over another, but by understanding that the Bible provides a way to heal the sinful separation we’ve wedged between truth and feeling.²

The apparent solution Cooper provides (elevate “biblical truth” over feelings) is just a different version of the problem. And, ironically, Cooper’s continued divorce of truth and feeling has no biblical warrant.

A Biblical Solution to Truthless Feeling

In According to His Excellent Greatness, I address a similar problem with a basically antithetical solution:

Most artists, Christians and otherwise, have abandoned the notion that art should communicate truth, thus hamstringing the primary purpose of Christian art—edification. . . . In Colossians 3:16, Paul instructs the church to “teach” and “admonish” one another with “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.” He does not say “entertain” or “inspire” or “fill with fuzzy feelings.”³

Why doesn’t Cooper recommend that artists become more educated, or that we encourage them to teach and admonish us? Why doesn’t he address the woeful absence of art education for ministerial students? He assumes that the only proper place of art is to “set the mood.” The Bible rejects this in both its form and content. From the instruction of Old Testament story-telling (1 Cor. 10:11) to psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (Eph 5:19; Col. 3:15), artists have had a long-term leadership responsibility in the church to teach deep biblical truths through the arts. The answer is not to tell artists to step aside. The answer is to encourage them to step up.

What About Marty Sampson?

In Sampson’s reply to Cooper, he criticizes “Christian media” for creating “ever more content . . . about people losing their faith and doubting, while receiving ZERO backlash for using their megaphones to broadcast those doubts to their audiences.” I agree that Christian media should hold themselves to a higher standard than click-throughs and ad revenue. But what did Sampson expect to happen? He aired his doubts to thousands when he published his first Instagram post. Maybe he agrees that he should not have done that now. But what should he have done instead?

Certainly Sampson could have, and probably should have, sorted through his doubts with trusted friends in his local community. But does he even have a local community? Why not? Because of us! Celebrity Christianity hurts celebrities as much as it does the rest of us.

Further, what if Sampson had pursued local solutions for his nascent doubts? Could he have felt comfortable singing platitudes for us while they no longer represented his beliefs? If his faith became deeper, could his songs remain shallow at our request? Maybe Sampson thought it was better and more honest to discuss his doubts honestly. I think he started too late. And we encouraged him (and even paid him) not to start at all.

That’s what Sampson really meant by his criticism that “no one ever talks about” any number of so-called problems in Christianity. He meant that he didn’t feel like he was allowed to talk about those things from his platform. And the reaction to his post proved his point true, actually. We do not allow Christian celebrities to talk about their own faith struggles in any but the most generic terms, lest the “skittish sheep” be drawn away from the security of platitudes and the comfort of clichés.

Conclusion

This article solves nothing, I understand. But I hope it raises important questions only you can do anything about. If celebrity Christianity poses a problem, will we solve it by switching out one kind of celebrity for another one? Do we address the vague emotionality that has become the norm for our leaders by continuing to empty our feelings of any truth and our truth of any feelings? 

What if the CCM industrial complex stopped coercing its artists to always and only present an idealized and untroubled version of abstracted Western Christianity? We could actually encourage this by refusing to buy and support saccharine, monotone, shallow, and juvenile Christian art. What if we expected Christian artists to use their platforms to do more than set a “mood” of worshipfulness? Rather than lamenting the influence of our artists, we should support them while they deepen their education and grow in emotional maturity, artistic uniqueness, and biblical depth.

We might not be able to do anything for Marty Sampson now, but we can encourage local leaders to address their doubts with trusted friends while those doubts still remain in their infancy.⁴ We need more local leaders and local congregations who fulfill their responsibilities to each other and their local communities first.

Maybe we’ll solve the celebrity Christian problem when the average church-goer stops thinking he or she needs to solve it. Invest in your local church. Stop wringing your hands in anxiety. Start folding them in prayer. And let’s work on the local application of biblical truth (in all of its emotional depths) where we have any degree of real accountability and influence—in our hearts, our homes, and our local churches.

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If you’re interested in hearing more on this topic, be sure to listen to the conversation Rusty and Michael had on the Renew the Arts podcast: Ep. 35: How to Solve a Puzzle Like Marty Sampson