Announcing My Future Scandals

Probably the worst part of an evangelical scandal is the feeling of being surprised.

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Whenever there is a new scandal in Christianity, we harrumph indignantly and act offended, not because of the horrible sin, but because we were caught off guard. Who could have seen this coming, again? We pick deeply flawed believers because they have shiny skin and teeth, and we prop them up and enable them to become rich and famous for doing a ministry. Deep down, we know that this is a bad system, but we want our celebrities, so we do it anyway. And then when the money and fame makes our celebrities even crazier than they already were, and they crash out, we have to act like we weren’t a part of the process, so we huff and puff and write think pieces.

As a Christian celebrity, I look at the years ahead and ask myself: do I have to have scandals? Yes. Yes I do. But how do I protect my brand?

Simple: I will eliminate the surprise of it all by announcing my scandals ahead of time. This way, no one will be shocked. It will almost be like a prophecy.

My tentative schedule of future scandals:

2026: Fake hacked

I plan to get started at some point next year. I will post an off-putting selfie of myself after a workout. Sorry, I meant to send that to my wife. No, wait—I was hacked. And by “hacked,” I mean “testing the waters and seeing what I can get away with.”

Late 2026: Plagiarism

Move over, Dale Partridge and Christine Caine. I will elevate evangelical plagiarism to an art form. I will lift entire sections of other people’s work, including paragraphs that begin with the phrase “As a woman.” I will steal ideas, themes, and even the fake anecdotes that are like housewife catnip in evangelical bestsellers.

And here is how I will get away with it: I will only steal from famous authors who don’t write their own books. This way, when I am confronted, I will simply call their bluff and claim that it was a simple matter of using the same ghostwriter.

2028: Heresy

In three years, I will appear on a podcast that up until that point no one has ever heard of. A grainy video clip will surface of me telling the host that you don’t have to believe in Jesus to be a Christian, because the important thing is that you believe in yourself, or some other platitude nonsense. Or maybe I will say that the Bible isn’t true, or that Jesus’ name was actually Golek-13, or Steve.

2029: Bullying

Several members of my team will quit in disgust and start an informational website detailing my various sins. Julie Roys will run an article with screencaps of my texts to these team members, where I accuse them of being “under the spirit of Soros,” call the men “broke dick Baptists,” and belittle the women by calling them “Great Value-brand Gwen Shamblin.”

I will have no comment at that time.

2031: Methodist nudes

By this point, I will be in the sort of Jimmy Swaggart delirium freefall of someone who is begging to be caught but no one will hold me accountable. Kate Shellnutt will report that I am soliciting Methodist women for nude photos using a kind of tortured, Christianese word salad: I am so worried about sexual sin that I have to see naked women in private, so that I can remain pure in person. That may not make sense now, and it also won’t make sense in 2031, but listen: if one dozen 36-year-old Methodist women named Kayla want to keep you holy by sending you dimly lit selfies of what appear to be their cans, sometimes you just have to go with it.

2032: Finances

Abusing other people is one thing, but it will be my abuse of money that eventually brings me down. Temporarily. This will all be by design, of course. There is big money in a rebrand, if you do it correctly. I will have a Jim Bakker I Was Wrong-style media tour and (ghostwritten) book in the chamber, ready to launch.

And did you know that I didn’t actually do anything to be disqualified from ministry? And furthermore, did you know that God needs people like me, who have been restored, to teach people about grace? I mean, Paul killed people. So, yes. I would love to speak at your conference. It feels great to be back. To be fair, this might be a bad system, but we all knew that already.

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