From a conversation about Ravi Zacharias and the revelations of his misdeeds with masseurs.

One note I should make first is that it’s very easy to have the right ideas and quite another thing to live by them. As much as I like to talk about the need for courage to face the truth and admit our mistakes, it’s much easier said, especially about someone else, than done. Most of us couldn’t bear for our failures to be seen or known. And most of us fear what it would cost us so much that we would be unlikely to do any better. So as much as I might have decided to back brave and lofty ideals, the reality is that I’m no better, and there but for the grace of God go I. In any case, the following discussion certainly reveals my own proclivity for pontificating.

X: “This Ravi stuff makes me sad. His wife denies it, but it seems like there is a lot of smoke there?”

Me: Yes, it does. I’m not one to be overly attached to the people behind a message. But this one is harder for me.

It brings to mind something George W Bush said, that there something about being at the top that’s just fundamentally corrosive to your soul. And men just have this extremely powerful built in biological weakness. And so corrosion sets in, and maybe you think “I can just keep it in this one little box in this one place and just let it take over this one part of me. I can give into it in this one way and it won’t matter. It won’t affect anything else.”

But, so often the problem is, it doesn’t stay in that box forever. Even if it isn’t in our own lifetime, it gets out. Sex is the easiest place in the world to let things go, but it’s such a deep and fundamental part of who we are and what we do that it’s actually one of the least likely places to keep the snakes inside it. It’s happened so many times, not just for Christian leaders, but for all men in positions of power and fame and success everywhere in every time, in every culture, so that it’s beyond a stereotype, it’s a universal. This is what happens. So much.

And as Christians we understand that everyone is a sinner and suffers the same temptations, but we hope for more. We hope that it will make a difference, that people will really strive to live up the position they’ve been given. But it’s very hard to be a leader before the world in any capacity, even in serving God, and not suffer the same fate as all other kinds of leaders before the world, in secular art, politics, music sport, business, and so on. Power removes limits on behavior, and it increases your ability to avoid scrutiny, and it’s always so tempting to think you could do or want more.

That’s why Bush said he actually valued his critics. Because for all that they were a thorn in his side and often accused him unjustly, he said they helped keep him honest too, because you truly don’t know who you could become if given the opportunity, and it made him work harder to be above reproach.

Still, it’s a great disappointment, all this. It really undermines the value of the message, because even if he thought it was all about the truth and the goodness of the message, not about him, which it is, it’s still the case that what many people tend to connect to is the person, not the philosophy. The stories matter so much to people. And these kinds of betrayals tend to rewrite the story.

And for the sort of people for whom the embodiment of the story really matters, it makes the message sound like lies, regardless of its internal soundness. I think that’s also partly why the right lost so many women in the last couple elections. The person matters more to many women. They can’t set that aside. It’s a reliable marker for them. So it doesn’t matter what the arguments were or how good they seemed, you just couldn’t get someone like my mom to vote for Trump. He was too leaky a vessel to carry the message, for her. And she might have a point.

People don’t have time to follow all arguments to their ultimate ends and dig into all the facts and all the disciplines. There’s just too much. So people look for a proxy to give them an idea of the integrity of an idea. And the easiest way to represent an idea to a person is with another person, to incarnate it. That works. But it has weaknesses. You can manipulate people with a false appearance of goodness that doesn’t really reflect the underlying ideas.

And you can genuinely try to represent good ideas but still fail as a human and as a representative, and people will impute that failure to what you were representing. People respond to people more than to ideas, I think. Or to ideas represented in lives. That’s why the ultimate embodiment of God isn’t an essay or a theological or legal document, however brilliant. It’s a person, and in fact a book telling about lots of persons, and their lives. I wish Ravi had been alive to face all this, at least. That would have helped.

I think part of the problem is that right now technology has gifted us all with immense power in this arena. Porn, birth control, std treatments, government aid, and general liberalization of sex, falling behavioral costs, mean that we all have access to opportunities that no previous generation had in this area. So we’re all facing opportunities and wield power that are equal to kings. We can have whatever we want for the asking.

That’s a really, really hard thing for humans to resist. And right now the argument of the world is: you can’t resist it, and why should you? We’re all kings now, take what you want. There’s a very strong argument being made that these things can’t be resisted, and that therefore it’s possibly even wrong to resist them. And it’s very annoying if anyone tries to resist, or tells us that we should and tries to abridge our power and freedom, our sovereignty. And it’s even worse if that person demands it and then doesn’t follow their own demands and standards.

If those preachy people couldn’t resist, and really wanted to, and they said that you should, then maybe they were wrong all along. Maybe it’s not possible and the world is right. Power and desire of this kind can’t be denied, and so they shouldn’t, because at least then we wouldn’t be hypocrites.

Consistency, practicality, and livability are often valued more than lofty but impractical and utopian ideals. Why chase an impossible and absurd standard? It’s not so different from the main argument against socialism. Yes, it would be nice, but you would have to change people and the whole world in such a drastic and tyrannical way that it’s really just empty dreaming and antihuman oppression. I think that is the counter argument being made against the regulation of sexuality.

At the very least, you hope that someone in that position gets caught during their lifetime so they can face it, prove themselves one way or another, and if guilty, admit it and repent. Ideally without being forced into it and committing lots of lies and abuses of power to delay the day of reckoning. There’s a real value in losing. It lets you learn. Because at least it lets you deal with the breach and reaffirm your position, despite your failings, by proving your commitment to the ideal by being willing to admit it and face the truth. By going yourself under the sword you set up.

Sometimes it’s better to lose honorably than to win or escape in dishonor. It may seem better for you personally to escape, but it harms your cause. Your cause would be better honored by seeing you sacrifice some of your own power and glamor for it willingly, than by seeing it preserved by lies and coercion.

It sounds like Ravi maybe made that mistake and argued with some people that they shouldn’t talk because it would harm the cause. And to a degree he was right. But the harm had already been done by him. Telling the truth would just reveal the harm he had done. But until you reveal the harm, it can’t be healed. And he had maybe come to believe too much in himself, that the integrity of the cause and his work was dependent on his own protection and preservation, including and up to hiding the truth. And that’s where self-deceit sets in.

The cause would have been honored more by an honest loss, it would have shown his commitment to the idea that it wasn’t him but the message that was good. And keeping up the lie forces other people to pay the price you weren’t willing to. The women involved, your family, your organization, the people who listened to you and found out after the fact. What will it force them to do and become? How will that serve God?

Ok, final thoughts, I promise. We’re all so focused these days on maintaining the case at any cost to protect the efforts of the team. And yes, because there is a lot at stake, and there are real dangers to confront and work to be done. But I think we lack faith in our own convictions when we’re willing to make so many conpromises for the team effort. As if all that’s standing between good and evil is our ability to brazen it out and win.

But our confidence isn’t supposed to be in those things, in those tactics, in the victories of tribes or kingdoms. Christ didn’t conquer Rome and free his people by getting voted Emperor. He became a criminal and was executed by the state. And as a result Christianity conquered Rome and his people were freed. The truth has to be enough for us, or we won’t have even that. And that’s a power worth sacrificing our own reputations for, our own powers and glamor and respectability, if need be. Because that’s not where our power or righteousness comes from.

So if we really believe, we should put our money where our mouth is and not fear failing and losing and being defeated and humiliated (including when we deserve it), so long as it is for the sake of the gospel. If we don’t, then our faith is still in the world, and in our own sin. We think God’s power is dependent on our ability to hide our sin and preserve our power and prestige. And that’s wrong.

Even in politics, maybe part of our mistake right now is thinking that true righteousness can be advanced effectively by worldly means (I think both parties make this mistake). But maybe there’s a real value in being defeated, because it forces us to question that belief and return to the true source and trust in that instead and do better in the future because we’ve seen our own frailty and inadequacy be revealed by that defeat. I think we’re all forgetting the power of admitting that. I just wish Ravi had had the chance to take that opportunity.

X: “Well said.”