By Kaeley Harms,
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post critiquing the speaker lineup at a national Christian men’s conference.
Freedom Con is organized by Stronger Man Nation, a group founded by Josh McPherson, pastor of Grace City Church in nearby Wenatchee. This year’s speakers included Josh Howerton, who “joked” that women should “stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do” on their wedding night, Ryan Visconti, who said wives become toxic unless they’re weaker than men, and Graham Allen, who spoke of his mother as a “vagina.” Perhaps the most controversial name on the list was Mark Driscoll, who under the pseudonym William Wallace II once wrote that God created women to be “penis homes.”
My point was simple: Something is wrong when we revere these men instead of rebuking them. A choice to let men like this set the gold standard of masculinity in the church is a choice to teach the next generation that control, vulgarity, and domination are marks of biblical manhood.
A lot of people didn’t hear that point. Instead, I got a wave of comments assuring me it was unfair to paint their favorite pastor with the same brush as Mark Driscoll, along with a set of responses that had nothing to do with Driscoll, or Howerton, or the actual content of what I’d written.
Today I’m dissecting this kind of comment. I feel called to speak out about problems that threaten the Church from within, and I run into this exact pushback constantly. I know I’m not alone. My hope is that naming these patterns will help sincere Christians think more critically before adopting them.
It sounds compassionate. It sounds humble. It sounds biblical.
But often it isn’t.
It’s spiritual manipulation wrapped in Christianese, and it relies on a handful of accusations that have silenced Christians for generations. I’ve collected the greatest hits below. See if you recognize them.
1. “You’re obviously wounded. I’ll pray for you”
Maybe I am wounded. Maybe I’m not. Either way, it’s irrelevant.
First of all, when you say this to someone, you’re essentially relying on shame to shut them up. It’s an ugly thing to do. Do you actually care about their alleged wound? Or do you care more about convincing them to be quiet? Or if you genuinely believe they are, in fact, wounded, have you stopped to wonder about the source of their injury?
And sometimes people really are wounded. Survivors of abuse often become advocates because they don’t want others to suffer what they did. Their wounds may explain why they speak, but they don’t answer whether what they’re saying is true. You still have to contend with the work of examining their actual arguments.
Scripture never teaches us to evaluate an argument based on the emotional state we imagine the speaker to be in. The Bereans were praised for examining Paul’s teaching against the Scriptures, not for speculating about his motives. The prophets weren’t told, “You just need healing; go to therapy and take up needlepoint.” Jesus Himself was accused of having a demon rather than having His words answered.
If someone raises a biblical concern, the response is to examine it against Scripture, not to diagnose the person’s heart from a distance.
2. “You’re being divisive”
If someone punches your best friend in the face on the playground and you tell the teacher, are you the divisive one? Even kindergarteners know the answer. But give the bully a seminary degree, a bestselling book, and a microphone, and suddenly we’re hopelessly confused about who the real problem is. Either we’re too twitterpated by the good to notice the bad, or we’ve decided that pointing out the punch is worse than throwing it.
The New Testament makes an important distinction: the person exposing sin is not the one creating division.
Romans 16 tells us to watch out for those who cause divisions by teaching contrary to sound doctrine. Titus tells us to rebuke false teachers sharply. Paul publicly opposed Peter when the gospel was at stake. Jesus Himself said He came not to bring peace, but a sword.
Biblical unity is unity in the truth. It is never unity purchased by silence.
Calling out sin, false teaching, abuse, or hypocrisy is not what divides a church. Those things divide a church. Naming them is how the wound gets treated instead of ignored.
3. “That’s gossip. That’s slander”
This one works because gossip and slander are real sins, and real sins deserve real caution. To make it even trickier, there are, in fact, a bunch of ministries that seem to create their own job security by perpetually stirring up conflict so they can appoint themselves as the professional hall monitors. Controversy is content, and they’re never in short supply. That’s not healthy either.
But these abuses and excesses don’t absolve us of the responsibility to root out truth. There’s a test Scripture gives us, and it isn’t, “did you say something unflattering about a Christian leader.”
Gossip spreads private information with no legitimate purpose. Biblically, slander is false or malicious speech intended to damage another’s reputation.
Neither gossip nor slander describes the communication of public fact for the purpose of protecting others. Nathan confronting David wasn’t gossip. Paul naming Hymenaeus and Alexander by name in his letters wasn’t slander. The Corinthian church was told to publicly address a man’s sin precisely because leaving it private was the actual danger.
It’s not exactly like the church is hurting for examples of the harm done when private sins in high places are allowed to fester. Ravi Zacharias comes immediately to mind.
Truth spoken publicly, about a public figure, for the protection of the vulnerable, is not gossip. Calling it gossip is a way to make honesty sound like sin, so the sin itself never has to be discussed.
4. “If it doesn’t affect you personally, just pray about it”
This one always baffles me because it’s so overtly self-centered. I often have to bite my tongue and pray for grace before inviting people to remember that God calls us to care about people other than ourselves.
The Bible tells us to remember prisoners as if we were in prison with them. We’re told to defend the fatherless and the oppressed, not just our own household. Paul wrote entire letters about churches he’d never visited, correcting problems that had zero effect on his own life.
If distance disqualified concern, most of the New Testament wouldn’t exist. Prayer is good. Prayer instead of speech, offered as a way to end a conversation rather than begin one, is simply manipulation.
5. “If you don’t go to that church, mind your own business”
Since when has church membership defined the boundary for Christian accountability? Since when was official church membership even an inherently biblical standard? (That’s a blog for another day.) We are one body. Paul’s letters were written to churches he didn’t pastor and read aloud in congregations he’d never stepped foot in, because what happened in one local church mattered to the whole church.
When abuse or false teaching in one congregation goes unaddressed by outsiders, it rarely stays contained to that congregation. Pastors move. Networks share resources, conferences, and platforms. Silence only serves to widen the circle of people eventually hurt by the problem.
“Mind your own business” sounds like an invitation to humility. In the context of actual gossip or slander, it’s sage advice. But context matters, so when you say this to someone who’s actually trying to confront a problem, it functions more like a wall around accountability.
I heard this all the time in the trans debate, too. “Mind your business,” they said, as if allowing grown men to shower next to girls at the Y was somehow entirely inconsequential to me. Our actions (and inactions) affect others, too.
6. “This doesn’t belong on social media”
Freedom Con is advertised on social media. The speakers built their platforms on social media. Howerton’s sermon clip went viral on social media. The conference sells tickets through a website and promotes them with an Instagram feed.
If the platforming happens in public, the critique of the platforming belongs in public too. The venue objection only ever gets raised in one direction — at the person raising the concern, rarely at the men whose teaching is already circulating to thousands of followers.
Jesus rebuked the Pharisees in the temple courts, not in a private letter. Paul corrected Peter to his face, in front of the church at Antioch, “before them all,” because the influence was public and so was the correction.
I also want to pause here to invite people to consider the fact that social media can function as a great equalizer for people who lack the influence or power of those whose behavior they’re trying to confront. I’ve seen many people turn to social media as a last-ditch effort, long after they’d written their private letters and finished the Matthew 18 checklist to no avail.
Ironically, comments built from the list I just compiled rarely engage the substance of what was actually said. They don’t quote the false teaching. They don’t address the documented harm. They imply that if you were healthier, more loving, more spiritually mature, or minding your own business the way a good Christian should, you would stop asking uncomfortable questions.
It’s a way of avoiding the discussion while making the other person feel guilty for having started it.
I’m not writing this to be cynical about every well-meaning comment I receive. Some people really are just praying for me, and I’m grateful for that. But there’s a difference between prayer offered alongside engagement and prayer offered as a substitute for it, and it’s relatively obvious when you’re dealing with the latter category.
Legitimate critique can still be offered in unrighteous ways, and I’ve been guilty of that more than once. Righteous indignation curdles into something else faster than we’d like to admit. Not all resistance to what I write is a deflection tactic. Sometimes people respond to my actual tone, and that’s worth sitting with. So, I ask God to search me on it regularly: “Create in me a clean heart, God. Help me do the work you’ve called me to do without losing what makes it worth doing.”
But once you’ve done that, you don’t owe anyone a free pass to bulldoze your work with hyper-spiritualized attempts to shut you up.
Scripture gives us a better model. Test everything. Hold fast to what is good. Speak the truth in love, which means both parts, the truth and the love, not just the second one used to silence the first.
If a concern is unbiblical, show me where. If it’s uncharitable, show me how. But don’t tell me, or any of the countless advocates who’ve been handed this exact script, to be quiet when we know we’re called to speak. The question was never whether we saw clearly. It’s what we’re willing to call good, and who gets harmed by our silence.
Originally published at Honest to Goodness.
Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.
