There is a now familiar and deeply troubling pattern within American evangelicalism: the moral collapse of high-profile spiritual leaders followed by public scandal and institutional fallout. Over the past twenty years this list has grown long and dispiriting—Carl Lentz, James MacDonald, Bill Hybels, Ravi Zacharias, Robert Morris, Brady Boyd, and now Philip Yancey. Beyond these public figures lies a far larger, less visible story: countless local pastors removed from ministry for sexual misconduct, and an expanding record of abuse, mismanagement, and institutional cover-up across evangelical churches and organizations.

In most cases, the evangelical instinct has been to respond with grace—calling for repentance, forgiveness, and, where possible, restoration. These impulses are right and necessary. But they are not sufficient. The damage done by such failures is real, cumulative, and lasting. You do not have a senior figure in evangelical center institutions—an author who has sold over fifteen million books—confess to an eight-year-long affair without profound consequences for trust, credibility, and moral authority. To pretend otherwise is not charitable; it is naïve.

One commentator captured the severity of the moment with brutal honesty: “If I were trying to destroy Christianity, Philip Yancey is one of the people I would have saved a bulldozer for.” That remark may be overstated, but the intuition behind it is not. These collapses strike at the plausibility structures that sustain evangelical faith in the public square. Anguish, in moments like this, is not an overreaction. It is appropriate.

Yet when these failures come to light, our response is often narrowly individualistic. We locate the problem in personal weakness and respond with familiar exhortations: guard your marriage, keep short accounts with Christ, maintain accountability. These are necessary admonitions—but they are not enough. Something deeper and more systemic is at stake.

Taken together, these episodes reveal persistent structural failures within contemporary evangelicalism, including:

• the accumulation of power without meaningful accountability
• celebrity leadership models insulated from oversight
• institutional instincts toward self-protection rather than truth
• theological deficiencies that thin out moral seriousness
• and formative practices of discipleship that fail to shape durable character

When we ignore the social and institutional context of these failures, we fail to take them seriously. If context matters—and it does—then individual willpower alone cannot prevent recurrence. We are all shaped by the moral ecology we inhabit. And that ecology increasingly reflects the conditions of late modernity: authority becomes subjective, prohibitions are minimized, victimhood is valorized, sin is reframed in therapeutic terms, and anonymity is amplified by technology.

I have no insight into the circumstances that led to Philip Yancey’s failure. But I do know this: every human life has points of weakness. Under the right conditions—fatigue, isolation, illness, unchecked authority, moral drift—any of us can find ourselves standing at the threshold of failure. Wisdom requires vigilance not only about our choices, but about the environments that normalize temptation and conceal consequence.

What we must resist, therefore, is the temptation to rubberneck—to treat this as one more scandal in the evangelical news cycle. Instead, we should receive it as tragedy. And tragedy, properly understood, is not spectacle; it is instruction.

Tragedy is the aesthetic–liturgical expression of a functioning sacred order. It does three indispensable things:

• It makes transcendence visible.
• It teaches limits by enforcing prohibitions.
• It makes moral cost unavoidable and meaningful.

Modernity is anti-tragic, precisely because it rejects authority, denies limits, and pathologizes sacrifice. Yet when news like this break, we feel something deeper than outrage or disappointment. We are simultaneously repelled and drawn in. Rudolf Otto named this experience mysterium tremendum: ontological dread—the realization that reality is morally charged and not safe.

Christianity does not eliminate tragedy, as modernity attempts to do. It intensifies it—and redeems it. The cross does not explain suffering away; it exposes its weight and bears it.

Tragedy is the cultural form by which a sacred order teaches people how to live under moral authority without destroying themselves. It calls us back to the seriousness of sin, the reality of judgment, and the costly meaning of grace. Only within such a moral framework does forgiveness make sense. Only there does restoration have substance.

These are lessons modern evangelicals must relearn—not merely in words, but in the daily practices of leadership, discipleship, and institutional life. Anguish, in this moment, is not the enemy of faith. It may be one of its last remaining signs of health.

David John Seel, Jr. is a writer, cultural analyst, and educator. He is a principal at Reframe Consulting LLC. He is the author of eight books, the most recent being Aspirational Masculinity: On Making Men Whole (Whithorn Press, 2025). He and his wife, Kathryn, live in Wilmington, North Carolina where they attend Christ Community Church. You can listen to John’s podcast, here 

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Books by Dr. John Seel:

Men are scolded. Men’s lives are fragmented. Young men are basically confused, directionless, and paralyzed. Men are experiencing identity dysphoria. In contemporary society they are blamed as toxic, discounted as important, and even questioned as real. This is a contrasting narrative that celebrates the importance of masculinity.