The evangelical Protestant culture isn’t known for its humor, but there are the rare exceptions. I’ve been enjoying John Crist’s fun-pokes at Christian culture for some time.
Who can forget his “If Bible characters took Uber” video or his “17 Christian ways to say no” video? So it’s been downright depressing to learn that Crist too is being hit with sex abuse allegations like so many others in the religious media spotlight.
What’s kind of surprising about this story is that it was broken on Nov. 6 by a charismatic Christian publication — Charisma — that is definitely not known for breaking hard news and certainly not stories of the negative variety.
For instance, next to the Crist story are others with headlines like “Are you inviting demonic spirits into your home?” and “Prophetic Vision: I saw angelic armies being activated, released in worship.”
But this time, their investigation made real news, with publications such as People magazine and the Washington Post doing follow-ups. The Charisma story begins with a woman called “Kate” telling of her date with Crist.
I was blown away when John [Crist] agreed to do an interview with me for my senior project,” she says. “… I was shaking and so nervous to be around someone I had idolized for months.”
From a makeshift podcast studio constructed in her room at Bally’s Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, Kate* was thrilled to be interviewing her professional hero, comedian John Crist. She and her boyfriend drove to Las Vegas in May 2017 just to record this interview—and everything was going great.
So she thought nothing of it when Crist asked her for her number before he left. Or when he later added her on Snapchat and immediately began messaging her. Or when he invited her out for the evening — just the two of them.
Crist goes on to buy this woman a bottle of raspberry vodka, which right here tells you a lot, right there.
A bottle? Most of us are flattened by a half-cup of the stuff; this woman was hit with a lot more than that.
Intoxicated, they took off their blades and ran into the water. Once there, she says Crist grabbed her and tried to kiss her, and in her drunken state, she struggled to push him off. He told her in crude terms how much he wanted to have sex with her and continued to pursue her. In response, she tried to explain that she had a boyfriend and only desired a mentoring relationship with Crist, not a sexual one. Eventually, he relented.
Once they returned to his apartment, the scene got ugly once more and the woman barely escaped, later saying that she’d thought that Crist, a born-again Christian, was above such behavior.
Apparently not, said Charisma, which had been hearing rumors about Crist for some time.
According to multiple sources, Crist has exploited his Christian reputation and platform to harass, manipulate and exploit young women over the last seven years. The allegations include, but are not limited to, individually sexting multiple women during the same time period, initiating sexual relationships with married women and women in committed relationships, offering show tickets in exchange for sexual favors and repeatedly calling these women late at night while drunk.
For those of you who are still wondering who this guy is, the article explains:
In 2019, few Christians seem better known and more influential than Crist. To those unfamiliar with him, that may be surprising; after all, Crist is not a pastor, ministry leader or worship leader. But Crist has risen to fame precisely because he’s what many young believers want to be: funny, smart, cool, relatable and vocal about his faith. The son of a Vineyard pastor, Crist is best-known for his stand-up comedy and popular YouTube videos satirizing Christian culture …
He tours nationwide to sold-out comedy clubs and churches alike. According to Pollstar, he is one of the top 100 touring artists in the world. In 2018, he became the first stand-up comedian to join the popular Winter Jam tour, sharing the stage with Jordan Feliz, Skillet, Kari Jobe and evangelist Nick Hall. During that tour — the second-best-selling tour of Q1 2018 after “Disney on Ice” — Crist reportedly offered to trade women tickets for sexual favors.
This news could not have come at a worse time for Crist, who had a Netflix special due out later this month and an upcoming book next spring. Both have been put on hold.
What’s interesting here is that Charisma inserts itself into the story, noting that members of the editorial team felt a calling from God to expose this man. Most newspapers would have relished such a juicy story but the Charisma folks said they didn’t.
Yet some evidence suggests certain Christian leaders have been aware of Crist’s behavior and — through inaction — let it continue unchecked. This is why Charisma believed it necessary to warn the body of Christ about what Crist has been doing behind the scenes. To be candid, our editorial team does not relish being in this position. We sifted through and gathered information for months before deciding to move forward with the story. Though the allegations against Crist are not criminal, we believe they are newsworthy for three reasons. We believe pastors and leaders who book Crist at their ministry events need to know the person they’re signing. We believe leaders who make Christianity part of their public persona — whether or not they are formally in ministry — should held to a higher standard. And above all, we believe the body of Christ must police itself and has an obligation to protect the innocent and vulnerable among us.
Isn’t that also the story in other denominations? How many times have we read this year about church leaders knowing of illegal and immoral things going on but they did nothing about it?
The history behind what led to Charisma’s decision to write this up goes back 11 years.
That is when Charisma and many other Christian leaders got snookered by an even worse Christian leader called Todd Bentley who in June 2008 got prayed and prophesied over by top charismatic leaders as the most anointed individual to show up since Jesus. Within a few months, Bentley was divorcing his wife for another woman.
Lee Grady, then editor of Charisma, obviously decided this would never happen again and his late 2008 essay on the CBN website excoriates churches for creating a celebrity culture that allows imposters to flourish. Do read it, as Grady’s remarks were a sea change at the time. (Grady just wrote another column about Bentley this summer saying Bentley needs to leave the ministry for good.)
I’m not implying that Charisma jumped into investigative mode right away after the Bentley mess. In recent years, in fact, it appeared to have abandoned news altogether, particularly during the eight-year editorship of Jennifer LeClaire. She finally left in 2017 by which time a recent University of Wisconsin graduate, Taylor Berglund, had joined the staff. He’s the one who wrote the Crist story.
Other than the aforementioned Post and People stories, plus these takes from Crist’s hometown outlets such as Nashville’s Fox affiliate and the Nashville Tennessean, neither of which say anything new, there’s not been much else about Crist in the news.
Maybe that’s because abuse by church leaders is no longer the news it once was?
Just in this week alone, look what’s popped up in Southern Baptist circles regarding a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary who was a top pastoral candidate at a Tennessee church. Note that the seminary’s leadership went public with this immediately and directed people to contact law enforcement officials.
A comment from a reader of the Post piece says it all: Is there anyone left in the world who hasn’t been, in some way, accused of sexual allegations? Of course there is, but with all these #ChurchToo scandals happening, lots of people might rephrase that question to ask if there’s any Christian leader left who hasn’t been tarnished by sexual misdeeds.
The numbers of those who haven’t is getting smaller by the day.
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