re: #50 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

God has already forgiven them, so let’s just move on…

Your personal testimony is the central part of Charismatic Evangelism.

The reason Evangelical preachers who are caught being hypocritical to what they espouse as their faith is because confession, repentance, and forgiveness are built into Christianity, and Evangelicals take it seriously.

The Testimony consists of what convinced or brought a person to Jesus. Christians are expected to stray (I’m not perfect, just forgiven, is a common Protestant rubric), and they are expected to confess their sins to God and work to do better.

Confession in Evangelical churches is similar to early Christianity, where it was public.

Thus, the confession of sins, and the forgiveness of the congregation, is expected of evangelical members. Thus people such as Jim Bakker or Kent Hovind are permitted back into the fold to preach again. Most people religious or not want to see the good in others, and everyone knows that people seldom measure up to arbitrary ideals, so Christian Evangelicals are willing to give their preachers a pass for even terrible crimes.

It’s not just evangelicals though, pretty much every Christian faith does this to some degree (without the public confessions). Note how long virtually every church will fight allegations of child rape (Catholics aren’t alone in that, they just get better press because of lingering anti-Catholic bias in the country).

It is rare for Christians to consider a person within their faith to be wholly irredeemable. Evil is only reserved for people who aren’t Christians.

Amongst other things, that’s why atheists are less trusted in our society than rapists and paedophiles (who are mostly Christians).