When a pastor preaches cruelty, why does the congregation listen?

Halfway through Netflix's jarring docuseries Death of the Pastor’s Wife, I found myself rewinding a clip to make sure I had heard it correctly. It was that unhinged.

There was John-Paul "JP" Miller, pastor of Solid Rock Church, telling his congregation that a wife who refuses her husband sex is inviting the devil into her marriage. He claimed that withholding intimacy was comparable to rape, sex trafficking, or homosexuality.

He said it as doctrine, as some sort of Bible-based fact, and as justification for his own abhorrent behavior. What stunned me was that members of his congregation sat in the pews and nodded along.

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You might think Miller was an outlier. I don’t. I think this type of behavior — pastors exploiting Scripture to justify their predatory actions and manipulate their congregations — is more prevalent than we know.

The documentary lays out, in the words of his late wife, a marriage defined by control but rationalized as “God’s way.” She claimed that Miller demanded sex up to four times a day and presented it as a wife’s spiritual duty. That is not spiritual. That is slavery.

She made countless allegations of infidelity and exploitation that Miller reframed, whenever word began to spread, as God's plan rather than the consequences of his own immoral choices. Just as striking as his specific cruelty toward his wife was its pattern: The worse his behavior got, the more his sermons bent toward submission and away from anything remotely biblical.

To me, a guilty pastor doesn’t preach humility. He preaches obedience, slavery and cruelty, then twists those demands into what he wants other people to believe is God’s word.

I recognize this absurdity because I grew up inside it.

I was raised deeply Catholic, which included eight years of Catholic school, Mass every Sunday and parents who gave their time and faith to the parish without reservation. My father was a saint and an extraordinarily good man. To a child, the priests who came to our house for dinner were something close to God's stand-ins on earth.

They were revered. You don't question a man you've been taught is incapable of being wrong. After my father died, one of those priests tried to groom me. He made attempts — I'll leave it there — that no child should ever have to describe, let alone survive. Yet on Sundays, he would preach about avoiding sin, following Jesus's word and the dangers of not doing so.

That experience taught me something I wish I hadn't had to learn so young: The vestments, the altar and, most especially, the title — none of it makes a person righteous. It just makes people less likely to ask questions about them.

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For years, rumors followed this priest from parish to parish. Whenever they surfaced, he was shipped somewhere else, and the cycle began again.

Yet, on Sundays, people still came to hear him, listen to him and take communion from him. I often wonder why the congregations turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to what was happening.

Watching Miller’s congregation absorb his twisted theology without blinking, I also thought about a close friend from high school in Pittsburgh — someone smart and funny whom I admired — who went on to earn a divinity degree and start a church and youth ministry in Kansas.

Nothing wrong with any of that. But when the anti-LGBTQ+ funding scandal involving Chick-fil-A broke years ago, he didn't just ignore it or remain silent. He became fixated on defending a company funneling money into anti-LGBTQ+ causes.

Among his scores of Facebook followers were kids in the rock bands he sponsored, young people in the youth groups he oversaw and members of a congregation that hung on every word he said on Sundays and beyond.

He mounted that adamant defense knowing full well I was gay. I wrote to him privately and then blocked him. There are times I want to check on him and see what he’s doing, but I stop myself because I’m too afraid of what I will find.

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I thought, too, of cousins of mine who were obsessively plugged into a network of extreme right-wing pastors; one cousin even married one. They would share sermon clips that were less about love and more about condemning people who didn’t think or believe as they did. One of those pastors was later arrested for attempting to solicit sex from a 13-year-old boy.

I share these stories because each happened within my own circle. They are data points, not the findings of an extensive study. And I’d venture to say there are no statistics capable of proving what my gut has told me for a long time.

I have long believed that the structures surrounding these zealot pastors, who stand before a captive, adoring audience every week, create ideal conditions for abuse.

The job itself gives them the room's adoration and attention. They can frame their conduct as God's will and try to prove it by manipulating the Bible or demonizing people whom congregants have already been taught to see as heathens, sex traffickers, rapists and queers.

This is the running theme that connects the white evangelical right to a twice-impeached, twice-divorced, criminally convicted, grifting, demonic president they've decided is God's imperfect vessel. They twist Bible verses into convoluted logic to justify treating him like the second coming.

In doing so, they become just as demonic and just as guilty of sin as he is — as do the pastors who praise him. In essence, Trump is the ultimate abusive pastor, surrounded by a MAGA congregation that thinks he can do no wrong.

None of this means every pastor, priest or minister is a predator. Most, I have to believe, are exactly what they claim to be. But "Death of the Pastor's Wife" isn't most shocking because of what Miller did. It's most shocking because of how unsurprised his own congregation seemed to be; how practiced they were at hearing something monstrous tied to Scripture and believing it was part of their faith.

The scandal was never just the man behind the pulpit. It's every person willing to sit in the pew and mistake his certainty for God's.

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