Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
‘Politically incorrect’

‘Politically incorrect’

Last updated on: March 18, 2022 at 12:26 pm by Fred Clark

‘Politically incorrect’ 2022-03-18T12:26:58-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“Sexual Harassment Went Unchecked at Christianity Today” according to an aggressive, blunt report published yesterday by Christianity Today.

Here’s the beginning of that report, written by Daniel Silliman and edited by Kate Shellnut, “published without prior review” from executives at the magazine:

For more than a dozen years, Christianity Today failed to hold two ministry leaders accountable for sexual harassment at its Carol Stream, Illinois, office.

A number of women reported demeaning, inappropriate, and offensive behavior by former editor in chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye. But their behavior was not checked and the men were not disciplined, according to an external assessment of the ministry’s culture released Tuesday.

The behavior of these two men was gross, and just as disturbing was the apparent culture of retaliation that silenced, shamed, or stymied anyone who tried to report it. For years.

Olawoye’s harassment of women at Christianity Today only ended in 2017 because he was arrested in a federal sting and wound up serving three years in prison for trying to pay for sex with a teenage girl. Galli’s crude and creepy behavior continued unchecked for years “until August 2019, when Galli was accused of inappropriately touching three women in three days.” That led to his first workplace reprimand, after more than a decade of impunity despite numerous complaints. Galli announced his retirement two months later.

This long article is an unpleasant, icky, and appalling read, but Silliman deserves credit for his candor and thoroughness. And CT’s new leader, Tim Dalrymple,* deserves credit for introducing accountability, bringing in an external investigator, and going public with this report rather than a total spin job.

Religion News Service interviewed Galli after the piece. He’s piously unrepentant, offering only a stock non-apology:

Galli said he was deeply troubled by the allegations in the story, which he denied. Several of the incidents in the story were taken out of context, he said, or were simply false.

“My initial reaction is that I am shocked at how many of the statements made in the article were simply not true,” he said.

Galli also said he was “deeply troubled” if he did anything that offended or intimidated other people and would be open to meeting with people he had offended and apologizing.

That’s about how you’d expect Galli to react based on the creepily indignant and entitled portrait painted of him by lots of women he used to work with. Silliman’s report includes some particularly vivid — and skeevy — snapshots of the man’s character:

When [one] woman was hired on as an editor in the mid-2000s, someone joked that she was only brought on because a senior editor wanted to have sex with her. She didn’t report that to HR, but a colleague did. After that, the woman heard regular comments from men at CT about how she was too quick to see sexual harassment in everything.

Galli in particular began asking her if she was offended when he held a door open for her, she recalled. He would make a banal statement about gender, she said, and then add, “Are you going to report that?”

… None of the women saw Galli suffer any repercussions, and several said he seemed to brush the complaints off as a minor annoyance, a generational difference, or a problem of “politically correct” culture.

I don’t know Mark Galli personally,** but I know that guy. You probably do too. The guy who extravagantly makes a point of holding open doors and pulling out chairs and other “chivalrous” behavior toward “the ladies” while always aggressively joking that he’s sure they’re offended by his doing so because it’s “politically incorrect.” The guy who is constantly pushing for a reaction in the hopes of being able to tell women they’re over-reacting. That guy.

The “politically incorrect” bit there is a tell. I’m not saying that every man who repeatedly recites variations of that 40-year-old “joke” will turn out to be a smarmy, handsy sex-pest seething with resentment toward women for their failure to grant him the deference he believes he’s entitled to. But “Politically Incorrect” was the name of a show by Bill Maher. So*.*

These not-really-jokes about “political correctness” (or, more recently, “wokeness” or “cancel culture”) are a form of mockery directed at moralistic scolds. Or, to be more precise, they’re an attempt to evade legitimate moral condemnation by portraying the sources of that condemnation as legalistic, hyper-sensitive, tyrannical moral scolds.

They are, in other words, part of the bitter and bewildered backlash against the moral revolution of the Civil Rights Movement and the wave of feminism that accompanied it. That revolution didn’t topple the old regime — its power structures and systems mostly remain in place. But it completely demolished, forever, the prior claim that those structures and systems were morally legitimate.

So The Powers That Be retained their power, but no longer enjoyed any pretense of moral authority. The fact that uppity women and people of color no longer defer to their alleged moral superiority is something they cannot abide. So they hide the past, or try to rewrite it while they whine about their context by inventing an imaginary tyranny of “political correctness” and “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” portraying themselves as victims.

This imaginary victimhood shows that they still don’t fully understand what changed. It shows they never fully heard, or understood, or examined the moral arguments that overwhelmed their objections. All they took from the Civil Rights Movement and from feminism is some vague, dim sense that those people who had been perceived as the victims of injustice somehow thereby gained some kind of moral authority. And since they refuse to examine either justice or injustice itself, they guess this must be due to some magical property of victimhood. And so they try to claim the power of that magic for themselves by portraying themselves as the real victims. (“Are you going to report that?”)

This attempt to evade well-earned disgrace by a claim of victimhood is unconvincing — even to themselves — unless there’s at least some tiny shred of evidence that those uppity inferiors really are the over-reacting, vindictive moral scolds that all those jokes about “political correctness” and “cancel culture” make them out to be. So that guy needs to get a reaction from them.

And if those people with all their talk of equality and decency and justice don’t initially provide the reaction he seeks, then he will goad and needle and grope and harass and offend until finally somebody cracks and gives him the reaction and the pretext he so desperately needs to paint them all as uptight, hyper-sensitive jackbooted stormtroopers attempting to impose moral tyranny from the bottom up.

That’s why Mark Galli’s long response to Christianity Today’s article doubles down on his defensive defiance. It’s not an apology, it’s a victory lap in which he savors the opportunity to portray himself as the victim.

Is it full of pious humble-bragging and sanctimonious faux lamentation? Of course. Does he play the weaselly Matthew 18 card that every evangelical abuser plays? Of course. But the main sense one gets from his ill-advised screed is that Galli perceives that article as a kind of vindication. It all just proves that he was right and that the “politically correct” gazpacho were out to get him. That makes him the real victim here and — according to his garbled misunderstanding of the magical power of victimhood — that must re-establish his moral legitimacy and moral superiority, right?

That post from Galli reminds us of another unfortunate side-effect of choosing to become that guy — the guy seething with downward-focused resentment and indignant entitlement vented off in a steady stream of “jokes” about “political correctness” and “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” Choosing to become that guy makes you incapable of listening to anyone who might care enough about you to tell you to choose better. It turns you into someone who lacks the trust of friends or family members who might tell you that the best thing to do right now would be to shut up for at least a day or two rather than firing off a narcissistic, obtuse tribute to your own imagined martyrdom.

* Yes, that’s the same Tim D. who purged us “liberals” from Patheos’ evangelical channel, thereby inadvertently popularizing the term “progressive Christian.” And who once blamed me, by name, for the popularity and influence of Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Billy James Hargis. And who once seriously suggested that Wendell Berry needed a deeper understanding of the meaning of marriage and should turn to Focus on the Family for their wisdom on the subject (which is exactly like suggesting that Berry should turn to Monsanto for greater wisdom on farming).

In this case, though, he’s acting responsibly.

** I have, over the years, interacted quite a bit with Galli’s writing. See, for example:

Galli was also the source of a long-time running gag here, and the butt of that joke. He wrote the CT editorial that sought to define that magazine, in perpetuity, as: “a publication that believes gay and lesbian couples are destructive to society.”

Read through the links in this footnote and then re-read Silliman’s report and, well, it’s all rather consistent, isn’t it?

evangelicals

Christianity Today

church abuse

Previous Post

March 18, 2022

March 18 Flashback: Satanic baby-killers No. 1

Next Post

March 19, 2022 March 19 Flashback: Adrift

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

According to James, where does wisdom that is pure, peace-loving, and considerate come from?

Select your answer to see how you score.

From experience From heaven From study From Prayer