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Solomon’s Paradox: Everyone’s Deceived but Us

Solomon’s Paradox: Everyone’s Deceived but Us

Last updated on: September 29, 2026 at 3:45 am by Stuart Delony

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Solomon’s Paradox: Everyone’s Deceived but Us 2026-09-28T17:06:56-04:00 Stuart Delony

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Close-up of a stern evangelical pastor with one eye blocked by a rough wooden beam, standing in front of a blurred church stage and glowing cross.

DALL-E

King Solomon had a reputation for wisdom. People came to him with disputes, impossible questions, and problems they couldn’t solve. He was the guy who could look at somebody else’s mess, cut through the noise, and see what everyone else was missing.

His own life was more complicated. According to 1 Kings 11, Solomon eventually accumulated 700 wives, 300 concubines, and enough religious side projects to build a high place for Chemosh, the god of Moab, outside Jerusalem. The biblical writer does not present any of this as evidence that things were going particularly well.

Solomon could settle everybody else’s disputes while looking at his own household and thinking, You know what this needs? Wife 701.

Psychologists Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross eventually gave this problem his name. Their 2014 study describes Solomon’s Paradox: our tendency to reason more wisely about someone else’s problems than our own. Distance gives us perspective. We see contradictions, bad motives, and obvious patterns more clearly when our own identity isn’t tangled up in the answer.

American evangelicalism took that tendency and turned it into a spiritual discipline.

Everyone Else Has a Blind Spot

Evangelicals are remarkably good at explaining why other people believe strange things. Ask why a Muslim believes Islam and suddenly everyone understands the influence of family, geography, culture, and childhood conditioning. Ask why a Mormon accepts Joseph Smith and evangelicals become amateur experts in group psychology. Ask why somebody stays loyal to a charismatic religious leader despite contradiction after contradiction, and they can explain social pressure, fear, identity, and the human need not to discover that you’ve spent thirty years being spectacularly wrong.

Catholics inherited traditions. Mainline Protestants compromised with culture. Atheists were shaped by secularism. Liberals were brainwashed by universities. People in other religions believe what their parents taught them.

Humans inherit assumptions before we are old enough to question them. A child in Pakistan is Muslim because of geography and family. A child in Alabama is Southern Baptist because God led him to the truth.

Then, apparently, sociology stops working.

Their beliefs are inherited; ours are discovered. Their traditions shape how they read scripture; we just read what the Bible says. Their certainty is indoctrination; ours is faith.

The distinction gets especially entertaining around religious experience. A Mormon saying he felt a “burning in the bosom” is treated as proof that subjective spiritual experiences cannot establish truth. An evangelical saying “God laid it on my heart” apparently clears peer review.

What an astonishing coincidence that the eternal truth of the universe so consistently resembles the religion practiced by our parents, neighbors, pastors, and preferred media personalities.

They Call It Discernment

Evangelicals even have a word for identifying everybody else’s error: discernment.

There are discernment ministries, discernment podcasts, and undoubtedly several people currently discerning whether this article is demonic. They watch for false teachers, suspicious books, suspicious music, suspicious pronouns, and whatever Target is selling during Pride Month.

Scrutinizing religious claims is not a bad thing. The trouble is where the scrutiny points. Evangelical discernment tends to ask How are they wrong? long before it asks How might we be wrong?

That isn’t discernment. It’s border patrol with Bible verses.

Christianity Already Warned Us

Christianity already has a vocabulary for human self-deception. Idolatry starts with our ability to take desires, loyalties, fears, and ambitions and make them sacred. Scripture warns repeatedly about false prophets because religious authority can be manipulative.

Then Jesus gives us the log and the speck.

He describes a person trying to remove a speck from somebody else’s eye while ignoring the log sticking out of their own. The order matters. Deal with your own obstruction first, because confidence in somebody else’s blindness does not guarantee clear vision on your part.

I spent more than two decades in ministry. I know this machinery because I helped run it.

We were trained to inspect the specks.

We built apologetics ministries, anti-cult ministries, heresy-watch organizations, biblical-worldview programs, and publishing industries dedicated to explaining exactly where everyone outside the approved boundaries had gone wrong.

We became world-class speck inspectors, but the log department never really got funded.

A Theology With an Immune System

Doubt inside evangelicalism is rarely just an intellectual matter. Questioning a doctrine can threaten your understanding of salvation, your church membership, your marriage, your friendships, your job, or your relationship with your family. If your paycheck depends on signing a statement of faith, changing your mind suddenly has a price tag.

Once enough of your identity and community depend on a belief remaining true, the mind gets very good at keeping it true.

Evangelical theology supplies plenty of language for that. Criticism becomes persecution. Doubt becomes spiritual warfare. People who leave were never really believers. Contradictions become mysteries. Outside criticism becomes further proof that the world hates the truth.

You don’t need a conspiracy when your theology comes with an immune system.

Turn the Checklist Around

Evangelicals spent decades building an industry designed to identify unhealthy religious movements. Walter Martin’s The Kingdom of the Cults helped define the modern evangelical countercult world, and the Christian Research Institute he founded still publishes tools for evaluating religious groups.

CRI’s own sociological checklist asks about “authoritarian control,” how a group treats former members and dissenters, and whether it encourages a “we-they” mentality that alienates people from family and friends.

So turn the checklist toward Mars Hill.

In 2007, two Mars Hill elders were fired after objecting to changes in church governance. The next day, Mark Driscoll stood in front of a gathering of church planters and described his leadership philosophy: “There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus.” He then explained that the two elders fired the night before were now under that bus.

That was 2007. It cost him nothing.

Mars Hill kept growing. Driscoll’s profile kept rising. His books kept selling. The checklist did not seem especially urgent when the guy driving the bus was on our team.

Eventually, the bestseller scheme became public. His own church-planting network kicked him out, Driscoll resigned, and Mars Hill dissolved within three months.

Driscoll later launched Trinity Church in Scottsdale. The comeback went fine.

Trinity now draws about 5,000 people a week and is raising $50 million for a new campus.

No elders.

Now score CRI’s checklist.

Authoritarian control: roughly 5,000 people and no elders.

We-they mentality: the family of Driscoll’s security guy reportedly cut off friendship with a family pushed out of Trinity because of their “choices and decisions.”

Former members and dissenters: that same security guy, Caleb Glennie, by then Trinity’s men’s pastor, left the church, and a churchwide email reportedly accused him of trying to split the congregation and invoked Acts 20’s warning about “fierce wolves.”

Three for three.

The immune system had found its diagnosis: the man leaving was now the wolf.

We were fluent in cognitive dissonance, authoritarian leadership, tribal loyalty, religious manipulation, and cultural conditioning in everyone except ourselves.

We just kept pointing the checklist at somebody else.

The Harder Kind of Discernment

Solomon’s problem was never a lack of wisdom. It was where he aimed it.

Can we talk about idolatry without assuming the idol belongs to someone else? Can we admit that Christians inherit beliefs from family and culture just like everyone else? Can we ask whether “biblical truth” means little more than the assumptions shared by everyone in the room?

Evangelicalism can give you a hundred reasons why everyone else has been deceived.

What if we have been, too?

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Trinity Church Scottsdale

About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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