On October 31, 1992, a pastor made a public statement addressing a long-standing controversy in his church. It involved false accusations against a famous intellectual whose conflict with the church had not only led to the destruction of his career and reputation but also imperiled his life. The pastor, acknowledging the hazardous nature of academic exploration for people of faith, called the entire episode a “tragic . . . mutual misunderstanding,” which—as anyone who follows the careers of politicians and pastors knows—is as close to “We got this wrong and I’m sorry” as some of them get.

It was all the more extraordinary that the pastor in question was Pope John Paul II. While “mutual misunderstanding” was morally and factually insufficient, I imagine it was incredibly satisfying to the ill-fated academic—or would have been, had the victim in question not been dead for 350 years. But such was the fate of Galileo Galilei.

Still, the gesture was enough to make news around the globe. On the front page of the New York Times, the headline read, “After 350 Years, Vatican Says Galileo Was Right: It Moves.”

The Inconvenient Truth

Galileo published The Starry Messenger in 1610, setting off a maelstrom of controversy that would disrupt the rest of his days. It confirmed the thesis put forward sixty years earlier by Copernicus—that the earth rotated around the sun—and seemed to directly confront the claims of Scripture that the sun “rose” and “fell” and that the earth’s foundations were immovable.

While some church officials were comfortable with reinterpreting these Scriptures as poetic metaphors, others saw it as a challenge to the Bible’s authority. Some also thought that it set a terrible precedent to let discoveries from the study of the natural sciences challenge the way the church interpreted the Bible.

This infuriated Galileo. In a letter to one of his patrons, he described how the church was demanding literalism out of passages of Scripture that were never intended to be read literally. In forcing the Bible to say what it didn’t say, it made the church look ridiculous. He wrote, “These men have resolved to fabricate a shield for their fallacies out of the mantle of pretended religion and the authority of the Bible. These they apply, with little judgment, to the refutation of arguments that they do not understand and have not even listened to.”

In the end, the church rejected Galileo’s discoveries and subjected him to the Inquisition, with all the coercive means at their disposal. Not only was he wrong, the inquisitors said, his teachings were considered heresy—a damnable offense. It was a threat of violence against not only his body but his soul as well. In 1616, heliocentrism was officially condemned as heresy. Galileo was called to Rome and warned to no longer teach on the subject—a command he obeyed until 1632, when he published a second book: Two Chief World Systems. That book expanded on the arguments in The Starry Messenger and reignited the controversy. Once again he was called before the Inquisition and this time was forced to recant under threat of torture The trouble wasn’t just his research—though they continued to label it heresy—but, rather, that he had rejected the church’s authority by continuing to teach and write about it.

We often talk about Galileo as someone who can help us understand the advent of modernity. But his story, and the missteps of the seventeenth-century church, also reveal much about the contemporary crisis of abuse and moral failure in the modern church. There’s a familiar architecture to his story, one I’ve seen far too often in the years I’ve spent examining the dynamics of spiritual abuse inside the church:

Things can unfold this way whether a person is confronting improper governance, poor leadership, spiritual or sexual abuse, or even the movements of the planets and stars. And while the truth won out for Galileo as it has in other cases, it did so far too late. Nothing can diminish the years spent under threat of torture, a decade in physical confinement and isolation, the public humiliation, the dismissal of his life’s work as anti-Christian.

When he died in 1642, his family and patrons conspired to quickly and quietly bury him at the Basilica at Santa Croce, concerned that the Inquisition would deny him a consecrated, Christian burial. He lay there for ninety-five years before his remains were moved into a marked tomb built in his honour.

From our vantage point, four hundred years later, the attempt to suppress Galileo’s teaching seems comically absurd. The church simply didn’t understand the times or the science. Perhaps a century earlier, such an effort to stifle Galileo’s inconvenient truths might have succeeded, but by this time, the Protestant Reformation was in full swing and its ethos emboldened Galileo and his allies. The printing press also created conditions in which the church’s ability to maintain authority through violent control was rapidly diminishing.

In the fifteenth century, when the Gutenberg press was first invented, only about 10 percent of Europeans could read. By the seventeenth century, when Galileo was publishing, nearly 50 percent of Europeans could read. The Starry Messenger was a “bestseller” in its day, and it was copied and distributed widely. Like scientific papers today, the publication of his theories and methods made his work repeatable. Anyone with a telescope (which was becoming more widely available all the time) could “check his work,” which meant that the church wasn’t simply attempting to suppress one man’s ideas; it was soon at war with people’s own vision.

As noted, Galileo’s ideas were not met with humility or curiosity by many religious leaders. Instead, his ideas were met with reactionary fear and calculated, violent coercion. What followed for Galileo illustrates the moral and spiritual hazards not of authority but of the abuse of authority from within the church. Their treatment of Galileo reveals to the church today how a reactive and coercive posture can destroy its own authority and witness, resulting in a loss of credibility and loss of opportunity to shape the culture around it.

While most contemporary churches and denominations don’t employ inquisitors anymore, we need to recognize the perilous nature of the authority any church leader possesses. Pastors can articulate who is “in” and “out” of a spiritual community—either through formal means like excommunication and church discipline, or informal social exclusion. As a pastoral tool, exercising authority is a vital part of the formative life of the community. But when employed coercively, it yields spiritual violence, severing Christians from community and burdening them with anxieties about the state of their souls.

The scandal among evangelical leaders is a scandal of authority. Through the misuse or misunderstanding of their authority, pastors have done unspeakable damage to the church’s witness. This dynamic is nothing new. It’s older than Galileo. But scandals of authority do not mean the church should relinquish its authority. Instead, the church needs to remember its proper means and ends. And by reframing our understanding of authority, we can begin to see a path toward a better and more beautiful—and less violent—church.

Real Authority Is Not Violent

The word “authority” comes to us from the Latin auctor and is related to “authorship.” In Roman society—where the concept as we know it first emerged—authority was rooted in the founding of Rome. To have authority meant one had the ability to represent Rome’s values, character, and history. One could speak “authoritatively,” and as a result, people wanted to follow you into war, a noble life, or the ballot box. As such, authority is never coercive.

Building on this Roman concept, Hannah Arendt, the twentieth-century German-Jewish social theorist, defined authority as “an obedience in which men retain their freedom.” It is an attribute of those who can lead and direct free men and women. According to this definition, a person represents something shared—religious beliefs, civic values, institutions—and directs others on behalf of them.

This can be confusing, Arendt acknowledges. She writes, “Since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed.”

Put another way, authority evokes obedience without pressure or threat of violence. To clarify this, she contrasts authority with its most familiar alternatives: tyranny, the rule of the one; and authoritarianism, the rule of the few. In tyranny, there is no functional distinction between the will of the leader and the law. Disobedience of the leader will lead to severe consequences, and authority doesn’t matter since the tyrant doesn’t require consent to hold his position. In authoritarianism, power is vested in a few people and in the laws, codes, and rules—written or unwritten—that establish the community. The law is brutally enforced.

The common thread between them is the absence of freedom. Obedience, whether to the law or the tyrant, is motivated primarily by the threat of consequences for disobedience, which in either case can be limitless. By contrast, authority operates by activating a person’s internal desires and convictions. One obeys an authority in the interest of something greater, whether that’s for religious reasons, a vision of common good, or deeply held beliefs.

Arendt goes on to describe how violence and authority are, essentially, opposites. She writes, “Violence destroys that which it was meant to save.” A leader or institution only reaches for violence and coercion when efforts to persuade fail. But once you’ve reached for violence, authority vanishes. The threat of violence eclipses the common love that was the source of authority—whether it was love of Rome or love of God as in the church.

This was certainly true with Galileo. Coercion, in the form of the Inquisition, eclipsed any arguments the church might have made about their apostolic authority or the Scriptures themselves. The consequences were obvious, even at the time. Any obedience that resulted from such coercion was to be short-lived.

The philosopher René Descartes, for instance, writing shortly after Galileo was declared a heretic, hoped that the church would back away from their position. But even if they didn’t, Descartes acknowledged, “I would continue to believe [heliocentrism] to be true.” The damage to the church’s authority was complete. As a result, the potential for radical doubt and despair, inherent in Galileo’s discoveries, could run unchecked by the church’s influence. As Arendt describes it,

It’s been said that we lost the world at the precise moment we mastered it through technology, reason, and abstraction. Perhaps in a similar way the church lost its authority at the precise moment it abused its power and coerced Galileo into silence.

With the suppression of Galileo, the church made itself irrelevant to public intellectuals seeking to understand what we fundamentally can and cannot know. In trying to preserve its authority, it destroyed it, and its lost its opportunity to speak to the critical issues of the Enlightenment that gave rise to a much harsher severance of religion from science, faith from reason.

I’m not inclined to a lot of speculation about how history might have been different—but it is at least worth considering how different the last two hundred years of history might have been if the authority and credibility of the church hadn’t been eroded throughout the 1600s. What if the church had played a more integral—authoritative—part of the moral, ethical, and spiritual conversation throughout the Enlightenment?

But the church lost that opportunity when, feeling threatened, it reached for violence.

Trust Wants More Than Uniformity

I think of this story often because the church seems to me to be at a different kind of inflection point. For more than a decade, evangelicals have witnessed a parade of moral failures among their best and brightest. Almost every denomination has had a reckoning related to sexual abuse. And churches of all kinds have been pulled apart because of political, racial, and cultural polarization.

The pastors who remain in the pulpit are surveying the devastation and asking, “What can we do about where the church is now?” As a journalist who has covered the devastation left in the wake of abusive churches and church leaders, I hear this question more than any other.

It’s a fascinating question with deep anxieties underneath. To some extent, pastors are afraid of being lumped in with corrupted leaders. They are also afraid of becoming one such fallen leader. But most of the time, that’s not really what’s being asked. Most pastors believe they aren’t such a leader (and most are correct, thank God), but are dealing with the consequences of a church that has lost its authority.

To be sure, we aren’t struggling to prove the relevance of the church to matters of science and inquiry; it’s far worse than that. The cascade of fallen evangelical leaders and the parade of those who have been co-opted by political polarization have raised questions about the church’s authority on questions of faith, morality, and conscience.

Frustrated pastors sense the distrust and angst in their churches and the hostility of the world. They hear stories of deconstruction all the time, and they sense the landmines in their congregation—knowing that if they say the wrong thing about race, politics, gender, sex, or Covid, they’ll get flooded with angry calls and emails.

These frustrations are entirely legitimate, but in responding to them, we have to ask another question. It’s the old question Jesus often asked of those who approached him: “What do you want?”

What I’ll often ask directly back to pastors who raise concerns about the state of the church is, “Is what you’re asking actually, ‘How do we get back to having people do what we tell them to?’”

It’s a tricky question, because as pastors and leaders, they ought to want a trusted obedience to some extent. The question is why, and how will they pursue the ability to do so. On the one hand, if you simply want obedience because you’re exhausted by the disillusionment and distrust of your parishioners, you may have lost the thread of what it means to be a pastor. On the other hand, if there’s a genuine desire to help people, you then have to look at what authority actually is and the heavy, slow work that will be required to restore it.

The desire to preserve or restore authority tempts us to act with coercion (violence). If our reaction to feeling threatened is to cling to authority by means of power and the influence it gives us, we will accelerate the crisis and open the door to ever-deepening distrust.

In the Galileo affair, had the church been willing to reassess its claims of authority on the natural sciences (as some of its leaders suggested), and had they reconsidered the need for literalist dogma about the earth’s foundations and the sun’s movement, they might have maintained a seat at the table as a voice for ethics and human dignity in the evolution of the sciences in the modern age and beyond. The power of secularism as we know it today might have a different shape.

Of course, that’s speculation. But there should be no doubt that the idea that the church had nothing of substance to offer the study of the natural sciences emerged directly from the persecution of Galileo, and if that intellectual rift had not taken place, the modern world’s spiritual imaginary might look different.

Similarly, in our present age, while Christians are trying to reckon with a church plagued by personal scandals, political idolatry, and widespread sexual abuse, the church’s first priority should not be to protect its claims of authority and preserve the privileges of the office of pastor. Nor should it be to look for power as a substitute for authority. Such gains, if they can be called that, will be short-lived at best.

Consider Donald Trump and his embrace by evangelicals. Christians in the years before 2016 felt kicked around by progressives, having “lost” in the courts and in schools. Trump promised to fight for them and win, restoring a world they’d lost and making America “great” again.

Today, even while Trump appears positioned to regain his party’s nomination (and possibly the White House), it’s worth asking what his effect was on the church’s authority. Are Christians better situated to influence the world because of a common sense of values and story, or less? Has the church’s authority expanded or contracted? Are we more known as a source of meaning or as one of coercion and violence? I think the answers speak, tragically, for themselves.

Any vision for the future of the church needs to take into account the real architecture of authority, understanding how it emerges from a shared commitment to a larger story and a deeper source of meaning. This is an invitation for Christians to think about cultivating communities marked by goodness and beauty, understanding that these communities are the “children” that prove the wisdom of the gospel right. Virtue and beauty and the stories we tell about how they are formed and made to flourish are the only things that establish real moral authority.

In the devastated spiritual landscape of the twenty-first century, where lack of community and lack of meaning are the normal experience for most Americans, and where performative rage dominates our cultural and political life, building a community of love sounds quaint. But it is precisely love’s countercultural and counterintuitive nature that makes it so powerful. As Guy Garvey puts it, love is the original miracle. Love is a source of authority we know from our everyday lives.

The apostle Paul warns us that if we have everything but lack love, we have nothing. I take that as both a spiritual reality—that it’s a key to the good life for an individual person—and a political reality—that it’s a vision for a flourishing community. Because of that, I also believe that the church’s diminished place in the world shouldn’t trouble us so long as we have—or can resurrect—love.

Imagine if we possessed all that we think could cure our crises, both inside and outside the church: power and influence in politics, the academy, the marketplace, the entertainment and media industries. Imagine if we had a place at the table in discussions of economics, philosophy, the natural sciences, or medical ethics. If we had all of these, but didn’t have love, what good would we be? Moreover, how long would we last in those places and at those tables, if we showed up with all the right answers and no love?

Too often, the church’s contribution to dark times was a failure to love when unpleasant or inconvenient truths confronted us, from Galileo to the plague of narcissism and the sexual abuse crises facing the church today. It wasn’t the individual or collective failures that destroyed the church’s authority; it was her own efforts to preserve authority, to grasp power as it slipped away, that ultimately destroyed it. Galileo—who was surely not the first—stands as a hero not only for scientists in search for truth but for Christians of all kinds who suffered exile for the sin of telling the truth.

A church that wants to reckon with that history honestly will discover that there is very little power or authority left to grasp. As a result, the choice to love may be the only bold or decisive act left in her hands. And that in itself could actually be a gift. Because love, and the testimony of what love alone can do, is itself the foundation of another authority altogether.

So in the end, there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that the loss of authority may be a forgone conclusion. There is too much in the water right now to expect a return to authority as we knew it in the past.

There is something lamentable about this, given that much of what is good and worth advocating in the Judeo-Christian tradition is open to debate in ways that were unimaginable in previous eras. But there’s something liberating about accepting it as fact. We no longer need be tempted to calculate for the preservation of authority or the accumulation of power in our moral considerations. Instead, we’re left with a relatively simple and straightforward command. The command was given by Jesus, when asked what was the greatest commandment. He answered: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. Not only is this the best guidance for preserving a clean conscience; it’s the only real path to establishing a new basis for authority in the new world that is being built before our eyes.