Why are Christians So Gullible?

We don’t understand how trust is built, maintained, and lost.

This week, a group of leaders in the Church of God in Christ have been accused in a lawsuit of defrauding a major pharmaceutical company out of more than $200 million in rebates for diabetes drugs.

Photo by Andrea Lightfoot / Unsplash / Creative Commons

This is far from the only case of financial fraud we have covered here at MinistryWatch. In the past six months alone, we have covered more than a dozen such cases. They include:

• Blake Bowman, a former Christian camp director in Texas, pleaded guilty to stealing or misapplying more than $600,000 in ministry funds.
• Rodney Locklear, the former pastor of Victory Church in Ruckersville, Virginia, was sentenced to prison on charges that included felony embezzlement alongside child abuse convictions.
• David E. Taylor, of the Kingdom of God Global Church, was indicted in a forced-labor conspiracy case involving donation call centers and alleged exploitation of workers.

When we report one of these stories, I often get emails from readers asking some version of this question: How can Christians be so gullible?

As I thought about that question, I came to believe a lot of Christians are ignorant or naïve about a simple concept: trust. We want to trust people, and in many areas of life we should and must trust people. Indeed, trust is the lubricant that makes the engine of modern life run smoothly. Even getting in a car and driving down the highway means you trust people with your life: You trust strangers to stay on their side of the yellow line.

Because trust is hard-wired into our lives, we rarely step back and ask questions about trust, such as why and when we should trust someone — or should not.

That’s why I thought a primer on the mechanics of trust would be helpful.

Earned Trust and Imputed Trust

In general, trust is built in two ways: trust is earned, or trust is imputed.

Psychologists tell us that earned trust is a result of frequency of interaction and the making and keeping of agreements. So, for example, if I show up for work every day and do my job, you trust that tomorrow the same will happen. You have a set of experiences that cause you to trust me. If I tell you I will do something and then I do it, trust will grow. Even small agreements, if they are kept, are powerful tools to build trust.

Imputed trust is different. Trust is imputed because of one’s reputation with other known and trustworthy people.

Consider, for example, the fact that many cultures have arranged marriages, and these marriages are often as successful as those in cultures where marriage is by choice. Why is this?

In part because the spouses come into the relationship with a level of trust imputed to the spouse due to existing family relationships and community bonds and experiences. A woman in an arranged marriage might reasonably expect her spouse to be faithful, a good provider, a good father, and an upstanding citizen in the community (thereby creating purpose and standing for the family) because she knows he was raised from his early youth to possess these qualities. Her own parents, whom she trusts, confirms for her that these assumptions are true. Further, the cost for him to behave in unfaithful ways is huge. So, she marries a man she barely knows, and she has a happy and productive life with him.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating arranged marriages. I am simply saying that trust is an essential element in any relationship, and we build trust in various ways. Those who engage in fraud know this, and they will do things to create an illusion of trustworthiness. They are experts in causing their victims to impute trust in them without having to actually earn that trust through personal interaction.

Faith-based frauds often claim not just to share a common religion — Christianity — but also common but aberrant, or at least non-mainstream, beliefs. They might promote esoteric eschatological views, or political views, or tribal affections (pro- or anti-vaxx, pro- or anti-immigration, pro- or anti-David French or Doug Wilson or some other figure). They might reference common relationships, or common affections and sometimes common enemies to create an illusion of solidarity.

(By the way, if you want to see this phenomenon in action, type “my good friend” into the search engine of X, and see how many hits you get. I got 50 that were less than an hour old. That’s nearly one per minute from someone trying to earn my trust by trafficking on the reputation of someone else.)

When we understand trust in this way, we can start to understand why people follow and support charlatans. It’s also why so many of the least trustworthy religious leaders congregate on television. Television creates the illusion of intimacy. The “frequency of interaction” needed to build trust is television’s stock in trade.

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We Have Met the Problem, and it is Us

Of course, this understanding of trust also reveals something about us that we don’t want to admit. The victims of fraud are often neither stupid nor gullible. They are, however, often needy. Again, I do not want to blame the victims of these frauds, but we must admit that those taken in by frauds and charlatans often have a powerful self-interest — emotional, spiritual, material, sexual, whatever — that they are attempting to satisfy.

I do not mean to diminish the wrongdoing of perpetrators, but we should acknowledge that most financial frauds have few truly innocent victims. Faith-based fraud is truly a dance in which “it takes two to tango.” When a televangelist tells a viewer to “plant a seed” by giving to his ministry, the viewer is looking for something, too.

And, we must admit, sometimes they get what they are looking for — or they get an acceptable counterfeit. For example, I devoted a chapter of my book “Faith-Based Fraud” to the Jim Bakker/PTL scandal. I quoted Rudy Spikeleto’s family, who bought at least four of PTL’s fraudulent timeshares. “We don’t have any regrets,” said Spikeleto. In fact, when Jerry Falwell, Sr. replaced Bakker as head of PTL in a too-little-too-late attempt to clean up the mess, he was disappointed: “They just wish Jim Bakker himself could come back, because his record at dealing with crises in the past indicates he could handle this one, too. Even the reports that $92 million is missing do not concern many of those visiting here. They assume Bakker did something appropriate with the money; their trust is eerily total.”

Indeed, such people did give Bakker a second chance. Today he is in Branson, Missouri. He has a new wife and a new television program. In January 2008 he moved into a 600-acre development called Morningside. At age 86, he is still on the air and still raking in money. He peddles everything from doomsday prepper food to — in 2020 — a solution that regulators say he claimed would cure the COVID-19 virus. But Bakker remains brazenly undeterred, once again. He stopped selling the “Silver Sol Solution” on his program, but he did so only after the FTC and the FDA threatened legal action. He blames “certain government agencies” for his troubles. “While I strongly disagree with the idea that these statements were in context any way misleading,” he told his television audience in March of 2020, “in response to these government agencies, and after prayerful thought, we have suspended offering silver solutions.”

Most people now see through Bakker’s scam, but a faithful few continue to trust — and in a large, diverse country, that faithful few is enough to keep the money rolling in.

Ask Hard Questions

So what is the antidote in such abuses of trust?

Ask hard questions. Great ministries love hard questions because hard questions give them opportunities to shine, to distinguish themselves from other, less reputable, ministries. If you don’t know what kinds of questions to ask, I’ve got good news. MinistryWatch does. You can find 75 questions here.

At the risk of oversimplifying a complicated issue, the answer comes in the form of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War maxim when dealing with the Soviet Union: “Trust, but verify.”

It was good advice then. It remains good advice today.