How Evangelicals Fake Holiness Through Denial and Deflection: Loran Livingston For Example

My Reaction to Loran Livingston's Viral Super Bowl Haftime Show Quote

Following this year’s Super Bowl LX halftime backlash, a sermon clip from Pastor Loran Livingston began circulating widely. Livingston is the longtime pastor of Central Church in Charlotte and a prominent voice within the Church of God (Cleveland, TN). Several friends sent me the clip, assuming it would resonate. I understood why. In it, Loran appears to take a very moderate approach to the subject claiming that being conservative isn’t neceessarily being Christian and that both half-time shows were too worldly for Christians in the first place. So what did I think of it?

His Super Bowl halftime remarks sounded, at first, like clarity. While Christians argued over a Super Bowl halftime show they found obscene and an “alternative” event framed as righteous, he refused the choice. He rejected both. He reminded his listeners that neither the world nor a Christian imitation of it has anything to offer someone who has already met Jesus. He warned against confusing conservatism with Christianity, insisting that a person can be pro-life, pro-family, pro-Israel and still be lost. For many people, that landed as relief. He says there is no such thin as a black church and a white church. It felt like someone with a voice in Evangelicalism was finally stepping out of the culture-wars. It felt like holinesss, not partisanship. It felt prophetic.

But that feeling is misleading. What Pastor Livingston has done is clever misdirection. An orator’s trick, if you will.

I am not an outsider to this. I grew in the Church of God. I was ordained by them. I knew Loran Livingston. I was formed by Pentecostal preaching, learned the instincts, and absorbed the techniques. I learned how these moments are constructed to sound prophetic while leaving deeper problematic patterns intact. Christianity’s entanglement with the culture wars goes unaddressed. The quote works not because it dismantles the habits that have malformed Evangelical witness, but because it satisfies the cravings those habits have produced. It places the listener at a safe moral distance. They are not like the vulgar world: “foul-mouth, lost, degenerate people.” It seesks to call them out from other compromised Christians who watched worldly spectacles. They are discerning. They are clean. They are on the right side of things.

Nothing in the quote asks how Evangelical outrage got us here. It does not ask what has been excused, tolerated, or justified over the last decade. It does not ask how cruelty, insult, and vulgarity became acceptable when they served political ends. It does not ask what kind of formation allows outrage to arrive late and selectively. Instead, it offers clarity without cost. Moral seriousness without exposure. Conviction without confession.

Loran says, “I wish the President of the United States would clean up his language. I wish he would stop insulting people.” For more than a decade, conservative, politically engaged Christian leaders, including Pastor Loran, had repeated opportunities to speak clearly about the corrosive effects of cruelty, insult, and vulgarity in public life. They did not.

When Donald Trump’s rhetoric normalized mockery, dehumanization, and obscene speech, Evangelical leaders found reasons to stay quiet or to soften the critique. He was a new Christian. He was not a pastor but a president. The media exaggerated. His language was unfortunate but necessary. Character mattered less than outcomes. Each excuse moving the goalposts more and more. And when that wasn’t enough, they gaslit critics with the diagnosis of a fictitious mental illness: Trump Derangement Syndrom (TDS).

Over time, I saw the Church of God adjust. What once would have been named as incompatible with holiness was reclassified as regrettable but tolerable. Vulgarity was no longer disqualifying if it delivered results. Cruelty could be overlooked if it was aimed in the right direction.

The moral instincts of the community were reshaped not by repentance but by repetition. By parroting. I watched peers and leaders within my own denomination adopt the same posture and language. Church leaders publicly trafficked in mockery and demeaning rhetoric that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. A Church of God Administrative Bishop with oversight of states and regions, publicly called people “libtards” and “snowflakes” on social media. Peers, used names like “Hypocrats” and “Democrits” in online discussions with non-Christian and unchurched people. (Yes, I have the reciepts.)

When that happens, the right to speak authoritatively about the holiness of language is not lost in theory, but it is forfeited in practice. To discover that concern now, in the advent of the Epstein Files release, when the offender is now too hard to defend, is not moral courage. It is convenience.

This is how Loran’s halftime quote feels serious while avoiding risk. It names a problem that can be condemned without implicating the listener. It allows the church to recover a sense of righteousness without confronting its own accommodation. The outrage is real, but it is selective. It arrives after the damage is done and directs attention away from the habits that made that damage possible. What sounds like disentanglement functions instead as absolution. The listener is reassured that they still stand for holiness, even though the standards have already shifted beneath their feet.

What is left untouched is the history that made this moment inevitable. A community trained to excuse cruelty when it is politically useful cannot suddenly recover moral clarity by denouncing a halftime show. Condemning public excess is far safer than confronting private compromise. It allows the church to feel clean without becoming accountable. And that is why his preaching works. It does not disrupt the system that produced the crisis. It comforts those who have learned how to live with it.

That posture becomes clearer when placed alongside Livingston’s broader preaching. In a sermon preached on August 25, 2019, the same moral architecture is fully visible. Entire groups of Christians are named, categorized, and dismissed from the pulpit: liturgical churches are described as “dead and dried-up,” women who stand behind pulpits are framed as rebellious, as those who have “buck[ed] the system,” and sinners are spoken of not as people to be borne with or restored, but as those who will “never make it into heaven.” These are not incidental lines. They function formatively. They teach the congregation who belongs and who does not.

The sermon does not invite shared discernment or vulnerability. It sorts. It contrasts. It caricatures. Entire traditions are reduced to shorthand symbols of spiritual failure. The congregation learns which forms of Christianity can be dismissed without examination and which kinds of people need not be taken seriously at all.

Holiness is expressed through separation. You are faithful because you are not like them, and you are discerning because you stand apart from both sides. In the Church of God we used to defend our legalism with this logic. We didn’t give in to cultural fashion norms because we should “look different.” Our outward appearance was a statement of separation. We didn’t go to places like movie theaters to stay away from worldly influence. These are practices most Church of God members have abandoned now because they admit the foolishness of it.

But, once holiness is learned this way, it becomes transferable. The same reflex that trained us to measure faithfulness by dress, speech, or proximity to the world can just as easily be applied to a halftime show, or a musical artist, or a political platform. Discernment shifts from shared humanity to sorting. Who belongs. Who is suspect. Who feels safe to stand near. Who must be kept at arm’s length. The quote does not name these outcomes, but it trains them by making distance feel like virtue.

This is where faux piety quietly takes over. Holiness is not measured primarily by shared life, mutual submission, or costly love, but by visible restraint and verbal clarity. The goal is not communion but distinction. To be holy is to be unlike them. And the further “they” can be pushed away, the more secure the sense of righteousness becomes.

The turn of phrase Loran and other preachers use works because shame is doing the heavy lifting here, even when it sounds like discernment. Shame is not only directed outward to “the other.” It disciples the insider. It teaches people how to belong by showing them what to avoid. What not to sound like. What not to desire. What not to risk. You stay clean by staying clear.

And once that posture is learned, it rarely remains aimed only at the world. The same logic that distances the listener from a halftime show easily extends to other Christians whose faith does not conform to this pattern. Traditions that resist abstraction, certainty, or control become problems rather than partners. They are the frozen chosen, a church no real Christian would want to attend. Distance does the work before disagreement ever has to.

Distance alone is not enough to sustain this posture. It must be reinforced by shame. And nothing produces shame as quickly, visibly, or reliably as sexuality. This helps explain why sexualized or sensual expression becomes the easiest moral battleground. Once holiness has been defined as distance, sexuality offers a ready-made line. It is visible. It is emotionally charged. It allows the church to perform restraint publicly without confronting its deeper contradictions privately. Bodies can be judged without proximity. Desire can be named as the problem without asking how desire has been formed, distorted, hidden, or shamed within the church itself. Holiness becomes containment rather than integration.

What makes the church’s reaction against sexual expression so unstable is that Scripture itself refuses a disembodied nonsexual faith. The Bible does not treat sex as an embarrassment to be managed away. It names it, celebrates it, warns about its misuse, and refuses to pretend it is not powerful.

The most obvious example is the Song of Solomon. This is not allegory masquerading as romance. It is adult, mutual, embodied love poetry. The language is sensuous, playful, physical, and joyful. Bodies are praised. Longing is voiced. Pleasure is not apologized for. The lovers speak openly of desire without shame or secrecy. For centuries the church has tried to spiritualize this book, as though God could only approve of love if it were stripped of its flesh. But the text itself resists that move. Desire here is not sinful. It is good, mutual, and celebrated within love.

Even more uncomfortable for modern Christians is the fact that Scripture does not sanitize sexual language when it wants to expose exploitation, power, or idolatry. Ezekiel 23:19–21 talks about well-hung Egyptians with massive loads who caress virgin breasts. This is deliberate graphic imagery to condemn political and spiritual infidelity. The prophet does not blush. He names lust, excess, and abuse in bodily terms precisely because abstraction would soften the critique. It assumes that adult readers can handle embodied language when moral stakes are high.

That matters. Because it reveals something we often avoid admitting. The Bible is not prudish. We are.

Evangelical purity culture did not raise the bar of holiness, but lower the church’s tolerance for honesty. Desire became suspect. Sexual expression was framed as dangerous unless tightly controlled. And when desire could not be named in the light, it did not disappear. It was suppressed.

This is why Christian outrage over sexualized dancing during an NFL half-time show feels so righteous. It allows Christians to perform restraint without reckoning with their own sexual impulses. It polices bodies on a screen while leaving untouched the shame, secrecy, and fragmentation inside the church and its members. It creates the illusion of holiness by focusing attention outward, where judgment is cheap and risk is low.

But desire itself is not the enemy. Libido is not a defect. It is part of what it means to be human, embodied, alive, and capable of love. Scripture assumes this. The question is not whether desire exists, but whether it is integrated, named, and principled, or hidden, shamed, and left to distort in isolation.

This is also why embodied expression, especially within Black and Latino cultures, unsettles most white Evangelical piety. Their lives integrate rhythm, sensuality, movement, joy, grief, and physical presence because survival required the whole self. What some label as sensual is often simply honest. The whole of life is lived communally, not compartmentalized. Desire, celebration, and sorrow are shared rather than buried. That is not vulgarity. It is embodiment.

A holiness that cannot tolerate bodies is not biblical holiness. It is fear dressed up as virtue. And a church that reacts more strongly to dancing than to secrecy, shame, and hypocrisy has confused control with righteousness.

Sex is awesome. Dancing is not sinful. Desire is not a moral failure. The trouble begins when purity culture treats desire as inherently suspect rather than morally formative. When that happens and sexuality goes underground, it becomes private, shame-laden, and disconnected from community. In that sense, purity culture has almost certainly produced more secret sexual sin in the church than it has prevented. What cannot be named honestly cannot be healed, and what must be hidden cannot be redeemed. A church trained to police bodies publicly while refusing to integrate desire communally does not become holy. It becomes fragmented.

But this prudism posing as piety is not universal among Christians. It is cultural. Again, Black and Latino Christian traditions have never had the privilege of disembodied faith. Movement, rhythm, voice, celebration, and lament are not threats to holiness but expressions of it.

This is why Loran’s dismissal of a “Black church” matters so much. When it is flattened rhetorically or brushed aside, what is really being rejected is not theology but proximity. The Black church carries a lived theology of suffering, holiness, resistance, and hope that white Pentecostalism desperately needs but rarely listens to. A movement that claims to be Spirit-led recoils from communities that have survived by clinging to the Spirit in the face of violence, poverty, and exclusion. The irony is staggering.

The same logic applies to women preachers and liturgical traditions. These are not merely doctrinal disagreements. They represent forms of faith that refuse abstraction. Faith that takes shape in liturgies, histories, rhythms, and shared life. That refusal threatens a piety that depends on distance. And so those traditions are dismissed, caricatured, or kept at arm’s length.

Condemning public excess is far safer than confronting private compromise. It allows the church to feel clean without becoming whole. And that is why the quote works. It feels serious. It feels righteous. But it leaves untouched the formation that made this moment inevitable. The system remains intact. Distance is preserved. All the while shame continues to do its quiet work.