Reflecting on Ravi Zacharias: When we have to apologize for the apologist

(OPINION) Ravi Zacharias was perhaps the world’s most famous apologist for Christianity until his death last year, but now the most memorable part of his legacy is the apologetics challenge he has left behind for the rest of us. 

Ravi Zacharias in 2011. Photo courtesy of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM).

For the uninitiated: in this context, an “apologist” is not someone who says “I’m sorry,” although this story does involve plenty of that type of apologizing too. Rather, for Christians, apologetics means defending the faith, or presenting reasonable arguments as to why Christianity is true and should be believed and followed.

The Indian-born Zacharias traveled the world for 40 years, magnificently preaching and defending the Christian gospel. Meanwhile, using his chronic back pain as a pretext, he accessed and engaged in sexually inappropriate and abusive behavior with massage therapists.  

Zacharias faced one crisis in 2017 when one woman threatened litigation over alleged sexual harassment. He sued her for extortion and paid her $250,000 (nearly twice what Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels) for her signature on a nondisclosure agreement.

But only after Zacharias’s death in May 2020 did mounting accusations, extensively documented by Christianity Today in September, cause the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) to commission an independent investigation. The investigative firm’s report, dated Feb. 9, was worse than just about anyone had imagined. It disclosed conclusive evidence—buttressed by analysis of four of Zacharias’s mobile phones—of sexual communication and contact with numerous women. 

Since then, many others have denounced Zacharias’s behavior, decried those who enabled it by conducting incomplete inquiries and accepting his explanations, and expressed sorrow for the many victims. While fully sharing those sentiments, I would like to devote my limited word count to a less-discussed question: how can anyone believe Christianity’s purported ability to save people when one of its most famous evangelists was living such a duplicitous life?

I’m not auditioning for an apologetics career, but here is my attempt at an answer.

First, the Zacharias episode can’t disprove Christianity, because the Bible predicted that such things would happen and even describes some similar stories. The most prominent such incident involves the Old Testament’s King David, who committed adultery with Bathsheba and arranged to have her husband killed. The Bible records the prophet Nathan’s divinely inspired confrontation of David and his abject repentance in Psalm 51.

The New Testament contains one explicit discussion of sexual misbehavior within the church (in 1 Corinthians 5) and indicates frequently in more general terms that professing Christians, even church leaders, will act in all kinds of dishonorable ways.

Why must it be this way? Because Christian commitment makes people better but does not make them perfect. Logically, from an apologetic perspective, this has to be the case. 

If Christians were perfect and everyone else was totally bad, then the distinction between the two groups would be obvious. But then the horrible people would have nothing in them that could recognize the good and cause them to seek redemption. Conversely, God can’t make all Christians perfect unless he overrides their free will.

 So logically, we should expect Christians to fail—sometimes in quite ugly ways. That’s why mature Christians acknowledge that they are prone to wander from the truth. They humbly affirm, “If you ever find a perfect church, don’t invite me into it because I’ll spoil it.”

Although we do not see evidence of positive transformation in every individual who claims to be a Christian, we do see more positive impact than could be explained by coincidence. Some Christians may be selfish, rude, or devious, but overall Christians have played a disproportionately large role throughout history in addressing humanitarian and public-service needs. Even in our age of enormous publicly funded relief programs, in times of disaster the world regularly reaches out for help to Christian organizations such as World Vision, Compassion, The Salvation Army and Samaritan’s Purse.

Moreover, the universal outcry against Zacharias’s now-uncovered behavior in both Christian and secular circles reminds us that we are not moral relativists. Rather, we have a substantially shared sense of right and wrong, which is hard to explain without reference to a Creator.

The important lesson of Ravi Zacharias’s posthumous fall is not that Christians are imperfect—we already knew that—but that we risk perpetrating great harm by acting as if they are not. Despite the long and well-documented history of Christian leaders falling into sexual sin, most of the people around Zacharias either assumed that a great apologist could not have serious moral flaws or decided that the value of his public ministry justified pushing warning signs under the rug. They overlooked what now seem in retrospect to be obvious red flags, from the massage therapists who accompanied Zacharias on travel to his refusal to release phone records. 

Perhaps the international prominence of this sex scandal will propel more Christian organizations to make “trust but verify” a standard operating practice. Rigorous accountability is not an expression of distrust; it’s a fulfillment of Christians’ responsibility to avoid even the appearance of evil and a recognition of the theological truth that we all sin.

Some are wondering if any of Zacharias’s long-acclaimed messages are still useful. If he ever wrote or spoke publicly about his success in avoiding sexual temptation (which, to the best of my knowledge, he did not), we should probably discard that message. If there was a statue of him, we would have to remove it. RZIM will presumably either change its name or shut down. There may be no way for anyone to sell his books henceforth without appearing to tolerate his behavior.

But as horrible as the sordid tales of his private conduct are—and we should in no way minimize them or the severity of the pain he inflicted on his many victims—the sins of an apologist do not cancel out the truthfulness of his arguments. After all, this essay has been written by a sinner too.

Bruce Barron is executive editor of the Evangelical Review of Theology, the World Evangelical Alliance’s theological journal. He is a former congressional aide and author of six books on U.S. religion and politics. The views expressed in this essay are his own and do not represent official WEA positions.