Five Counterfeits: The Odious Practices American Churches Have Embraced

Entertainment, prosperity, revisionism, a cold orthodoxy and a flag-draped faith have each traded the real thing for an imitation. The pews are emptying accordingly.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | October 19, 2026

Every heresy, the old saying goes, is a truth gone mad. One could say something similar of the practices now hollowing out the American church. None of them began as an outright denial of the faith. Each began with something good, something the church genuinely needed, and then traded it for a cheaper imitation. The result is a church that has the form of godliness while denying its power, and a nation that has noticed.

The mainline denominations are descending slowly into the abyss, and much ink has been spilled, some of it on these pages, explaining why. But it would be a mistake, and a self-serving one for those of us on the orthodox side, to lay all the blame at the feet of liberal bishops. The rot runs across the whole spectrum of American Christianity: left and right, liberal and conservative, the cathedral and the converted warehouse. I count five counterfeits. Each one has done real damage. Each one will continue to do so until it is named and repented of.

Megachurch entertainment counterfeits community. Prosperity preaching counterfeits blessing. Liberal theology counterfeits love. Dead orthodoxy counterfeits truth. And Christian nationalism counterfeits the kingdom of God itself.

The Megachurch: A Crowd Without Fellowship

The megachurch promised to reach the unchurched, and in fairness it reached a great many. The lighting is professional, the music is excellent, the parking is plentiful and the coffee is better than at most Episcopal parishes. No one should pretend these churches lack talent. They possess it in abundance.

But what they cannot manufacture is intimacy. You can attend for years without a single elder knowing your name, without anyone noticing when you stop coming. There is no real spiritual intimacy, no real sense of belonging. A man can sit among five thousand people on a Sunday morning and be as alone as he would be in his car. The small group is offered as the remedy, but a small group bolted onto an arena is still a satellite of the arena, and everyone knows where the real action is: on the stage.

And the stage is where the trouble begins. When a church is built around a single gifted communicator, it becomes, almost inevitably, a personality cult. Numbers become the measure of faithfulness. Quantity displaces quality. Discipleship, the slow, unglamorous work of forming Christians, gives way to attendance figures and campus launches. The pastor becomes a brand, and the brand must be protected at all costs.

We have seen where this leads. Bill Hybels, the architect of the seeker-sensitive movement, resigned from Willow Creek in 2018 amid allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied. Mark Driscoll left Mars Hill in 2014 amid charges of bullying and abuse of power, and the church he built dissolved within months. Brian Houston resigned from Hillsong in 2022 after the church found he had behaved inappropriately toward two women. These were not small men in small pulpits. They were the models a generation of pastors was told to imitate. Power was concentrated, accountability was thin, and the gospel was brought into disrepute before a watching world.

Let no Anglican feel smug. Bishops are every bit as prone to the lust for power as megachurch pastors, and a miter is no prophylactic against it. We have seen this not only in liberal Episcopal circles but, painfully, in orthodox Anglican ones as well. The archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America has faced charges of sexual immorality, plagiarism and bullying, and we await the outcome from the bishops who sat in judgment on him.

The temptation to power is real, it is very dangerous, and its consequences can kill off entire ministries. Orthodoxy of doctrine has never guaranteed orthodoxy of conduct.

The Prosperity Gospel: Wealth in Place of Grace

If the megachurch is a distortion of evangelism, the prosperity gospel is a distortion of the gospel itself. It is a uniquely American invention, born of revivalist showmanship and positive thinking and baptized in television money. Its message is simple: God wants you rich and healthy, and your faith, measured by the size of your offering, will unlock the blessing. Sow a seed, reap a harvest.

Its preachers have been remarkably candid about where the harvest ends up. In 2015 Creflo Dollar asked his followers to help fund a $65 million Gulfstream jet. Kenneth Copeland has defended his fleet of private aircraft on the grounds that commercial airlines are full of demons. One does not need a theology degree to see that the Jesus who had nowhere to lay his head has been replaced by something else entirely.

But the gravest damage has been done not in America but abroad. Exported to the Global South through satellite television and itinerant crusades, the prosperity gospel has spread across Africa, Latin America and Asia, landing among people who can least afford it. In Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, the poor are urged to give what they do not have to men who fly in private jets, with the promise that God will repay them a hundredfold. When the money does not come, the fault is laid at the feet of their weak faith. It is a cruelty dressed up as a blessing.

The evangelical world has not been silent. I was at Lausanne in 1974 when John Stott and the gathered church set out a vision of world evangelization rooted in the cross and in costly discipleship. Thirty-six years later, the Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town explicitly rejected the prosperity gospel as contrary to biblical Christianity. Stott would have expected nothing less. The cross was never a ladder to success. It was an instrument of execution, and the Christ who hung there calls his followers to take up theirs.

Liberal Theology and Its Favorite Stepchild

Nothing has done more to empty pulpits and pews than the advance of liberal theology and its favorite stepchild, the sexual revolution brought inside the church. I have called it pansexuality, and I do not retract the word. Once Scripture ceases to be the Word of God and becomes merely the record of human religious experience, there is no principled way to say no to anything. Sexual ethics are simply where the abandonment of biblical authority became most visible. The root is unbelief; the fruit is everything that has followed.

The liberal project promised relevance. If the church would only shed its outdated doctrines and embrace the spirit of the age, the young and the educated would return. The experiment has now run for half a century, and the results are in. The Episcopal Church reported roughly 1.96 million members in 2010 and about 1.55 million in 2023, and in 2024 it stopped publishing a total membership figure altogether. Average Sunday attendance stood at around 600,000 in 2014; in 2024 it was 413,000. The median congregation now has 38 people in the pews on a Sunday morning, and the median age of a member is 60.

This is not the profile of a church on the cutting edge of anything. It is the profile of a church that married the spirit of the age and has found itself, as Dean Inge warned, a widower in the next. The world was never going to be won by a church that agreed with it. It already had its own opinions; it did not need a church to repeat them back with incense.

The tragedy is that what liberalism offers in the name of love is not love at all. Love that will not call sin by its name is not love but indifference wearing a clerical collar. The God of the Bible is love, but he is a holy love, and the gospel of a God who accepts everyone and transforms no one is no gospel. It is a counterfeit of the costliest kind.

Dead Orthodoxy: Right Doctrine Without Life

Here I must speak to my own side, because the orthodox are not innocent. There is such a thing as a church that is perfectly correct and perfectly dead. Its doctrine is sound, its liturgy is in order, its statements of faith are impeccable, and it has not seen a conversion in a decade. Its members can recite the Thirty-Nine Articles and would be hard-pressed to name a neighbor they have prayed for. It is gray, aging and evangelistically inert. It has the truth and does nothing with it.

Dead orthodoxy is the temptation of those who have fought hard for the faith. After years of battle with revisionists, it is easy to become defined by what we are against. The fight for truth crowds out warmth, joy and mission. We become guardians of a museum rather than heralds of a living Lord. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott, who famously parted ways in 1966 over whether evangelicals should leave the mixed denominations, both warned against precisely this: truth held without love becomes hard, and a church that is only right will soon be only small.

And when orthodoxy is hollowed out, it does not merely sit in a corner and die. It becomes available for hire. The most chilling example in our time comes not from America but from Moscow. On 25 September 2022, days after Vladimir Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 reservists, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church told the faithful that a soldier who dies in the line of military duty in Ukraine makes a sacrifice that washes away all his sins. He compared it to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

One wonders whether the patriarch has ever consulted the Bible. Here is a church with ancient creeds, glorious liturgy and an unbroken claim to apostolic order, and its chief shepherd has offered the remission of sins to anyone who dies invading a neighboring Christian nation. That is not orthodoxy. It is the form of orthodoxy with the life drained out of it, a shell into which Caesar has climbed. American Christians who drift toward a faith that is mostly about flag, tribe and culture war should look carefully at Moscow. That is where dead orthodoxy ends up.

Christian Nationalism: The Cross Wrapped in a Flag

Which brings me to the fifth counterfeit, and the one closest to home for many who read these pages.

It begins, as the others do, with something good. Love of country is no sin. Gratitude for a Christian inheritance that shaped American law, conscience and liberty is entirely proper. Alarm at an aggressive secularism that would drive faith from the public square altogether is justified. Christians have every right, indeed a duty, to carry their convictions into public life. William Wilberforce and the Clapham evangelicals did exactly that, and the slave trade fell. No believer should be bullied into silence by the charge that any Christian who votes his conscience is a theocrat in waiting.

But Christian nationalism is something else. It is the fusion of the Christian faith with national identity and political power: the conviction that America is, or must be made, a Christian nation, and that the church’s task is to seize the levers of the state to make it so. It is no longer an idea whispered at the margins. Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene declared in 2022 that Republicans should be Christian nationalists. That same year Stephen Wolfe published The Case for Christian Nationalism, calling for a “Christian prince” to rule over a Christian people. Some Reformed pastors now wear the label as a badge of honor. Nor is the following small. A 2025 PRRI survey of more than 22,000 Americans found that 67 percent of white evangelical Protestants qualify as adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism.

We have already seen what happens when the cross is wrapped in a flag. On January 6, 2021, Christian banners, “Jesus Saves” placards and wooden crosses went up alongside the mob that stormed the United States Capitol, and a prayer in the name of Jesus was offered from the dais of the Senate chamber. Whatever one’s politics, every Christian should have been ashamed to see the name of Christ carried into that building by a mob.

The trouble with Christian nationalists is not that they love America too much. It is that they love the kingdom of God too little, or cannot tell the two apart. Jesus told Pilate plainly, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Paul reminded the Philippians that “our citizenship is in heaven.” The church is not a chaplaincy to any nation-state. It is a holy nation in its own right, drawn, as the Revelation says, from every tribe and tongue and people. When the church marries the nation, the gospel shrinks into a tribal religion. The believer in Lagos or Lahore becomes a foreigner, and the unbeliever next door hears not “repent and believe” but “join our side.”

Augustine saw this sixteen centuries ago. Rome had fallen to the Visigoths and the pagans blamed the Christians. In The City of God, he answered that two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly city by the love of self, even to the contempt of God, and the heavenly city by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. Christians live in the earthly city. They pray for it and seek its welfare, as Jeremiah urged the exiles in Babylon. But they never mistake Babylon for Zion.

History shows what happens when they do. In 1930s Germany the so-called German Christians fused the gospel with the Volk. It took the Confessing Church at Barmen in 1934, with Karl Barth as its chief drafter, to declare that Jesus Christ, as he is attested in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear, trust and obey in life and in death. No one should glibly equate American evangelicals with the German Christians. But Barmen remains the church’s standing answer to every attempt to set another lord beside Christ, whether a dictator, a flag or a party.

And here the circle closes. Scholars have documented the admiration many American Christian nationalists hold for Vladimir Putin as a defender of Christian civilization, the same Putin whose patriarch promised forgiveness of sins to soldiers dying for Russia. That is no accident. Kirill’s “Russian World” is Christian nationalism come to full flower: a church that blesses the tanks. It offers Christians power, and asks in return only that they forget whose kingdom they serve.

What Faithfulness Looks Like

Five counterfeits, then: a crowd without fellowship, wealth without grace, love without truth, truth without love, and a kingdom without a cross. Each has an audience. Each has its defenders. And each, in the end, empties the church it claims to fill.

What is the alternative? It is not glamorous, and it will never trend. It is the congregation of modest size where the pastor knows the names of his flock and visits them when they are dying. It is the pulpit where the Bible is opened and expounded, week after week, without apology. It is a church that tells the truth about sin and the truth about grace, in that order, and means both. It is leadership that is accountable, that does not confuse a platform with a calling, and that is willing to be small if faithfulness requires it.

I once sat in a church service in the Anglican Diocese of Sokoto in Northwestern Nigeria. The service began at 9am and continued for six hours till 3pm. There were multiple hymns sung, several sermons preached. The Nigerians took seriously a day of worship. Locally here in upstate New York near where I live, my wife and I attend a small independent church with some 25 believers. We rent the main floor of a private home owned by a Jewish gentleman. Our pastor, a Hispanic man, is a former Methodist minister who fell afoul of his church because he was preaching the gospel, an embarrassment to a group of aging and dying Methodists. We have people from at least 8 different denominations. We are a motley crew but deeply committed to one another, to the gospel and outreach ministries like Holy Hoops, Pub Theology and ministering to women caught in addictions. It’s authentic, it’s real and, I am told, we are the largest and fastest-growing church in a 30-mile radius. Our preacher reaches an additional 600 through social media. This is not the Bible belt. There are no Jesus Saves billboards, but we have a small food pantry where locals can get free canned goods. There are no mega churches or celebrity pastors. This is hard slog terrain. One convert at a time.

Such churches like ours do exist. They are found in unlikely places, often in the Global South, sometimes in a converted storefront down the road. They will not make the cover of any magazine. But they possess the one thing every counterfeit lacks: the real thing. And the real thing, in the end, is all that will survive.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com