Making a Martyr?: Scandal, Symbolic Power, and the Controversial Death of Evangelical Missionary John Chau

Abstract How do groups respond to accusations of scandal? Because scandals pose significant risks of moral stigma and loss of status to those associated with them, sociologists have analyzed how actors within an accused community use strategies like denial, scapegoating, public apologies, etc. to manage the general public’s response to and interpretation of scandalous claims. While this focus on groups’ “external” responses to scandal has been productive, limited scholarship examines how actors also seek to interpretively manage scandals “internally,” among fellow members of their communities. Through an analysis of evangelical Protestants’ public statements concerning John Chau, an American missionary who garnered international media attention and public controversy after being killed by an isolated tribal group whom he sought to evangelize, we demonstrate how representatives of two factions of the American evangelical field—conservative and progressive, respectively—leveraged scandal as an opportunity to promote their respective visions of ‘authentic evangelicalism” to their broader evangelical audience. More specifically, our findings demonstrate how these spokespersons converted scandalizing accusations made against Chau and American evangelicalism into symbolic resources for solidifying or transforming the professed values and collective identities of their co-religionists. Ultimately, our study demonstrates how scandals not only reveal and potentially reconfigure moral boundaries and conflicts between accusers and accused—as previous sociological research has shown—but that scandals may also involve field-level conflict and contestation among the morally accused themselves, creating opportunities for actors to (re)shape their contemporaries’ moral certainties and collective self-understandings.