A superstar Evangelical musician is exposed as a gay sexual predator
The shock story of Michael Tait, of DC Talk and Newsboys
As a member of the bands DC Talk and Newsboys, Michael Tait is among the most successful Christian musicians in history. He had a second career in recent years as a Republican advocate for Donald Trump.
On June 4th, a shock exposé was published at The Roys Report, the abuse watchdog site, that detailed decades of sexual predation on male fans.
A religion then had to face a fact that it already knew.
I’m looking over the life of Michael Tait.
He was born in 1966, the youngest of nine, and grew up in Washington D.C. His father was a ‘street evangelist’ and taxicab driver who was constantly promoting his kids into becoming professional musicians. “How much did you sell?” was the refrain of their childhood.
Growing up, Tait was androgynous, a near replica of an older sister.
“I didn’t understand how a boy and a girl could look alike and not be each other,” he’d recall. “I’m like, mom says, ‘Honey, you can look like your sister, but you’re still a boy.’ I said, ‘Thanks, mom.’”
Tait resisted the Christian messaging until he was a senior in high school. Then he heard a sermon on Hell and decided to convert. The subtext here, I suspect, is his emerging sexuality.
He went to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Falwell arranged a scholarship for Tait and took a special interest in him. “I always would joke with him, calling him my white daddy,” Tait recalled.
Tait would sing on Falwell’s T.V. show, The Old Time Gospel Hour and recorded with the Falwell Singers. But in the mid-to-late 1980s, the Evangelical teenage culture seemed ripe for a “Christian rock band,” and they created ‘DC Talk’.
He was an unusual Black presence in Evangelical Christianity, but critical to the group’s urban stylings. The other two band members were upper middle-class white boys.
The band was an instant sensation.
DC Talk gave Christian teenagers the feeling of participating in Pop Culture while still being real religious. The members continually said they were there to prostylize, or “to use the stage to let people know about Jesus.”
So that made the rock (and rap) religious. They constantly talked about their divine sexual control. As a profile in People magazine read:
“We made a pact with God that we wouldn’t make love with anyone until we married them,” says group founder Toby McKeehan, who coauthored Talk’s parody of George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” (Talk’s take: “I Don’t Want It”). “My friends say, ‘You gotta be kidding! No sex?’ It blows their minds.”
That wasn’t the only blowing going on.
All along the way, Tait was having sex with male fans—often nonconsensually. The Roys Report exposé details three encounters with 22-year-old men who met Tait between 2004 and 2014.
“Two men stated that they were drinking alcohol with Tait and later woke to him fondling their genitals. One alleged Tait also offered him cocaine while on the Newsboys tour bus. The third told TRR that Tait gave him a back massage while skinny dipping and later invited him to share his king-size bed. There, Tait allegedly non-consensually massaged his anal region.”
On social media, much more gory accounts were circulating.
There were TikTok videos with claims that Tait had been a “sexual predator” on men, including underage men, going back decades. The allegations include scenes of Tait drugging victims, who’d wake up to find themselves being accosted by him.
And there were admissions on social media by Evangelicals who had followed the band. They had heard suggestions of it.
None of Tait’s band members have made statements, but must surely have known all along.
Fans are left to suspect that the band whose hits included “What If I Stumble?” was not speaking hypothetically.
Maybe DC Talk knew all about ‘stumbling’.
If they knew about Tait, it appears they agreed to give their male fans over to a sexual predator to keep the act going—and all while they were reading the Bible onstage.
It’s a lot to realize.
But even Tait’s father was running cover for him.
That’s how I’m reading a 1996 newspaper feature which features Nate Tait on hand for one of his son’s concerts in Houston.
He surely knew his 30-year-son was gay, and was sending out misdirection.
“A pastor from Washington D.C., the senior Tait is proud of his talented son, and he understands the many risks involved as dc Talk’s fame grows. ‘Temptation is everywhere, what with all the beautiful girls and all,’ he explains.”
DC Talk came to be viewed as the “Christian version of the Beatles.”
Their Jesus Freak album in 1995 was a cultural sensation—and a means of marketing Evangelical Christianity to millions of American teenagers.
DC Talk were everywhere the “church” was. They played Billy Graham Crusades. As I look over a photo of the band with Graham, it seems like Tait is flirting? I’m not so sure Graham isn’t flirting back.
It’s striking to find a gay man effusively physical, in full view of the Evangelical world, and also unseen.
Meanwhile, many who knew the band believed they were terrible people.
As I survey social media commentary, there’s a regular statement that the band was as un-Christian as could be. One man volunteered on Facebook:
“If you had ever met/dealt with the DC Talk guys before they disbanded, you could have seen this all coming a mile away. That includes all three of them. Worked a couple of festivals in late 90s. They were insufferable.”
An Evangelical commenter noted he knew a “concert promoter that said weird stuff about him, took it with a grain of salt then.”
Another: “I’ve known about this for years.”
And another Evangelical commentator discusses the Tait exposé: “I have first hand knowledge of some of his victims and his drug abuse.”
A reply goes: “He’s not even a Christian.”
Another reply: “None of them are.”
Michael Tait never married.
He became an even bigger star with another band, Newsboys, and seems never to be asked about not having any apparent public love life. It suggests a Christian media culture that knew about his homosexuality and would allow him to quietly discuss it as “sin.”
He’d go on about being forgiven of some unnamed indiscretions:
“But God has been so faithful to this boy, so faithful to me when I had been grossly unfaithful more than once, but he keeps bringing me back to the cross.”
With the Donald Trump era in politics, Michael Tait had become a regular booster.
In retrospect it might have been another gesture of his closeting. A reliably right-wing Black Christian celebrity who’d speak up for Trump would be even harder to ‘cancel’.
He sure knew how to play the game.
On January 15th, a TikTok user outed Tait as gay.
Though the video was almost immediately taken down, flagged as “violent extremism,” the word began to spread. The next day, January 16th, Tate resigned from Newsboys, without providing an explanation.
He framed it, of course, as being a divine servant, doing God’s will.
The Roys Report began hearing reports of his sexual crimes, and contacted Tait and Newsboys asking for clarification. The Evangelical outlet Protestia also began to investigate and ask questions. They were met with silence.
In retrospect, the Newsboys had known everything.
Now, Protestia reports:
“Michael Tait’s sins were not private. They were known by many people for years, especially by Newsboys manager Wes Campbell, who is incredibly corrupt and kept it all hidden. He’s been fielding complaints for years, from Tait texting folk penis pictures to being caught on the tour bus with other men, to the point that multiple bands REFUSED to go on tour with the Newsboys because of Tait’s reputation.”
And they kept the show going.
If the band thought it would all “blow over,” they were wrong.
Many Evangelicals, of course, don’t care even about leaders being accused of rape (see: Mike Bickle, etc.). But as radio stations were no longer playing the Newsboys’ music, it was becoming clear the band would have to say something.
They began to speak, at first seeming to be utterly shocked. Then they dropped on social media that they’d long known about Tait’s predation on their male fans, and had asked him about the reports. He’d denied it.
On June 10th, then, Tait released a statement on Instagram (with comments closed).
He didn’t speak about being gay, and vaguely admitted to the crimes he’d been accused of committing. He said upon exiting Newsboys in January he’d checked himself into a rehab facility for substance abuse.
He proclaimed himself nearly healed of whatever “sin” he’d done.
Had he really been in rehab?
Another TikTok user recalled seeing him at an airport in late January, boarding a plane to Vegas with two young men. But Evangelicals were widely praising Tait’s letter for its sincerity and genuine contrition. They were clearly already ready to take back this favorite entertainer.
But wasn’t it the religion itself that was really putting on the show? It sold anti-gay messaging as its core focus, all while knowing that Tait—and many of their artists—are gay.
They covered everything up. He knew that they would. 🔶
Added: The ex-Evangelical feature writer Josiah Hesse wrote an article for the Guardian with a lot of sex details on the Michael Tait story. It describes Michael Tait’s life and music career as really a gay pedophilia sexual trafficking operation, operating under the cover of Evangelicalism.
In the aftermath, I noticed Cory Asbury, the well-known Christian singer, being asked if he knew about Michael Tait.
“Everyone knew,” he said.
