Are Evangelicals close to outing their #1 musician?
Rich Mullins’ twisted story gets twistier
He may be the most significant musician in modern Evangelical Christianity—and a bizarre figure the religion has never been able to figure out.
Rich Mullins died on September 19, 1997 in a car accident. As Evangelicals marked the 25th anniversary, Mullins was trending on Twitter. My 2020 post “Was Rich Mullins Gay?” was getting a spike in views.
And there was a profile in the New York Times, where Mullins’ biographer is quoted. James Bryan Smith says he’d not mentioned Mullins having an “immensely difficult” history of “dark” sin.
Smith had known Mullins.
He was a professor at a Christian college that Mullins came to attend. After Rich’s death, the Mullins family asked Smith to write a biography.
It was quite a challenge. Close friends, like ‘Beaker’—the young man often seen in Mullins videos—didn’t want to talk. Amy Grant was only briefly quoted and it’s not clear she was interviewed.
Then Mullins himself had been given to telling multiple versions of events, discussing some vague inner tortures haunting his youth.
