After confessing to an extramarital affair, a popular evangelical author faces angry Christians known for ‘eating their own’

(CNN) — Philip Yancey has sold millions of books and become a sought-after speaker because he tackles tough questions of faith that many Christians prefer to avoid.

But after confessing this week to an eight-year extramarital affair, the evangelical author faces a difficult question that even he may not be able to answer:

Will evangelicals extend the same grace to him that he so often wrote about in his books?

The initial answer to that question is a no, according to some evangelical pastors and commentators who reacted with shock and sadness to Yancey’s confession. They doubt whether many Christians will rally around the man who encouraged so many others struggling with their own failures of faith.

“Christians have become the best at eating their own,” Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, lead pastor of the Sheridan Church in Oklahoma, told CNN.

“Those who have been forgiven so much should be willing to forgive others,” said Lahmeyer, who disclosed his personal struggles with pride and anger in a recent book, “Divided.” But, he added, “There is a self-righteousness that comes upon many Christians. They’ll look at the speck in their brother’s eye while totally ignoring the plank in their (own) eyes.”

Yancey’s ‘great shame’

Years before social media, Yancey went viral for his columns in Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine, and with his books, such as 2002’s best-selling “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”

A slender, bespectacled man with a sandy-brown afro, Yancey embodied the thoughtful, erudite evangelical. He could quote Dostoevsky as well as Deuteronomy. He sprinkled his books with candid admissions about his personal struggles, such as growing up as a “born and bred racist” in the segregated South before evolving into a man who championed racial justice.

In his writings, Yancey often returned to the theme of grace.

“Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more… And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less,” he once wrote.

Yancey is 76 and has been married to his wife, Janet, for 55 years. He had hinted at marital struggles in past interviews.

But his public persona took a hit Tuesday when he issued a statement published in Christianity Today. In the statement, he confessed to an affair and said he would retire from writing, public speaking and social media.

“To my great shame, I confess that for eight years I willfully engaged in a sinful affair with a married woman,” Yancey said. “My conduct defied everything that I believe about marriage. It was also totally inconsistent with my faith and my writings and caused deep pain for her husband and both of our families.”

Yancey said he has committed himself to professional counseling and an “accountability program.” He said he realizes that his moral and spiritual failure will disillusion readers who “trusted in my writing,” and that “I grieve over the devastation I have caused.”

He also said he would not share more details out of respect for the other family affected by the affair. Yancey had been scheduled to speak Wednesday evening at a church service in Pasadena, California, but canceled his appearance. He did not return a request from CNN for comment.

Yancey was open about his marital challenges

Yancey had faced a series of massive personal challenges in recent years. In 2007, he almost died after he lost control of his Ford Explorer while driving on an icy Colorado road and broke his neck.

Yancey said in an interview eight years after the accident that it became a “hallmark event” that strengthened his marriage. He said he and wife, Janet, had been “coasting along, avoiding emotional land mines and resigned to living with certain recurring problems.” He said that he and his wife had very different personalities, were both “control freaks,” and it took them years to learn how to operate as a team “rather than rivals.”

“We both entered marriage with wounds: mine from church and family, and Janet’s from trying to find her identity as a third-culture missionary kid,” Yancey told a journalist. “I fell madly in love. I thought she did too – only later did I realize that she had adopted me as a kind of social work project. Yet when we said the ‘till death do us part’ vow, we meant it.”

In 2023, Yancey revealed that he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and was already displaying mild symptoms. In a Christianity Today column that year, he said his wife was displaying “selfless, fierce loyalty” as she faced the prospect of being his caregiver.

Janet Yancey provided her own statement to go along with her husband’s confession this week. She said she was speaking from a place of “trauma and devastation” that only people who have been betrayed can understand.

“Yet I made a sacred and binding marriage vow 55 ½ years ago, and I will not break that promise,” she wrote. “I accept and understand that God through Jesus has paid for and forgiven the sins of the world, including Philip’s. God grant me the grace to forgive also, despite my unfathomable trauma. Please pray for us.”

Yancey’s revelation is just the latest scandal to rock the evangelical world. Many involve famous evangelical men accused of sexual infidelity, sexual harassment or other behaviors that some Christians would classify as sins. That list includes men like Carl Lentz, the former pastor of Hillsong Church, the Rev. Bill Hybels, a megachurch pioneer, the late evangelist Ravi Zacharias, and further back, televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.

Other Christians may grant Yancey less mercy than his wife does

Some of Yancey’s peers in the evangelical subculture may not be as forgiving as his wife, according to pastors and fellow Christian authors who spoke to CNN. And they say these peers’ scorn won’t just be limited to Yancey.

Jonathan P. Walton, an evangelical author and speaker, said women are often doubly shamed when the Christian commentariat focuses on them.

“Now she (Janet Yancey) is forced to comment on these things, and she’s not a public figure, said Walton, author of “Beauty and Resistance: Spiritual Rhythms for Formation and Repair.” “She didn’t ask to be violated and betrayed and have that processed as public information.”

The mystery woman with whom Yancey had the affair will also suffer, Walton said.

“Women in the church are framed as temptresses and homewreckers,” said Walton, a senior resource specialist with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical campus ministry. “I guarantee you that someone will try to figure out who she is and there will be blame cast on her.”

Others say that some Christians will try to turn Yancey’s compassionate model of Christianity against him.

Diana Butler Bass, a historian and author of the popular Substack newsletter The Cottage, said Yancey embodied an evangelical Christianity that valued grace and respect for different opinions. That type of evangelism, though, has narrowed its definition of grace in recent years, she told CNN.

“I think evangelicals will have a very mixed response (to Yancey’s affair),” said Bass, author of “A Beautiful Year,” a book of mediations based on the Christian calendar. “There will be some who will feel sorrow and they might extend grace in some way, shape or form, but in recent years evangelicalism has been increasingly closed to expressions of empathy and narrowed its definitions of grace.”

Bass said she suspects many evangelicals will turn on Yancey.

“They will say that his open theology was a result of moral sinfulness, and the two things are always connected in their mind…” she said. “The failing in his personal life will probably be used as a way to undercut his more generous theological message.”

Lahmeyer, the Oklahoma pastor, said pastors and Christian leaders often labor under the burden of expectations. Lahmeyer said he doesn’t know Yancey’s private life but added that in his experience, Christian leaders must learn how to “replenish themselves” to avoid emotional droughts that lead to sin.

“When they (Christian leaders) are tired and weary, we’ll make the dumbest decisions of our lives,” Lahmeyer told CNN. Those poor decisions get compounded when they become shameful secrets, he said.

“When you live a double life, that secret sin can grow. It gets worse, and the only way to break free from the double life is … to shine a light on that secret sin.”

Now that Philip Yancey has shined a light on a personal failure, he and his wife may now need something that words alone cannot supply.

In a 2015 interview with Plough publications, Yancey seemed to foreshadow what that might be. He said something about suffering that takes on a new meaning with this week’s confession.

“Suffering is not a mathematical puzzle,” he said. “It’s desperate human need. We should respond not with words but with practical acts of love and compassion.”

John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.