When a pastor preaches cruelty, why does the congregation listen?

Halfway through Netflix's jarring docuseries Death of the Pastor’s Wife, I found myself rewinding a clip to make sure I had heard it correctly. It was that unhinged.There was John-Paul "JP" Miller, pastor of Solid Rock Church, telling his congregation that a wife who refuses her husband sex is inviting the devil into her marriage. He claimed that withholding intimacy was comparable to rape, sex trafficking, or homosexuality.He said it as doctrine, as some sort of Bible-based fact, and as justification for his own abhorrent behavior. What stunned me was that members of his congregation sat in the pews and nodded along.Related: A nine-hour prayer service on the National Mall & LGBTQ+ hate in the midtermYou might think Miller was an outlier. I don’t. I think this type of behavior — pastors exploiting Scripture to justify their predatory actions and manipulate their congregations — is more prevalent than we know.The documentary lays out, in the words of his late wife, a marriage defined by control but rationalized as “God’s way.” She claimed that Miller demanded sex up to four times a day and presented it as a wife’s spiritual duty. That is not spiritual. That is slavery.She made countless allegations of infidelity and exploitation that Miller reframed, whenever word began to spread, as God's plan rather than the consequences of his own immoral choices. Just as striking as his specific cruelty toward his wife was its pattern: The worse his behavior got, the more his sermons bent toward submission and away from anything remotely biblical.To me, a guilty pastor doesn’t preach humility. He preaches obedience, slavery and cruelty, then twists those demands into what he wants other people to believe is God’s word.I recognize this absurdity because I grew up inside it.I was raised deeply Catholic, which included eight years of Catholic school, Mass every Sunday and parents who gave their time and faith to the parish without reservation. My father was a sai