A siege mentality leads to step three: the refusal to hear criticism from the outside and crediting critique only from the inside. In part because of my three-decade experience defending religious believers, I’ve been prone to make exactly that mistake. Other people saw who Mark Driscoll was well before I did. Other people saw who Ravi Zacharias was well before I did. I often considered the source of criticism (hostile media, angry bloggers) before I considered the substance of criticism.

That’s on me, and I regret it deeply.

But then here’s where step three gets most insidious. In a sufficiently tribal environment, all criticism ultimately becomes “outside” criticism. If secular media critiques Christians, then that’s of course outside. If an Evangelical critiques Christians—even a theologically orthodox Evangelical who has been part of American Christian culture his or her entire life—then that’s betrayal. And traitors are the ultimate outsiders.

You see that pattern again and again. As I outlined in my story about Zacharias, the treatment of my friend Ruth Malhotra, the ultimate insider as the ministry’s public relations manager, was brutal once she started asking hard questions about Zacharias’s conduct.