It would have been easy for the directors of Death of the Pastor’s Wife, currently the No. 1 TV series being watched by Netflix subscribers, to sensationalize the sexual abuse that appears to have led to the event of the title. And it would have been easy for them to go into even more detail than what they did about the pastor’s troubled legal history. A case might be made that the series actually downplayed the troubling aspects of Pastor John-Paul “JP” Miller’s ministry as it told the story of his wife, Mica Miller, who died by suicide in April 2024.
What was most striking to me as I watched the three-part series was how ordinary so many of the documentary scenes were, particularly those of Mica singing with the congregation of the Solid Rock Church of Myrtle Beach, S.C., as a worship leader and of JP preaching his sermons. But all was not as it seemed.
The series’ story begins when Mica moved with her family to Myrtle Beach at the age of 13. She met JP, 15 years her senior, as a teenager and babysat for him and his wife, the parents of five. At the age of 18, Mica married another member of the congregation, but the marriage didn’t last, in part became Mica and JP started having an affair when she was 20 — or at least everyone involved seemed to treat the relationship as an affair even though describing it as abuse undoubtedly would have been more appropriate considering the ages and power differential between the two. They eventually divorced their spouses and married each other — but in an autonomous church such as Solid Rock without denominational oversight, that wasn’t enough for JP to be defrocked.
The film sympathetically tells Mica’s story largely through interviews with her friends and relatives. But the most damage to JP’s image comes from clips of sermons in which he advises wives that they face an obligation under Biblical teaching to give their husbands what they want in terms of sex — and we learn through what Mica told her friends that JP was demanding sex multiple times per day.
And his sermons all seem so ordinary.
You see, JP’s words echoed what was often uttered by many church leaders during the “purity culture” days of the 1990s and beyond. It was a culture that told Christian teenage girls and unmarried women that they needed to dress conservatively to keep men from being tempted sexually, but that after they were married they were expected to give everything sexual they had to their husbands. Women, the message was, are responsible for the sexual lives of their men.
Of course, JP was the kind to freely quote verses such as Ephesians 5:22, which directs wives to “submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”1
And lest you think that turning Ephesians into a command to submit sexually to such a degree is out of the ordinary, keep in mind that there is a part of the evangelical subculture — practiced by not all evangelicals by any means, and not even most — that sees it that way. In some evangelical stores as well as via Amazon, you can still find supposedly Bible-based books such as 2004’s Created to Be His Help Meet: Discover How God Can Make Your Marriage Glorious by Debi Pearl, in which she writes: “God has clearly told us that not having regular sex is giving Satan an opportunity to tempt married couples. Wife, it is your God-ordained ministry to your husband to be his totally enthusiastic sex partner, ready to enjoy him at all times.”
The story of Mica, who filed for divorce before her death, isn’t over. As the series comes to a close in the present day, JP is facing federal charges related to stalking, and he has married for a third time and continues to lead a diminished ministry. Meanwhile, friends and relatives of Mica are pushing for legislation called “Mica’s law” in South Carolina that would expand the definition of domestic abuse.
Part of me would have liked to see the directors of Death of the Pastor’s Wife more directly point to the red flags that might have helped Mica avoid her marriage or her friends and relatives to see the threat she was facing. But on further reflection, I’m thinking that maybe they were right to avoid portraying JP and his church as more obviously sinister than they did. After all, the fact that the pressures on Mica came from a supposedly God-endorsed pastor and organization is what put her at so much risk of being abused.
From the New International Version translation. The verse is used in a context that also calls for the husband to submit to the wife.