There would definitely need to be many people who are are deliberately deceitful. Those who both know how to "read between the lines" and who clearly seek to persuade others in the objective facts of Christianity.
Take CS Lewis as an example. He write strong and clear defences of the incarnation, miracles etc. as objective facts. He was either trying to deliberately deceive or he did not actually understand older writing, and the latter is not really credible given he was the professor of mediaeval and renaissance literature at Oxford.
> The mystique of this is openly part of the draw for people to sign up for it.
Not in my experience of priests, monks and nuns and people who consider becoming clergy.
I haven't read any of CS Lewis's writing for adults, but unfortunately, it is not at all unusual for academic liberal arts scholars to have only a very shallow surface understanding of the ideas in literature they formally study.
Another possibility is that if you get what I'm saying here, you might re-read CS Lewis and have a very different perspective on what he was actually saying- because those Christian "truths" are extremely important, and exist for a good reason - and one can write a strong clear defense of them from the perspective I am coming from.
I read a lot of old philosophy and religious texts translated and commented on by "well respected" scholars, and it is not uncommon at all that I can tell they are seeing only the surface of the ideas... which can make it frustrating and difficult to read when the translator wasn't 'getting it.' The level one needs to be at to be a well respected philosopher, and just to succeed as an academic are not close at all, and there is no guarantee that the latter will be capable of fully grasping the ideas of the former - it is probably the norm that they cannot. If they could they would not be just a translator or scholar, but a powerful philosopher in their own right.
An intelligent person whose mind is fundamentally oriented towards communicating deeper meaning, does not operate on the level of obsessing over banal binary verification of facts- and they need to be able to assume their reader is already capable of thinking abstractly in this way as well. To put it simply one must assume intelligence in the reader to communicate deep ideas and meaning, and neglecting to "explain how to be intelligent" is not deception- when it is not even something that can be explained.
Take CS Lewis as an example. He write strong and clear defences of the incarnation, miracles etc. as objective facts. He was either trying to deliberately deceive or he did not actually understand older writing, and the latter is not really credible given he was the professor of mediaeval and renaissance literature at Oxford.
> The mystique of this is openly part of the draw for people to sign up for it.
Not in my experience of priests, monks and nuns and people who consider becoming clergy.