https://blog.ayjay.org/gaslighting/
One of the more pernicious quirks of English usage to arise in the past few years is the employment — by a remarkably large number of people, it seems to me — of the term “gaslighting” as the default explanation for disagreement. Nobody just disagrees with me anymore, they’re trying to gaslight me.
Let’s remember where the phrase comes from: a 1944 film in which a husband attempts to make his wife think that she’s crazy. To say that someone is gaslighting you is to say that they know you’re right but are pretending not to. They’re maliciously trying to get you to doubt yourself. They are dishonest, deceitful, manipulative. The charge of gaslighting is an extreme form of Bulverism: Instead of claiming You say that because you’re a man or You say that because you’re an American it’s You say that because you’re a moral monster.
It’s a useful tactic to deploy if you’d prefer never to think about whether any of your assumptions are correct. Your opponents are not only wrong, they are wicked, and why should you engage with arguments that are obviously made in bad faith and for evil purposes? These convictions keep your echo chamber hermetically sealed.
What I find especially interesting about this usage is that it seems to have been adopted with equal eagerness by extremists on the left and the right. (Unlike the structurally very similar red pill/blue pill meme, which has been totally co-opted by the right.) It’s one of the many ways in which the far left and the far right are continually borrowing language, rhetorical strategy, and in some cases even direct political strategy from one another. It would be nice if we could ship them all off to their own island where they could fight it out, or, perhaps, discover that they can’t tell one another apart.
The first time I heard the term gaslighting or read it was when I was accused of gaslighting in comments at The Wartburg Watch. It may have been in reference to the alleged "machete incident" that Mark Driscoll mentioned in his Mars Hill period. It may not have been. I've chronicled a lot of Mars Hill history over the course of a decade but most intensely in the 2011 through 2015 period. What I found happening in comments at TWW for a while was some folks decided I was gaslighting them by correcting some factual errors and misunderstandings about aspects of Mars Hill history. What made the claim that I was gaslighting baffling was that I can say that I've met Mike Gunn, Lief Moi, and Mark Driscoll. I attended from roughly 1999 through 2009; was a member of the church for years; and was recruited to serve in a ministry by leaders at Mars Hill and, besides all that, managed to land a journalism degree that's been useless on the job market but useful for documenting the history of the former Mars Hill.
What I was not willing to do was to just say "Mark Driscoll is evil". Now, having said that, he might be but I'm less interested in settling that question than in digging into what we can, as far as humanly possible, figure out about what happened. As I put it years ago, on the subject of Mars Hill this blog is an experiment in journalistic and historical documentation and not necessarily what people like to call a "watchblog". So ...
I was willing to point out that Mars Hill discipline of Andrew (Lamb) seemed characterized by double standards, conflict of interest, punitive measures taken against Andrew, and that this gave people reason to question the equity of church disciplinary processes and yet despite having said all that in comments, I managed to get told I was gaslighting people in the comments section at Wartburg Watch. I had to go look up what the term meant. Apparently, a la Alan Jacobs above, I've discovered that accusing someone of gaslighting can paradoxically be a form of gaslighting in itself.
Eventually enough former Mars Hill members and staff vouched for me that dee and Deb came to understand what I was trying to do. I've tried to be clear here that my lack of space for people to share how they've been hurt by Mars Hill is not about a lack of sympathy for (or solidarity with) people who have been harmed by teaching at Mars Hill. There's swaths of my life that have changed, and possibly for the worse for a while, by Mars Hill ethos and praxis. But I wanted to document what happened in a way to let readers (specifically those who by now are former members) reach some conclusions about whether or not they wanted to stay or leave without forcing the issue and ordering them to leave, which I saw so many former members doing I concluded it could be counterproductive.
But by not being willing to outright denounce leaders at Mars Hill I got accused of gaslighting and even, as hard as this is to imagine, as a Driscoll apologist. The messages I got in comments sections about how I would one day have to stand before God and account for every bad thing I was told I was saying against Pastor Mark told me a different story. If some initial responders at TWW thought I was a Driscoll apologist actual defenders of Driscoll saw me in pretty adversarial terms (and quite possibly still do). By 2013 there were periods in which I would quote passages from Driscoll sermons or teaching and said teachings would just vanish, especially on the topic of spiritual warfare.
But a lot of material that was circulating about Driscoll was, in fact, a supermyth or a fabrication, especially the old progressive rumor that Mark said anything to the effect that Gayle Haggard let herself go and that such was the reason Ted Haggard went to a male prostitute. That nasty remark was made as a joke by then editor of The Stranger Dan Savage. I discussed how disturbingly similar Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll followers could (and probably still) be in The Dan Savage age of Mark Driscoll's Seattle: revisiting how both men responded to the 2006 Ted Haggard scandal that led to an internet myth. Why mention that? Because pointing out that a cruel joke that was actually made by Dan Savage being credited by, say, Lindy West, as being said by Mark Driscoll is the kind of provably wrong meme that balkanizes the proverbial left and right, or progressive and conservative wings.
Fans of Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll alike can prove themselves to be jerks. Fans of these kinds of self-appointed public figures can very often be jerks despite seeming to be on opposite sides of issues. What they are not on the opposite side of, alas, is what kinds of methods they use to ... how to put this delicately, engage hot button issues in mass and social media in the hopes of sparking public discussion. I've gone on record saying that across the board we need fewer men like Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll (and also Frank Schaeffer, for that matter), but those are the kinds of people who often prevail in the online scene ... or somewhat by extension the Twitter-verse. Not everyone, probably not even most.
I think that if I have established anything about Mark Driscoll as a public figure after 12 years it is that very often the simplest way to "make him look bad" has been to quote him accurately, quote him in context, and let his own public conduct and statements be seen for what they are. Even if you are an actual exorcist telling people they have demons doesn't go over well.
But along the way I've discovered that there's a vocal subset of internet users for whom someone like me becomes a gaslighter for not confirming what they may have heard and decided was true. If someone wants to believe Mark Driscoll really said Gayle Haggard let herself go because they think Driscoll is a bad person and such a presumption fits their understanding of what a guy like him would say then they won't care if I trawl back through the social media usage and blog posts to show that the perpetrator of the "Gayle Haggard must have let herself go" was Dan Savage. Even in the midst of ostensibly combating prejudice people can often run with their prejudice. The stuff Driscoll did say over the years is troubling enough without imputing to him things Dan Savage wrote.
Why mention this kind of stuff? Because while Driscoll can talk about from the pulpit about how he has been slandered (and no doubt he has been slandered in some way), he told Carey Niewuhoff something about the conflict(s) at Mars Hill across 18 years when Nieuwhoff asked about it in a podcast interview earlier this year:
https://careynieuwhof.com/episode328/
28:00
And I mean, you kind of casually breezed through death threats, bullet proof vests, the whole deal. How do you recover from that?
Mark Driscoll: Yeah, it wasn't just at the end. It was most of my time. I mean it was well over a decade of ... I mean we moved many times for safety issues. Address to the house would be posted online. Critics would show up. They tended to post the address when I was out of town and Grace and the kids were home alone.
We had a safe room built at one house. We have had people arrested on property. Rocks thrown at the kids playing in the yard. Media for gotcha. I mean, just a little bit of ... It was crazy for a very long time.
And so as a family we had security protocols. We had to live a very, very, very careful life. And so the kids ... They couldn't go for bike rides, they couldn't go for walks alone. They couldn't just walk around church alone. We were on high alert. And one of the things that's really been great I think with the move is, the kids just get to do normal. They can go to the store, they can go for a walk, they can ride a skateboard, they can just get to do normal. And that's been really incredible. And the kids really like having a little bit more freedom for sure.
Carey Nieuwhof: (29:30) Can I ask, was the opposition from the church, like Christians? I mean, the Capital C church or was it more from other people in Seattle or was it widely distributed?
Mark Driscoll: (about 29:47) You know, 18 years things ebb and flow, different issues blow up and different groups have an issue. And some of that I'm not going to say I'm Jesus and I've never done anything wrong you know.
Carey Nieuwhof: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark Driscoll: And so, but in that it just kind of ebbed and flowed but most of it was internal and it was theological in nature around the issue of transgender-ism and same sex marriage and a lot of what was the energy behind it was ultimately against bible teaching.
Now I've chronicled the history of the late Mars Hill for about a decade now and I don't recall even hearing rumors to the effect that there was a contingent within Mars Hill leadership at any level that was in favor of transgenderism or same sex marriage. Now it's certainly possible that people who were formerly in leadership at Mars Hill Church may have gone on to be in favor of transgenderism and same-sex marriage since Mark Driscoll's resignation, there are definitely former pastors from Mars Hill who have since identified themselves as feminists and egalitarians, and there are former deacons from Mars Hill who are women who have since been ordained in egalitarian institutions but Mark Driscoll would have to provide some actual evidence that the above-quoted claim has any basis of any kind.
The thing is, what Mark Driscoll said above probably can't be considered gaslighting if he has really convinced himself he was basically "released" by God from Mars Hill over what he now describes as a theological battle inside the former Mars Hill over transgenderism and same-sex marriage. That the internal battles were over church governance and how much direct and indirect power Driscoll wielded to get his way or elevate himself to celebrity status is closer to what I've been able to document over the course of a decade, but Mark Driscoll may sincerely believe this year that the battle that took down Mars Hill was not his own resignation in the face of a disciplinary process in which the Board of Overseers disagreed with the Board of Elders as to whether or not Mark Driscoll showed himself disqualified from ministry.
I mention all the above because I have yet to get around to writing about the two-part interview Warren Throckmorton did with Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas about the final years of Mars Hill.
Now you might want to go back and review the six accounts given for how and why Mark Driscoll resigned; and consider the diachronic survey of those accounts before reading the Throckmorton interview parts 1 and 2 respectively. If you read faster than people talk go over to Sutton Turner's site for transcripts of part 1 and part 2 respectively. You might have reasons to suspect Bruskas and Turner are not going to be able to give objective accounts of the later years of Mars Hill but given the calamatous decline of Mars Hill and what Mark Driscoll has said about his time there the hypothetical historian's question might come up as to, well, between the three executive elders who ran Mars Hill in its final year which of them seems most reliable in terms of conveying a consistent account that can at some level be verified?
If historians have to work with a variety of sources of varying degrees of reliability and none of them can be construed as "perfect" which executive elder, at this point, seems more credible if we have to compare the testimonies of Sutton Turner, Dave Bruskas and Mark Driscoll? Based on the documents that were leaked to Warren Throckmorton and the documents Mars Hill itself published for public access the Bruskas and Turner accounts make more sense as a coherent narrative than Mark Driscoll's statement to Nieuwhoff earlier this year. It's not "impossible" to claim there was some kind of battle inside the late Mars Hill within leadership about transgender-ism and same-sex marriage but the burden of proof should be on Mark Driscoll to back up the assertion.
1 comment:
The game with gaslighting accusations is that if you accuse your gaslighting victim before they get around to accusing you, then it takes some of the political steam out of their own accusation. So, if you're going to do something like tell someone their privilege is invisible to them (although yours, for some reason, wouldn't be invisible to you?), and then tell them to "check their privilege" (really, let someone else, like me, check it for you), then you need to accuse them of gaslighting before that. Because that is definitely attempted gaslighting. "Check your invisible privilege", in effect, says the most demographically typical depositor (a white woman over age 50) to a financial institution that derives dividends from young black men in prison being coerced into unpaid labor under threat of sexual assault; "check your invisible privilege", in effect, she says about the fewer than 1/3 of US sexual assaults that happen to occur to persons of her gender, as if female suffering must be somehow twice as tragic as male suffering because the perps are mostly male (using, with gender in place of race, the same logic that black victimhood is just an incidental facet of black criminality); "check your invisible privilege", in effect, says someone who works fewer hours than her male counterpart, consumes more, and ends up with more stuff at the end of the process by spending the last 5 years of her life living on benefits mostly paid in by men who are already deceased; "check your invisible privilege" says someone who thinks being less likely to be impoverished in old age is a privielge, even when the reason why one is not impoverished is that one is, instead, simply dead.
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