When I used to lead women’s ministry at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, I helped organize our yearly Women’s Retreats. The men, however, never had Men’s Retreats. They had Men’s Advances. Retreats, as they saw it, were for sissies.
Nevermind that the larger church adopted the concept of retreat from Jesus’s example in the Gospels. Jesus withdrew/retreated on several occasions, the Greek word meaning to make space away, to retire to make room for something else. In contrast, the men at Mars Hill Church were not discipled to withdraw to make room for Jesus. The Men’s Advance had quite the reputation for being a boisterous weekend filled with conversations about sex and UFC fights. Perhaps the men did spend some quiet time in prayer and Bible study, but if they did, no one talked about that aspect of the Men’s Advance when they got home.
Since the release of Kristin du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith, evangelicals have been buzzing about her portrayal of the recent history of conservative evangelicalism. I didn’t need to read Jesus and John Wayne to believe the author’s main conclusion—that American evangelicalism has had a long affair with warrior masculinity, to the point that evangelicals are willing to sacrifice character for leaders who are willing to kick some butt. My experience of American Evangelicalism from the independent fundamentalist churches of my youth to Mars Hill Church as an adult fit the one du Mez described. I was caught up in the warrior model of Christian manhood for a while. I looked to marry that kind of man for myself.
The warrior mentality that has emerged in the last fifty to seventy-five years of evangelicalism is not new in Church history. It was bred, for example, in actual warriors during the Crusades, to devastating effects. It has been used metaphorically to describe Machen and his warrior children or in the popularization of the warrior as the model for Christian manhood among Baptists on the heels of the rise of dispensationalism with Scofield and Ryrie. In Scofield’s end times scenario, Christ raptures a marginalized church valiantly holding off secular opponents. The gates of hell are biting at the church’s heals, with liberal wings falling left and right. Only those who valiantly fight to the end will be found holding on to the fundamentals of the faith.
I would like to argue that the warrior mentality is not the Biblical paradigm for Christian manhood, or womanhood for that matter.
After the implosion of Mars Hill Church and a divorce I didn’t want, I moved from Seattle, Washington to my grandparents’ farm in South Carolina. My elderly father still shares crops with the farmer who rents our land. For the last six years of my life, rocking on my screened porch overlooking the fields, recovering from both my divorce and the cancer diagnosis that followed two years later, I have been detoxing from the poor discipleship around sex and gender I received at Mars Hill and the warrior mentality for Christians, particularly Christian men, of my upbringing. The fog has cleared in my brain, and the true model for Christian manhood and womanhood has become as clear in my head as it actually is in Scripture. I stare at it every day.
Land. Seed. Work. Harvest.
The model for Christian manhood isn’t a warrior. It’s a farmer. ...
I went to, I think, one mens' retreat (advance, whatever). I have not been a fan of mens' retreats. I talked with a friend of mine who also went to the same retreat and we both considered how depressing it was. We were given homework modeled on the Jon Phelps "Reverse engineering your life" paradigm and we were supposed to write down if we'd be married or not; how much we would weigh; how often we'd have sex; how many kids we'd have, how much money we'd be making and ...
My friend put it plainly, who in their right mind can even know any of that in advance. If you're an unmarried man on what absurd basis could you imagine you'd be married inside of the next five years? That's right, Pete, that's right. No one can know that stuff! For that matter someone who is married "now" can be divorced inside of the next five years. I've seen that happen a few times in the history of post-Mars Hill.
So I am not much for retreats, whether they're called retreats or "advances" ... and I've written about that in the past
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/03/on-mens-retreats.html
Wendy's comments sparked some conversation among some of us who used to be at Mars Hill in another context and one of the things that came up was the mysteriousness of Mark Driscoll's air war/ground war categories. I have written about that in the past, too.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-problem-of-markulinity-as-air-war.html
Even before I left Mars Hill I had begun to talk about the distinctions between masculinity and markulinity, and after I left I wrote about that at some length. The concept of the "warrior" a guy like Driscoll espouses is meaningless blather. He's never served in the military and he has never once displayed any interest in military history of historiography. He would never read a book on the history of the coup in Bolivia or the significance of maritime logistics for winning a war. I don't do those things myself and I have been a lifelong civilian but I have had enough family and friends who either joined the military or are steeped in military history that I know this, air war supports the ground war and never vice versa. The planes are there for the soldiers on the ground, to get them where they need to go, to support them, and that in the history of war no one has ever won a war with air power. There's general agreement among military historians that bombing the daylights out of people never works to win a war. No, not even dropping those nukes on two cities in Japan "won" the war.
Now if a man espoused a clean, manly evangelical Christianity the way Chaplain M. S. Evers did in the First World War then actual soldiers would actually show up for his homilies, as they did in fact do. Evers refused to discharge a weapon but he took supplies and ammunition to soldiers and he bunked with the soldiers in the combat zone rather than away from them. THAT kind of man got respect from soldiers as a chaplain who was literally there with them to serve. Driscoll's version of manliness turned out to be someone who screamed from the pulpit and blogged about how challenging his life was doing urban ministry in Seattle while it turned out he and his family had already relocated to Wedgwood, WA into a million-dollar home. Yes, it's possible to feel bad for his kids and wife being afraid and also consider him less a man for continuously hiding behind stories about his wife and children when he makes contentious claims about a variety of things. A real man would not hide behind stories about his wife and children when asked point blank how he alienated so many people in the Puget Sound area.
I do have the du Mez book in my backlog of reading, so I'll get to it. Reception has been mixed. One of my more progressive associates warned me it was a frustrating and somewhat pointless read, whereas Christian readers have said they found it a bit skewed but useful. I don't know what my conclusion will be but I have it on my sprawling reading list. What I DO know is that du Mez has written a very positive endorsement of Crawford Gribben's monograph on survivalism and Christian reconstructionism in the Pacific Northwest. I should write about a small pile of Gribben's books but I'd say that that new Gribben monograph is a must-read for Mars Hillians and for anyone who wants to understand Mars Hill. Why? The short version is that Gribben outlines the concept of the Christian Redoubt and how it developed in the PNW during the period when, it doesn't just so happen to turn out, Mark Driscoll was getting his communications degree at Washington State University. Driscoll's invocation of Doug Wilson as a key influence on his views of masculinity is established by William Wallace II himself.
I ended up reading Real Marriage after reading Wendy and Andy Alsup's review of it, by the way. When I got done reading it I was struck by how Mark and Grace Driscoll (assuming she wrote material rather than a ghostwriter) had used Dan Allender's work without crediting him once in the first edition. I went on to do a detailed comparison. I pointed out that as far back as the start of the century Grace listed Allender as one of her favorite authors.
But the other thing that stuck with me after reading Real Marriage was this--if this is what "real marriage" looks like then real celibacy has got to be the better option. Mark Driscoll's not the only person to use a variety of gimmicks to sell a self-help book for people who want to be told it's their God-given right to get laid, Nadia Bolz-Weber has done the same basic thing. These are teachers who, if I have to call them teachers at all, are selling people on the idea that they can be the kinds of Americans they already want to be anyway.
I could probably write more but we're already approaching 90 degrees in Seattle and are about to face what are reportedly record high temperatures over the next few days. I'm going to try to get to the podcastathon Warren Throckmorton mentioned recently. Glad to read that Phoenix Preacher's situation is worked out (let the reader understand). In weather like this there's a time and a season to everything and a time to not blog during a sweltering weekend can be the season we've got coming up.
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