From Len Oakes’
Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities
Syracuse
University Press
Copyright ©
1997 by Syracuse University Press
ISBN
0-8156-2700-9
ISBN
0-8156-0398-3
From Chapter 7,
“Followers and Their Quest”
... But charismatic involvement provides a
confrontation with one's ultimate concerns. To fail therein leaves one damaged
at one's core.
Or perhaps it
merely reveals an earlier damage of which one was previously unaware, a damage
we all share. Perhaps there can be healing there, too.
Leaving
Each of the
groups studied had lost far more members than it had retained. And most of their
original members had left. On average, less than 20 percent of those who
joined, stayed on for more than five years, and fewer still stayed for ten or
more years. Ex-members who still felt warmly about the leader were those who
had succeeded in their great work. They had used the group for their purposes
and moved on at the right time. Success gave them a new appreciation of the
leader, gratitude for his help, and also pragmatism about his faults. They no
longer needed to believe in him so intensely. [emphasis added] Usually by the time they were successful, they had witnessed some of
the leader's less savory attributes-his mistakes and
excesses. They held few illusions about his nature but retained a fondness. After success they felt restricted by the
group and needed new challenges. The commonest pattern was to remain until the
next group crisis (charismatic groups have lots of crises) and then move
on. Probably they never again joined a
charismatic movement.
Embittered ex-members
tended to be those who had in some way failed at their great work. They felt
conned, that they had been tricked into believing the unbelievable--and indeed
some had, although most had contributed to their own miseries. [emphasis added] But there is a
special pain felt by one who has deliberately chosen to abandon reason to
follow another-in deep trust and love- into an unknown darkness, only to fall
flat on his face. Typically, when such a follower confronts the leader over
this hurt, the leader refuses to bear any responsibility for it, even mocking
and rejecting the follower. Perhaps the follower did something unethical for
the leader, and in the throes of guilt needs the leader to share the burden.
When the leader laughingly admonishes, "Well, you did it, not me,"
and dresses the tragedy up as a spiritual lesson, the follower feels
betrayed-"burned to the bone," as one described it--trust evaporates,
and the great work is no longer possible in that situation. Now, rather than
seeing the journey as the goal, the follower chooses to leave, blaming the leader
when he finds out that the impossible ideal is, after all, impossible. The failed
follower leaves when it suits him, sometimes with open hostility toward the
group. However, there are shades of success and failure, and even in the most
rigid groups there are degrees of membership. Some leave to join another
charismatic group. Some leave, then rejoin and go through the previous stages
again, and continue onto later stages. Some make several attempts to join a
group, several attempts at a goal, each time achieving partial success; and so they
come and go, remaining, ambiguously, a part of the group.
Each stage may
become a trap. Members may get stuck in one stage and lose themselves. If they
don't move on, they become vulnerable to the excesses of the group. If one doesn't find oneself in such a group,
then someone else-usually the leader will possess one. Charismatic groups
usually have some members who are stuck at various stages. Leavers are sometimes those who have become
stuck and withdraw rather than continue to go round and round. Lacking their
old sense of purpose, they may forge a new one by opposing the leader and his
group, becoming 'career apostates" (Foster 1984b). These are disillusioned ex-followers who
battle against their former group, often at great personal cost, by attempting
to publicly expose every scandal associated with the group. Fortunately for
them, charismatic groups usually have a lot of skeletons ln their closets and
dirt under their carpets, so the "mission" of the career apostate can
become a full-time vocation. [emphasis added]
After having
spoken with several of these people, none of whom was necessarily "wrong"
in his opposition--there genuinely were falsehoods and crimes that needed to be
aired--I nevertheless gained the impression that they were driven by some need for
absolution. A common refrain ran
something like "I ... was so
hoodwinked while in the group that I, too, condoned or took part in these
misdeeds." Hence it seems likely that career apostates are trying to make
amends and assuage their own guilt through their actions. But that is not all,
for there is a particular discovery that people make about themselves in
charismatic groups that many find especially hard to accept. It concerns how
easily one can sell one's soul, how shallow one's sense of ultimate concerns
really is, and how readily one can perform the unspeakable. ...
One of the things I have noticed over the years about former members of Mars Hill is that those who were volunteers or staff in the leadership culture have taken different, often drastically different, approaches to differentiating themselves from their past lives than the paths often chosen by former members. It's not so much that former members who were leaders become `career apostates', although some of them became apostates; it's more that Oakes described a dynamic that gets at the failure of the former member to change the "what" of their activity and activism. When I read Jessica Johnson's book Biblical Porn I got a sense that she was described an acculturation process in which members, particularly members who got immersed in leadership roles either as staff or volunteers, were cultivated into what I called fire-and-forget weapons in culture war.
What I have tried to describe over the years since Mars Hill collapsed is that people who were fire-and-forget weapons of culture war may have labored to reprogram their targeting systems but they never stopped being fire-and-forget weapons in a culture war, they just changed the priorities of their targeting system. Ergo, someone who felt (and may not have actually been) "red state" determines to become "blue state". The complementarian becomes egalitarian. The capitalist embraces social democracy. At this point I trust you get the idea. My concern over the years is that these sorts of confrontational activist temperaments never changed into different people, i.e. they didn't stop being those fire-and-forget weapons, they just began to target new people who are emblematic of all that is wrong with America.
Friends and family who have been soldiers have remarked that when crises hit soldiers default to training. Driscoll used to quip that sometimes the only way there can be peace is when all your enemies are destroyed or defeated. I have been disappointed to observe that among some former Mars Hill leaders they only know how to be culture war weapons. Actually being peacemakers may be beyond them, and possibly was even before they joined Mars Hill. It's tough to say.
Oakes' observation that those who were bitter about participation in a cult tended to be the ones who failed in their great work reminded me, vividly, of a single guy who bitterly noted that for all the time he gave to Mars Hill he should've "gotten something out of it". It was impossible to misunderstand that by "gotten something out of it" he meant "wife". Conversely, some men who felt that Mark Driscoll's shouting marathons inspired them to shape up and fly right seemed to feel, per Oakes' description of the short-term participants who leave, those men got what they wanted. They got the wife, so to speak, and then didn't feel much need to stick around to be "on mission". Why should they? Oakes thus highlighted a paradox that very few people in a cult actually stick around for even half a decade or a decade, let alone more. It takes the dyed in the wool zealots to stay longer than five years, let alone ten, let alone even longer.
Oakes didn't mince words about the guilt driving the quest for absolution and the anxiety that can accompany realizing how cheaply you can sell yourself out to a cause, particularly in a cultic scenario. There is, in that sense, an escape hatch men and women can use with a cult leader--it's easier to blame the cult leader's abusive patterns and crazy teaching than to admit that you bought into that teaching and actually lived it out in your own life. For my part I was grateful I never got married at Mars Hill. When I stopped attending and moved on to another church my mother once said she wished I had, at least, found a wife while I was at Mars Hill. I replied, "Mom, I thank God every day I didn't meet a wife at Mars Hill." I meant it.
I used to think that people who defended Driscoll and Mars Hill as having had a positive influence despite all the flaws were working from a sunk-cost investment fallacy but reading Oakes helped me get an appreciation for many, maybe even most, the appreciation was real and sincere. If a person managed to accomplish what Oakes describe as a personal "great work"; if a person managed to establish a important life-goal within a setting like Mars Hill Church, then however bad the church ended up being the achievement of that "great work" was and is a real accomplishment and it's even reasonable to be appreciative of that. Does that excuse anything? Well, no, not really and yet the fact that many a former Mars Hill member went there and accomplished one or more of their hoped-for projects that Oakes described as a "great work", then the positives did and do outweigh the negatives.
If a man or a woman got married at Mars Hill and they're still married to that person, that's a great work. Now, of course, for those who got married at Mars Hill and have since gotten divorced, or whose marriages didn't survive in the wake of the collapse of Mars Hill, that "great work" (if it was marriage) became a marriage or a spectacular or pedestrian failure. I knew some really bitter never-married guys from my Mars Hill years but I have wondered, since the collapse of Mars Hill, whether those guys are necessarily as bitter or jaded as some people who were married at Mars Hill and aren't married since.
A great deal about Real Marriage convinced me that real celibacy had to be a better option. Since marriage and family-making was so often explicitly offered as the "great work" Mars Hill men in leadership admonished people to seek out whether or not those marriages actually thrived or even survived has become a thorny issue.
I didn't think I was cut out for marriage before Mars Hill and am even more doubtful now. That said, in a way Wenatchee The Hatchet had a "great work", of a kind, chronicling the peak and demise of the late Mars Hill Church. I once errantly hoped that Mars Hill could be a place, a community, where I might be able to discuss and explore possibilities of musical convergence. Regular readers of my blog (however many there are at this point) may know that when I started this blog back in 2006 it was supposed to be about contemporary classical music, particularly for the guitar.
Since the demise of Mars Hill I have shifted the blog back to music, music theory, musicology and the idea and hope of restoring a synergistic relationship between "classical" and "pop"; and also a principled though not entirely unsympathetic stance against what I regard as post-Wagnerian highbrow art-religion. I didn't stop being an evangelical, I didn't stop being a Calvinist, and I didn't stop being a moderately conservative man on politics or religion. I used to say I was a "moderate actual conservative and not a neo-con" back in my Mars Hill years. I have since joked that I figured out I was a Mark Hatfield Republican. They clearly don't make `em like that anymore to go by the GOP of the post Cold War era ... but I digress ... .
It's taken me years away from the Mars Hill scene to remember and realize that the dream of writing ragtime sonata forms and fugues based on blues and country licks was something that spurred my musical explorations and interests in theory before I ever heard of Mars Hill. To put this in terms of what Len Oakes called "the great work", I had one I was pursuing before Mars Hill existed, it was something I kept pursuing bit by bit during my time there, and it became something I was able to commit more energy and thought to since 2015. I don't think I could have written Ragtime and Sonata Forms if I had still been within the Mars Hill orbit. The mission was so time-consuming and the ethos so singular that even as a volunteer participant in a mere handful of ministries over the course of nine years I don't think I would've had the time and focus to spare to read Hepokoski & Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory. In fact, come to think of it, I didn't even know of the book until a year or so after Mars Hill collapsed.
But I suppose you get the idea, I had a kind of "great work" I was interested in more or less regardless of Mars Hill while I was there and since. Being a watchdog blogger was never an actual goal and I don't even think it should be a goal.
What I admit to thinking and feeling after the demise of Mars Hill is that what Oakes described as a quest for absolution is a quest that can only fail. You can't find absolution from having been part of a cult, not through your actions. The Christian concept of repentance is relevant here and by that I mean you have to become a different kind of a person, not just a person who has a new set of metaphysical or dogmatic convictions who is still basically the same kind of person you were when you were in the midst of the cult. I may have inchoately moved toward the idea too harshly at the time I wrote a little haiku that went as follows:
no one is more fake
than the person obsessed with
authenticity
The older version is over here.
When I was growing up one of my parents was a firm culture warrior type who thought Nixon didn't say or do anything wrong except maybe just getting caught doing what other presidents did. I did not agree with that sentiment or surmise. By the time I got to Mars Hill it's earliest phase seemed to offer an alternative to that kind of constant culture-war modus operandi. Of course ... it wasn't long before that turned out to not be the case but I mention it because I have wanted to avoid getting stymied in culture war polemics. It's not that I don't have convictions or beliefs so much as that I believe the "grift" that political operatives have across the board can be to make all cultural issues matters of our worldview being vindicated against their worldview, the old "Us and Them" of the Pinkfloyd song.
I did not want, to invoke the terminology I used earlier, a life where I was a fire-and-forget weapon in a culture war. If there's a probably too-withering axiom I've had in my head lately it's that culture warriors are too busy fighting their culture wars to produce any culture worth talking about, more or less regardless of whether they consider themselves conservative or liberal, capitalist or communist, and so on.
When the reason you read about or participate in the arts is worldview vindication then nothing in the arts can merely be "fun" because then it's not "art" or "serious" because too much is at stake for the frivolity of anything less than timeless, eternal verities. That whole mentality seems to partake of a notion that either/or defines the entire scope of creative activity. As Raymond Knapp put it in his book on Haydn, camp and the legacy of German Idealism, the entire idea of "camp" is inimical to the authenticity and serious rubric of Romanticism--ergo, Haydn, whose music is allegedly not as sublime as Beethoven or Mozart, is less "deep". I am, I trust you see, openly skeptical about that stance and it's not because I don't adore Beethoven's Op. 111 piano sonata.
Art-religion has ossified into the kind of fundamentalist dogma that is incapable of solving any problems in the arts; art for the sake of art is how we got Cage and Duchamp and I don't mind the prepared piano music now and then but I'm enough of a Calvinist that I don't regard art as actually being able to do for religion what religion supposedly can no longer do for itself. I think if Christian doctrines regarding perichoresis in Trinitarian doctrine and the hypostatic union of Christ's two natures is applied to concepts of musical time and space then Christians should have no problem at all synthesizing popular/vernacular styles with the syntactics of galant musical development across large-scale stretches of musical time and space. That was an inchoate, maybe nascent conviction I had about the old highbrow/lowbrow arts divides before I ever set foot in Mars Hill.
So despite frustrations I didn't leave the church feeling I'd been crushed or lost everything or lost my sense of self. I was disappointed by what I had seen happen and angry at how friends and family got treated, yes, but I look back on those years and realize that, I guess I'm saying that in hindsight whatever the "great work" was I was laboring toward I came to realize that not only was I not accomplishing it at Mars Hill, being at Mars Hill would probably have become an obstacle to it. Maren Haynes Marchesini's dissertation on musical culture at Mars Hill highlighted how DIY white punk/indie rock it was. Yeah ... and I can't say I've ever respected punk or indie rock. I regard punk as a foundationally reactionary aesthetic that responded to the aesthetic vices of progressive rock, art rock, and jazz/pop fusions. Ergo punk was always doomed to embrace a dubious concept of musical authenticity predicated on non-musical criteria I just never could take seriously. I had plenty of complaints about the diffuse and form-averse sprawl of progressive rock!
My own aesthetic convictions have been, as I've outlined them at length, advocacy of restoring inter-stylistic and inter-formal convergence. If Mozart and Haydn could do it why can't we? Because supposedly our age is bereft of genius? Jaroslav Pelikan, were he with us, would perhaps suggest that kind of mentality is a traditionalist defending tradition, having offered that a tradition is "the living faith of the dead" while the traditionalist has "the dead faith of the living". The traditionalist bewails the disenchantment of the world while being grateful some era of enlightenment sucked all the magic out save the magic of a preferred creative idiom.
If I were still busy doing volunteer ministries at Mars Hill I wouldn't have had time to study music the way I have since. That said, I did appreciate meeting all the people I met and I love the friends I made there. I don't take any of that back.
But let's ask if "the great work" is a Christian aspiration? Is it? What about the apostolic admonition to live peaceably with others and work quietly with your hands and work for your food and mind your own business? What about the instruction that as far as it depends on you live at peace with everyone? This comes around to my thoughts of how people who were in the leadership cult(ure) of Mars Hill became fire and forget weapons of culture war. Not all of them stayed that way but ... people who are drawn to lead in some capacity may already have a hard time with the scriptural instructions to live quiet, ordinary, peaceable lives. People who want to become legends in this world may struggle to live quietly and humbly and generously in a way that may make them ready for the next.
This may come back around to a thought I had years ago that Mark Driscoll's sales pitch was "legacy".
If you wanted your life to "mean something", if you wanted your life to "matter", if you wanted to be part of a movement or be an individual who has a legacy then you were ripe for joining up. It might not be Mars Hill, it might have been enlisting in the services, or whatever else might be grist for legacy-making. Online videos and commentary can be full of this or that thing or person that is "iconic", especially lately. Wanting to be a blessing to people isn't a bad thing. Wanting to live a life that matters isn't a bad thing, either. Those scripts of adulthood Mark Driscoll and other Mars Hill leaders shilled were not necessarily even bad things but as Jesus warned about teachers of the law, they sit in the seat of Moses and you should do what they tell you but don't follow their example. Mere hypocrisy, I have often said, I can understand but double standards aggravate me and over time it became clear there were double standards. All of us fail to live by the best of our ideals often enough but to exempt myself from standards I am unstinting about with others? That's terrible.
In a way to really pull away from a cultic legacy is not just to question the aims and means of the cult but to find a way to disentangle yourself from the allure of the "great work" that such cults generally have. To put this in Christian theological terms there's such a thing as doing your best to love God and neighbor and leave the rest to inscrutable providence. Had Mark Driscoll actually bothered to do that he wouldn't have made use of Result Source to rig a No. 1 spot for Real Marriage on the New York Times bestseller list ten years ago. Cultic dynamics may be full of zealous seeking after the "what" of "legacy" without any scruples as to the "how". The "how" matters. The "how" matters so much that choosing the wrong "how" for the "what" of the legacy you're chasing down can tell the world whether or not you're a Christian in any way that actually matters.
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