that Josh Butler incident ... product shilling and well-poisoning are the business as usual

The first and most jaded thing that comes to mind is there's always an opportunity any time The Gospel Coalition publishes something provocative for people to plug for books.

Rod Dreher and Doug Wilson can agree on something, after all, these days.  It seems it has to do with thinking women are freaking out unnecessarily (Dreher) or that the liberated sisters inevitably ran out of the room crying (Wilson) about this ... 
https://web.archive.org/web/20230301170931/https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/sex-wont-save-you/

Dreher may not yet know that he and Wilson have overlap in their responses at this point but their respective takes are different in fairly predictable ways.  Dreher cites Chrysostom and how the marital union and sexual intercourse are part of Christian mysticism going back more than a thousand years.  Wilson, being Wilson, goes back to the Jared Wilson citation of Doug Wilson and back to formulations about what Doug Wilson thought was the basis for women having rape fantasies.  Along the way Doug Wilson made a point of saying women are penetrated.  That would probably be greeted by Slate contributors as part of endemic rape culture even if Doug Wilson would probably not commend 50 Shades of Gray to anyone.

I have read a handful of Doug Wilson books over the years on account of Mark Driscoll having touted his work and I gotta say I don't see exactly how or why people think Wilson is a competent exegete or theologian.  Much as I hesitate to take Slate writer responses as "the" explanation for why women would even have rape fantasies I hesitate (even more) to take a guy like Doug Wilson as having any idea what he's talking about when he decides to even bother bringing up rape fantasies.  But then he wrote about a sex robot being destroyed in a novel ... 

I don't really want to wade into the matter in a blog post but why women have rape fantasies seems like the kind of thing men should avoid discussing in public and most of all when they are (or purport to be) pastors.  Rod Dreher seems, spit take, to have decided to go with the moment.  What Dreher and Wilson both manage to do is plug books, Dreher someone else's and Wilson his own.  

Doug Wilson is proud to be associated with Canon Press and what they publish.  Alright, so when Canon Press published a book denouncing recovered memory counseling and the inner healing movement of Agnes Sanford in the previous century one might have guessed that when Doug Wilson (if ever) learned of Mark Driscoll's accounts of reliance on dream divination to make important leadership appointments in the history of Mars Hill, that, well, Wilson would've decided to disavow Mark Driscoll.  Nah.  Why do that? It is worth noting Driscoll mentioned he normally didn't do interpretation of other people's dreams but he did mention it "did" happen in rare cases.  As publicly professing cessationists go the John MacArthur stance toward Mark Driscoll seems more coherent and consistent than the Doug Wilson stance.  Let the reader understand.

There is a Reformed take, over at Heidelblog.

https://heidelblog.net/2023/03/nature-grace-sex-and-analogies/

What sticks out to me is that in Wilson's account he infantalizes the women who objected to Butler's essay.  Dreher laments that men who admitted they didn't even bother to read the entirety of Butler's book felt obliged to retract their endorsements of it before it's even published.  That was something that inspired Jim West to point out that if you have not actually read the whole book why did you endorse it?

https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2023/03/03/a-retraction-of-an-endorsement-of-a-wretched-book/

If you didn't read the whole book, don't endorse it. Indeed!  When Wenatchee The Hatchet praises or blames a book here it's generally because I read the entire book. There "have" been books I didn't finish because they were wastes of time (Cynical Theories) but even in the just-mentioned case I slogged through two-thirds of the dogpile before I gave up.  

Now my own admittedly jaded-to-hostile take on a lot of this stuff is that many Americans who are evangelical or socially conservative will say they love Jesus but the practical outworking of the Jesus they have in mind is a front for venerating Aphrodite and Hera, goddesses of erotic love and of household and hearth.  Jesus' teaching about eunuchs?  Did that even happen?  Did Isaiah have anything to say to the eunuchs serving in the royal house?  Nah, that can't be in the Bible.  Did the apostle Paul advise the unmarried it was better if they could remain as he was?  Oh, well, see, I recall Mark Driscoll and others like him declaiming from the pulpit that unless you're called to some life-threatening ministry smuggling Bibles into China you should be married.  Now it's hard not to note that the life-threatening ministry was smuggling Bibles into China but I'll leave that at that for the time being.  

For many a new Calvinist only a demon would tell you that a relationship that won't even exist in the age to come wouldn't be the only way to understand how to be a Christian.  You'd think from the new Calvinist bromides from the bros that whole swaths of Christian cultural and intellectual heritage only came from dudes who were constantly getting laid and not living out vows of celibacy.  Yes, the very Lutheran J. S. Bach had a lot of sex and only four of his children survived into adulthood in good mental and physical health.  Having lived in Seattle most of my life I think back on how people at Mars Hill were admonished to go "upstream" and "influence culture".  The new slogans are "kingdom down, not culture up" but Driscoll is doing his "kingdom down" variation of the same old program in a county that's even more financially on the up and up (last I checked) than Seattle has been in a long time.  I.e. go to where the buzz is and then pitch your tent.

All of these responses going back and forth came because TGC published something by someone with a book to sell.  The question of why the book "needed" to be written is probably the most important yet least important thing about the whole affair.  

Rod Dreher made a point about how sex is not a sacrament but it is sacramental.  Now if I hadn't been reading Frances Young's books on the history of exorcism in the Catholic and Anglican churches recently I might be more stymied as to what that distinction even is than I currently am.  How providentially convenient that reading about the sacramental of casting out demons has put me in a position to discuss Dreher's talk about marital sex as sacramental but not a sacrament.  Frances Young describes the distinction as follows--a sacrament is effective regardless of the holiness or piety or ethics of the administrating clergy provided it has been done in the proper way, a sacramental only works if the life and character of the person undertaking the act actually is saintly enough.  I.e. any priest suitably ordained and trained can administer the sacrament of eucharist but only a saint can cast out demons.  That's too simplistic but I don't want to get into the history of efforts to clamp down on exorcists who charged money for their services and things like that.  

I hope the point is more or less clear.  Sex in marriage can have a sanctifying effect in some Christian teachings that it doesn't and cannot have in other contexts.  In the Reformed traditions marriage is not itself a sacrament, so the question that has come up with the Butler piece being published and retracted has been, if I may paraphrase, how it is that ostensibly low church Calvinist Protestants got so eager to stump for a sacramental take on marriage and especially the sex part?  In the case of Mark Driscoll the explanation for that turns out to be he was raised in a Catholic home with a charismatic Catholic mother and grandmother respectively and that he was an altar boy for a while and whether or not he'll ever cop to this, his notion that marriage isn't supposed to make you happy but holy could be far more indebted to Catholic teaching than he may be able to admit.  

No, I am not really in a rush to discuss Real Romance or even read it.  The last book I read of his was Christian Theology vs Critical Theory which was a dog's breakfast and some of the most incompetent ranting I've ever read him do across 20 years.  I've read about half a dozen books by Theodor Adorno so I know exactly where I think Adorno was disastrously wrong but my hunch is Driscoll hasn't read a single chapter from a single book by anyone in the Frankfurt school, even if he can claim via Twitter that critical theory and critical race theory are different and his book only dealt with the former not the latter.  Given how wildly incompetent he was in the topic he did claim he was addressing we can be grateful he didn't try to address the topic he said he wasn't addressing.

As longtime readers will know I lean conservative in religion and politics. I'm a Christian and a Calvinist and I came by the Calvinist wing through the Native American side of my family.  It's not as impossible as you might think if you know that there were PResbyterian Nez PErce for generations before any Doug Wilson types showed up.  Richard Twiss was in the Pacific Northwest for a while.  But my weariness with culture war tropes across the proverbial right and left has reached a high water mark in the last few years.  There are areas where I think people can and should work toward shared goals.  I happen to think aesthetic pluralism in music as a creative practice is something where theologians and theologically minded musicians have made some compelling contributions and maybe later when I'm not annoyed with the latest cycle of book shilling in pop-level Christian publishing and media in the U.S. I can get back to that stuff.  But sometimes I feel frustrated at what I see as predictable market patterns.  The Butler fracas is one of those and I find it annoying partly because it's so predictable and partly because the predictable part of it is that "everyone" is using the occasion to shill for their products and castigate the products of the other teams.  

Longtime readers may also know this by heart but one of the things this sort of situation reminds me of is my lament that evangelicals (whether "left" or "right") accomplish nothing of any cultural significance because they squander what little intellectual capital they have on theories of sovereignty/power or sexual ethics that will not gain any traction in the post-industrial United States.  There are so many, many other things people can think about besides formulating theories for a theocratic libertarian state that will never exist or for why "authority" needs to be theorized in a way that would revitalize "Christendom".  Tangentially, Alan Jacobs made a barb about that being something he sees at too many Substacks.

https://blog.ayjay.org/unstacked/

Now, back to the guy who manages to wade into controversies and close with promoting his books.  You may know who:

Allow me to explain, yet again, what is actually going on here. I had a little bit of fun above with the game that the sob sisters are playing, but their fastidious reactions to certain sexual realities is not where the main action is. Their central concern is to maintain their right to bully other people. Their kinky interest is to get grown men at The Gospel Coalition to crawl on all fours, asking for forgiveness. When they ran from the room, that was certainly a spectacle, but the real problem was that they teamed up with commies out in the hallway, and they have come back in with certain mandatory requirements for everybody. Their commitment to the free exchange of ideas is somewhere near North Korean levels, and the only thing they know how to do is demand things—apologies, retractions of blurbs, withdrawal of book deals, cancel culture, and so on. They are she-bullies. And the men who enable them in getting away with this kind of gross misbehavior are being pencil-necks.

After twenty-five years I'd venture a guess that the real reason Doug Wilson could never disavow a Mark Driscoll is because he sees too much of himself in the man, and it "is" hard to shake a sense after a lifetime in the Pacific Northwest and decades in the orbit of the former Mars Hill that Mark Driscoll's personae are substantially indebted to Doug Wilson's rhetorical flourishes and style.

The real problem was "they teamed up with commies out in the hallway".  A man who laments the decline of manhood sure seems eager to write in the style of a fifteen year old who can't resist showing off the thesaurus reading he's been doing.  

If the "real problem" is that, as some former endorsers of Butler's book admitted, they didn't even bother reading the whole book before endorsing it, then maybe the real problem is somewhere "there".  The pop level Christian publishing (and even some academic publishing) has been churning out more product that turns out to be either sub-par or par for the course.  Doug Wilson can have the heading that says he made an appearance in a sideshow but when the entire article has built up to that appearance in the sideshow that may, if we hazard a guess, be the real point of the essay all along.  Wilson can spin a yarn that culminates in him joking about the she-bullies and yet simultaneously seems to revel in inviting the pity of his fan base.  

The late Rachel Held Evans admonished people to stand up to Mark Driscoll but as I contended while she was alive and continue to contend, popular level Christian publishing and books would be better off if both RHE and MD were simply not being "platformed".  Why would I read Driscoll if all he's going to do is regurgitate J. I. Packer?  Why would I bother with Rachel Held Evans at all when I could read Susan R. Garrett, Esther Hamori, Esther Acolatse, Amanda Witmer or Jennifer Eyle, actually trained biblical scholars and pastors?  As Katelyn Beaty put it the book publishing industry can't "solve" any of the problems of Christian celebrities because it is one of the most powerful drivers behind creating and venerating said-same celebrities. What's the point, I ask, of Mike Cosper even rhetorically asking why we keep looking to celebrities as spiritual touchstones in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill if he's just going to turn around and talk with Bono?  I'm not much of a fan of U2 since Acthung Baby but I "suppose" that hearing Bono talk couldn't be less focused than the sprawling podcast about Mars Hill was.

Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of the days when Driscoll would claim that bloggers do things for clicks.  He does have a book out and he has touted that his new sermon will be his most controversial ever.  But about blogs and clicks ... I did notice in the last few years traffic took a nosedive here.  I'm okay with that.  I'm at a stage in life where if fewer people are reading that's okay.  If fewer of the people reading are actual people and not bots that's better.  I have hit 3 million views and that's neither here nor there since views on blogspot could easily be bots or search engine results for all I don't know.  For anyone who voluntarily reads this blog, thanks.  I do appreciate it if you find some value in what I have written.  I have made a point of never monetizing this blog.  I was considering writing a book about the history of Mars Hill but that was before Lief Moi died and now I have zero motivation.  I also had some deaths closer to home in the last few years.  

Now I don't want to write a book about the history of Mars Hill but if someone wanted to write such a book (preferably someone like Crawford Gribben!) I would be willing to help in whatever way I could.  I still think Johnson's book is the one to read and Vermurlen's book is pretty decent, actually, but that Christian publishing as a whole has not done much to write anything compelling or competent about Mars HIll.  Ergo, Johnson (who is not a Christian) having published at Duke University Press has written the best-researched book so far.  I'm more interested in expanding on the Ragtime and Sonata Forms project.  Ranting about the state of things is too easy a default across the spectrum.  I did my citizen journalist thing for a decade and it was a draining but substantial part of my life but a side-effect of it was that i was so busy chronicling the life and times of Mars Hill I kinda forgot large swaths of my own childhood.  My working memory is often good but I am but flesh and blood and bone and brains have limits, especially mine.  

My sense has been Christian publishing will not bother writing a really well-done history of Mars Hill because all the "lessons learned" have been ladled out by all the usual suspects.  People want "lessons" not history.  Any history that doesn't fit the "lessons learned" of the various groups across the proverbial left and right spectra will get dismissed.  I know Cosper didn't exactly talk about race and Mars Hill but who on the progressive side of things bothered to interview POC from Mars Hill?  Could they name even a single one of them?  I honestly don't know and I worry that such talk from progressives is a dog whistle rather than  serious inquiry.  On the conservative side, proceeding as if either nothing happened or whatever went on at Mars Hill was an outlier seems to have been the order of the day.  

Now when I have finally mostly gotten Wenatchee The Hatchet back on to all the topics I wanted to write about when I first started blogging the traffic has withered away and I'm kind of grateful.  I have become jaded and skeptical about the ethics and competency of Christian pop publishing across the board, whether its conservative or progressive forms.  To put it starkly, I regard Doug Wilson as a self-aggrandizing hack and he is comparably opportunistic as Franky Schaeffer or Randal Ballmer.  Men who have no real observable reason to sound off on Mars Hill did so, like Peter Rollins or Tony Jones.  I know I have "probably" written more than any person in the English language about Mars Hill without having been a paid staff member but I kept at it because I wanted people to learn what they could for free.  There's also the fact that the sheer tonnage of what I have cited (pre redaction/purging/that didn't happen stuff) would've gotten me a slap down on IP if I had not explicitly said all my blogging on Mars Hill was for journalistic and public historical purposes and that I refuse to monetize my blog.  There basically isn't a more airtight Fair Use defense than that and I suspect that at some poine in the history of Mars Hill there may even have been lawyers who told leaders that.  At no point was I ever threatened with any legal action of any kind.  I don't and didn't htink of mysel fas an enemy of anyone at Mars Hill regardless of how they may have felt about me. 

But blogs can vanish without a trace or, as I have noted lately, search engines can decide that they don't exist for search engine results purposes for whatever reasons.  I can deal with that, although I admit I'm a bit more put out that it means people can't find my blog posts about music than about Mars Hill.  English language analyses of Matiegka's guitar sonatas are in short supply as it is. :)

Even I, as you have seen, have come around to blogging about myself.  That's an example, no?  :)  It may be the nature of blogging. I have set aside McKinney's book from OUP because it's frustrating.  There's so much material she draws upon from secondary and tertiary sources when primary source material is easy to find.  Specifically, she leans on du Mez and others when she could quote Doug Wilson directly.  It's not like he isn't always out there touting his own material!  One of the reasons I blogged for so many years about Mars Hill was precisely because so much cut-rate sub-par writing about Mars Hill relied on secondary and tertiary sources (and all the editorializing along the way for or against) rather than engage primary sources.  McKinney has at least quoted from the 2006 Resurgence pieces but as I'm going through it there's hardly a reason to wander through evangelical social teaching if you don't note that Mark Driscoll has said numerous times he grew up Catholic.  

The academic books that are coming out about Mars Hill are going to just replicate the canards of past editorializing if they don't get past the super-expanded thinkpieces about toxic masculinity or the need for resurgence.  I am at a particularly frustrated stage in life and I don't want to belabor the details but I have had a few deaths among people close to me in the last few years and it has hit me that many people from the Mars Hill years who I thought of as friends have not bothered to stay in touh.  To put it another way, at the risk of just saying this, I have sometimes felt as though now that Wenatchee The Hatchet has served the "watchblog" purpose there's no use for the actual person and people who used to stya in touch can't be bothered.  It's also possible that having lost both parents and a friend in the last few years this is just getting to me more than it would've previously. 

Fortunately even during my peak involvement with Mars Hill I made a point of staying in touch with friends I'd made elsewhere.  As the years go by it sometimes seems as though many people in Mars Hill put all their eggs in that basket, especially if they got involved in the leadership cult(ure).  

And seeing the divorces, man, I thank God I never dated or got married at Mars Hill!  This comes back around to what people who have been critical of The Gospel Coalition have been pretty insistent about, that the ideals and standards it has promoted seem both unrealistic and un-Christian on the one hand, and lazily put-together and harmful on the other.  I recall reading Real Marriage and thinking that it needed a companion book called Real Celibacy.  That book will never get published and that is, in a way, probably the best way to wrap up this stream of consciousness post.