Friday, January 16, 2026

some thoughts on twenty years of reading Mere Orthodoxy: think of it as a bicycle with two gears and one of them can be read as grad school variations on a William Wallace II theme

I think I have been reading Mere Orthodoxy since 2005, which would mean I’ve been reading it off and on for it’s whole two-decade run.
 
So when I see a title like this …

https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-it-is-difficult-to-talk-about-ethics-of-the-body


I know that it’s never been difficult for any contributor or editor at Mere Orthodoxy to talk about the ethics of the body because that is functionally one of the only two things they ever talk about.  Marriage and concerns about marriage have been all over M. O since its beginning.

Variations on this track can be found at the Theopolis Institute, which has some overlap with Mere Orthodoxy. 
 
The other big track has been to assess the state of contemporary conservatism in the United States.
 
If the first track was set down by Matthew Lee Anderson the other track has, probably, been best articulated by Jake Meador.  That other track is some variation of political theology in light of the prospects of whatever comes next for American political life and the role evangelical Christians and socially conservative Christians are thought to (or expected to) play within the shifting terrain of pax Americana.
 
Those are the two gears on the bicycle, basically, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say there has either not been a third gear or the third gear is hardly ever used.  That would be any and all other topics discussed in pieces published at Mere Orthodoxy that don’t involve the tracks laid down by Anderson or Meador.  Sometimes there have been essays on theories of race or discussions of media literacy or discussions of books.  On the whole, reproductive ethics/marriage and political theology have been the two gears on the bike.
 
Now I am writing not just as someone who has read Mere Orthodoxy for decades I also write as someone who used to be part of Mars Hill Church from probably very late 1998 through to 2008 and I documented the history of the church such as I could by keeping tabs on events from about late 2011 through to corporate dissolution some time around 2015.
 
What I realized last year was I had been reading Mere O all this time and the first gear of the bike, if you’ll indulge me, can be described as grad school variations on William Wallace II’s “Using Your Penis”.

 

Author  Topic:   Using your penis 
William Wallace II
Member   posted 01-08-2001 10:59 PM             
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is His penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while.
While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wandering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.


Therefore, if you are single you must remember that your penis is homeless and needs a home. But, though you may believe your hand is shaped like a home, it is not. And, though women other than your wife may look like a home, to rest there would be breaking into another mans home. And, if you look at a man it is quite obvious that what a homeless man does not need is another man without a home. Paul tells us that your penis actually belongs to your wife, and once you are married she will trade you it for her home (I Corinthians 7:4), and every man knows this is a very good trade for him to make.


With his penis, the man is supposed to please his wife and learn how to be patient, self-controlled and be educated on how to keep his home happy and joyous (I Corinthians 7:3). The man should be aroused by his new home, and his wife should rejoice at seeing his penis rise to greet her (Song of Songs 5:14b).

[This message has been edited by William Wallace II (edited 01-08-2001).]
IP: Logged

 

What of all the man who do not “make the trade”? Driscoll’s take, 24 years later, on those guys is as follows:

Act Like a Man: 9 Ways to Punch Life in the Mouth

Mark Driscoll

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8989717347

Publisher ‏ : ‎ RealFaith

Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 16, 2024

 

page 92

Men who do not marry, father, and get up every day to feed their family are the eventual cause of a complete collapse of a civilization

 

Now for socially conservative Christians the reason it is bad people don’t marry and make babies has often been construed as being because culture “dies”. Civilization is on the line, men!  Mere Orthodoxy surely has a more complex and sophisticated variation of what some might aspirationally call Protestant social teaching than Mark Driscoll has had, but I submit that grad school variations on “Using Your Penis” is still just that, grad school variations on “Using Your Penis”.  Who would have guessed Jesus taught that there were three types of eunuchs in one of the Gospels? 
 
I managed to come to and leave from Mars Hill as single as I ever was and the question has lingered in my mind how any of this “man up and marry” teaching has ever actually had any practical value in my life. I know that someone like Samuel D James can say that men are fearful of taking risks.  I remember a few single guys from the Mars Hill years who were bitterly and desperately single and a few of those guys never married, never got girlfriends, and probably weren’t going to get married anyway (which, in a select few cases, would be the greatest thing for womankind possible, to be extravagantly blunt).  It was in the wake of my years at Mars Hill I wrote a haiku that goes thusly
 

The men who most want

To reproduce seem to be

The ones who shouldn’t.

 
Now I was given a Christmas gift this last year, Resonance by Hartmut Rosa.  The parable early on in the book about the painters Gustav and Vincent has stuck with me.  Rosa sets out a scenario in which two painters are given two weeks to make a painting and the first assesses the resources and the techniques and the things he wants to create and what he should create; the second just yanks out paper and pencils and water colors and gets to work and works on the surmise that he will make something coherent that he likes eventually and it’s best to just work with what is at hand.  Rosa’s rhetorical question was to ask which of the two painters was most likely to have something done in time for the deadline.  The answer was obvious. 
 
But the point of the parable is to argue that fixation on appraising and assessing the state of resources constitutes a methodological crisis for individuals and groups, even cultures.  This would be where Mere Orthodoxy differs from Mark Driscoll at a substantial level, because I can tell you after two decades that Mere Orthodoxy brims with assessing the state of things.  A guy like Mark Driscoll self-publishes his identikit scripts of adulthood in his self-help books.  They are far worse written and less competently cited but in terms of who made a bigger splash over twenty years it might seem to be, well, Mark Driscoll more than Mere Orthodoxy.  Driscoll could be consider the second painter and maybe the painting is color by numbers hackwork of a lame knock-off idea but the painting got made. If Mere Orthodoxy aspires to get people to appreciate the work of Rembrandt than Driscoll's sold variations of those How to Draw X books you could check out at your school's library when you were a kid.  Whether either approach shows you to have a knack for painting is another matter. 
 
Now I have dipped my toes into Mere Orthodoxy adjacent websites and so I have read stuff from the Theopolis Institute and also Ad Fontes.  I know “of” the CREC and I am very aware that Douglas Wilson was a formative influence on Mark Driscoll over the last thirty years.  So I can read something like this:
 

Ryan Handermann

March 13, 2025

...

Shakespeare seems to divide up the ages of men according to different roles that he plays, a nursing infant, a boy at school, a sighing lover, and so forth. These ages are appropriate to his extended metaphor that “All the world’s a stage.”

 

Yet, the more fundamental stages of a man’s life should be defined by his changing relationships as he matures. What does it mean to be a man? The answer to that question is instantiated in the created relationships that a man moves through in life: as a son, a brother, a husband, a father, and an elder. These relationships are not only basic to human life, but they are the common expressions used in Scripture to describe men in their various stages of life. In other words, God has designed men in a particular way, with a particular growth and development, and one that instantiates what it means to be male and masculine.


Or something like this:

Brad Littlejohn

June 5, 2024

…

In other words, to be a man is to be ordered toward fatherhood, and to be a woman is to be ordered toward motherhood. From this standpoint, the recent rise of transgender delusion is hardly surprising. Beginning sometime in the middle of the last century, we began to separate these two ideas, still taking it for granted that men were men and women were women, but treating childbearing as a purely optional extra. Instead of treating childlessness as a (usually tragic) exception, we reframed it as the default, with fatherhood and motherhood constituting an optional add-on, a choice of little moral significance. Deprived of the most essential component of masculinity, some men began to wonder whether they were not in fact women after all, and vice versa. …

 And see, wrong though I might be, that these come off like higher brow variations of something like:
 

Today marks the start of 4 years of unrestrained builder energy. Men, now is the time to start that company, add that service time, grab that piece of real estate. Don't miss your shot 👊

7:35 AM · Jan 20, 2025

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/1902509138770546983

How to Be a Good Man

 

Whether or not you had a great dad, whether or not you've been a terrible man, there is always time to start being the man and the father God wants you to be, and to set your life up to finish well. https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1zqKVYardeAxB

4:55 PM · Mar 19, 2025

 
What I have found in my actual life is that there's this gap between the axioms and bromides in general and what people say to me or about me specifically, a kind of "Oh, well, nobody was actually talking about you, per se ... ."  So what was I doing with my time over, say, twenty years, reading these variations high and low of brow?  Wasting my time?  I have to at least consider that. 

I have been thinking about twenty years of reading M.O in the last year because I realize that I am probably alone in making the connections I have made to the Anderson gear on the bike with Mark Driscoll.  I get to be alone in making that connection but I think it’s a correspondence worth considering.  When writers take stock of “the way we live now” it is metacultural analysis and speculation and it was reading online back and forth between Alan Jacobs and Brad East that inspired me to comment that metacultural speculation is not the same as cultural production.  East memorably wrote a piece “against pop culture” that I found largely unpersuasive and pointless.  It’s also behind a paywall unless you go find it at East’s own blog.
 
In another way the distinction between talking about culture and actually contributing to it is something I am thinking about with regard to the former Mars Hill and the present Mere Orthodoxy.  Driscoll used to say that Mars Hill was gunning to take over Christian radio and to change the shape of contemporary Christian music.  That most certainly didn’t happen and a bit more than a decade after the demise of Mars Hill Church here in Seattle the prospect that Mars Hill associated musicians have “changed things” seems like a meager prospect indeed.  I have heard stories of how bands had to buy back their own intellectual property because it was owned by the church. I met a fair number of musicians during my time there and I hope they are all in good health and making music!  But I also can’t remember that much of the Mars Hill sound.  That’s probably because I was spending the last fifteen years more focused on catching up with theory and praxis for classical guitar and competing conceptions of sonata forms. 
 
And I probably don’t really need to say that none of that tracks readily with the two dominant gears on the Mere Orthodoxy bike.  It is possible to suggest, politely, that in the realm of cultural engagement and production socially conservative Christians can count chickens before they have hatched, or are maybe, to spin this a bit, debating the ethics of how properly take up locavore organic free-range chicken breeding with natural planning methods because that's the only appropriate way to assemble any eggs that could hatch because, well, the ethics of chicken breeding are paramount. In any event, the eggs are numbered up and accounted for even before the hens have laid any eggs.  

Or there's just cracking open all the eggs you have at hand and going for that huge omelette.  That's how they roll in Moscow, it seems. 

Anyway, semi-organized thoughts on some things I've been thinking about over the last year. 

SECONDARY MATERIAL from about 9pm 1-17-2026

I read an essay at Mere Orthodoxy about why it was important to not talk about Mark Driscoll.  My gut take was that since Mark Driscoll had been around since the mid-1990s he had been around since ten years before Mere Orthodoxy began and there's no reason to think his ministry won't outlast the existence of Mere Orthodoxy at present. 

At another level, if there's no probable married life in my future both the Mere Orthodoxy track and the Real Marriage track have been kind of wastes of time in terms of "practical" teaching.  It's not exactly that I regret reading everything I read.  I couldn't have spotted how Grace Driscoll (or an uncredited ghostwriter?) made such free and uncredited use of ideas from Dan Allender if I hadn't read Real Marriage. Janet Mefferd pointed out way back in 2013 that when she  broached the matter of Driscoll's plagiarism she wasn't even the first person to discuss the issue for the record and linked to my work from July 2013.  That mention is gone but Mefferd made her point and I admit I appreciate the point.  

I have gotten a sense that there's a tension in socially conservative Christian cultural pundits.  Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you but, uh, for the sake of "civilization" we need that epidemic of singleness to stop being the terrible social disease that it is so culture can improve.  I have said this to a friend or two here and there but evangelical Christians in the United States seem to say Jesus when they really venerate Aphrodite and Hera.  This can go for the blue-state types and the red-state types in America.  I have already said that I think Nadia Bolz-Weber and Mark Driscoll are two sides of the same coin.

It's been years since I read Matthew Lee Anderson's effusive commendation of Douglas Wilson's Wordsmithy. Wordsmithy from that Douglas Wilson ... that bloviating gasbag from Blog and Mablog ? The guy who showed up on The Mark Driscoll Show just a few weeks ago and seems to have taken no heed of how Mark Driscoll publicly said he felt obliged to apologize to Joel Osteen?  Or talked about being friends with T. D. Jakes?  Or was happy to name-check Paula White and others for helping him connect with people in D.C.?  Maybe there's just a difference in aesthetic convictions.  If I were advising aspiring writers Douglas Wilson is one of the last people I would recommend anyone read. 

Now I thought Anderson was right to point out that Real Marriage seemed more full of spreadsheet axioms than poery, and that the chapter on sex suggested Driscoll and wife were so steeped in a culture influenced by pornography they couldn't see that it inflected their own work. One of the progressive canards and the fantasies of liberal Christians (in doctrine or politics) was that "evangelicals" all gushed over Real Marriage when it came out.  That's not even remotely the case.  Heath Lambert strongly objected to the 2012 book for introducing people to pornographic sites the readers wouldn't have known about prior to reading the Driscolls' book; and Anderson pointed out that it seemed the Driscolls were symptomatic of some of the things they claimed to be against.  That really is something you can only know about Mere Orthodoxy after reading it for twenty years. 

But how many books about asking good questions does an author write before a reader asks what questions does this author keep coming back to?  To go by Anderson's record he keeps coming back to marriage, sex, opposing gay marriage and in vitro fertilization and ... as I was saying earlier, these are grad school variations of William Wallace II's "Using Your Penis". Anderson teaches at Baylor so there you go.  

Which I guess has me thinking that neither of these men really are pastors but one of them teaches at Baylor and the other one says he is a pastor.  That is a difference.  Intra-ivory tower metacultural speculation from someone who specializes in ethics and who has never described himself as a pastor I can understand more readily and sympathetically than two self-ordained bros who think they communicate clearly.  

But I have wondered to myself whether these kinds of things are like side quests that distract from the things I found myself wanting to actually do over the course of my life.  That parable about the two painters in Resonance is really sticking with me. 

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