Prank and variations with James Lindsay, a belated thought or two on the American Reformer prank

May be the thing about one trick ponies is this, however many times you’ve seen a one trick pony do the same trick over and over for the pony it’s new every time he does it and it means something new in this magical moment.

 

Rick Beato has a video on "The Death of Music Genres" which reminds me that as the loss of mono-genre dominance goes Leonard Meyer called it back in 1967 with classical music

The Death of Music Genres

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-h_OHhtvPU

 

As Kyle Gann put it, back in 1967 when Leonard Meyer published a book proposing the death of any single genre in music being the norm (in classical music) it was greeted with controversy.   Gann quoted Meyer saying the following:

I should like to suggest - and, considering the rapidity and frequency with which styles have followed one another in recent years, the suggestion will probably seem a rash one - that the coming epoch (if, indeed, we are not already in it) will be a period of stylistic stasis, a period characterized not by the linear, cumulative development of a single fundamental style, but by the coexistence of a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic steady-state.

That was in 1967.  Gann noted a bit dryly that while this was a revolutionary suggestion that the “present” of music indicated a post-genre “future” academic musicology did not get together and hail Meyer’s idea as prescient or accurate.  Gann said that what actually happened was stuff like playing Handel on 200-year-old woodwinds and looking at Fanny Mendelssohn and looking at the influence of minstrelsy on Broadway musicals.  In other words, academics stuck to their ruts and lanes and did not think through the implications of every style and form of music the world over being able to exist simultaneously in a potentially synergistic poly-stylistic steady-state.

 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3629352.html

Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture

Leonard B. Meyer

ISBN: 9780226521435

ISBN: 9780226521442

ISBN: 9780226521442

 

But suppose the paradigm which posits cumulative change and the discovery of a common style is no longer pertinent and viable? Perhaps none of the "revolutions" will be definitive; then astonishment would disappear. Suppose, too, that there are no "imperatives" of the sort that Boulez assumes (Whose imperatives? What is "our time" but the totality of actions, including art works, that take place in it?), and, consequently, that no style is necessarily superfluous. Suppose, in short, that the present pluralism of coexisting styles (each with its particular premises and even its attendant ideology) represents not an anomalous, transient state of affairs, but a relatively stable and enduring one.

 

I am suggesting not only that such a hypothesis is neither theoretically absurd no empirically impossible but that, once it is adopted, seemingly incompatible pieces of the puzzling present begins to form an intelligible pattern. If our time appears to be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made, challenging, and enjoyable.    pages 171-172

 

Kyle Gann has elsewhere noted (back in 2007) that it seemed after the mid-1980s the collective academic narrative stalled. Whereas composers and musicologists were holding forth on what was probably going to happen or “ought” to happen in the horizons of music by the 1990s and early 2000s there was not much of anything by way of sweeping histories or manifestoes.

https://www.kylegann.com/PC070425-NarrativeInterrupted.html

 

Okay, maybe, but Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music was (and is) pretty sweeping. Of course it began as a funereal observance that mutated into a more chastened observation that classical music isn’t dying, just changing.

 

Rick Beato’s video lingers in my mind as a rock (though not necessarily rockist) variation on an observation about the “death” of genre Leonard Meyer observed in what’s colloquially called classical music back in 1967.

 

Bryan Townsend had some thoughts about Beato’s recent video and, among other things, wrote “I think it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated for us.”  Sure, but as I hear Beato’s thoughts I think he’s coming at this more from the angle of exposure and not the angle of curation.  As William Deresiewicz put it in The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech it’s easier than ever to get published and harder and harder to get monetized for publication.  In yet another nod to the notion that artists are the prophet-priest-seer-king-moral-legislators of civilization we got an account of how part of the crisis in the humanities is that the writers and poets and artists who could tell us like it is and help us be those cussed individuals upon which free societies rely can’t make ends meet enough to keep doing what they do.

 

Part of me was sympathetic and part of me was curious enough to pick up Excellent Sheep but a big part of me thinks “Well, cry me a river.”  Larry Shiner has pointed out that the whole notion of fine arts as defined in art history is a recent innovation and invention that can’t even square with how the arts were actually practiced in, say, the Renaissance.  If the Artist as imagined since the Romantic era wasn’t even how Leonardo worked with other artists then the “death” of such an artist maybe isn’t as catastrophic or significant as vocational arts scholars and literary theorists make it out to be.  Sure, someone like Norman Lebrecht has been bewailing the death of criticism but Jacques Ellul pointed out in The Empire of Non-Sense that most of human history rolled along just fine with no arts critics to serve as brokers for patrons.  Who were the critics at newspapers who made Bach and Haydn and Mozart that musical touchstones they became in chamber music?  Well, hey, if autonomous art transcends constraints and all who needs to cheer for new music?  The good stuff will be found out and we could just gut music education and patronage systems and just trust all the hard-working musicians will just somehow get heard, right?

 

The reductio ad absurdum speaks for itself, and yet the death of genre hardly seems like it is necessarily a problem.  My own conviction has been that if there has been a death of genre over the last century in pop music there has been a diffusion of “focus” in classical music, too.  The simultaneous co-existence of every style and form is hardly a problem.  Richard Taruskin made a passing comment in The Ox about how back in the 18^th century there were tons of musical forms and styles and genres and yet nobody thought of the Baroque era as a rat’s nest of musical incoherence because every genre and form and style existed within and for a clearly socially articulated social use.

 

Social use, you say?  Isn’t that reducing art to mere servitude?  Adorno contended in Aesthetic Theory that the “liberation” of art from theology and from service to throne and altar created a crisis of purpose from which and to which “art” has zero answers.  Jacques Ellul, for his part, wrote that Adorno correctly grasp the aporia of modern arts, that they are either reduced to being propaganda on behalf of a state or cultural norm on the one hand or devolving into hermetically isolated technocratic experimentation for its own sake that can only ever appeal to insular coteries on the other.  “Pop”, however we define it, has always been music created in the sausage factory for writers like Adorno.  But Adorno created a double bind in which tonality was “used up” but pop music had no capacity for large-scale forms and yet the large-scale forms that had been the domain of “classical music” were obsolete because in the wake of the presumed death of tonality (and with the advent of the equal tempered tuning system) nobody could legitimately write rondos any longer. 

 

As I was saying earlier, Rick Beato’s concern is that nothing can become a big enough of a hit to create social cohesion if nothing is big enough to catch on.  I take Bryan Townsend’s point that Taylor Swift is popular and well-known and that a crack team of pop-meisters from Sweden tend to dominate.  This has been taking shape since the Clinton administration and got discussed a bit in John Seabrook’s The Song Machine.

 

Leonard Meyer floated a few ideas about what might happen moving on from 1967 in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: 

 

The ideal of individualism and the goal of intense personal expression have now been repudiated by two of the important ideologies of our time and have been derogated by some traditional artists. In their place has been substituted the concept of the work of art as an objective construct. Originality is no longer tied to the discovery of means expressive of an artist's inner experience, but to the ordering of materials; and creativity is seen not as an act of self-revelation, but as a species of problem-solving. Since any style can constitute a basis for objective construction and for the presentation of principles of order, such views are not incompatible with the use of past art works as sources for materials, relational patterns, and syntactic procedures and norms. Form and technique have thus superseded inspiration and expression. Logically, all modes of organization and all styles become equally available and viable.    page 188

 

Well, to that I’d say Meyer was wrong.  Ted Gioia has called for Romanticism 2.0 and the emergence of a new counterculture.  I say we don’t need Romanticism 2.0 because Meyer correctly said we never got out of Romanticism 1.0!  Meyer suggested that the kinds of artists he called formalists were most likely to become the heroes of their day but what would that entail?  I think inspiration and expression are not going to go out of style but I do think Meyer was on to something noting the loss of a shared vocabulary within which “expression” could be taken as given. If we look at this next suggestion by Meyer it could be read, here in 2024, as an anticipation of mash-up culture, sampling, pastiche and other recombinant approaches to genre:

 

If a work of art is an impersonal construct, and creation a kind of problem-solving, then experiments with mixtures of means and materials, either within or between works, need not constitute an imperfection. On the contrary, the skillful and elegant combinations of disparate styles (or of ideas borrowed from different works and different composers) within a single work may become a challenging and attractive problem.   pages 190-191

 

 

... if earlier styles and materials are employed in contemporary art, music and literature, it will most likely be done by those inclined toward formalism, rather than by those who still consider works of art to be vehicles for personal expression. One cannot "use" the expressive quality of a Bach, a Rembrandt, or a Donne. ... In like manner, it will probably be the formalist rather than the expressionist who delights in the possibilities of mixing styles and materials from different epochs within a work or in employing different stylistic models in successive works.

...

 

That this is indeed the case is shown by the fact that it has been avowed and explicit formalists, such as Eliot and Stravinsky, who have employed past procedures, models, and materials most patently and most extensively. And we are thus confronted with an amusing paradox: the end of the Renaissance--of belief in teleology, individualism, expression, and so forth--has made possible a return to the styles and materials originally fostered by those beliefs.   ...  page 191

 

 

...  If this analysis is correct, it should follow that in the future a particular past will be favored and explored because of the specifically artistic problems it poses rather than because of the ideological position it represents.   page 193

 

 

Star Wars hadn’t even happened yet and certainly not steampunk as a subgenre within manga.   Meyer’s examples of T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky as the arch-formalists of the 20^th century in poetry and music were well-chosen because they were both fond of formal explorations and genre blurring gestures. 

 

My personal interest has been in looking at the ways in which “pop” and “classical” reception histories among academics have tended to balkanize.  Poptimist and rockist approaches exist in pop and classical.  The “back to roots” types want their pet genre “redeemed” by being purged of extraneous or defiling elements.  We don’t have to look too far within classical music for the formerly-named Future Symphony Institute.  Among fans of rock the back-to-basic guys tend to announce themselves. 

 

The death of music genres that Rick Beato has observed can certainly be a real thing but he noticed (I suspect) that this has been happening for a while.  Leonard Meyer noticed it had been happening in the mid-20^th century. 

 

We’re better off if we allow genres and styles to be treated as flexible realms of the possible.  The demise of grunge doesn’t see me shedding any tears.  I actually hated most grunge but I’m not going to hold it against Rick Beato if he loves the style.  He loves Stevie Wonder so we can agree on that.  And here we are half a century from Innervisions and people still love “Superstition” and if people are even listening to Cornelius Cardew or Stockhausen, well, okay.

Alan Jacobs revisits Jacques Ellul's Propaganda via quote

https://blog.ayjay.org/forgetting-and-propaganda/
Longtime readers most likely know how much I've drawn upon Jacques Ellul to explain things I observed at Mars Hill Church.  Propaganda is certainly the main work I drew upon but The Politics of God and the Politics of Man has also proven useful, particularly when I relied on Ellul's work to propose that Mark Driscoll has not been a "King David" figure but a Jehu figure, a man who may have received some kind of divine commission at some point but swiftly transformed that moment into a blank check to do his own will--Ellul put it more starkly in claiming Jehu sought to do the will of God but everywhere used the methods of Satan.  Of course I've also drawn upon Ellul's work to make a case that Mark Driscoll has never been a pastor or a shepherd in a traditional understanding of those terms but has been a propagandist. Ellul argued strenuously that contemporary (i.e. 20th century onward) evangelists were propagandists rather than traditional shepherds, pastors or priests who cared for the souls in their flocks and Ellul courted some controversy by singling out Billy Graham in The New Demons.

Jacobs draws on Ellul's observation that propaganda depends on our innate tendency as humans to forget and the sheer speed of the news cycle to manipulate our responses so that we don't think about the headlines so much as viscerally react to them, to feel the news rather than think about it.

The excitement of Mars Hill going multi-site and multi-campus, for instance, could easily paper over the sheer debacle of the 50th street building purchase.  Rather than try to dredge up all that history I'm including a tag to let you go down that rabbit hole if you're so inclined.  

I know the CT series is continuing but the energy to tackle that is in short supply lately and there's other stuff going on but, I suppose, I can try to get back to it.

Mark Driscoll as King Jehu rather than King David, a Jacques Ellul-inspired reading of the man’s self-confessed vices and ministry history

I have revisited the various accounts Mark Driscoll has given over the course of his life on the topics of his conversion to some form of evangelical Protestant Christianity and his calling to ministry over the years.  One of the things that has stood out to me is how stable his accounts tended to be on both topics during the Mars Hill years, with significant variations and changes in emphases emerging after his 2014 resignation.  I have also looked at different accounts of that resignation, and at different accounts of Driscoll’s resignation in light of statements made for the record about that event from Mark Driscoll, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas in on record interviews in 2020. Some time ago I wrote:

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-recent-exchange-between-warren.html

 

If in Driscoll’s understanding of church governance and ecclesiology leadership is from the throne down and not the pew up, and if Justin Dean’s account is accurate that the Mars Hill Church governing board offered Mark Driscoll a restoration plan in which he would stop being in a managerial role and would preach, then the most plausible explanation for why Mark Driscoll resigned that takes all of his accounts as factual, face-value accounts is this: he decided that a church as a corporate entity in which he was not seated on the throne (as president and CEO) was not a church in which he would be a member. 

 

All of that is by way of introduction. I know we are down to the last two episodes of the Christianity Today podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, not counting any possible bonus episodes that may emerge. I know that it has been popular among Christian bloggers, if from time to time, to compare Mark Driscoll to King David.  I find such comparisons to reflect a poverty of imagination regarding biblical literature.  If we’re going to compare Mark Driscoll to a king in the biblical literature who received a clear call and then was “released” (per Grace Driscoll’s remarks to Brian Houston in 2015) then it’s more probable that Mark Driscoll would be a King Saul figure than a King David figure?  Why?  David was never “released” from his leadership role the way King Saul and Eli were told by the prophet Samuel that they were dismissed from their leadership roles. Where Eli accepted the Lord’s dismissal of his household from leadership Saul did not accept the dismissal and tenaciously clung to power.

 

Yet, for all those potentially fascinating parallels there is still another figure among the kings of Samaria to whom Mark Driscoll might profitably be compared.  Jehu has a claim to being a potential parallel, if we’re going to entertain biblical parallels of rulers with whom Mark Driscoll might be compared.  So today I mean to consider Driscoll’s life in public ministry to Jehu with help from the work of Jacques Ellul.

 

A friend of mine once pointed out that Mark Driscoll often repeated the story that God told him to marry Grace, teach young men, plant churches and teach the Bible.   None of those things actually required that Mark Driscoll sought out starting a church.  Certainly there was nothing about that calling, if we assume it took place (and I’m well aware not everyone will) that requires us to suppose that what Mark Driscoll subsequently has done since 1990 should be construed as having always … or even ever … been the will of God.  It is here I want to make reference to Ellul’s work:

 

The Politics of God and the Politics of Man

Jacques Ellul

Copyright © 1972 by Editions de la Table Rondo and Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-798-2

ISBN 0-8028-1442-5

Translated from the French Politique de Dieu, politiques de l’homme, Nouvelle alliance, Editions Universitaires, Paris, 1966

 

Pages 98-99

… Now this employment of an intermediary has a result one might expect. The message is changed. In the same way the Word spoken by God in Christ is undoubtedly modified by the church, and not for the better,. What Elisha says to the young man is this: “Lead Jehu to an inner chamber, anoint him with the oil of kingship, and say to him, `Thus says the Lord, I anoint you king over Israel,’ then flee, do not tarry.” There is nothing more, no address. The message to Jehu is both radical and also very terse. But this is not the way the young man delivers it. Instead, fleeing at once, he gives an address (as the church often does), and he adds his own invention: “You shall strike down the house of Ahab … I will avenge on Jezebel the blood of the prophets … the whole house of Ahab will perish, every male, bond or free. … The dogs shall eat Jezebel … .” In sum, the young man outlines a program of action for Jehu, which is something Elisha does not do. Now the young man is undoubtedly using prophecies of Elijah (1 Kings 21:19-24), but Elisha does not tell him to do this.  It is on this false transmission that the whole career of Jehu is based. We are usually struck by the fierce and bloodthirsty character of Jehu, and this is clear enough. But another and no less decisive element should not be missed, namely that all Jehu’s work is done in a situation of ambiguity and misunderstanding.

 

He is anointed by God, but in the long run he does nothing but evil wherever he goes. He fulfils prophecies but he is condemned for so doing. He is a man of God, but he uses all the methods of the devil. [emphasis added]

 

We are faced again by a question we have investigated already, that of the coincidence between God’s design and man’s, that of God’s employment of what is bad in man to bring about what he himself wills. Here, for example, there is undoubtedly coincidence between the anointing of Jehu and the existence of a conspiracy among the generals of Joram’s army. In fact, the conspiracy probably existed already. This would explain the immediate support of the generals and their siding with Jehu.

 

The situation was indeed favorable for a coup d’etat. The army was in the field, the king was wounded and had withdrawn, and the generals had a free hand. Probably Jehu already wanted to seize power and the decision of God passed on by the young man seemed to him to be a sign for action. There is also an obvious coincidence between the work that Jehu is commissioned to do and the glimpses we catch of his temperament. He is clearly a bloodthirsty man, and this not merely by reason of his trade. He is at home in massacres, and we thus see God choosing as the agent of his judgment a man whose temperament corresponds to what is asked of him. …

 

Given that Hebrew narrative can be laconic we might take caution here. Perhaps Ellul assumes the young man added a great deal that was not in Elisha’s statement. Or perhaps the young man conveyed something of Elijah’s warnings that were preserved in Elisha’s community that Elisha did not need to add.  Still, Ellul’s proposal that a rambunctious young prophet interposed a great deal upon Elisha’s instruction is thematically interesting—either way the young man transformed Elisha’s simple command into a pretext for setting a violent and activist agenda. Jehu was a man of violence and treachery who was given the task to depose the Omride dynasty and this Jehu did! 

 

But how Jehu deposed the Omride dynasty is what interested Ellul:

 

Page 101

… Undoubtedly, Jehu is the man who executes what God has previously announced. In some sense he is the one who manages the important acts which accomplish the condemnation. But in the last resort he does it all in his own interests. [emphasis added] He takes part in the fulfillment of the prophecy, but he does so, one might say, within the order of political logic. The prophecy intimates this unfolding of political logic. Ahab triggers the movement. Jehu, the champion of Yahweh, uses the same weapons as Ahab, the weapons of politics and violence. …

 

Page 103

We see here another aspect of Jehu. He is cunning. He sets traps for men, as he will do later for the worshipers of Baal. Indeed, in the story of the massacre of the priests of Baal he goes further and lies openly: “ Ahab served Baal little; but Jehu will serve him much. … I have a great sacrifice to offer Baal” (10:18f.). It is on the basis of this promise and this profession of faith that he gathers together the priests and worshipers of Baal to destroy them. Here Jehu is shown to be a liar. …

 

Pages 112-113

The real question in the case of Jehu is that of the heart. Like Abraham, one may say, Jehu is set outside the morality which God established. But Jehu is not Abraham. In fact Jehu is a man who, faithful to God and knowing his will, commandeers this will and makes it his own. He identifies his own cause with God’s design. He thus sets out to shape history in the name of God  but also in the place of God. No doubt he does everything exactly as prophesied. No doubt he achieves what the Lord intends. But it is now his own affair. He has substituted his own will for God’s. It is he who does it, he does not let the Lord act through him. He puts a screen between history and the Lord of history. For man can always erect this barrier and achieve his own purpose. What was God’s purpose has become purely and simply the autonomous will of jehu. He seizes control of the prophecy. He makes it his own cause, confident that he is in the line of God’s will.  He himself has decided to fulfill the prophecy. [emphasis added] …

 

Wanting to put into effect God’s decision, he pays no attention to the great statement that it is not of him that wills nor of him that runs. Jehu is one of those in the Bible who want to fulfill and accomplish of themselves what God has said.  Thus Abraham wants to fulfill the promise of posterity by his own decision and at his own time, i.e., the means of Hagar. This is the whole problem. …

 

Page 115

… Jehu uses prophecy in the interests of politics while pretending to use politics in the interest of prophecy. …

 

Why mention so much about Jehu by way of Ellul?  Because Mark Driscoll once preached through the book of Ruth and mentioned something about himself he heard from Grace Driscoll: 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/09/back-in-2007-ruth-sermon-series-mark.html

http://marshill.se/marshill/media/redeemingruth/gods-hand-in-our-suffering
http://download.marshill.se/files/2007/01/07/20070107_gods-hand-in-our-suffering_sd_audio.mp3

Mark Driscoll

Ruth 1:1-1:22

January 07, 2007

01:00:20
...Elimelech is the guy--everything falls apart. It looks dark, it looks bad. He takes a poll he makes a plan. He decides Moab has a lower cost of living. Moab has more vocational opportunity. Moab has food on the table. I will make a plan, I will be the sovereign. I will take care of everything. Trust me. I know what I'm doing. He leads well. He plans well. He tries to be the sovereign (they're all going to die anyways). I am Elimelech.

I asked my wife, "Which one am I?" ... She didn't even breath, didn't even take a breath, "Oh, you're Elimelech." And his name means what? MY GOD IS KING! That was me. If you asked me, Jesus, sovereign, lord, king, God! And if I ever need Him I'll call him but I don't think I do because I've got all this taken care of.
...

And how many of you are Naomi-ish? You’re a bitter, moody, cranky, self-righteous, finger-pointing, brutally honest, frustrating person that God loves deeply, for no apparent reason. You want to know me? Here’s how I work. I start with Elimelech. If that doesn’t work, I go to Naomi. That’s me. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll make a plan. I’ll lead well. I’ll take care of everything. Give me the variables. I got it all figured out. It didn’t work? Well, God, did you not get the memo? I knew exactly what needed to be done! [emphases added] I’m not sure who to call to tattle.” And if we’re honest, we find ourselves at varying seasons in our lives identifying with each character in the story.

 

So by Driscoll’s own account he starts with Elimelech and if things don’t work out he goes to Naomi. He played it all for laughs in the 2007 sermon but you can potentially hear past the jokes that he confessed to being a Jehu, the kind of man who conflated whatever he thought he heard from God with his own personal agendas and desires.  What Mike Cosper has continually circled around in his podcast is why no one sense that this Mark Driscoll guy was a Jehu rather than a David. How did people not pick up that Mark Driscoll was a guy who, in his own accounting, had made an idol of victory?

 

http://download.marshill.se/files/2006/06/18/20060618_resisting-idols-like-jesus_sd_audio.mp3

http://download.marshill.com/files/2006/06/18/20060618_resisting-idols-like-jesus_en_transcript.pdf.

RESISTING IDOLS LIKE JESUSPart 22 of 1st Corinthians

Pastor Mark Driscoll | 1 Corinthians 10:1-14 | June 18, 2006

...
Here’s the tricky part: Figuring out what your idols are. Let me give you an example. Let’s say for example, you define for yourself a little Hell. For you, Hell is being poor. For you, your definition of Hell is being ugly. For you, your definition of Hell is being fat. For you, your definition of Hell is being unloved. For you, your definition of Hell is being unappreciated. That fear of that Hell then compels you to choose for yourself a false savior god to save you from that Hell. And then you worship that false savior god in an effort to save yourself from your self-described Hell. So, some of you are single. Many of you are unmarried. For you, Hell is being unmarried and your savior will be a spouse. And so you keep looking for someone to worship, to give yourself to so that they will save you. For some of you, you are lonely and your Hell is loneliness, and so you choose for yourself a savior, a friend, a group of friends or a pet because you’ve tried the friends and they’re not dependable. And you worship that pet. You worship that friend. You worship that group of friends. You will do anything for them because they are your functional savior, saving you from your Hell. That is, by definition, idolatry. It is having created people and created things in the place of the creator God for ultimate allegiance, value and worth.

So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get incredibly personal. This will get painfully uncomfortable if I do my job well. I’m going to ask you some probing questions. We’re going to try to get to the root of your idols and mine and I am guilty. I was sitting at breakfast this morning. My wife said, “So what is your idol?” I was like, “Hey, I’m eating breakfast! Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about that.” I’m the pastor. I preach. I don’t get preached at. Eating bacon. Don’t ruin it. You know, it’s going good., And I told her, I said, “Honey, I think for me, my idol is victory.” Man, I am an old jock. More old than jock, lately, but I – I’m a guy who is highly competitive. Every year, I want the church to grow. I want my knowledge to grow. I want my influence to grow. I want our staff to grow. I want our church plants to grow. I want everything – because I want to win. I don’t want to just be where I’m at. I don’t want anything to be where it’s at. And so for me it is success and drivenness and it is productivity and it is victory that drives me constantly. I – that’s my own little idol and it works well in a church because no one would ever yell at you for being a Christian who produces results. So I found the perfect place to hide. 

And I was thinking about it this week. What if the church stopped growing? What if we shrunk? What if everything fell apart? What if half the staff left? Would I still worship Jesus or would I be a total despairing mess? I don’t know. By God’s grace, I won’t have to find out, but you never know. [emphasis added] So we’re going to look for your idols, too. Some questions. Think about it. Be honest with me. What are you most afraid of? What is your greatest fear? See, that probably tells you what your idol is. Sometimes your idol is the thing that you’re scared of not having, not being, not doing. What are you scared of? You scared that you’ll be alone? Are you scared that no one will ever love you? Are you scared that you will be found out that you’re not all that smart? Are you scared that you’ll be stuck in the same dead-end job forever? What are you afraid of?

And to this an Ellulian observation of the kind of man Mark Driscoll admitted himself to be would be to suggest that here is another Jehu.

 

Page 117

… As John says of himself: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30) Jehu, however, is a man who interposes himself while pretending to be accomplishing the purpose of God. …

 

Page 118

[Jehu] … is a type of the man who is unfaithful even in his faithfulness. He is both approved by God and also rejected by him. To be sure, he is always loved by God in spite of his lies, assassinations, and treacheries. But he is also rejected by God because of his commandeering of the Word and the harshness of his loyalty. [emphases added] The real tragedy, however, is that he is finally the reason for the rejection of the whole people, and the reference is very plainly to him in the extraordinary saying which Hosea speaks to Israel, “I have given you kings (a king) in my anger, and I have taken them away (will take him away in my wrath” (Hosea 13:11) …

 

Even if we suppose that Mark Driscoll had a sincere conversion experience and a genuine sense of calling to some kind of ministry literally none of that precludes interpreting his decades of pursuit of public ministry as partaking in the spirit of Jehu. Even if Mark Driscoll had a sincere conversion and calling process Jacques Ellul’s observation about Jehu was that Jehu ultimately regarded the word of the Lord as a pretext to do what he wanted to do. Deception and crushing enemies was just part of ruling.  Gaining and consolidating power through abuse and deceit was just part of Jehu’s deal.   Even when deceit isn’t involved there is, I suggest, a pragmatic streak in Jehu that may have been revealed decades ago when Mark Driscoll was talking to someone writing for Mother Jones.

 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/07/looking-at-mother-jones-feature-that.html

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/07/generation/

…

“There are gays all over our church and I don’t need to yell at them like the religious right,” Driscoll says. “You can be a gay or punk and we’ll treat you like everybody else. Even if you never become a Christian, we’re still friends.”
 
Mars Hill is all about acceptance. Compared to the religious right’s favorite son Ralph Reed, a vision of fundamentalist zeal in a blue suit, Driscoll seems downright countercultural. He’s unabashed about using the pulpit to discuss sex. “I speak very frankly about the reasons God made our bodies to experience orgasm, the Bible’s approval of oral sex between a husband and wife,” he says. “Once you’re married and as long as you remain monogamous, God tells his children to be unblushingly erotic and passionate.”
 
He offers classes at church on topics such as “evangelical feminism” (“the Bible is clear that men and women are both created by God in His image and likeness and totally equal in every way,” he says) and disavows any link with conservative politics. “I used to think it was part of Christianity to be conservative,” he says. “I was further right than Falwell and Limbaugh.” Now he says he doesn’t even vote. What changed? “It got boring,” he says with a shrug. “And I realized that politics didn’t change anything, that in the meantime, people were still starving.”  [emphases added]

 

Time has shown that Mark Driscoll may have just been saying what he believed was strategically necessary to ensure his church plant survived. Driscoll more and more, as time goes by, seems like he has been a Jehu rather than a David from the beginning.

Alan Jacobs concedes his stab at a history of critical theory wasn't so great but that Alexander Stern does a good job of explaining the actual Adorno vs. the imaginary Adorno conservatives think they're refuting

I'm not ... too hugely shocked that Alan Jacobs concluded his attempt to provide a history of critical theory wasn't as good or clear as it could have been.  

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-real-adorno/

...

I have written about the inept history linking the Frankfurt School to contemporary social-justice movements, but not in the kind of compelling detail that Stern offers here. 

So he points us in the direction of Alexander Stern's essay "Critical Theory and the Newest Left".

Alan Jacobs contra Ross Douthat on Douthat's public Christian intellectuals of our time--Douthat keeps picking as Christian intellectuals people who heap contempt on everyone who differs with them (Hart comes to mind)

There's a bit of set up for this one by way of quotation.

A Prelude and Fugue on demons and exorcism in American civil religion (by way of statue toppling and punditry on critical theory)

What I’m about to present is not so much an essay in a usual sense but more as the literary equivalent of a prelude with a fugue--a path of reading by way of a river of citations.  Think of it as a literally prosaic variation on a methodology of quotation used in T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”.

This is a survey of some reading I was doing in 2020 on the topic of statue toppling, statue vandalism, and the reactions of leftist, progressive, liberal, conservative and maybe even some reactionary responses.  I saw a fair bit of coverage that tacitly discussed the toppling of the statues of slave traders and slave owners in terms of political history but less often in terms of civic religion.  The conservative bromides about how toppling statues was a bid to erase history seemed to me in egregiously bad faith because, well, that may give me the opportunity to quote extravagantly from Jaques Ellul’s book The New Demons on the concept of the sacred as it relates to political life.  So ...

Fredrik deBoer's "only the club remains" about media professionals reminds me of Ellul's observation in The Empire of Non-Sense that attending the right parties where you meet arts critics was more important than the art you made

Since his posts still generally self-destruct after a few days, I wanted to mention deBoer has a post revisiting what he has described as the sclerotic and self-congratulating insular coterie of media figures.  The following reminded me, as I'll get to after complete quotation, to some observations Jacques Ellul made decades ago about how artists were not as significant in terms of their actual works as the personas they created that were then vetted by critics; that what mattered was which people you met at which parties in the right cities.  But first ... Fredrik deBoer's post:

Fredrik deBoer on "Here's a Thing That Used to Happen";a tangential riff from Ellul on how the right of the present (1970s) repurposes myths originated in the left

Since he has a custom of often self-destructing posts I sometimes consider posts that stick with me for posterity.  The whole process of preserving content posted to the internet for the sake of posterity was a habit I picked up on a ... very different author/speaker and set of topics a few years ago but, anyway ...
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/09/10/heres-a-thing-that-used-to-happen/

September 10, 2020

Alan Jacobs on "out-wrathing"

https://blog.ayjay.org/out-wrathing/

while folks are free to spend their summer weekends as they choose, Mark Driscoll's The Trinity Church is inviting people to spend those weekends on work parties

http://thetrinitychurch.com/launch-team/
...
These Sundays are an open event welcome to anyone interested in being part of The Trinity Church Launch Team. This is the best way to learn who we are, what we believe, and the mission we are on. After our Sunday Bible Study, we will be having work parties at the church that people are invited to serve at for any length of time.

Saturday Work Parties

In addition to our Sunday Bible study and work party, there will also be work parties every Saturday from 8am-4pm at The Trinity Church, excluding the weekends of Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, and Independence Day. You can come anytime, for any length of time, and do not need to pre-register. If you want to bring landscaping, construction, or cleaning items that would be helpful. If you have any questions, specific skills, or want to work at the building at a time other than a weekend



This year there's been no shortage of posts on Jacques Ellul's book Propaganda and while the book could certainly be discussed in light of the 2016 election it has seemed more necessary to discuss propaganda and propagandists in Ellul's writing as a way to understand the contemporary megachurch pastor.  It is easy to look at a political candidate and say of him or her "That is a propagandist" and it could be said about just about any successful politician in American society today, left or right.  But it could equally be said, I think, about pastors who have mastered organizations that distribute content across all manner of social and mass media platforms.  A Christian could be a propagandist in a more limited sense even if not a pastor.  Should you wish to revisit or read anew the blog posts discussing Jacques Ellul's work in connection to the history of Mars Hill in general and the activity of Mark Driscoll seen in the light of being a propagandist (as distinct from a pastor) here's the tag:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Ellul%20on%20propaganda%20%26%20MH

And among megachurch pastors it would be very difficult to find someone who has been more explicit about the need for a church leadership culture to master and deploy every conceivable form of media to get messaging out than Mark Driscoll in the history of Seattle.  While the tag will bring up all the posts a few highlights seem worthy of renewed mention:

Mark Driscoll as propagandist: excerpts from Driscoll presentation from 1-23-2013 on social media content cross-referenced with content from Jacques Ellul's Propaganda--updated with audio link

nearing the 10th anniversary of Confessions of a Reformission Rev--exploring the Midrash/Dead Men era as an integrated propaganda campaign with help from Jacques Ellul

a postscript to an earlier post on Pussified Nation and Dead Men as agitation and integration propaganda within Ellulian terms

That's why it seems useful to quote from Ellul here, again.

Why?

Because this year it seems that Driscoll has modified the branding and jargon a bit but that the process of exciting and integrating volunteers into an ambitious project of re:branding and re:birth for his public career in ministry is intended to be this summer's big thing for Team Driscoll..

Mark Driscoll and others are inviting a bunch of people to spend their weekends out in the Arizona sun to participate in work parties however much they see fit to.  Work parties ... Bible studies ... this sounds kind of familiar to me.  Back in 2000 there was that Dead Men thing launched in the wake of "Pussified Nation".  I've written at great length about how what seemed a bit frazzled at the time could, in hindsight and with some help from Ellul, be seen as a two step process of agitation propaganda followed by integration propaganda.  The agitation was, indisputably "Pussified Nation" and the collected writings of Mark Driscoll under the pseudonym William Wallace II.  The integration propaganda process was a kind of initiation rite process that came to be known as Dead Men. 

Well, here's Ellul on what agitation and integration propaganda are intended to do.

PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 195 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7

page 72
In all cases propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the individual to bear heavy ordeals. It takes him out of his everyday life, his normal framework, and plunges him into enthusiasm and adventure; it opens to him hitherto unsuspected possibilities, and suggests extraordinary goals that nevertheless seem to him completely within reach. Propaganda of agitation thus unleashes an explosive movement; it operates inside a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself. On the other hand, such propaganda can obtain only effects of relatively short duration. If the proposed objective is not achieved fast enough, enthusiasm can give way to discouragement and despair.  Therefore specialists in agitation propaganda break up the desired goals into a series of stages to be reached one by one. There is a period of pressure to obtain some result, then a period of relaxation and rest. ...

page 75
... Propaganda of integration aims at making the individual participate in his society in every way.

"a series of stages" can be managed by work parties on the weekends.  We could float the idea here that the propaganda of agitation can include the work parties because, as Ellul wrote so presciently half a century ago, one of the most powerful forms of propagandistic society is ... the small group.

The small group, whether at Mars Hill or in other contexts, can be an ideal means to allow the effects of agitation to work itself out in integration and not just at the level of work parties.  Weekend Bible studies can also get this task done. 

Driscoll has not let up on the blogging and vodcasts.  There's something every week.  There's usually been three to five posts of some kind a week or a post averaging about one every 1-3 days.  Old sermons from the Mars Hill days of old keep coming back, albeit in some cases dramatically sliced down in size.  Driscoll's made sure to share what products he's got coming up and what books he's thinking of tackling and there's stuff being shared.  He's still got conference activity lined up and sermons here and there.  It's as if there's no kind of mass media or social media channel he's not availing himself of in the preparation for the big launch.  There's a fully integrated social and mass media push to get things going.

Which is exactly what Jacques Ellul said propaganda is and what it aims to do.

PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 195 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7

page 9
Propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal--the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all of these media. [emphasis added] There is no propaganda so long as one makes use, in a sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, organizes a few meetings and lectures, writes a few slogans on walls; that is not propaganda.

page 20
To begin with, propaganda must be organized in several ways. To give it the above mentioned characteristics (continuity, duration, combination of different media), an organization is required that controls the mass media, is capable of using them correctly, of calculating the effect of one or another slogan or of replacing one campaign with another. There must be an administrative organization, every modern state is expected to have a Ministry of Propaganda, whatever its actual name may be.
page 46
.. Once again, we note that propaganda should be continuous, should never relax, and must vary its themes with the tide of events.

page 61
Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulation and incorporated in an organization.

Which is to say that Mark Driscoll hasn't even launched The Trinity Church yet and he already has a fully integrated propaganda apparatus.  Moreover, it's not that difficult to consult Mark Driscoll from instructions past about what he regarded as the necessity to use every available channel, get a message out, and even how he managed to kind of sort of prooftext a Pauline epistle into defending this.

Pastor Mark Driscoll Address
January 23, 2013

14:15... the hard thing is how to have enough fresh content to keep interest. It becomes very difficult.  Like, for me, I've got a weekly podcast/vodcast thing to fill; I've got my own website with a daily blog to fill; I've got Resurgence blogs to fill, I've got Mars Hill blogs to fill; I've got books to fill. I mean I've got Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and I don't even know where other stuff is because I never go on to those places but it's just a constant flow of content. So if you're going to open a communication channel then you have to fill that communication channel and it can get very laborious.
...
24:05
So we've built this (and I've brought myself into that same negotiation. We're all in it together) to provide us a way of getting our content out in as expedient a manner as possible through as many channels as is possible. And this is what Paul, I think, is alluding to in 1 Corinthians 9 when he says "I became all things to all men so that by ALL means, ALL means, I might save as many as possible." And in "all means" what he's saying is, "if there's a way to get the good news of Jesus out, I'm gonna look for that opportunity and I'm gonna take that opportunity." [emphasis added] And so these are various opportunities but I would encourage you, you're now part of a system where if you are a content creator, and you build a tribe, and you provide good content there really is no limit (all the way to the New York Times best seller list) for an opportunity for you. I can't guarantee you anything but we can provide you an opportunity. ...
38.00
What's the big idea I'm sending out right now?  Identity. One big idea and it's a hook and then all the other ideas hang off that big hook. So for the whole 16-week sermon series there's one big hook called identity. All the social media, all the blogs, all the community groups everything's hanging on the hook. And then it's even consistent. So you walk in and you see "I am a saint" and, all of a sudden, the theming is consistent in the building. And so it's just, every medium, how do we communicate this message? And so for 16 weeks it will a concentrated content message on identity in Christ. But then once we're done with the series, let's say somebody gets saved in two years and walks in all of that content's available. [emphasis added]
Back then it was "identity" and now it's "the father heart of God", but in terms of overall technique and process, it can still be described as propaganda.  The key is to use every channel available to constantly keep a message getting out there and it can function to excite participation and integrate volunteers into the nascent church launch Team Driscoll has in mind.  If we remember that back in the old days of 2012 Mark Driscoll boasted that he had a degree in communications from a top university program and that his wife Grace did, too (her background was in public relations) we're looking at a rare case of a megachurch pastor who was basically bragging that both he AND HIS WIFE had academic credentials in what Ellul would describe as propaganda.  Even if we could make a case that a majority of megachurch pastors are propagandists Mark Driscoll's unusual in the sense that he actively sought education in getting the tools of a propagandist and that his wife did, too. 

And if people want to spend their weekends this summer under the Arizona sun working to get The Trinity Church off the ground that's their call.  It's just that having seen where things went with Mark Driscoll as a preacher and propagandist in the last ... twenty years here in Seattle ... it seems necessary to say a few things for the folks in Arizona.  If you're in Arizona and you actually see Mark Driscoll do actually ask him when the last time was he talked to Mike Gunn or Lief Moi.  When's the last time he talked to Dave Bruskas or Sutton Turner?  What about Gerry Breshears?  What about John Catanzaro?  What about Phelps?  James MacDonald?  The point isn't too complex, if Driscoll's going to share proverbs about ways to be a better friend, it might be worth asking him about some specific friends.  And if people get to talk to Grace now they could ask her when the last time she talked to any of the above.