https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-christianity-manly-again-9780197655795?cc=us&lang=en&
Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars
Hill Church, and American Evangelicalism
Jennifer McKinney
Published: 03 February 2023
280 Pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
ISBN:
9780197655795
I have read, but have not felt much like reviewing,
Jennifer McKinney’s 2023 book about Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill and American evangelicalism.
It has nothing you couldn’t have gotten with far better citational
practice from Jessica Johnson’s Biblical Porn. For that matter there’s
nothing in McKinney’s book you couldn’t absorb for free (if you wish) by going
to Driscoll’s websites.
Now, if you wanted a history of how sermons from the Mars
Hill years got redacted and purged, you’d probably want to come here to
Wenatchee The Hatchet. One of my
concerns about McKinney’s book is that she’ll quote Driscoll without giving a
date and timestamp for when and where from which sermon she quotes. That
matters because Driscoll and company had an extensive history of purging and
altering sermons in the 2013-2014 period.
I found it a regular occurrence that I would quote Driscoll down to the
minute and second from a specific sermon preached on a specific day and then a
week later it would be gone and there was no way to pull it up via The WayBack
Machine because Mars Hill sites set up robots.txt to preclude archival
retrieval.
So, when you’re dealing with a megachurch that was habitually
doing that, it’s just not good enough to say that “Oh, well, in a sermon called
X Driscoll said Y”. That’s it? That’s not good enough, I know this
firsthand. So even though I said there’s nothing in her book you couldn’t absorb
for free I write this knowing that Driscoll has purged and redacted a lot of
material. McKinney’s book is no help in helping you find out how extensively
this has been done. If all you wanted to
discover is the stuff the man has said that can be construed as misogynistic
and homophobic he’s tweeting all that on X for free. You don’t even need to go buy McKinney’s book
to find that out.
But there’s the other matter that only recently came to my
attention. It turns out the Oxford
University Press book is really the second book inside of a two year period
that got published by McKinney on what seems to be the same topic.
Anyone heard of this one before?
https://pickwickbookshop.com/products/9781350100206
American Evangelicalism and Hypermasculinity: Mark
Driscoll and Mars Hill Church
ISBN: 9781350100206
https://pickwickbookshop.com/products/9781350102682
Bloomsbury Academic 2021
I hadn’t heard of it until this year and look …
https://www.amazon.com/American-Evangelicalism-Hypermasculinity-Driscoll-Church/dp/135010020X/
Amazon listed it as March 10, 2022 and as unavailable. Bloomsbury is niche and academic so I realize
they publish books where if you blink you missed their publication. Has anyone who reads Wenatchee The Hatchet
heard of this earlier book and read it?
The Oxford title goes for about $10 in Kindle and that’s
cheap enough if you want to read it. But
I got to the end of McKinney’s sprawling and exasperating book (that piggybacks
off of Jesus and John Wayne overtly and Biblical Porn in
precedent) thinking that if you wanted to get a grasp of who Mark Driscoll is
you’d be better off reading Mark Driscoll’s books. If you wanted to read someone who is not-Mark-Driscoll
you’d be better off reading Justin Dean’s PR
Matters: A Survival Guide for Church Communicators. I
reviewed the book at length here at Wenatchee The Hatchet years ago back in
2018 with a 2021 follow-up post.
Now it turns out that the OUP book could potentially be a
reworking of an earlier book that was published in 2021?
