links for the weekend: a thread of Aaron Renn and Anthony Bradley on the lack of an evangelical elite, the failures of the YRR; and some links on alt-right publishing

Prepare for a bit of a weekend sprawl known as the links for the weekend.

The 2020s form of "where are the evangelical intellectuals?" question, and the question of whether there is or can be an evangelical elite in the United States, a sampling from Mere Orthodoxy, Old Life and Aaron Renn's Substack and First Things article

https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-promise-of-a-christian-small-magazine

January 26th, 2026

By Jake Meador

 

... Really, the best way to read Schaeffer is not even to regard him as an intellectual himself, so much as someone who attempted to relate to intellectuals in the same way that someone like Hudston Taylor related to the Chinese. In other words, Schaeffer was less an intellectual himself and more a very sensitive and shrewd missionary to readers of the intellectuals.

 

That reminds me … of something from years ago …

https://mereorthodoxy.com/francis-schaeffer-and-christian-intellectualism

and how D. G. Hart wrote a response to Meador’s older piece saying:

 

https://oldlife.org/2016/08/23/was-francis-schaeffer-an-intellectual/

 

I wasn’t reading Time in 1960 but fifteen years later I was reading Schaeffer and the better description of the apologist is not as missionary to intellectuals but missionary to would-be intellectuals.  …

 

Francis Schaeffer as a missionary to would-be intellectuals is pretty blunt but probably also very true.  

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.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/forsaking-all-others
https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-in-vitro-fertilization
https://mereorthodoxy.com/kelly-loving-act
https://mereorthodoxy.com/gay-marriage-by-judicial-decree 
https://mereorthodoxy.com/special-feature-why-i-am-opposed-to-gay-marriage

Variations on this track can be found at the Theopolis Institute, which has some overlap with Mere Orthodoxy. 

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/what-obergefell-did-not-and-could-not-do/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-and-the-wisdom-of-the-old-law/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-the-illicit/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/what-does-the-church-have-to-do-with-obergefell-a-response-to-shafer-stoner-and-farrow/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-pointy-end-of-the-sexual-revolution/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-and-the-parts-whole-relation/

 

The other big track has been to assess the state of contemporary conservatism in the United States.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-nationalism-what-next-for-american-conservatism

https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-populism-is-a-problem-for-the-intellectual-right

https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-should-evangelicals-respond-to-the-vanishing-mainline

 

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.

 

some follow up within/on the Theopolis Institute conversation about the late Michael Heiser and the field of demonology and spirit possession in scholarship

I'm belatedly coming back to the Theopolis Institute conversation on the work of the late Michael Heiser.

an inevitable defense of Christian worldview thinking from an inevitable partisan: if Warren Cole Smith and The Calvinist International had doubts about Christian worldviewism then Doug Wilson's gotta speak up in favor of it

On February 5th Warren Cole Smith published a review of a book by Simon Kennedy called Against Worldview.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-worldview

 

Naturally Doug Wilson wrote "In Defense of Worldview Thinking" and published that on February 10.

https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/books/in-defense-of-worldview-thinking.html

...

In conservative Christian circles, worldview thinking was quite a hot item for a while. Most recently, I reckon it became “a thing” among us during the Francis Schaeffer times, and it then burgeoned into something of an industry. ...

 

Of course that was the problem, according to Warren Cole Smith, Alastair Roberts and, conspicuously Simon Kennedy. There could be an irony lurking in that Wilsonian observation, that worldview industrial generation of metacultural analysis from Christians in the 1970s could be to critical theory in the 1930s through 1940s what Christian rock that began to take shape in the 1970s was in relationship to rock `n roll from the 1950s.

 

Back when Adorno and Horkheimer claimed there was a culture industry that sold “us” an illusion of freedom via products and that it was selling a simulacrum of freedom passing itself off as real freedom, they may not have necessarily anticipated that the kind of metacultural criticism of “the way we live now” was going to burgeon into a kind of evangelical/fundamentalist Christian version of the same. 

 

a 50th and a 10th anniversary this year, the resignations of Richard Nixon and Mark Driscoll

50 years ago this month Richard Nixon resigned from being President of the United States
10 years ago this October Mark Driscoll resigned from being pastor at Mars Hill Church here in Seattle and the institution went into its final death spiral, closing its doors by the end of the calendar year.  

When I started this blog in January 2006 the aim of blogging was to discuss contemporary classical guitar music, particularly repertoire that was not the usually well-worn paths of composers from Spanish-speaking lands or South America.  I also tried to write about animation in the United States and Japan with digressions into French animation (I commend Persepolis and The Long Way North).  I dug Pixar films up to about Inside Out and have more or less left Pixar in post-Disney acquisition behind. I didn't get to Death Note until last year or even get to InuYasha until a few years ago (and I've been a fan of Rumiko Takahashi's work for decades).  Why? 

Because from about 2010 to 2015 I was pretty immersed in chronicling the life and times of the former Mars Hill from roughly the peak of its prestige and attendance to its meteoric death spiral in 2014.  

I had a journalism degree that was mouldering away and in the wake of the 2008 financial crash I was jobless for at least three years.  I saw that the mainstream and independent press in Puget Sound were not really or seriously covering things that were going on, give or take a few exceptional stories.  I was (and am) a basically evangelical low church Calvinist Christian and so I realized that I had enough theological and biblical acumen to wade into the swamp of issues that would be involved in writing about Mars Hill.  While I was an attending member I made no secret of my amillennial partial preterism, for instance. If you even know what that composite term means you'll understand why I could have felt that journalists were insufficiently trained in the religious issues to wade fully into the kind of church culture Mars Hill had.   

I hoped that by documenting what was going on the leadership culture could repent and reform from what increasingly seemed to be abusive practices and teachings.  Obviously that did not happen, inasmuch as Mark Driscoll resigned and the church was dissolved as a corporation.  In that sense everything here at Wenatchee The Hatchet that was written about Mars Hill Church is a testament to failure, not of them, me.  I obviously completely failed to write anything that catalyzed in any way repentance or reform within the leadership culture of Mars Hill.  I wondered over the years if that was how things would go.  There were times I prayed, quite a bit in the 2013-2014 period, that if the leaders would not repent that God would strike down the corporate empire known as Mars Hill.  

Unsurprisingly inside Mars Hill its partisans presented most of the negative coverage as, to some degree or another, satanic resistance and spiritual attack.  Driscoll began to speak as though Mars Hill resources got hacked or attacked.  That is conceivable but that may be have been a flourish to paper over the extent to which people were leaking documents, information and leads to bloggers such as Warren Throckmorton or myself.  Mars Hill leadership either did not realize I at one point had access to The City or just didn't cancel my account until April 2012, at which point it didn't matter what they had canceled because I had by then come to know enough people across all the campuses that the leaks kept coming.  Attempts to find out who the sources were do not seem to have been successful and I have not volunteered information about sources because no one who got a journalism degree would consider that to even be a thing.  You don't sell out sources.  

 They in turn, as best as I know, didn't sell me out.  Even people who were not sources at all but who knew who I was kept quiet.  Someone I knew from the Mars Hill years told me "I must have had a hundred people ask me if I knew who Wenatchee The Hatchet was and I'd say `I'm not gonna say who it is'."  The identity of Wenatchee The Hatchet was probably an open secret and transparent to anyone who wanted to find out.  If anything it seemed almost miraculous (or actually so) that there were people in 2013 who couldn't figure it out.  Not that I'm advertising now.  If people don't know Batman is Bruce Wayne it's not like Bruce Wayne tends to just say "I'm Batman" when he's not in costume.  And to borrow a line from The Dark Knight Rises, "The mask isn't for you, it's for the people you care about."

 Here we are, a decade after the demise of Mars Hill Church and it's like there never was such a church.  At the time it seemed like Seattle was some kind of mixture of the shock jock fixations of Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll as conjoined twins of jerkitude but that era of Seattle has come and gone.  Mark isn't here to see how many Mars Hill marriages ended in divorce, or how many marriages that were probably healthy enough pre-MH have crashed and burned in the years since he quit.  He'll take credit for the baptisms and weddings but not for the apostasies and divorces.  

 Depending on who you were listening to and at what time Mark Driscoll's resignation was proof that "the bloggers won".  No, they didn't, certainly not this blogger.  I said before that I failed and I failed.  I admit that I decided that if Mars Hill wouldn't repent and reform that chronicling it to its end was a possibility.  Giving people the information they needed to make a decision to leave (or not) became the main goal.  Nothing I published here could be construed as anything like a real news scoop to mainstream, institutional journalism.  It wasn't all bad while I was there but it wasn't all good, either.  Even King David had Joab, for instance, and Joab was a bad, bad guy.  Mark was and is no King David, more of a Jehu figure so far as I can tell.  

 Maybe Mars Hill would still exist if he hadn't sacrificed the health and welfare of the church on the altar of his own celebrity by publishing Real Marriage; having it rigged a place on the New York Times bestseller list; and all for a book that turned out, in its first edition, to be chockful of "citation errors", which is colloquially known as "plagiarism". 

 Now since the subject of Driscoll has come at Mere Orthodoxy in the last few weeks and there's a newer piece about the distinction between faithful presence and owned space in how evangelicals engage culture, I am going to pivot into that set of topics to make a case for why it has been important to chronicle the life and times of Mars Hill Church.

 Jake Meador has a piece about the distinction between faithful presence and owned space, among other things, at Mere Orthodoxy. He mentions James Davison Hunter, for those who know of him, and I’m going to skip ahead to Meador’s following proposal:

 https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-presence-after-the-evangelical-fracturing

…

The Hunterian influence is important to understand here because you could read the dispute between these two school as basically being a dispute between varieties of Hunterians.

 

The older group, which still broadly holds to the vision articulated by my RUF pastor, is largely following in the footsteps of Keller. For Keller, a large part of good, careful cultural influence meant faithful presence in elite, pluralistic institutions. Christians would not always or often control these institutions, but they also had a seat at the table and were thus theoretically (and sometimes actually) able to steer them in better, healthier directions.

 

The other Hunterian tribe is not downstream of Keller, but downstream of Moscow ID pastor Douglas Wilson. Wilson agreed with Keller in as much as he felt that Hunter is correct in saying that culture is shaped in a disproportionate way by influential institutions. This is why Wilson's father, who also affirmed this view, originally moved the family to Moscow, in fact. Moscow ID is a small mountain town that is within ten miles of two large, state universities in the interior Pacific Northwest: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman, which is just eight miles away from Moscow across the state line into Washington. The idea, as with Keller, was to establish a presence within these large, influential institutions and, through that presence, accomplish real change over time.

 

There was one crucial difference, however: For Keller the point was to exercise faithful presence within pluralistic institutions, willingly recognizing that Christians were unlikely to ever exercise full control over those institutions. Wilson rejected this part of the strategy. This is why they set up in Moscow and not New York: New York is too big to ever plausibly be more or less "taken over" by Christians. But Moscow, a small town of 25,000 today and around 15,000 50 years ago, was "plausible" for such a strategy.

 

This, then, is the key difference: Keller's brand of Hunterianism is accepting of pluralism in a way that Wilson's is not. For Wilson, there needed to be some plausible chance of Christians coming to exercise something near total control over the institutions they would participate in.

…

Elsewhere I have suggested that Mark Driscoll’s success may have stemmed in part from jettisoning postmillennialism and other aspects of Wilson’s ideas so as to transplant the mere idea of cultural investment as a catalyst for cultivating owned space from the ground up, leveraging an indie start-up ethos and praxis so as to ensure the owned space would be collaboratively created.  The old fundraising film from 2012 was God’s Work, Our Witness, which was bound to be a more winsome title than if Mark Driscoll had insisted it be called This Church, My Project! The latter, in the long run, would have been a more honest title, I’m afraid. In any event, among those who self-identified as having been formatively influenced by Wilson hardly anyone gained more notoriety in his heyday than Driscoll.  And yet … 

While it may be useful to distinguish between faithful presence and owned space (for socially conservative evangelicals who write for and contribute to Mere Orthodoxy in some way)m  Meador’s reference to both Tim Keller and Douglas Wilson skimmed past the one prominent figure in New Calvinism who, at one point, was obviously affiliated with both men, the man who Jake Meador has said it is important for us to ignore, Mark Driscoll.

 We’re just supposed to ignore that both Keller and Wilson contributed to The Resurgence while it was operational from about 2006 to 2014? Not paying attention to Driscoll ten years after his resignation, with evangelicalism, is not prudent. Why? Because if there was anyone in New Calvinism and evangelicalism who potentially ruined the viability of “faithful presence” by, arguably, having used it merely as a front for pushing for “owned space” over the course of two decades, it was Mark Driscoll. 

 Then again, the guy who may have poisoned the prospects of faithful presence by using it as cover for owned space may not even be Driscoll.  Douglas Wilson could have some praise or blame for branding his project as a faithful presence (and really believing it is!) while Meador has designated it as “owned space”.  Who gets to decide the distinction between whether Wilson’s working with a faithful presence and an owned space as if these two are actually diametrically opposite options?  A Wilsonian might contend an owned space is the only real assurance of a faithful presence there is.  A Wilsonian could contend that bids at a mere faithful presence without owned space have been doomed to fail in the face of pluralism over the last 150 years and is there a rebuttal to that?

 A potential paradox (or irony?) is that Matthew Lee Anderson, the founder of Mere Orthodoxy, had nice things to say about Douglas Wilson’s Wordsmithy back in 2012. That writers and editors at Mere Orthodoxy have evolved regarding Douglas Wilson is something that happened, I guess.  Regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet since 2006 already know that I very obviously came to a different perspective on Mars Hill between 2006 and 2016 than the net positive with some lingering doubts I had in 2006 to the belief that the entire corrupt institution needed to die in 2014 and I write that as someone who met all three co-founding pastors of the former Mars Hill Church and regarded Lief Moi as a friend.  So, surely, there’s room for Mere Orthodoxy editors and writers to come to a newer and more negative appraisal of Douglas Wilson. 

But since among those self-identified students or proteges of Wilson’s approach to “owned space” don’t get more famous than the former lead pastor of Mars Hill Church it would be hard to see how we in evangelicalism would actually benefit from not paying attention to him and his history.  If anything, there has been too much eagerness in projects such as Mike Cosper’s The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill to ask “what does it all mean?” rather than the more basic journalistic and historical question of “What (actually) happened?” There’s probably plenty of time to ask “What does it all mean?” after you’ve figured out what actually went on in chronological order with all the pertinent who, what, when, where, why and how issues tackled more directly. At the moment evangelicals have ceded the questions about what actually happened to secular and/or progressive authors while carrying on as if there was nothing in what happened in Mark Driscoll’s cult of celebrity to give us any word of caution (Katelyn Beaty’s Celebrities for Jesus and Warren Cole Smith’s Faith-Based Fraud being the exceptions that prove the rule).

Having chronicled the peak and demise of Mars Hill Church in Seattle from 2010 through its corporate dissolution and into the 2015 post-mortem liquidation of assets I would say it is important to actually pay attention to Mark Driscoll; for those of us who observed him up close here in Seattle he reveals a problem in evangelicalism that an analysis like Meador’s could potentially miss—what looks like faithful presence to Christians is going to seem no less belligerent to secular progressives in Seattle than a bid at owned space.  Inside the fledgling Mars Hill Driscoll made no secret about his vision of a church founding a church planting network, a music label, a Bible college, and a publishing company; he would later claim none of that was necessarily in what he initially envisioned but his testimony against the truth of such a claim was too well and widely distributed for that claim to be taken at face value. 

But when talking to Mother Jones?  His stance was ostensibly, if to the author implausibly, more conciliatory.  Driscoll was more than happy to act as if he was just aiming for faithful presence when owned space had been his dream all along.

From 1996 through to about 2002 into 2004 (as noted by Dan Allender in his conversation with Mike Cosper) Driscoll’s rhetorical default was faithful presence, if only to outsiders.  It was as his personal brand and reputation became stronger and stronger he began to reveal what his swiftly suppressed antics as William Wallace II revealed about him in 2000 and, eventually, in 2014, that for all his formal obeisance to the rhetoric of faithful presence while Mars Hill Church was Mars Hill Fellowship, his real devotion was to owned space.  This became clear by 2012 when he bowed out of The Gospel Coalition.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/driscoll-steps-down-from-tgc-council
https://web.archive.org/web/20140525232248/https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/driscoll-steps-down-from-tgc-council

 

Driscoll Steps Down from TGC Council

Mar 28, 2012

Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle has recently announced he is stepping down from the Council of The Gospel Coalition. Mark let us know in advance of his intentions, part of a major reorganization of his priorities and a changing of the guard in Acts 29. We are saddened by his departure but understand that all busy people must establish priorities.

The Council is grateful to Mark for his contributions to TGC during the past decade. In the months and years ahead, we will certainly be praying for him, his family, and the ministries he influences.

Here is what Mark said about TGC with regard to his departure:

I was a founding member of The Gospel Coalition and to this day enjoy deep friendships and theological unity with the men. But I'm no longer going to be a Council member, as I seek to focus my energies on a handful of things. If I'm honest, with the continued growth of all the ministries in which I'm involved, it's not sustainable for me to keep up with all of them. So, this is a season of pruning for me.

For the record, no one has asked me to leave the Council, and I have no relational conflict with anyone and no disagreement theologically. The men remain friends who are welcome to speak into my life, and I'm transitioning for no other reason than I find myself at the end of my tether with time and energy.

I'm deeply thankful for the Council and have been deeply honored to be a part of it. Thankfully, Acts 29 fellow Board members Matt Chandler and Darrin Patrick are already on the Council to represent Acts 29, along with one of our network captains, Ray Ortlund.

 

That he was influenced by Douglas Wilson was no secret.  He announced it even as William Wallace II.  So it was not a long-term shock that he was aiming for owned space.  So eager was he for owned space even in intra-Christian media he announced Mars Hill was gunning to take over Christian music and radio with what turned out to be a dead in the water bid at Mars Hill Music 3.0 that morphed into a collaboration with Tooth & Nail Records.

But within the realm of evangelicalism Driscoll’s ties to the emerging church and his ostensibly “faithful presence” approach in his early career came across to some evangelicals as too liberal.  Douglas Wilson, for his part, always said he liked the guy and might even still like Driscoll now.  But Driscoll was affiliated with Keller via The Gospel Coalition.  When Keller spoke with Cosper in the sprawling podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill he commented that it was not so much that he platformed Driscoll or Mars Hill as they platformed him, Keller. Keller made reference to how he was not part of a young tech-savvy generation and, by contrast, Mars Hill had all the technological and social media resources to “platform” The Gospel Coalition.  Rather than merely be skeptical, as some have been, that Keller had to have platformed Driscoll, I take Keller’s point as given and that tells us that Driscoll and Mars Hill were sufficiently big enough that Keller (whatever flaws you impute to his memory) remembered that it was they who platformed The Gospel Coalition and not the other elder statesmen within it. If Keller wrong there needs to be proof and if he was right it makes it more dangerous to simply “not pay attention” to the influence Driscoll came to have within evangelicalism just because writers with an interest in exploring dualisms have already factored him out.

 Driscoll’s withdrawal from TGC in 2012 after Real Marriage had made the New York Times bestseller list for one week turned out to be telling, the more robust Mark Driscoll’s personal brand and reputation was the more at liberty he felt to openly push for the owned space paradigm.  Mars Hill was going to have its own music label, its own Bible college, its own publishing company with its own books. 

 Former Mars Hill biblical living pastor James Noriega, for instance, was willing to say that an aspiration of his was that Mars Hill Church would have a plethora of inside-church resources to help people with various issues so as to not be beholden to outside materials or resources. 

http://ballard.marshill.com/2009/03/17/meet-the-staff-pastor-james-noriega/
https://web.archive.org/web/20111018045238/http://ballard.marshill.com/2009/03/17/meet-the-staff-pastor-james-noriega/
…

What is your greatest joy while serving in this ministry?
To have front row seats when someone really gets who Jesus is for the first time, when the light really goes on for the first time. You literally watch their heart melt in the presence of God. It is an amazing thing to watch; I feel very blessed by God to have such a great job that I get to watch lives transformed before my very eyes.

What are you looking forward to seeing God do in this ministry?
Uncovering more of the enemies schemes, that the church actually becomes a real healing ministry, that we do not have to rely on outside sources to help our people, and that the church is seen by the secular world as a place where real change that glorifies God is going on. [emphasis added]

…

Even in 2011 the paradigm within Mars Hill had clearly shifted to an ethos of owned space as a matter of public rhetoric.  For those who already knew the aim was owned space this couldn’t have been a surprise but it suggests the wrinkle in Meador’s analysis, that it’s a bit too pat to regard faithful presence and owned space as opposed either in theory or in practice.  The history of the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church could be a potential case study of the permeability and fuzziness of the dualism if Christian historians were willing to sift through the rubble. Progressive and secular writers were never fooled about whether or not Mars Hill constituted a faithful presence and saw the bid for owned space. If anyone wanted to see faithful presence in the early Mars Hill it was evangelicals and particularly New Calvinists who aligned with Mars Hill. Let's remember that Keller and Wilson were both connected to Driscoll at one point, so if Driscoll managed to reel in both the Tim "faithful presence" Keller and the Douglas "owned space" Wilson how useful is the dualism as an analytical tool to describe anything that transpired in recent North American evangelicalism?  I would be cautious about using this suggested heuristic absent a clearer history of how these three figures actually interacted with each other over the last thirty years.  I can't even pretend to know myself and I'm Wenatchee The Hatchet. 

links for the weekend, riffs on celibacy at Mere Orthodoxy, Freddie deBoer on the mania for the sexual orientation of cartoon characters as a wrong kind of entitlement, Alastair Roberts on the probably not-helpful nature of Aaron Renn's `negative world' taxonomy

A bit unusually for a weekend of posting I decided to retroactively make this the penultimate post of the night rather than the formal close.  I just felt that what I wrote in "You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror" is more what I wanted to close the weekend with in publication order even if I 'technically' wrote this links for the weekend later.  That's how choosing a publication time can work.

There's variations on a theme for this one, though in the new iteration of Mere Orthodoxy you might not even be able to read the first link by the time you see this.  Stuff is now visible for a week and if you didn't catch it the week of you have to be a subscriber to read older entries.  Such is not the case with the materials in the chain. 

Matt Loftus contends (with cause) that Christians will not win culture wars by becoming fertility cultists (with an afternoon update)

https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-cant-reclaim-the-culture-by-having-more-kids
I agree that enjoining Christians be fruitful and multiply will accomplish nothing in itself to prevail in a  culture war.  I do, however, have a moment of pause about this statement.

Most people who think that conservatives can just outbreed liberals are under 40 and simply haven’t spent enough time talking to people from various walks of life.

Maybe those people who think that were just too busy reading cultural commentary written by people at The Gospel Coalition.

Brad Edwards writes at Mere Orthodoxy about Captain Hook, Peter Pan and fantasies of masculinity sold as masculinity in an era of crisis (of course) regarding masculinity

https://mereorthodoxy.com/redeeming-neverland-the-question-of-shame-the-crisis-of-agency-facing-modern-men/

...

The Right’s Pirate Kings and Vain-Glory

In a sermon entitled “Young Men and Their Strength” from September, 2020, Moscow ID pastor Douglas Wilson articulates an acute awareness of how cultural dynamics have intensified and sensitized men to shame:

Our culture has a real hostility to genuine masculinity and because of that, we don’t want to bring our additional contempt on masculinity… We’d only be pouring gasoline on these cultural fires if we bring along any additional contempt. (emphasis added)

Wilson plays “good cop” to culture’s “bad cop,” and effectively so. He positions himself and those who think similarly as a refuge for the persecuted and misunderstood male. This isn’t malicious. After all, Jesus offered refuge to many ostracized by impoverished culture or oppressed by legalistic religion. What could be more noble or biblical?

In the same sermon, Wilson defines “godly masculinity” as “the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility.” I’d prefer “glad acceptance” to reinforce that sacrificial responsibility is ordinarily bestowed by others (and God, ultimately), and is therefore entrusted and received rather than entitled or presumed. Still, that short definition offers shame-burdened men a genuinely worthwhile telos, an aspiration of real significance to men feeling trapped by shame both culturally- and self-imposed.

However, it is my hesitation at his use of “assumption” rather than “acceptance” that illustrates where Wilson’s masculinity goes astray: no aspiration is independent of its path, and no end is unshaped by its means. Wilson’s admirable and biblical aspiration of “sacrificial responsibility” is nevertheless corrupted by its means. [emphasis added by WtH] When masculine strength assumes responsibility it is not entrusted with it becomes functionally presumptive and entitled. Responsibility with presumption as its genesis can’t help but become self-serving and vain. Complementarian ends through patriarchal means is neither complementarian nor Christlike. At best, it is extremely difficult to arrive at a virtuous stewardship of masculine strength or agency. At its worst, “glad assumption” becomes a Trojan horse smuggling selfishness through the gate of “sacrificial responsibility,” reducing masculinity to performative means and counterfeit ends.

...

Could not those who admire Wilson suggest that complementarianism is just what people called patriarchalism with a politically correct gloss?  Progressives and egalitarians have made that move themselves so frequently it "almost" doesn't need stating but it probably does need to be said. Brad Edwards points out that the "assumption" of responsibility is the problem.  Many an egalitarian would likely agree.

Regular readers will not likely have forgotten I have had my doubts for years that Doug Wilson could play "good cop" to the "bad cop" of culture.  One of the most obvious points of contention even within evangelicalism is whether Doug Wilson's idea of genuine masculinity is "the" standard for masculinity.  

Now having finally finished the book, I have been struck, in the worst possible way, by how Jennifer McKinney couldn't be bothered to cite Doug Wilson directly in Making Christianity Manly Again.  It can't be a reticence on the part of Oxford University Press because Crawford Gribben's OUP published book on survivalists and reconstructionists in the Pacific Northwest not only quoted Doug Wilson's materials extensively but also quoted kinists and compared and contrasted contemporary kinist views with Rushdooney's views.  McKinney's book, by contrast, leans heavily on secondary or even tertiary literature.  Doug Wilson quotes are mediated by Kristen Kobes du Mez or Beth Allison Barr works instead of being quoted from Doug Wilson's own sermons and works.  Note that the author at Mere Orthodoxy jumps straight to the primary source.   

Brad Edwards has labored to chart out a position in which the scripts of masculinity for contemporary Western culture (almost by default the United States) are not realistic, whether the progressive or conservative; egalitarian or patriarchal. Whether he has succeeded will depend in no small part on your perspective about a complementarian stance that distinguishes itself from patriarchal views.  That Edwards has gone to the trouble of quoting Doug Wilson directly is, I'm afraid, more than can be said about Jennifer McKinney.  McKinney quotes Driscoll, yes, but the actual citations are astonishingly sparse.  Tell me that you quote from the Christians Gone Wild series and I'll have to ask where you got your audio files, what date you accessed them, from which site and whether you know about the extent to which that series was redacted and purged in the re:branded version Good News for Bad Christians.  McKinney did none of the above.  The contrast with Jessica Johnson's Biblical Porn on this issue is striking.

By way of background, when I read Biblical Porn I was struck by Johnson mentioning a sermon from the Genesis series in which Driscoll said he prayed that God would kill someone and that the prayer was answered.  I had forgotten about that claim!  But Johnson's citations were at least detailed enough that I was able to find the sermon and write a blog post about the claims a few years back.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/03/6-29-2005-mark-driscoll-but-i-still.html

Unfortunately actually finding Mars Hill era versions of Driscoll sermons is hard to do now.  The marshill.se site is either down or not what it was.  Ditto for other sites that hosted Mars Hill media.  You can't find Wenatchee The Hatchet via Google search these days, not directly, and so if you're here it's because you know of the blog or looked for it and not necessarily via Google.  It's a paradox, or an irony, that having used Blogger since 2006 SEO results have changed to such an extent that you can't find this blog using Google.  The search engine has certainly changed, ,but I digress.

What I'm getting at is that maybe McKinney's book has been published at the worst possible time for being able to independently verify that any quotes from Mark Driscoll sermons actually came from Mark Driscoll sermons.  It's not that I don't believe the man said X, Y or Z, it's that I realize that finding primary source materials has become harder for the Mars Hill era since the launch of The Trinity Church.  It has also become harder to connect dots between Driscoll and Wilson from the Driscoll side, although you can find Wilson fans who are happy to connect the dots for you.  Daniel Kleven seemed to find that out via his Twitter, I think.

Brad Edwards may well be right that the core problem with Doug Wilson's taxonomy of manliness is the "assumption" of responsibility rather than the "acceptance" of responsibility.  If he's right the distinction between acceptance and assumption gets at a potential Achilles' heel in scripts of masculinity on offer.  If you're not supposed to seize responsibility and you're not entrusted with responsibility are you a man?  This is the question that by and large can't be answered, most likely because contemporary postulates about masculinity are so abstract as to be divorced from flesh and blood relationships.  Honor father and mother does not seem to me the "salute the uniform" axiom that some people make it out to be--you have to figure out how to honor your father and mother even if they may have been genuinely bad people.

Since Mark Driscoll made no secret of being significantly influenced in his ideas about men, women, gender and sexuality by the writings of Doug Wilson I would have thought McKinney would have spent a single paragraph writing about the ways in which Driscoll built upon or diverged from Wilson's ideas.  Nope.  Nothing.  Not one single paragraph.  If you haven't read about this topic before I have a couple of posts that may be of use to you.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-seminal-and-continuing-thematic-link.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/08/some-more-thoughts-on-formative.html

Edwards came across as trying to articulate that if the blue state masculinity script is Peter Pan the red state masculinity script is Captain Hook and that, ultimately, the Doug Wilson and ideological descendant variations constitute a kind of Captain Hook Neverland masculinity that seems like an alternative to Peter Pan syndrome without being a real alternative.

Here we are in 2023 and it's as though within evangelical and socially conservative Protestant settings nothing has changed (surprise!) from the scene I considered in an old post from 2011, "Roy Baumeister, the disposability of men, and social meaning for the unattached male".  Attempting to give today's men a script of glory will do nothing to change their inherent disposability within society.  A Doug Wilson or a Mark Driscoll can strive to give men a "purpose" by giving them a set of responsibilities to assume but in days of yore men and women who were not cut out for those cultural scripts got sent to monasteries for all sorts of reasons.  Even back before the Industrial Revolution it was known that not every man was ever going to get married, could afford to marry, or chose to get married.  You'd never know Jesus said some men made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of God given the frequency with which the "epidemic of singleness" gets discussed.  

Having scripts of adult masculinity and femininity and prescribing those scripts is not the same thing as people being able to live them out or live by them.  One of the inescapable problems of scripts of masculinity in any culture (not just the culture of "late capitalism") is that men are disposable.  The "boys who can shave" may have figured out that they are disposable and want nothing to do with taking on responsibilities they may not have been offered or may not feel are worth sacrificing for.  Mark Driscoll's gimmick was predicated on the surmise that if you screamed enough you could shame some of those "boys who can shave" into deciding to take responsibilities upon themselves but the gimmick had nothing like good news for those who would not or could not assume responsibilities.  

What I keep seeing over and over from progressive and conservative social commentary is that the scripts for masculinity and femininity either are or aren't the problem in and off themselves.  That has not been the problem.  The problem isn't even as simple as that "society" deigns to impose one or two scripts that people don't fit into.  Gay activists and feminists can point to how there are a variety of scripts within and across cultures to which people can easily conform or not conform at all.  Many times people content themselves with pronouncing the scripts themselves as the cause and source of the crises of a society.  

Not having enough scripts to account for those who can't attain the prescribed scripts is, I am relatively sure, part of what's at issue.  Having more scripts so that if a man or a woman fails to achieve the benchmarks of adult manhood or womanhood or whatever for A, B or C have options via D, E, F and so on.  We have had no shortage of household codes in ethical instruction over the millennia.  It may be that some of the tensions in contemporary society have to do with the possibility that among the scripts of adulthood on offer from both progressive and conservative punditry the only scripts on offer are the ones where you are supposed to be in charge. You are not supposed to reconcile yourself to being a replaceable cog in the capitalist machine (left) or to being someone who is less than a legendary patriarch (right) but I hope, perhaps, you can see that there is an underlying distinction without a difference.  

What makes the scripts of adulthood from the socially conservative Christian side of things seem like an aporia (now there's a buzzword from Marxist theory for you) is that the prescribed scripts, if implemented as widely as social conservatives want, would preclude the kind of culture-making they want.  If everyone is pairing off and making babies to be as fruitful and multiply as possible who's going to have time to "make culture"?  Augustine had a son, yes, but had Augustine been busy living the new Calvinist best-life-now fulfillment of his masculine potential he would be so busy raising that kid he might not have had time to write City of God.  If socially conservative pundits indulge in reductio ad absurdums I can be granted one or two, yes?  Certainly J. S. Bach had many children and wrote a lot of music but partisans of mere Christendom may want to appeal to the exceptions among exceptions as the hoped for outcome of the rule.  

The disconnect between what parents hope their kids can/may/should achieve as culture warriors and what they discover their capable of may be something evangelicals haven't delved into as a potential ground for a crisis of faith.  Expressive individualism is easy to rip on when you're using it as a scapegoat dogma for "them" but what if it's so baked into the conservative side, too, it can't be recognized as a focus in hoped-for legacies of children?  A guy like Mark Driscoll could remain a useful case study since he'd say from the pulpit he'd tell his kids "You're Driscolls."  In other words, you don't get to be like all those other normal kids because you have a great generations long family legacy to think about because Mark Driscoll is your dad.  No, that's not a cue for pop Lutheran bromides about Law because it's not like there have never been nepo-babies in the history of Lutheranism. Depending on how you parse it Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the nepo-babies of generations of composers and that the legacies of nepo-babies is even the overt and explicit point of cultural mandate ambitions parents have for their descendants in Protestant social teaching of the conservative kind.

I remain unconvinced the scripts of adulthood from the progressive/liberal side are better.  If anything, per my old post on male disposability, the crisis of the incel seems to be firmly planted on both the progressive and reactionary sides.  The man who can't get any is a distillation of the most toxic elements of contemporary society either by dint of toxic masculinity for progressives or the man-child who refuses to grow up for conservatives.  

It was one of the things that stuck with me during my Mars Hill years, that the scripts of adult masculinity on offer didn't seem attainable and it didn't even seem desirable to waste time trying to attain them.  Somehow I managed to find a place there for years and even had a variety of positive experiences despite being the single guy who never dated.  But my experience overall has felt profoundly ambivalent and I have probably written more about Mars Hill than the average person.  I didn't know while I was there the extent to which Doug Wilson's scripts of adulthood influenced Driscoll because I read one or two Wilson titles in my Mars Hill years, found them pretty "meh" and ignored Wilson.  If I was never cut out to be married of what possible use could Doug Wilson's scripts of masculinity ever even remotely be?

I'm not sure what I think about Brad Edwards' essay overall, but what sticks with me is he brackets Doug Wilson's ideas into a kind of "Captain Hook" take on masculinity.  It's a vivid example in its way that Jennifer McKinney's take on evangelical masculinity movements seems like a cardboard cut-out that has not engaged any primary source materials seriously.  Mere Orthodoxy might be on course to become the National Review of new Calvinist cultural commentary (it's not my idea, I assure you, but the comparison was made in an off-blog conversation).  If even Mere O has a history of regarding things Wilson and Driscoll as of doubtful value regarding scripts of masculinity McKinney's recently published book comes across as having failed, even pretty thoroughly, to make its case based on an engagement with a wide and deep range of primary sources.

It took me writing through this blog post to realize that is what has really stuck with me about Brad Edwards' post.  It's not the point in itself so much as realizing that his point flies in the face of McKinney's simplistic take about how emblematic Mark Driscoll's views on masculinity are of conservative evangelicalism.  Uh, no.  I've been reading Mere Orthodoxy since 2005 and that sort of claim is just indefensible on its face.  Sorry. Maybe the shades of gray resemble black but there is some gray in the socially conservative evangelical scene discussing gender and sexuality, as evidenced by intra-evangelical disagreements about the scripts of manhood on offer by the likes of Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll.

some links for the weekend hidden in a weekend ramble about Alan Jacobs' thoughts on a piece by Brad East at Mere Orthodoxy

https://mereorthodoxy.com/once-more-church-and-culture/

Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority. Christendom traces its beginnings to the fourth century after Christ; it began to ebb, in fits and starts, sometime during the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern period. It is tempting to plot its demise with the American and French revolutions, though in truth it outlasted both in many places. It came to a more or less definitive end with the world wars (in Europe) and the Cold War (in America). Even those who lament Christendom’s passing and hope for its reestablishment have no doubt that the West is post-Christian in this sense. The West will always carry within it its Christian past — whether as a living wellspring, a lingering shadow, a haunting ghost, or an exorcised demon — but it is indisputable that whatever the West has become, it is not what it once was. Christendom is no more.

 

To ask about the church’s place in society while living in Christendom is redundant. The question answers itself. The question is genuinely new, however, when posed after Christendom. For that reason it has been posed continually in the past few centuries, especially in the last 75 years. H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, published in 1951, is a reliable touchstone. The postwar period up to the present has seen American Protestants in particular eager, and sometimes anxious, to clarify, to solidify, and, if necessary, to resituate their relationship to the nation: its legal and political operations, its respectable professions, its educational institutions, its means of cultural production. The conversation is no closer to being resolved today than when Niebuhr first gave the lectures in Austin, Texas, that would later become his book.  …

 

Alan Jacobs saw that article and had a relatively pithy reply.  The title of his piece is “Christianity and … ?” For the TL:DR era, Jacobs points out that for all Brad East’s erudition his post begs the question of what culture actually is, which is not something that earlier writers and philosophers, particularly Johann Gottfried Herder, took as given.  A sampler:

 

https://blog.ayjay.org/christianity-and/

This essay by Brad East is very smart, and takes the Christianity-and-culture conversation usefully beyond H. Richard Niebuhr’s categories. But I have one big question: What is “culture”?

 

Almost everyone who writes on this subject treats it as unproblematic, yet it is anything but. In the late 18th century Herder wrote of Cultur (the German spelling would only later become Kultur): “Nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods.”

 

I suspect that (a) when most people use the term they have only the haziest sense of what they mean by it, and (b) no two writers on this subject are likely to have a substantially similar understanding of it.

…

Brad’s essay, for all its virtues, suffers from its reluctance to dismiss the eminently dismissable Niebuhr. He doesn’t straightforwardly say what he means by “culture,“ but he begins his essay thus: “Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority.” This suggests that culture is something distinct from the other items in the list, but if culture does not include “society, … law, art, family, politics, and worship” I’m not sure what’s left over for it to be.

…

 

Now the invocation of Herder interests me because I’ve been reading Richard Taruskin’s last book and have also been reading a recent translation of Herder’s writings about music.

after Jake Meador's "The Therapeutic, Ctd": the sword of the therapeutic, the sword of the spirit, and how the former can be wielded by those accused of misusing the latter-exhibit A: post-Mars Hill Mark Driscoll

https://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/jake/the-therapeutic-ctd/

Last year we raised a number of concerns about the ubiquity of therapeutic discourse within the evangelical movement.

In particular, a number of writers associated with Mere O, including myself, are alarmed by two things in particular:

• First, the ways in which therapeutic techniques seem to be replacing Christian discipleship as the means for pursuing personal growth.
• Second, with the ways in which categories of mental health and wellness seem to be replacing Christian maturity as the chief end of that growth.

And so when I see projects like this and language like this, well, I think my friends and I are rather vindicated in those concerns:

With the help of the Enneagram, powered by the gospel, you can experience transformation.

04. Be Transformed
And finally! You’re on your way to transforming your life and relationships.

In some sense, many of the people falling into these habits of thought have been somewhat ill-served by the church. We are now 40 years into the seeker-sensitive liturgical experiment and the results, with regards to discipleship and catechesis, have been fairly abysmal. If our churches have behaved as if “Christian discipleship” largely consists of “holding the right ideas in your head” and “consuming the right content,” then it isn’t terribly surprising that many Christians would encounter the difficulties of life and feel radically unprepared for them. Their churches didn’t teach them to expect suffering, didn’t give them models for resilience and dependence on God, and didn’t provide practical guidance in mortifying sin and offering oneself up to God. So of course we now have many Christian people who are a bit at sea, particularly given how chaotic, angry, and uncertain this cultural moment has become. In such a scenario, techniques like the enneagram have an obvious appeal.

And yet the way of imagining the Christian life as conceived by this particular sort of approach to the enneagram seems hopelessly compromised to me. For 2000 years Christians have seen transformation through the Gospel without availing themselves of the enneagram. They have endured torture, persecution, the loss of family and status, and much else besides and have done it all without the aid of modern therapeutic technique. So while I understand that the failures of the attractional model created a vacuum that therapeutic technique has rushed in to fill, I also know that the cost of allowing therapeutic technique to persist in this work is far too high.

What is that cost, exactly? The cost is that the people of God would forget how to understand themselves using the language that the people of God have always used. ...

[5:07 pm, date of publication--I just got this idea that Meador may want to, if he hasn't already, go through Ephraim Radner's A Profound Ignorance for the trajectory of how Christianity in the West dropped talk of martyrdom and discipleship in favor of personal triumph over adversity via pneumatology. Nobody in the post-seeker-sensitive milieu may embody the doctrinal and ethical vices of what Radner called the "pneumatic man" quite like the guy who used to head up a megachurch here in Seattle since he bailed on Seattle, but I"m getting ahead of myself after the fact]

Having gone my whole life until a year or so ago having never heard of the Enneagram I have to admit that it’s a challenge to understand what people use it for and why Christian writers would balk at what sounds like a variation on the Meyers Briggs Temperament Index which itself was openly indebted to the four temperaments of Hellenistic speculative thought and philosophy.  The point I'm going to make will, as usual for me, take a while, and it springs off of some of Meador's concerns.