Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of [escaping] white trash: part 7--put down people with more degrees than Fahrenheit ca. 2003-2007, invoke credentials in 2012-2013 in response to a "kerfuffle", an arc of double standards on credentials

In order to more fully flesh out some implications of Mark Driscoll as a man of white trash lineage who spent his public ministry simultaneously invoking the idioms of the redneck for their colloquial appeal while belittling rednecks/hillbillies/white trash as a group to distance himself from them, it might be useful to quote something from Rod Dreher's conversation with the author of Hillbilly Elegy:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/

Rod Dreher
I’m not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite, most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today?

Vance
I know exactly what you mean.  My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively.  She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it.  “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.”  During my final year at Yale Law, I took a small class with a professor I really admired (and still do).  I was the only veteran in the class, and when this came up somehow in conversation, a young woman looked at me and said, “I can’t believe you were in the Marines.  You just seem so nice.  I thought that people in the military had to act a certain way.”  It was incredibly insulting, and it was my first real introduction to the idea that this institution that was so important among my neighbors was looked down upon in such a personal way. To this lady, to be in the military meant that you had to be some sort of barbarian.  I bit my tongue, but it’s one of those comments I’ll never forget. 

The “why” is really difficult, but I have a few thoughts.  The first is that humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us.  And if you’re an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe.  By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.  So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is. [emphasis added]

...

RD
On the other hand, as Hillbilly Elegy says so well, that reflexive reverse-snobbery of the hillbillies and those like them is a real thing too, and something that undermines their prospects in life. Is there any way for it to be overcome, other than getting out of the bubble, as you did?

Vance
I’m not sure we can overcome it entirely. Nearly everyone in my family who has achieved some financial success for themselves, from Mamaw to me, has been told that they’ve become “too big for their britches.” [emphasis added] I don’t think this value is all bad.  It forces us to stay grounded, reminds us that money and education are no substitute for common sense and humility.  But, it does create a lot of pressure not to make a better life for yourself, and let’s face it: when you grow up in a dying steel town with very few middle class job prospects, making a better life for yourself is often a binary proposition: if you don’t get a good job, you may be stuck on welfare for the rest of your life.


What Dreher and Vance were discussing is straightforward enough.  Now that Mark Driscoll has relocated into Arizona and has begun to put up old sermons we can revisit some of those older sermons and writings to consider whether or not there were times when Mark Driscoll had his own variation of saying someone had become too big for their britches. Before Mark Driscoll had amassed, to his own understanding, credentials enough to invoke as pre-emptive trump cards on public issues, he had a history of inveighing against those sorts of people who tried to do that.


It's not that hard to establish.


http://download.marshill.se/files/2003/03/16/20030316_setting-the-record-crooked_sd_audio.mp3

SETTING THE RECORD CROOKED

Part 1 of Ecclesiastes
Pastor Mark Driscoll | Ecclesiastes 1:1-18 | March 16, 2003

Some say, “But, did he try this? Did he try this? Did he try this?” He did. Verse 17 – “Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this too is a chasing after the wind.” What he says is this – “There’s two approaches to finding meaning in your life. One is high brow.” Some people go high brow. “I’ll get a suit.” “I’ll figure out what the salad fork is actually for.” “I won’t drive my car. I’ll pay a driver.” “I will go to the symphony and I will pretend that large, Italian women yelling at me is enjoyable.” [emphasis added]
(Laughter)

“I will eat good food. I will drink good wine. I will sleep in a nice bed.” “And I will use big words that I don’t understand and I will live the high brow life.” And he said, “I did that. I went to college and got more degrees than Fahrenheit. I spent all kinds of money and hung out with very sophisticated people. And you know what? They’re all just lost and crooked and confused and frustrated like everybody else.” [emphasis added] So, he said, “You know what? I tried folly as well. I looked over, saw my redneck neighbors, thought, ‘Hey, they look happy’. Maybe they’re drunk and not that bright, but they look happy, so maybe they have an angle.” So, he says, “You know what? I tried that as well. I got rid of my suit, got all NASCAR t-shirts.”
(Laughter)

“I got rid of my condo in Belltown and I got myself a brand new old trailer. I took all the furniture and put it outside in the yard. Don’t know why. All the neighbors did it, didn’t wanna stick out.”

http://download.marshill.se/files/2006/08/06/20060806_spiritual-gifts-part-i_sd_audio.mp3

SPIRITUAL GIFTS PART I
Part 27 of 1st Corinthians
Pastor Mark Driscoll | 1 Corinthians 12:1-8; 11 | August 06, 2006

So the whole point of study is what? Love of Jesus. You can memorize the whole Bible. You can get more degrees than Fahrenheit but if you don’t love Jesus, you kinda miss the whole point. [emphasis added] The whole point of all study and knowledge is the love of Jesus through science and through medicine and through law and through philosophy and through history and through theology. What does this reveal about God? What does this tell me about Jesus?

That’s how you study.

Vintage Jesus, page 148
Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
Copyright (c) 2007 by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
ISBN 978-1-58134-975-7 (HC)

Following in Jefferson’s and Paine’s fatal footsteps, in 1985 the two hundred fellows (a.k.a. kindling) of the Jesus Seminar gathered to vote on the probability of the truthfulness of the words and deeds of Jesus as recorded in Scripture. By the time they were finished, they surmised that only 18 percent of what is recorded as Jesus’ words in the Gospels were actually said by Jesus. Only one statement from the Gospel of Mark got voted in. Even the most critical of scholars think that the trustworthiness of Scripture is a lot better than this. These guys were obviously educated beyond their intelligence. [emphasis added]

Now certainly a Christian can affirm that love for Christ and devotion to Christ's teaching and example and to regard Jesus as Lord and God is the thing that defines a Christian, if we aim to boil everything down.  That's not necessarily the point, which is to observe that it's fairly easy to establish that Mark Driscoll's polemics against people with doctrinal views or views of biblical texts he disagreed with was to say these people had more degrees than Fahrenheit and were educated beyond their intelligence.  These were people, in a phrase, too big for their britches.  When there was a possibility that "nerds" would contest an interpretation Mark Driscoll had for a biblical text based on the Greek Driscoll could be summarily dismissive of that whole approach.  Or at least that could be the approach until it was his turn to assert he was right, as when he proposed Song of Songs 2 had to refer to a woman performing oral sex on her husband regardless of having failed to make a compelling exegetical case for that interpretive approach in the last ... twenty years.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/from-january-12-2012-mark-driscolls.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20120115012617/http://pastormark.tv/2012/01/12/a-blog-for-the-brits

from A Blog Post for the Brits, published by Mark Driscoll January 12, 2012:

...

I have a degree in communications from one of the top programs in the United States. So does my wife, Grace. We are used to reporters with agendas and selective editing of long interviews. Running into reporters with agendas and being selectively edited so that you are presented as someone that is perhaps not entirely accurate is the risk one takes when trying to get their message out through the media.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/12/mark-driscoll-shows-us-hat-and-not.html

http://theresurgence.com/2013/12/02/6-simple-ways-to-write-better-blog-posts

...

I don’t pretend to be the world’s greatest writer. But I did start writing professionally as a journalist in high school, paid my way through high school and college writing articles and editing my college newspaper, got a bachelor’s degree in Communications from the top-notch Edward R. Murrow School of Communication, and have written blogs and articles for everyone from CNN to the Washington Post to Fox News.

It's frankly impossible to take seriously any claim from Mark Driscoll that what he wrote by way of op-ed editorializing for The Daily Evergreen as professional journalism of any kind.  Still, it's interesting to observe how during the 2012-2013 period Mark Driscoll was very ready to tell the world what his credentials and status were as a way to pre-emptively secure his case.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/from-april-16-2012-mark-driscolls.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20140722005242/http://pastormark.tv/2012/04/16/an-official-response-to-the-kerfuffle-at-liberty-university

An Official Response to The Kerfuffle At Liberty University
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Apr 16, 2012

...

Lately, I’ve been busy with something you may have heard of called Easter. So, I’ve not been on the Internet much but instead busy with church and family. However, rumor has it there is a bit of mushroom cloud of controversy over my planned trip. So, I asked our community relations manager, who gets to enjoy reading blogs about me while eating breakfast every day (it’s amazing he holds anything down), to give me a summary of this kerfuffle. (Henceforth, we will officially refer to this situation as “The Kerfuffle.”)

The trouble started with a Southern Baptist blogger . . . yes, you should have seen that one coming. Now, to be fair, the blogger quoted an anonymous “source.” And, we all know that almost everything bloggers say is true. But, when they have something as solid as an anonymous “source,” then you can rest assured that when Jesus talked about the truth over and over in John, this is precisely what he was referring to. I have a degree from Washington State’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication and worked professionally as a journalist, and I can assure you that The Kerfuffle is a very serious matter to be taken with the utmost sobriety and propriety. In fact, one anonymous “source” I spoke to said that Watergate pales in comparison.

The irony of this juxtaposition in just half a decade would hardly seem worth commenting on if Mark Driscoll had not lately positioned himself in Scottsdale with a new church plant.  It's easy to talk about how a person weathers storms while skimming over just how much of those storms could ... conceivably ... be explained as variations on pride going before a fall. 

A decade earlier Mark Driscoll would have scoffed at the idea, from the pulpit, that merely invoking credentials proved you had won the argument or even knew what you were talking about.  That's what made Mark Driscoll's eagerness to invoke his credentials and reputation to pre-emptively settle scores over an interview with Justin Brierley or the "kerfuffle" at Liberty University in 2012 such a drastic contrast between the rules for "me" and the rules for "thee". 

It's impossible to not notice the condescension with which Driscoll talked about having been distracted by this thing called Easter.  It didn't take long for Driscoll to invoke Washington State University's Edward R. Murrow College of Communication and remind people that he worked professionally as a journalist (without mentioning the apparently all op-ed side of that). 

Within ten years’ time the guy who was functionally saying scholars who disputed doctrines he considered essential were too big for their britches by having more degrees than Fahrenheit and being educated beyond their intelligence was riding pretty high.  By late 2013 a fateful on-air interview with Janet Mefferd started to change things. 

During the first quarter of 2012 Mark Driscoll avoided any public occasion to discuss the disciplinary case of Andrew Lamb or the publication of the Petry documents at Joyful Exiles.  But if the controversy was something like justifying his approach to Elephant Room 2 or riffing on the "kerfuffle" or even doing a pre-emptive character hit on Justin Brierley, Mark Driscoll was more than ready.  So long as the controversy in question swirled around his public persona he was ready to talk.  Once a controversy swirled around the substance and credibility of what he published things and how he handled things as the lately crowned legal president of Mars Hill things were very different.

One of the questions that never got asked along the way in the scandals that swirled around Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill from 2013 through 2014 is "why?"  Not just why Result Source was contracted or books weren't credited and cited in first editions but why someone in leadership at Mars Hill would have felt there was any need for any of that.  In some effort to work toward proposing a possible theory we can revisit years' worth of stuff Mark Driscoll shared for the record about his family background. 

Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of [escaping] white trash: Part 8—on Tim Smith, on manly and unmanly musicians, and a not-so-latent redneck aesthetic

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2

Excerpts from page 146-148

...

I first met Tim [Smith] while teaching at a conference in New Mexico for Leadership Network. He had been raised in a Baptist home in Portland and was working as a youth worship leader at a Lutheran church in Missouri. Tim and his wife, Beth, moved to Seattle simply hoping that Tim would become a guitar player in one of our worship teams. Tim and his wife lived with Grace and me for a few months until they got settled, and I saw in Tim some very strong leadership qualities that had not been cultivated. So I spent a lot of time investing in Tim, as I was with Jamie. Tim had never played in a band, written a song, or played an electric guitar. Additionally, he did not know how to sing, and it sounded like he'd been hit by a car when he tried to hit high notes.

But I really liked Tim because he is one of the few manly men whom I have ever seen leading worship. I am not supposed to say this, but most of the worship dudes I have heard are not very dudely. They seem to be very in touch with their feelings and exceedingly chickified from playing too much acoustic guitar and singing prom songs to Jesus while channeling Michael Bolton and flipping their hair. Tim was a guy who brewed his own beer, smoked a pipe, rock-climbed, mountain biked, river rafted, carried a knife on his belt, and talked about what he thought more than what he felt.

We clicked because I drive a 1978 Chevy truck that gets single digits to the gallon and has a bacon air freshener and no functioning speedometer and because I fashion myself as the self-appointed leader of a heterosexual male backlash in our overly chickified city filled with guys drinking herbal tea and rocking out to Mariah Carey in their lemon yellow Volkswagen Cabriolets while wearing fuschsia sweater-vests that are perfectly matched with their open-toed shoes. Anyways, Tim learned quickly, took vocal lessons, and soon assumed leadership over the entire worship department. Like Jamie, he started by firing most everyone and starting over from scratch.

There is more that could be written about Mark Driscoll and Tim Smith but this extended excerpt will suffice.  Driscoll repeatedly articulated that his sense of the average music leader in American church contexts was effeminate and that in seeking a man who would be an alternative to that kind of musical culture, Mark Driscoll was willing to put up with a guy who couldn’t really play the guitar, couldn’t sing, and had never really written a song.  What Tim Smith had, by Mark Driscoll’s account, was leadership potential and he passed Mark Driscoll’s man test. The rest was simply, at the risk of making a long narrative too simple, simply pouring enough time and money into making Smith the kind of worship leader Mark Driscoll wanted and shaping the raw material.

No, for that matter, would Mark Driscoll’s crusade against unmanly musicians in churches stop with having selected and promoted Tim Smith.

 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2011/july/much-ado-about-mark-driscoll.html

This week the Christian blogosphere worked itself into a frenzy over a Facebook status posted by Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. The status, which was later removed, read, "So, what story do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leader you've ever personally witnessed?"

Driscoll was willing to stoke the fires of controversy about gender and masculinity in 2011. When the online reaction had stormed up, Driscoll presented his reasoning and it had to do with a conversation he had with a blue-collar type:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/from-july-13-2011-mark-driscoll-on.html

The Issue Under a Lot of Issues
Mark Driscoll

Gender. Is it a socially constructed reality or a God-given identity?

 

That’s a significant question, and how you answer it has massive implications. The question of gender underlies many current cultural conflicts and theological controversies that go beyond even the long standing debates about whether or not a woman can be a pastor and whether or not a man is to function as the head of his home.

…

I had a recent conversation with a stereotypical, blue-collar guy who drives his truck with his tools, lunchbox, and hard hat to his job site every day. He said he wasn’t a Christian, but he was open and wanted to learn what the Bible said. In that conversation, he told me he’d visited a church but that the guy doing the music made him feel uncomfortable because he was effeminate (he used another more colorful word, but that one will suffice in its place). He asked some questions about the Bible, and whether the Bible said anything about the kind of guy who should do the music. I explained the main guy doing the music in the Bible was David, who was a warrior king who started killing people as a boy and who was also a songwriter and musician.

I then put a flippant comment on Facebook, and a raging debate on gender and related issues ensued. As a man under authority, my executive elders sat me down and said I need to do better by hitting real issues with real content in a real context. And, they’re right. Praise God I have elders who keep me accountable and that I am under authority.

So, we are working on a new website where I can speak to these real issues in a fuller context. Lord willing, sometime in September, after my trip to Europe with my family and a lot of other people, and then some recovery time, we will launch a new website.

In the past, I’ve not had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues, and so I’ve erred in sometimes doing so in places like Facebook, Twitter, and the media, where you can have a good fight but don’t have the room to make a good case.

Never mind that Mark Driscoll had made himself notorious for commenting on social issues from the pulpit, at The Resurgence (most infamously when he had comments in the wake of Ted Haggard’s scandal), or on guest appearances on film or writing an op-ed column for a Seattle newspaper.  Driscoll was declaring that he had not previously had a platform for working out his ideas on social issues.

Functionally, the controversy surrounding Mark Driscoll’s comments about unmanly musicians became a promotional gambit on behalf of Pastor Mark TV. What made the move so cynical is that Mark Driscoll had explained his views on church music and church musicians half a decade earlier in writing about Tim Smith as Mars Hill’s worship leader.

After all, this gets us back to:

http://download.marshill.se/files/2001/10/28/20011028_men-and-masculinity_sd_audio.mp3

MEN AND MASCULINITY

Part 5 of Proverbs

Pastor Mark Driscoll | October 28, 2001

… I thought immediately I would have to become very feminine. ‘Cause all the guys I knew who were Christians were just very – very soft, very tender, very sort of weak guys. And I thought, “That’s just not gonna work.” So, I wouldn’t go to youth group. They tried to drag me to – I was in a Catholic church and our priest was gay, and I didn’t get this guy at all. He would wear silk shirts and silk pants, and he would wear low – basically, like, bathroom slippers all the time.

Whether Driscoll recognizes this or not, he’s kept coming back to this idea that whatever a Christian musician can or must be, if he’s a man he can’t be confused for an urban gay man. This view creeps into Driscoll’s polemics in spite of the fact that within the confines of Mars Hill’s Midrash he remarked that it was stupid for evangelicals to want to ban gay marriage when Christians divorced at a higher than average rate compared to non-believers and that his gay neighbors were great neighbors.  Both in terms of Mark Driscoll’s concerns about stereotypically “effeminate” male musicians and in how people reacted to Mark Driscoll’s publicity stunts it’s become apparent that leveraging stereotypes related to the ethos of the redneck as a relatable or unrelatable ethos played a substantial role in the 2011 controversy Mark Driscoll sought out as a preliminary to promoting Pastor Mark TV.  Leveraging stereotypes from and about the redneck ethos has been crucial to Mark Driscoll’s public persona.  But as for the person, it seems he has been determined that his children not have to be directly familiar with a redneck white trash life beyond maybe being able to joke about it a bit.  The clearest example of Mark Driscoll taking steps to ensure his offspring had not-redneck cultural life is a story we’ll turn to presently.

Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of [escaping] white trash: Part 9--a night of ballet for a special little girl, a story of Mark Driscoll wanting to play little league, and a church plant tailored to generational resentments

http://marshill.se/marshill/media/generous/generous-part-2a

GENEROUS (PART 2A)
Part 3 of Generous
Pastor Mark Driscoll | 2 Corinthians 9 | December 21, 2008


... Start by telling you a story. It’s that time of year at our house. We’ve got all our little Christmas traditions. Yesterday, it was Daddy Date Day with Alexi and I. She’s 5, blonde hair, blue eyes. And the rule is with the girls every year, we get a new dress for them, they get all dressed up. And I get dressed up. And they sort of lay out with me the order of the day, and we do a nice big Daddy Date.


So yesterday, we went downtown to the Space Needle, and she loves that rotating restaurant. Just absolutely is smitten by that. And she looked as cute as she could look. And we had lunch. And then we walked through the Seattle Center, and we rode the carousel, and went to the Center House.


And then we went to the Nutcracker, something I’ve never done. But I love Alexi, so we got good seats to the ballet and sat right up near the front. And the whole time, she was just on the edge of her seat, in her little dress, just absolutely awestruck by this ballet. She loved it. Got her some nice gifts from the gift store. During one of the breaks, she wanted a cookie, so we went to get a cookie. And they were totally out of cookies, very long line. Everything sold out. And I looked at her, and I said, “Honey, they’re out of cookies.” She said, “That’s okay, I prayed to the Lord Jesus.” I said, “Well, then, we need to stay in line and just pray that Jesus brings a cookie out of nowhere,” ‘cause the last thing I’m gonna tell my little girl is, “He doesn’t do cookies. That’s a big job.”


So, we’re waiting in line, and all the cookies were gone. Everything was gone. Everybody left the line, ‘cause there was nothing left to sell, except for one couple in front of us, and they got the last bag of nuts. That was it. Literally, the concessions were cleaned out. And she looks at me, and I said, “Well, what do you think?” She said, “There’ll be a cookie.”


And true story, this woman walks up from the catering group with about six more cookies at that moment, and Alexi got her cookie. And she looked at me. She said, “See, I told you, I asked Jesus for a cookie.” I said, “All right, cool.” So, my daughter, if you need anything, she’ll pray for it. She’s got the red line.


And we got done with our time, and we came outside, and it was snowing. We held hands and walked through the Seattle Center and went to our car. We had just this amazing little Daddy Day. I think my favorite was during the Nutcracker, her sitting on my lap in her beautiful dress, holding her little ballerina doll that we bought for her in the gift shop at the Nutcracker, and just being absolutely awestruck by what was going on, on the stage. We had this amazing, amazing daddy time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it with her.


And on the way home, we were visiting and talking. We were singing Christmas songs on the radio while the snow was coming down. And she said, “Daddy, thank you so much for my Christmas present.” And I said, “Well, you’re welcome, sweetie-pie.” And she said, “But I don’t know what to get you for Christmas. What do you want for your present?” And I told her, I said, “I always wanted a little girl. Thank you for being my daughter.” What a gift my little girl is. That actually made me cry, driving home in the Jeep, just thinking about the tremendous gift it is to have a little girl and to be her daddy.


And so she was my great Christmas gift. And Ashley and I’ve got our date this week. And me and the boys got our dude time set up. And it’s that great time of year, when we get an opportunity to enjoy family and friends, to give gifts, to receive gifts, and it all makes sense biblically.


There is probably no single story that better illustrates Mark Driscoll’s desire that he and his immediate family, meaning his wife and children but also his siblings and parents, should never have to be tethered to the cultural constraints of a white trash milieu than this story of his taking Alexi on a Daddy daughter date to the ballet. Sure, he’d joked in the past about how high-brow meant you pretended that while at the symphony that you liked being yelled at by large Italian women. Once he had a daughter old enough to express interest in ballet things changed.  Why?  Well, Driscoll put it pretty simply himself in a sermon years ago, “Children grow up in the world that their father creates.” Driscoll was going to see to it that his children didn’t grow up ever knowing the kind of life he and his siblings and his parents knew living by a strip club.


There are other things that are as far from white trash as possible in the United States.  One of those things would be being the founding pastor of one of the fastest growing churches in the country. Another would be being a New York Times bestselling author.  Still another would be the kind of pastor whose sermons get translated into Korean and Spanish where you wonder how the redneck jokes get translated.


A detailed analysis of how Mark Driscoll got to that moment will demonstrate that what he euphemistically described in terms of “all grace” was, at a very practical level benefiting from the financial and social patronage of wealthier people who believed in him as well as thousands of people who were encouraged and admonished to give sacrificially to the cause of promoting the Gospel at Mars Hill.  This isn’t a guy who has paid his own way so much as a guy who has convinced other people to buy his ticket to legitimacy.  What made the decision by Mars Hill leadership to game the system of the New York Times bestseller list is that it betrayed everything you would think was inherent in the ethos Mark Driscoll claimed to have been taught by his father. 


To more fully appreciate why Driscoll would decide to take his young daughter to the ballet it may help to review a story Mark Driscoll shared from the pulpit about a set of conversations he had with his father at the age of eleven.

http://download.marshill.se/files/2001/10/28/20011028_men-and-masculinity_sd_audio.mp3

MEN AND MASCULINITY
Part 5 of Proverbs
Pastor Mark Driscoll | October 28, 2001
…

Proverbs 29:21, “If a man pampers his servant from youth, he will bring grief in the end.” These guys are pampered; totally pampered. Okay? And again, this is not a boasting on me. This is a – this is actually a tribute to my dad. I was eleven years old. I was going out for the little league all-star team, and I needed a new glove. My dad said, “Good. Go make some money.” I said, “Hey, dad, I’m eleven.” He said, “Well, you’re taller than the lawn-mower. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.” True. So, I get the lawn-mower, and I go and I mow lawns to get my glove. And I come back and my dad says, “You owe me gas money. You used my gas.” It’s the nicest thing my dad ever did. Up until that point, I didn’t know gas cost money. Now, I do. Now, I appreciate gas.


It comes to the point where I’m 15 and I wanna get a car. I said, “Dad, I need a car.” He says, “Good. Go get some money.” I said, “Okay, fine.” So, I falsified my birth certificate, I lie about my age, and I get a job at a 7-11 selling lotto tickets and liquor and cigarettes to people that are twice my age. I was not a Christian, so – I shouldn’t have done it anyways, but I wasn’t a Christian. And so, I’m 15, working at a 7-11 selling stuff. And I make a decent living, and I buy my first car, a 1956 Chevy that I should’ve never sold. That’s a whole other sermon. And – and so I’m 15, driving myself to work without a license, because I gotta go make money to pay for my car. Okay? And again, I was not a Christian. Okay? So, I’m not saying, “Thus sayeth the Lord.”


And I realize that, since I was young and I was strong, I could make more money. And so I started dinking around trying to figure out where to make more money. And I find out that guys in unions make a lot of money. And – at least compared to me working at the 7-11. And I got tired of getting robbed and held-up, too. ‘Cause if you run a 7-11 behind a Déjà vu, somebody’s gonna put a gun at your head. And after a couple of those, you realize, “For minimum wage, I’m not taking a cap. You know? I’m not gonna get shot for, like, a pack of cigarettes. I’m not gonna do that.” So, I lied about my age. I falsified my birth certificate again, and told them I was 18. Got a job working long-shoring down on the docks in Seattle. And I would go throw 100-pound sacks of peas, and unload trucks, and work hard. And they paid me tremendous money. At the time, it was like $10.00-something an hour. This was, like, in 1986 or ’87 or something. And I’d work 40 hours a week, and over-time was double-time. And none of the guys would wanna work over-time. Usually it was on Friday, ‘cause they had to get containers out, and those guys all wanted to go to the topless club.


And so, I would work all the over-time at $20.00 an hour as a 16 year old kid. This is in the mid-‘80s. Right? So, I’m loaded. I have money, money, money, money. So, I buy a car, and I start saving for college, doing my stuff. And with my dad – I thank God for my dad. My dad’s like, “You’re a guy. You work. You pay your way. Good. It’s good for you.” And you know what? He’s right. He was totally right. Thank God for my dad. My brother and my other brother and myself, we’re all doing great, making good money, doing fine. My brothers are all in management leadership running companies or businesses. It’s great. You pamper a guy from his youth, and he just – he gets this course of action. All of the sudden he feels like if his hands are dirty, or his muscles are sore, or if he put-in a long day, or thought something was tough, that’s unusual; that’s abnormal. And so, he avoids it.


But even this 2001 sermon is a contrast to the kinds of things Mark Driscoll was recorded as saying even a few years earlier, and not just Driscoll, for that matter.  Writers who observed the earliest years of Mars Hill noticed something about the leadership of Mars Hill and that wasn’t an emphasis on men being men. 

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

Lori Leibovich July/August 1998 Issue
...
"I was raised in a family that went to church, but I had no understanding of what Easter actually meant," Driscoll begins. "It was like Lincoln's birthday or the day Neil Armstrong landed on the moon." The audience laughs. Driscoll comes from a working-class Irish Catholic family. As a kid growing up in Seattle, he says, he was always getting into fights. [emphasis added] When it was time to go to college, he chose Washington State University. "The university I attended was pretty isolated so I had two choices: either become a binge drinker or a Christian."


While a student, Driscoll had a vision that he should start a church for his generation. Without a plan—financial or otherwise—he and his wife, Grace, moved back to Seattle, a city he claims is the "most unchurched in America." Driscoll, who has a bachelor's degree in communications, started his congregation with a dozen people who came to his house to study the Bible. Today, Mars Hill counts 800 members. 
...

"For financial reasons or whatever, the parents of Gen Xers put their lives ahead of their children's," says Lief Moi, 35, a leader at Mars Hill and the co-host, with Driscoll, of "Street Talk," a nationally syndicated Christian radio show. By playing the "dysfunctional family" card, Moi, Driscoll, and others implicitly coax young people to turn to church as a place where they can experience the family and fellowship they missed out on as a kid. The church then becomes appealing to college students for the same reasons that fraternities and sororities are: instant community.
...

By setting themselves up against their elders, postmoderns are ingeniously adding an anti-establishment spirit to their movement. [emphasis added] "I really preach; it's not just three points to a better self-esteem," Driscoll says. "Megachurches have perfect services with perfect lighting. We're a friggin' mess." Driscoll delivers his sermons largely off-the- cuff, and refuses to follow a point-by-point outline like most pastors at megachurches do. "I'm very confrontational," he says, "not some pansy-ass therapist."
...
Tonight's topic is "The American Dream and Postmodernity: Is There Hope for the Future?" and for the first 15 minutes Moi and Driscoll toss out questions and debate them: Can one be a Christian and be an upwardly mobile capitalist? How can young people reconcile Christian tenets such as service, charity, and community with American ideals such as individualism?

"Some of us haven't given ourselves over to the American Dream yet," Driscoll says into the microphone. "How do we make sure we don't become victims of what harmed us— parents who weren't around because they were too busy making money so we could go on vacations and look like a family?" The phones are dead. [emphasis added]


During a commercial break, Driscoll throws up his hands in mock surrender. Moi says, "When we do a show that is philosophical, either they sit back and listen, or it goes over their head. But when we do a controversial or reactionary topic—like paganism or Satanism—we hear from everyone."


Now that the era of Mars Hill has drawn to a close it seems uncontroversial to propose that rather than continue to press philosophical questions Mark Driscoll opted to go for controversial and reactionary topics.  Leibovich was not the only writer who noted that Mark Driscoll’s ethos and ideals were informed not just by a blue collar idiom but by also by inter-generational resentment.  Back in 2009 a blogger who blogged as C. Stirling Bartholomew wrote a few things about meeting the younger Mark Driscoll.

http://alternate-readings.blogspot.com/2009/04/who-does-mark-driscoll-hate-most.html

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

...

When I first met Driscoll he was clerking in a bookstore in Greenwood (North Seattle). I had heard about him. He makes a lot of noise. I knew his father-in-law very well when I was in my teens and 20s but I was long gone when Mark became a regular visitor in that household. When Driscoll came back from college and started doing "street talk" on the radio I would tune in now and then and listen. I noted right away that Driscoll was a generation bigot. He hated 'hippies' with a passion. I suppose this has something to do with growing up blue collar in Seattle which is a northern clone of San Francisco. The war between the hard hats and the flower generation was still in progress when Driscoll was born into the world of hard hats. In the end the hard hats lost the war. The flower children and the neo-pagans took over the culture and nowhere is that more evident than in Seattle. So Driscoll hates what he calls 'hippies' because his people lost the war and now he would like to put the culture back where it was in 1955 and it just isn't going to happen.


Driscoll seems to have adopted the notion that the hard hat world view is somehow connected with Jesus. This is so silly it hardly deserves refutation. Jesus didn't join a union, watch football, drink bud, have a dragon tattooed on his biceps, wasn't a carpenter, didn't have a job, took his disciples away from their jobs ... and generally caused a social disruption where ever he went. Jesus was the antithesis of Mark Driscoll's model of "true manhood". [emphasis added]


It’s nearly axiomatic among a wide range of authors that Mark Driscoll’s Social Gospel is one in which a mid-20^th century nuclear family is restored as though this were something that could be restored.  The shortcoming of this axiomatic observation is that it has been proposed as a reactionary move when, taking all of the details and stories of Mark Driscoll’s life into consideration, Mark Driscoll’s fantasy is not a reactionary desire to get back to something but an aspirational fantasy.  As Driscoll put it, he believes children grow up in the world their fathers create for them.  If the earlier Mark Driscoll leveraged generational resentment and talked about how people could not repeat the mistakes of fathers who just made money without being around for their children, what happened that led Driscoll to begin to praise his father?  One possibility is that after decades of being some kind of nominal Catholic, Mark Driscoll’s father converted to what Mark Driscoll regarded as a real Christian faith.  That this happened is something about which Mark Driscoll has left us in no doubt.


There’s also no doubt Mark Driscoll wanted to create the best possible world for his children to grow up in. If that could include having a contract signed with Result Source to secure a number 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list then, well, if it’s not really illegal or even that uncommon then maybe it’s not really even cheating or gaming a system, is it?


As we saw in Mark Driscoll’s stories about his talking with his dad about getting a new glove for baseball tryouts, Driscoll’s aspirational drive was such that he felt it was justified to fudge facts and game things in his favor.  He’d say of his teen scheming that he wasn’t really a Christian back then, which highlights all the more what changed (or didn’t change) in the years during which Mark Driscoll was embroiled in controversies about the question of whether or not he plagiarized the works of others and why he believed it was okay to use Result Source to promote Real Marriage. 


Driscoll’s credibility within the community formerly known as Mars Hill was the long-term fall out of the discovery that the contrast between the mythology of Driscollian rags to riches (working hard, being honest, and paying your own way) and what was actually done to get Mark Driscoll where he was became impossible to reconcile. It became impossible to reconcile the Mark Driscoll as defender of women cultivated in his sermons and by his fan base in Seattle with the Mark Driscoll of Real Marriage who held forth at surprising length at how much he resented his wife’s frigidity about sex. It became impossible to reconcile Mark Driscoll’s public rhetorical flourishes about the perils of urban ministry with the reality that he’d moved his family into a house in Woodway that wasn’t even in King County. Blogging about the perils of urban ministry while ensconced in a million-dollar home in another county when the expectation from the public is that you’re still in Seattle depends on misunderstanding.

At another level, the Mark Driscoll who’d spent years joking about rednecks as someone who lived as one could only go on so long before tales of taking his baby girl to the ballet could begin to signal the gap between the gritty authenticity of the persona and the discretionary income of the person.  By the time James Cameron’s Avatar hit theaters Driscoll could in one breath talk about how bad consumerism was while sharing casually that he wasn’t against the arts because he had three Tivos and two home theaters. Mark Driscoll had, in the parlance of the redneck, grown way too big for his britches. 

But in the sense that Driscoll spent decades explaining how he grew up in the ghetto there’s something about this that still makes sense.  Driscoll was willing to do whatever it took to escape the white trash roots of his upbringing. It’s possible that anything that could offer the promise of escaping that milieu and into prestige and success for himself and his family seemed worth doing.  When the Result Source controversy erupted what some of Driscoll’s advocates were quick to point out was that what had been done was not illegal or even uncommon.  Perhaps to this day there are those who will propose that Mark Driscoll shouldn’t have gotten so much trouble over Mars Hill’s decision to use Result Source. 

Driscoll has spent decades telling other people what the best way to live life is.  Yet the question of whether or not the kind of reputation you can buy is really worth buying never seemed to cross his mind until the Result Source contract with Mars Hill had become a national headline.  What went unasked in press coverage was why on earth such reputation buying would even make any sense to the leader of Mars Hill.  By 2013 and 2014 Mark Driscoll had taken up the attire of a “father figure”, a kind of Doug Wilson light look that was supposed to convey fatherly credibility.  But the decade’s worth of previous sermons had already told another story. No matter how many suits he got, no matter how fancy they became, no matter how upscale his presentation, Mark Driscoll’s background that he worked so hard to shake free of for the sake of his legacy and for the sake of the family can be summed up as white trash.

In the wake of Mark Driscoll’s resignation after years of controversy at Mars Hill, Doug Wilson proclaimed that what had happened was the revenge of the beta males. Unfortunately for Wilson’s sentiment, there’s nothing about Janet Mefferd or her interview with Mark Driscoll in 2013 that suggests that she was a beta male. The people who stopped attending and stopped giving to Mars Hill Church were people who had a chance to hear Mark Driscoll’s story of how guys need to pay their own way. Over time these people had an opportunity to learn that they were the ones whose sacrifice was giving a man his platform to speak as though … he kinda earned all this stuff himself, really.


If anyone got “revenge” it wasn’t the beta males Doug Wilson imagined were settling some score with Driscoll, it was more likely the donor base of Mars Hill, the patronage groups that Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill depended upon for operational expenses. When the gap between the public persona and its mythology of going from white trash to world-changing pastor Mark Driscoll and the private reality of a man living as secretly as possible in a million-dollar home in another county (who was okay with rigging the New York Times while telling guys to not take shortcuts became too great) the patronage base of Mars Hill apparently threw in the towel. The Mark Driscoll who told Mars Hill in the 2011 film God’s Work, Our Witness could be tolerated telling them they stunk at giving for as long as it could be believed he was in the same county.


But within the Driscoll tribe Mark Driscoll could potentially very literally be seen as the guy who brought salvation to his entire family at every conceivable level, financially, socially and spiritually. Mark Driscoll’s own self-mythologizing about the O’Driscoll name shows us as much. From pirate to pastor is a lot of grace.  Whoever those ancient O’Driscoll kings were, they couldn’t possibly have wielded more influence worldwide than Mark Driscoll did at the peak of his fame. The allure of that narrative may be so potent that if any number of details and nods of credit where it would be due had to get fudged somewhere along the way, well, sorry.  

The case that Mark Driscoll’s journey can be understood as a conscious flight from the idiom of white trash isn’t wildly speculative. All it requires is a careful and steady reading of decades’ worth of his preaching and writing. Mark Driscoll presented his own father as analogous to a biblical patriarch who makes a decision for his household that leads to salvation, and then took an extra step in presenting himself as having taken a further step for himself and his family and even the Driscoll name itself.  

 

While those who have criticized Mark Driscoll for his views on women and gays have tended to see part of the picture, they have seen what could be described as prejudices that could be held within the culture of Irish Catholic white trash without seeing that the Gospel of Mark Driscoll is an epic narrative of redemption from white trash, perhaps paradoxically from within the milieu.  Mark Driscoll’s incarnational theology, by his own preaching, is of a redneck variety. You can take the boy out of the country, the saying goes, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.  Then again, Mark Driscoll has said that children grow up in the world their fathers create, and it looks as though Mark Driscoll has been determined to be a father who creates a world for his children in which they never have to know the life of being white trash. No one should begrudge a man for wanting his children to grow up better off than he was at their age.

The trouble is, as the years of controversy that swirled around him before his resignation began to show us, you can’t keep telling people to not take shortcuts to prestige and respectability that give you the outcome without the work if it turns out you’ve taken some of those shortcuts yourself.  Driscoll said from the pulpit that his dad taught him that you work hard, be honest, and don’t lie. The controversies that surrounded Driscoll had everything to do with how hard he was working writing his books, preaching his sermons, and whose work he relied on in the process and to what extent he gave those people their due. Perhaps there’s a tragic story in all of that, that a man was so determined to build a life for his children in which they never had to deal with the life of being white trash that he forgot, in the midst of working to build that world for them, that he was betraying all of the express ideals of the family that raised him. In eagerly working to escape the sins and failures of white trash, a man lost what he once extolled as their virtues.

Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of [escaping] white trash: Part 10—gratitude and entitlement

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
CHAPTER FIVE, 350-1,000 PEOPLE
[this season begins in early 1999]page 120

A friend in the church kindly allowed me to move into a large home he owned on a lease-to-own deal because I was too broke to qualify for anything but an outhouse. The seventy-year-old house had over three thousand square feet, seven bedrooms on three floors, and needed a ton of work because it had been neglected for many years as a rental home for college students. Grace and I and our daughter Ashley, three male renters who helped cover the mortgage, my study, and the church office all moved into the home. [emphasis added] This put me on the job, literally, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as the boundary between home and church was erased.

 

We ran the church out of my house for nearly two years, including leadership meetings and Bible studies for various groups on almost every night of the week. It was not uncommon to have over seventy people a week in our home. Grace got sucked right back into the church mess. She was a great host to our guests. But I started growing bitter toward her because I was again feeling neglected.

 

FISHES AND LOAVES
Part 12 of The Gospel of John
Pastor Mark Driscoll | John 6:1-14 | January 21, 2001

Grace and I, when we first started the church, we were living in a little rented home in Wallingford and we were starting our family. And Grace was working, and she was making good money, and she wanted to – we wanted to pull her out of work so that we could start our family. And our deal was, “Well we have to buy a house now, because if we just try to qualify for a house off of my income, we’re gonna end up with a honey bucket in Puyallup. That’s about all we’re gonna prequalify for. [emphasis added]

 

It’s worth quoting at length another sermon from 2001. Because it turned out that even though Mark Driscoll knew his finances were so bad that if it was all in him to provide for the house of Driscoll they’d be living in, as he put it, a Honeybucket in Puyallup, that was no obstacle to his preaching the following:

http://download.marshill.se/files/2001/10/28/20011028_men-and-masculinity_sd_audio.mp3

MEN AND MASCULINITY
Part 5 of Proverbs
Pastor Mark Driscoll | October 28, 2001 

The world is filled – if there’s anything I see right now with young men at Mars Hill, it is complete avoidance of their masculinity.  They think that because they sing a few songs and they don’t do anything real bad, that they’re men. No. [emphasis added] These are guys who – I’ll just give you some pictures. Should we do that? Should we just take the fig-leaf off and speak for a moment? These are guys who, 30 of them pack into a studio apartment and pay $25.00 each a month for rent, and have no plans of changing that, because then they only have to work five hours a week at their dead-end job, and spend the rest of their time doing whatever it is that they want to do. These are guys who don’t pick careers. They don’t pick jobs. They don’t go out and cultivate anything. They’re not building businesses. They’re not building their spirituality. They’re not building ministries. They’re not building relationships. They’re not building families. They’re really not doing anything. They’re just avoiding it altogether. Okay?
...

Some guys are like that. They’re looking for a short cut, all the time, but there’s no short cut. There’s only the long, hard road. [emphasis added] And God did that intentionally to build into the man toughness, resilience, patience, fortitude, strength, to keep chipping away until it breaks. And some guys go, “Well, I don’t know. That looks like a lot of work. I might, you know, break my nail. I don’t – I’m going to go home now and I’ll pray about it.” So, there’s where you get guys who are on their eight-year undergraduate plan. What are you studying? “Nothing. But, my parents said they’ll give me money as long as I go to school.” Well, great. I mean, that’s awesome. You’re now in your 40’s. You gonna declare a major? Like, you gotta get somewhere. You gotta step-up.
...

These guys are just – they’re avoiding all their responsibilities. What they want, they want food without working. They want drink without working. They want sex without marriage. They want a house without a mortgage. These guys look at means and ends, and they want the ends but they don’t want any of the toil that comes with the means. So, they try and find a short-cut. [emphasis added] “Well, I’ll just steal his money. And I’ll drink his beer. And I’ll sleep on his couch. And I’ll sleep with that girl.” [Whistles] Good. Whoa, short-cuts. Praise the Lord. And Solomon’s looking at his son and saying, “This is just foolish folly. This is just dumb. This isn’t going anywhere. You weren’t created for this.” Here’s how they get there; something for us all to think about

This would make the irony inherent in the controversy surrounding Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill using Result Source to secure a #1 spot for Real Marriage on The New York Times bestseller list all the more amazing.  Because, as we know, about a decade later, contracting to have a Driscoll book place on that list was what Mars Hill did.  When the news broke the initial defense from Mars Hill leadership was that it wasn’t unusual or illegal, really, just maybe not wise.  What it was, without finessing the matter, was a shortcut, a way to secure a #1 spot for Mark Driscoll’s name with help from a company, and with help from making the entirety of Mars Hill get the book so that Driscoll could preach through it.  Having spent so much of his ministry telling other guys not to take shortcuts, he was taking them. He couldn’t afford to buy his own home for his family but he could accept the generosity of a lease-to-own deal from a friend.  He could also accepting having single guys renting space from him but there’s more we need to know about who the single guys were.

If we cross reference to God’s Work, Our Witness, the 2011 fundraising film, we can recall that Mark Driscoll explained that the interns lived in the house.

http://marshill.se/marshill/media/gods-work-our-witness/gods-work-our-witness 

God's Work, Our Witness

December 4, 2011

about 27:33

The Driscolls’ Basement

Once we got kicked out of that building, literally everything moved back into our house. So offices in our house across from our bedroom, interns in the basement. [emphasis added]

Pastor Matt: Poor Grace. Like, it was so ghetto down there because, I mean, you know bachelors. There’s like three guys living down there, and the dishes would just stack up, stack up. I remember they’d start stinking real bad. And every couple of weeks, like, we’d see the dishes done. I’d come home from work, and I’d say, “Hey, man, did you do the dishes? Thanks.” He was like, “Nah, I think Grace did them again.”

Grace: We shared laundry facilities and so, yeah, I just ended up cleaning half the time, because it was—I couldn’t even stay down there to do laundry. It was so disgusting.

 

It’s too late to suggest that internships in which you pay rent to your internship overseer is probably going to have problems. 

 

It may just be that in the last twenty years Mark Driscoll never thought of anything that was offered to him as even possibly being a shortcut. Contrary to the quaint theorizing of Doug Wilson, who proposed that the fall of Mark Driscoll presented an opportunity for “revenge of the beta males”, Mark Driscoll’s ministry at Mars Hill depended upon the generosity and patronage of untold numbers of people who gave him opportunities that, had it been a matter of strictly by going off of his own resources and merits, he couldn’t have gotten.   Driscoll himself joked about how inadequate his financial resources were over the years.  People were willing to believe in him and invest in him and give him a hand up.  

 

By the 2011 fundraising film he was willing to say that Mars Hill historically sucked at giving.  But then he was willing to lecture men at Mars Hill about lazily taking shortcuts while living in a house he couldn’t have afforded on any other basis than a lease-to-own back in 2001.  Throw in that by 2011 he had research assistants and help from the Docent Group and a functionally captive audience in the form of his church to which to pitch his Real Marriage book and it “could” look as though he used every shortcut available to cement his celebrity, all for Jesus’ fame of course.  

 

That Driscoll named one of his LLC’s Lasting Legacy and buying a house with a Future Hope Revocable Living Trust befits a man who is concerned about his legacy and the legacy of his family. The trouble wasn’t that he wanted to provide for his family, it was that … to borrow from the redneck lexicon, he’d shown himself too big for his britches and was living too high on the hog for what he was genuinely able to do of his own resources.  He’d managed to go through the history of Mars Hill receiving the faith and generosity of countless people and yet to go by the stories people began to share as they left Mars Hill, or even to go by the things Mark Driscoll was willing to say about his own community when fisking them for their stinginess, this was a man who was willing to regard his own donor base with contempt.  Once that base of supporters figured out how Mark Driscoll was really willing to treat people who’d sacrificed so much to contribute to the legacy of Mars Hill that was increasingly the personalized legacy of Mark Driscoll, they began to balk. 

 

And Mark Driscoll’s epic tale of the Driscoll clan as kings who became peasants than pirates and became worthless white trash until one patriarch named Joe decided “enough” and took the infant Mark Driscoll to Seattle, well, it’s like a biblical patriarch taking a child into the promised land or something.  That Mark Driscoll could ever seriously write “from pastor to pirate is a lot of grace” depended on his being able to symbolically present himself as the culmination of a cosmic redemption across space and time for a clan he himself said was a bunch of worthless drunk criminal white trash.  So what was so valuable in that?  Driscoll escaped from that.  Mark Driscoll’s Gospel is of a redneck Jesus who saved rednecks from being rednecks, a Gospel of escaping from the dead end of being white trash. Where the early Mark Driscoll seemed able to perceive that this was not possible without receiving a graciously bestowed gift, the later Mark Driscoll could be construed as coming to regard it as something he was entitled to by dint of a divine commission.  Increasingly the story of Mars Hill stopped being an “our” story and became a “my” story about Mark Driscoll and his immediate family.

 

There’s something in the story of Mark Driscoll’s rise and fall that could be instructive for progressives and conservatives.  That Mark Driscoll’s background was urban redneck white trash has been so amply testified to by Driscoll himself it hardly needs to be explained further.  But it has needed explaining because when conservatives and progressives have reacted to Mark Driscoll it hasn’t always been clear they understand what they’re reacting to.  His paradoxical mixture of simultaneously leveraging and lambasting redneck tropes to define himself in public has largely gone undiscussed at a serious level. 

 

Instead we’ve seen decades of people on the left and right have visceral reactions to the persona-shaping and branding without seeming to know what they were reacting to. We had a Mark Driscoll who was telling tales of life in the ghetto while declaring most of that white trash deserved their poverty because they made stupid decisions and were immoral.  This was the kind of raillery that could line up with the assumptions of both progressives and conservatives about the white working class or underclass. 

 

For urban progressives belittling the redneck could be about their ignorance, their racism, their misogyny and any number of other things. For conservatives belittling the redneck could be about their lack of virtue, their lack of initiative, their laziness and their unworthiness of serious consideration.  That the Macarthur wing of American Christianity took umbrage with Driscoll’s cavalier redneck take on the Bible said more about the irreverence they believed Driscoll brought to the Bible by describing it in white trash terms than it said about how Mark Driscoll approached explaining the polemic in the Genesis story of the origin of Moab.  

 

Driscoll spent his public ministry at Mars Hill proposing that if you were ticking off the left and the right then you were probably doing the right thing.  He managed to position himself, through his rhetoric and the calibration of his publicity stunts, as the sensible centrist in the midst of crazy reactionary fundamentalists like John MacArthur and crazy godless liberals a la John Shelby Spong.  He also presented himself as the hard life kid who escaped the ghetto by being a better person.  That completely plays into a conservative ideal of someone escaping poverty by being prudent.  

 

But that wasn’t exactly what he did.  By his own account he fudged his birthdate to get a job he wasn’t legally old enough to do to get money to buy a car he didn’t have a license for.  But even if we set all that aside, let’s get back to that lease-to-own deal he talked about.  Driscoll needed a hand up from other people. Here is where conservatives have an incomplete paradigm.  Driscoll needed a hand up, so to speak.  He needed patronage from people and institutions willing to believe in him.  That could sound positively progressive, couldn’t it?  He worked hard, by his own account (at least early on before he delegated a lot of that work to research aides and got breath-takingly lazy about citing sources in a couple of books). But he also was given a lot of generous financial and social support.  

 

In order to understand how Mark Driscoll’s rise and fall were so drastic as they were, it’s important to understand his persona and the gap between this persona and the conduct of the person.  We’ve seen, at length, how the Mark Driscoll who berated young guys for taking shortcuts to success depended on the generosity of patrons and church members who made sacrifices to the cause of Mars Hill. At length Driscoll’s approach to that patronage base became condescending and even insultingly cavalier in the 2011 film God’s Work, Our Witness.  When Driscoll described how God showed up it was referencing people with the ability to write big checks.  When Driscoll regaled the internet with the perils of urban ministry in 2013 he did so as someone who had already moved his family into a million-dollar home in Woodway, Washington. But in a sense all of this can make sense if we see this as the work of a man determined to escape his childhood behind a strip club in the SeaTac area, the determination of a man to create a world for his children in which they’d never have to experience more than jokes about a redneck white trash existence.  

 

By 2014 the empire had collapsed under the weight of years of controversy and declining membership and attendance. Whereas other authors have weathered plagiarism scandals and reports of using Result Source, Driscoll’s reputation began to nosedive with the plagiarism and Result Source controversies.  What was at stake?  Well, perhaps the simplest way to explain it all is to point out that the discovered conduct of Mark Driscoll as a person was found to be so diametrically at odds with the ethics preached by his public persona the empire formerly known as Mars Hill was not able to survive that calamity. You can’t really preach to thousands of people about how you shouldn’t take shortcuts if seven or eight of your books have been documented by someone like Warren Throckmorton as having failed to cite panoply of books in the first editions of your books.  

 

When Janet Mefferd made her public statement on air to Driscoll about his work having plagiarism she had backed up her claims with evidence so irrefutable that the Trial study guide was retracted. Driscoll began to talk on The Resurgence about how he was taking over editorial duties.  But by March 2014 the Mars Hill contract with Result Source was in the news and questions about the credibility of Mark Driscoll’s product and the way one of his products was promoted got at the heart of the public persona.  This was beginning to look like a man whose celebrity depended on taking the shortcuts he’d spent years telling other men to not take. 

 

Having spent years preaching about how the poor people in the trashy neighborhood he used to live in as a kid were poor because they made stupid choices, the revelation that Driscoll had a book that became a best-seller through a Result Source contract, and that the book was one of the books featured in a plagiarism controversy, it all began to make Driscoll’s persona seem like a sham.  How did a man who could preach so adamantly that guys not take shortcuts not recognize that using Result Source was taking a shortcut to the status of being a bestselling author?  As we’ve seen from Driscoll’s stories about his own life, he could be described as a man who keeps his eyes on the prize, sometimes to the point where he was willing to fudge facts and game systems to get to where he wanted to be. Even if Mark Driscoll definitively escaped the urban white trash milieu he grew up in so that his family would never know it, the cumulative evidence of the shortcuts and hand-outs he took to make that flight began to suggest that he’d gone from having a sense of gratitude to a sense of entitlement.  The Mark Driscoll who talked about how some of us hadn’t sold out to the American Dream yet back in 1998 became the Mark Driscoll who said in 2007, “There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus …  You either get on the bus or get run over by the bus. Those are the two options, but the bus ain’t gonna stop.”  

 

By 2010 Mark Driscoll was sharing how, “From pirate to pastor would be a lot of grace” as he talked about how the O’Driscolls went from being kings to peasants to pirates to redneck nobodies. From pirate to pastor would be a lot of grace if Mark Driscoll had ever been a pirate but he was another urban redneck who wanted to escape the confines of that life.  This fantasy that the entire name of Driscoll found some kind of redemption in Mark Driscoll having become a pastor who co-founded a megachurch that, at its peak, boasted more campuses than the O’Driscolls had castles when they ruled as kings in Ireland reads like the American kind of “redemption” that is not just redemption from a life of sin and vice but also a Norman Vincent Peale worthy path to total self-actualization, even a Joel Osteen style Your Best Life Now.  That in the wake of his resignation from Mars Hill Church Mark Driscoll has found allies among teachers with a more prosperity-laden theology is not a surprise—it’s what we could expect from a man whose public ministry has been peppered with sermons about his urban white trash upbringing, the embarrassments it caused him, and the determination with which he set out to escape that life for his own sake and for the sake of the family he planned to have. 

 

If we bear in mind Driscoll’s urban redneck background it begins to make sense of most of the controversies associated with his pontifications on subjects like music, masculinity, femininity and culture. The imprint of a likely nominalist Irish Catholic working class upbringing probably did far more to shape the Driscollian ethos than his Calvinism, however much writers have attempted to explicate Driscoll through his Calvinist jargon.  Driscoll embraced with relish any controversies that could center on his public persona and, as 2012 through 2014 demonstrated, scrupulously avoided discussing controversies that dealt with the governance of Mars Hill or finances.  For as often as writers reacted to what Mark Driscoll insisted on saying about social issues they were distracted from looking at the issues of money and power, let alone considering the life Mark Driscoll had been saying he sought to escape over decades of preaching.  The Gospel according to Mark Driscoll is a gospel of breaking free of the sins and vices of white trash.  Early on it could take the form of an intergenerational resentment back in the days when Mark Driscoll did not consider his own father to really be a Christian, but it was able to transform into a more optimistic narrative of family redemption after Joe Driscoll became what Mark Driscoll considered a real Christian. 

By 2010 this Gospel could become a tale of how Mark Driscoll becoming a pastor constituted a kind of redemption of the name of Driscoll itself.  About a year after Mark Driscoll shared his O’Driscoll redemption tale, the fundraising film God’s Work, Our Witness was completed and distributed to members of Mars Hill. It was also the title of a sermon series.  The film could be read as a story of a “we” that was the whole of Mars Hill with Mark Driscoll and his family as a synecdoche for a movement, at least at the start of the film. By film’s end, when Driscoll scolded Mars Hill for its failure to give money to the cause, the fundraising film from 2011 could be taken as revealing that Mars Hill community and history as a whole were a synecdoche for Mark Driscoll’s personal ambitions and vision for his life with his family.  When we look back on the words of Joe Driscoll about his son and remember that Mark Driscoll was a student voted “most likely to succeed” for mention in his high school year book, we’re looking at a man of such ambition that had he not settled on being a pastor he was still determined to be a leader of real men. Joe Driscoll said of his son “He was always into something” and when we look at the things the father said about his son the pattern in “something” was leading people.  Driscoll aspired to be a family man, by his own account, and he aspired to create a world for them that would be as unlike the world he knew growing up as he could make. 

 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting a better life for yourself and your family but the controversies that surrounded Driscoll revealed to former members of Mars Hill that the man who had spent his public career telling men not to take shortcuts and not to game systems had been found out to be a man who was willing to take shortcuts and game systems.  The man who said that abusive men shifted blame began to seem like he was willing to shift blame. Driscoll’s criticism of the redneck was the lazy, stupid stuff they were willing to do because they lacked ambition.  He never seems to have realized that a man can decide to game systems and take shortcuts because of his ambition.  

 

When the people who were once Mars Hill began to discover these things about Mark Driscoll many of them did what he once asked to do if he ever went off the rails in theology or personal ethics, they left, just like he asked them to.  After discovering that Mark Driscoll seemed to possess the same vices as the rednecks he’d spent his whole public ministry making fun of as though he were no longer one of them, abandoning Mark Driscoll’s legacy project was arguably the most Christian thing to do.

on the eve of what would be the 20th anniversary of the church formerly known as Mars Hill

http://marshill.se/marshill/2009/10/06/happy-birthday-mars-hill-2


Sunday, October 11 is my thirty-ninth birthday, the twentieth anniversary of my salvation (the exact date is known only by God), and the thirteenth anniversary of Mars Hill Church. So, on that day we will air at all campuses a special one-hour sermon from Acts 17 that I preached live this summer while standing on Mars Hill in Athens.

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If there were a Mars Hill Church then tomorrow would be the twentieth anniversary.  But there is no Mars Hill now, although Mark Driscoll can celebrate another birthday. To remember the anniversary that cannot be because there is no longer a Mars Hill we'll have a series up tomorrow considering a lot of things said by one of the co-founders, the one who left the most words for the record to be considered.