HT to Mockingbird in particular.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/03/another-week-ends-buffy-summers-joan-didion-progressive-comfort-zones-petrified-wood-hapless-patriots-and-silent-faith/
What's stranger to think about than the idea that Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now twenty years old is that, for some reason, I feel as though time has not been that kind to the series.
The basic premise of the show is a wry twist on a horror trope, that the ditzy blonde who is usually first to get killed off ends up being the victorious final girl. It's perhaps clever in an inversely proportional relationship to how seriously people attempt to read socio-political significance into it.
I kinda began to lose interest in the series starting in season 3. Once the characters graduated from high school it seemed like the conceit of the premise was in some ways played out. Cheeky riffs on how American high schools are rampant with a suffocating caste system and supernatural evil is funny and also able to be poignant but for me a lot of the charm of this premise depended on it staying within the insular confines of the American high school of the public school variety.
From season 4 onward it began to seem that Buffy Summers was no longer a playful quip-as-character about horror genre tropes. The characters grew and changed but there were things that were lost as well as gained. Buffy Summers is a super-heroine and I'm afraid that as her series mythology expanded to approach the mythic aspirations and proportions so endemic to superhero narratives these last twenty years Buffy became ... more routine.
I've also come around to the thought that Whedon gets a disproportionately large amount of credit for creating characters that would not be what they are if he wasn't so fortunate as to keep being able to work with actresses who are better than the dialogue he writes for them. That the writers for Buffy began to cater to and tailor lines to the strengths and interests of the cast could be normal television writing. Had Hannigan not been cast as Willow Rosenberg we would have gotten a completely, almost inconceivably different character than the one we got.
Now maybe back in the decade when Fukuyama could talk about "the end of history" the arch genre savvy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer could work in a way that it might not n the Bush 2 era of the War on Terror. Without having the patience to explain on a late Friday night post exactly how and why, Whedon's creation was paradoxically easier to enjoy when it didn't take itself seriously and the more seriously the people making the show took themselves as to "what" they were saying the less interest I had in the show. I didn't really follow it steadily after a few episodes in season 4. Apparently for loyalists the show took flight between seasons 3 and 5. Buffy died at the end of five but was brought back for two more seasons. The comics, it seems, have us in a season 10 of some kind.
So Buffy is Batman or Superman at this point.
The transformation from wry riff on horror tropes to self-serious superheroine seems to be complete. It's not that there aren't fun episodes along the way ... but Whedon now seems like a one-trick pony. It's a great trick more often than not but a super-powered vampire slayer in some ways set Whedon down an odd path.
I can't find any reason to like River Tam, for instance. It's not about an aversion to strong or compelling female characters. I enjoy novels by Jane Austen. Joan Didion's been one o my touchstones as a blogger. Rumiko Takahasi possesses what I regard as a gift for comedic genius. I love the Powerpuff Girls. Katara and Toph from The Last Airbender are wonderful characters. I plan to see Wonder Woman.
But Whedon deserves at least some, or even a lot, of blame for what's known as waif-fu. River Tam embodies the waif-fu trope in a way that is easier to see as a trope. Now tiny women wielding swords can work. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ran with the fiery beautiful waif with a blade causing trouble. But the minute she dealt with seasoned fighters she was as good as dead and the story drove this home. Jen's egotism and self-regarded led to the doom of the people she cared about and she took her own life as a kind of penance.
Yes, we've had Kate and Milla doing a kind of waif-fu but a vampire and a super-powered guinea pig can break the rules of physics. River Tam's a punchline about a 90 pound girl beating up a guy two to three times her weight that is not the Slayer but who is supposed to be able to kick ass just because.
Can she manipulate the earth itself? Nope? Can she bend the water in your body on a full moon night to make you do what she wants you to do? No. Can she generate electrical bursts that can blow holes in your abdomen or blow-torch your hand off with fire? No. Katura, Toph and Azula in The Last Airbender are tiny girls who wield huge amounts of power thanks to the magical abilities they have in their narrative world. But what they all do is manipulate the environment in ways that give them an advantage. It's not the same thing as grabbing a blade, talking about how nothing in the universe can stop you, and then just magically winning off-screen aka Serenity.
In comics fandom River has a collossal character shield. Buffy's invulnerability worked at two levels. She had magical super-powers for one, but at another level the joke that the blonde who would normally be killed off first can't be killed so easily sold the joke.
Buffy became a joke that wanted us to take it seriously. The question the series has not necessarily answered is "why?" Is there a feminist text or subtext that could give us a reason? Well ... yes ... but then there's how Whedon and company put female characters in refrigerators, so to speak. Whedon and company were reveling in torturing characters and killing them before they could get what they wanted before Martin's Game of Thrones became prestige TV.
At some point if you do that to female characters enough times shouldn't you ... say ... lose the empowered female card? If we step back and consider how many female characters got killed off by the writers throughout the series just for the feels it seems that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in some crucial respects far more retrograde about women as agents than an earlier show from the same decade, The X-Files. Tropes abounded on that show, too, but The X-Files could send themselves up better than anyone else could.
What ultimately feels off about Joss Whedon's approach to story-telling is that insistence upon life-and-death stakes while simultaneously quipping away. Age of Ultron rolled out Arvo Part's Kyrie from the Berliner Mass and also gave us Hawkeye rambling in a trying-too-hard contrast between the epic destruction and his aspirations of domestic redecorating. Qucksilver's inevitable death might have carried more weight if we hadn't seen Elizabeth Olson's Scarlet Witch dutifully falling to her knees and screaming in trailers. As Honest Trailers put it last year (?) there's only so many times the villain's master plan can involve a beam of light with a halo of junk floating around it before the villain plots wear thin. You can make fairly small adjustments to the villain arc and have it work. Let's say the villain realizes that the heroes can't be defeated by the bad guys but you could try to get them to fight each other. Civil War, there you go. Or you could have a shadow form of an old villainous cabal infiltrate the team of the heroes and silently take over, Winter Soldier. Part of what has made the Captain America series hold up a little better than the other franchises in Marvel is the stories, though they may have issues, take seriously the idea that many a villain recognizes that a straight up fight with the powers of good is likely to fail. Why try to overpower when you can mislead?
So it's interesting that with two Avengers movies in a row Whedon's stories were all about power against power with the heroes winning. We're going to get Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet ... and Whedon's not going to be helming that project. Since my feeling about Marvel villains is that they are interesting in an inversely proportional relationship to how powerful they are I might skip Infinity War.
Nolan's films lack Whedon's witticisms but I admit to liking Nolan's Batman films more than I like the Avengers films (the first was fun and the second was frustrating). While Christopher Nolan's Batman films have been scorned in some quarters as too grim, too dark, too nasty and brutish we might want to forego making this judgment by way of comparison to Marvel films, often too drunk on their own sense of wit to take themselves seriously at the points they need to. Nolan's characters generally don't quip in the face of the death of innocent bystanders or their own potential demise. Agent Coulson was belittling Loki with his putatively dying words in The Avengers. That, too, would have had more pathos if not for bathos ... and since in Marvel there's this macabre joke that nobody stays dead except for maybe Uncle Ben ... death in the land of the super-powered isn't final.
Unless you're not a superhero and can die like anyone else.
But then Buffy got brought back from the dead. Much like Superman in the previous decade, Buffy Summers' death was undone in a fairly short period of time. By the end of the TV series Buffy had distributed the power of the Slayer to an army of slayers-in-training. The climax of the series involved Buffy questioning the foundational premise of the show. Now perhaps this was intended to be profound and ... maybe ... it was for some people. By the time I slogged through season 7 it seemed that straight up questioning the premise of the show could be taken as a sign that all the old rules that the early show's humor depended upon were being explicitly rejected. Whedon and company wanted us to take Buffy seriously in the midst of proposing that the rules changed. Okay, series finale ... and here we are years later with comics and Buffy joining the ranks of the super-powered ... .
I don't know. At this point I might just stick with Batman or read some old Wonder Woman comics. It's always the end of the world and the world is never really going to end. Even post-apocalyptic futures depend on the assumption that this world isn't really going to end. Maybe we could be mean and put it another way, we don't so much believe the world is going to end as much as we believe that a world without US in it is not a world worth living in. Buffy was more fun to watch when she didn't exactly want to save the world but did it anyway because then she could go to the dance or hang out with friends at The Bronze. When so much of the humor of a character comes from her demonstrable belief that she really has more fun and interesting things she'd like to be doing with her time than fighting the evil undead and saving the world can you really go all the way toward taking Buffy seriously as a character who faces shattering experiences when the foundational conceit of her character is regarding the apocalyptic as trivial and the trivial as apocalyptic?
Whedon's really gone much farther on the good graces of actresses better than the dialogue he writes for them than he may have deserved.
And yet Whedon's not necessarily to blame for a culture in which so much discourse has trafficked in the apocalyptic and in which in the political sphere people are described in terms applicable to superheroes and supervillains. We have not lost a capacity for apocalypticism in terms of surreal and exaggerated imagery but we may have lost the older sense of the apocalyptic as a revelation of what the world is really like. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was fun in the first three seasons when it leveraged the insularity of high school experience and the expectations of horror tropes by anchoring them in the limited perspective of its teenage protagonists. It was also a bit more charming when we had a Buffy who actively objected to and resisted all the weight and seriousness of the Slayer role Giles lectured her about. She made a sympathetic Chosen One because she couldn't hide her feeling that being a Chosen One was really just super lame.
By season four Buffy might as well have been Batman, even a Christopher Nolan style Batman.
But there was that loquacious cast constantly playing off each other. There were all the inside jokes, the pop culture references, the banter. Keeping that up on television season after season is no small feat. As 1990s geeky specialists in stories about insular self-regarding loquacious people go Joss Whedon came into his own at the end of the Clinton years while in cinema Whit Stillman was confecting three films about what he called the doomed bourgeois in love. It's a deliberately weird and impudent comparison to make, Joss Whedon's television aesthetic and Whit Stillman's stagey cinematic/literary aesthetic--but it might be a useful comparison to consider seeing as I've written for Mockingbird for years and Mockingbird has some love both Whedon and Stillman.
So I'm just going to throw this idea out--Joss Whedon takes characters seriously but not ideas. Whit Stillman takes ideas seriously but does not necessarily take his characters seriously. Maybe Whedon wants hope but it's hard to say on what basis he observes hope for humanity.
Maybe Whedon wants to run with this idea that everyone who made it through adolescence is a hero but who in their right mind can honestly believe that? Saying he wanted Buffy to be iconic is direct, but this gets me thinking about someone else who has been saying he wanted to create a potent mythology that would distill for a generation what friendship and honor and all that mean, George Lucas. Has Buffy the Vampire Slayer found a niche in television comparable to that of Star Wars for film? Apparently so, if the fan bases are any indicators.
So here we are at twenty years of Buffy. As super-powered girls from shows in the late 1990s go I'm finding that I like Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup now pretty much as much as I did back then. Buffy, it's weird that for a show I enthusiastically watched in the 1990s I haven't felt much interest in going back to it. It feels like Whedon had the advantage of being a third-generation screenwriter able to work with actresses who brought his ideas to life and while he might half-jokingly talk about how woke he is these days or fret about the narcissistic psychopath in the Oval Office, there's a sense in which generations of white male privilege were necessary preconditions for his brand. And the thing is, a bit weirdly as I mull it over this weekend, Whedon's vision of his achievement may have been blinkered by looking at his legacy in televised terms. Whedon's brand of progressivism seems to have been a precondition for the imputed greatness of his female-led action show.
And yet he tries to separate politics from art. Maybe that's a weakness rather than a strength. Stillman, since I bothered to compare Whedon to Stillman, comes off like he's kind of a conservative Episcopalian sort in both religion and politics but it may be his work benefits from that. Whedon's axiom of trying to keep his politics and his art distinct could explain why his second Avengers film felt like a slog. If he thought he was saying the Avengers were rich peole out of touch that didn't extend to himself, apparently. Which gets to the juxtaposition, Whit Stillman's whole cinematic career has been about lampooning just how extravagantly out of touch with the world rich kids are and Stillman's managed to do this while coming across like he's not a progressive about either politics or religion. That scene in Metropolitan where Audrey goes to Christmas mass didn't come off like the kind of scene that would have been written or filmed by a secularist.
So in a way I guess I stand by the proposal, that Whedon wants characters to be taken seriously but not ideas. If he did want ideas to be taken seriously he'd be as unashamed as Stillman to build entire movies out of debates about the merits and demerits of ideas. It might be, too, that Stillman recognizes his patrician stock in a way Whedon doesn't.
Well, in any case, I guess here's to twenty years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Friday, March 10, 2017
Tuesday, March 07, 2017
Jen Smidt shares story with Pastor with no Answers on podcast
First, let's note that it was just slightly over five years ago this month that Mars Hill Church in Seattle, in response to escalated controversy surrounding the disciplinary procedures employed against some members, posted "A Call for Reconciliation". Since Mars Hill dissolved as a corporate entity at the end of last calendar year they don't necessarily have this up of themselves but there is an archival site that can be referenced if you don't already have a penchant for plugging things into The Wayback Machine.
http://marshill.se/marshill/2012/03/02/a-call-for-reconciliation
Seeing as Mark Driscoll's still on schedule to speak at The Stronger Man conference perhaps people who go to the conference can give a listen to this while they wait a month-ish to hear what Driscoll has to say.
While we're at it ... anyone who read the following post:
Mark Driscoll to be a guest speaker at Stronger Men conference April 28-29 2017, plenty of time to ask Eric Mason how he's set to speak at a conference alongside Driscoll after signing off on booting MH and MD from A29
might be interested to know that Eric Mason's been on a leave of absence from being on the Acts 29 board. So, technically, an Acts 29 board member is not, strictly speaking, speaking at an event where Driscoll's also a speaker. So ... perhaps at a woodenly literal level, nobody from Acts 29 executive leadership is speaking at an event in any Acts 29 capacity, which is handy, since the Acts 29 board removed Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll from membership in Acts 29 citing that Driscoll had demonstrated disqualifying behavior.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/08/two-years-ago-today-acts-29-removed.html
Or, at least, they did a few years ago. Good luck finding any signs of that without help from The Wayback Machine now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083820/http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/a-message-from-the-board-of-acts-29-concerning-mark-driscoll-and-mars-hill-church/
It's necessary to remind ourselves that a couple of years after the Acts 29 board, which included Darrin Patrick, expressed concern that Driscoll needed to step down from ministry and seek help, Patrick himself ended up out of ministry. This was the Patrick of whom Driscoll used to say "He's my pastor, you know?"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/in-light-of-darrin-patrick-news-lets.html
The question of why Mason considered Driscoll fit to be sharing a podium or event with in spite of the Acts 29 statement from a few years ago that Mason signed off which strongly indicated (if taken literally or seriously) he felt Driscoll was unfit for ministry, could be asked by someone ... perhaps at some other time.
The social wreckage seems broad-ranging enough that it's not a surprise former leaders still feel like things need to be said. With that in mind, the podcast with Jen Smidt,which is slightly under 80 minutes long, more or less.
https://player.fm/series/pastor-with-no-answers/74-mars-hill-church-speaks-w-jen-smidt
Given the often prolix nature of this blog there's no promise that the ensuing comments will be brief.
One of the things Smidt mentioned was a story of how she said something to an executive elder and the next day her husband received a tongue-lashing and a warning that he needed to, basically, get his wife in line. That kind of story is not particularly surprising to hear or read about Mars Hill executive leadership. Smidt's comments about women seeming to have a marginal role in general but that she, paradoxically, had a significant writing and even teaching role within the history of Mars Hill is something you can hear in the podcast. What comes to mind, at the risk of still speaking too generally, is that one of the threads in the leadership culture could be described as a different set of standards for leaders and laity. This seems alluded to somewhat in Smidt's conversation, how once branded "leadership" people within Mars Hill treated leaders very differently than ordinary members.
Smidt's comments reminded me that in the Houston interview Grace Driscoll asserted that she never thought of her husband Mark as in any way misogynistic.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/revisiting-grace-driscolls-2015-ive.html
http://hillsongchurchwatch.com/2015/07/14/transcript-of-brian-houstons-nice-interview-with-mark-grace-driscoll-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSnqty0RUbU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5D9AQDfQHE
http://brianchouston.com/
Brian Houston: “So when in Australia your visits started to rise to the floor in secular Australia that word misogynistic. Uh, started being thrown around fairly liberally. I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary and it says, “dislike of, contempt for, or engrained prejudice against women.” Are you, were you ever misogynist?” (35:35-36:55)
Mark Driscoll: “No, but because of things I have said foolishly, that impression is entirely my fault, and I have no one to blame but myself. That’s now how I feel, that’s not what I think, um, but for certain, have uh, allowed that to become an impression.” (36:56-37:15)
Brian Houston: “Sure, and those are things you said when you were in your late 20’s.” (37:16-37:18)
Mark Driscoll: “Yeah, and I have a heart to see, part of this Pastor Brian is, young men aren’t going to church, young men aren’t going to college, young men aren’t marrying women young, young men are not raising their children, and I have such a deep burden and passion to see men. You know, 1 Corinthians 13 when I was a child I thought like a child I spoke like a child I acted like a child, when I became a man I put childish ways behind me. I want to compel young men to grow up to take responsibility and sometimes in doing that I have communicated that in a way that demeans women and that’s not helpful and that’s not right and in the grace of God I need to repent and do better at that. But I still want, I mean no one would say that young men are in the western world highly impressive and we’re all encouraged. There’s a lot of work to be done. And so, I regret the times that I have not communicated in such a way trying to compel them and up and it seems I’m pushing the women down and that’s my fault.” (37:19-38:20)
Brian Houston: “That’s how you feel. You can change moving forward?” (38:21-38:23)
Mark Driscoll: “I hope to with the Grace of God yeah, absolutely.” (38:24-38:27)
Brian Houston: “Good.” (38:28)
Grace Driscoll: “I mean, I’ve never seen him as a misogynist, and never even thought that him of that at all. So, I’ve witnessed the opposite and so, and I’ve known him 27 years And so I can say yes there were methods that were wrong in the beginning but I knew his heart.” (38:29-38:46)
Here's the thing, Mark Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare instruction session was a leaders-only message, not instruction made available to the masses until years later. Now perhaps Grace Driscoll was not at that teaching session and didn't hear or otherwise come into contact with the following:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-2-part_70.html
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 2: The Devil
49:58
How about this one? Idle gossip and busybodying. 1 Timothy 5:11-15. THIS one is amazing. Ladies this one is especially for you. Some of you say, "Oh, it's not me." Yeah, it is. [emphasis added] 1 Timothy 5:11-15, "but refuse to enroll younger widows for when their passions draw them away from Christ they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith. Besides that they learn to be idlers" Women learn how to make a lot of free time. Going about from house to house. Well now it would be from email to email and from phone call to phone call. Technology makes idle busybodying far more effective than ever.
And not only idlers but also gossips. They like to talk about people. How are you doing? What are you doing? And this isn't sisterly accountability, this is "I need to know what everybody's doing because I like to know what everybody's doing and then I can tell other people what other people are doing and then I can say, `Hey, you need to pray for so-and-so.' and I can make it sound spiritual so that when I'm gossiping and busy-bodying I'm doing so in a way that seems really Jesus-like." And busybodies, they need to know what everybody's doing. They need to know what everybody's doing, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children and manage their household, right? Stay busy, and give the adversary (that's Satan) no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan. Hmm.
A woman who's a gossip and a busybody; a woman who has to put her nose in everybody's business and knows what everybody's going on; know what they're doing, she's working with Satan. Now I know most women would say: "No, no, no. I'm not Satanic, I'm concerned. I'm not Satanic, I'm an intercessor. I'm a prayer warrior. I'm not Satanic, I'm an accountability partner. I'm not Satanic, I'm a concerned friend." Okay, you're a Satanic intercessory prayer warrior accountability partner concerned friend but just start the whole list with "Satanic" so that we don't misunderstand your job description.
Now there's a difference between someone inviting you into their life and saying, "I want to be friends, I want to have an accountable relationship." and you pushing yourself into everyone's life, okay? I'll tell you, in the history of Mars Hill, I mean, I have had to put up a firewall, a moat, guard dogs, and a high wall with barbed wire on the top, and snipers behind it, around my wife. There are certain women who, they just need to know what Grace is doing and they are determined, they say things like, uh, "Hey, we need to have dinner with your family."
[slight chuckle] No you don't.
"Hey, we need to have coffee."
No you don't.
"Hey, phone number."
What? Nope.
"Email." Nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
"Oh, come on." Nope.
"But I thought you were our pastor."
I am and my first lesson is to tell you you're Satanic.
"Oh, come on, in our last church the pastor's wife [sob] she was my best friend and I got to talk to her all the time."
Well, she was Satanic, too. Give me her number, I'll call her and tell her. We'll help her out.
You ladies KNOW these women. Right? How many of you ladies know these women? They will try first with the hyper-spiritual, "Oh, praise the Lord! I'd love to pray for you. Let's get together. Let's do Christian community. Let's go to heart." If you decline, then they emotionally manipulate, [inhales, sobbing voice], "I thought we were friends, I thought you loved me. I don't have anybody to talk to." It's all manipulation. It's FEMALE manipulation. Some of you ladies, right now? You think, "I can't believe he said that." It's all true. It's Satanic, Satanic.
Paul says, "Don't be a busybody, stay busy." Right? Your husband, your kids, your family, your home, Jesus Christ. You got things to do.
Busybodies stay busy inserting themselves into everyone else's life. In some churches there are certain women, if you call them, they'll know everything that's going on because, somehow, they know everything. There's a difference between being a woman who is invited into someone's life for friendship, prayer and accountability, and a woman who emotionally manipulates and is pushy and is sometimes hyperspiritual and demanding and forces herself in because she's a drama queen and has to be at the center of all the drama. That is a Satanic woman.
You need to believe that and the worst thing you can do is accomodate her. Okay, we'll have you over for dinner once. And then, the next month, it's "Okay, buddy, we haven't been together in a month. We need to get together again. I'm sure a lot has happened in your life and I don't know what it is and I need to know because I need to know everything. I have a God complex of omniscience. I want to know everything about everybody." And what you find with these people, Paul says, they tend to be gossips, meaning you don't just talk to them, then they talk to other people. "Well, did you know their marriage is struggling? Did you know that she's depressed? Did you know that she's post-partum? Do you know that, sexually, her husband's impotent?" These are the conversations I've heard in this building. Really?
Sometimes womens' ministry is the cesspool that this kind of activity flourishes in. Some have asked, "Why don't you have womens' ministry?" The answer is we do, but it's, you have to be very careful, it's like juggling knives. You put the wrong women in charge of womens' ministry, the drama queen, the gossip mama, all of a sudden all the women come together, tell her everything, she becomes the pseudo-elder quasi-matriarch; she's got the dirt on everybody and sometimes the women all get together to just rip on their husbands in the name of prayer requests. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. [emphasis added] We have worked very hard so that the women who teach here are like Wendy Alsup who I really love and appreciate and respect. She's not like that. It is not that no woman should lead, that no woman should teach, that no woman should in a position of authority over other women under the authority of their husband, Jesus and the elders it's just that the wrong women tend to want it. The wrong women tend to want it and they tend to want it for the wrong reasons. And sometimes it's the humble woman, who isn't fighting to be the center of drama, control and power; who doesn't have to be up front; she's usually the one who is most capable and qualified.
And for you single men as well I would say be very, very careful because if you're on staff at Mars Hill (everything I say sounds terrible, this will just be added to the pile) there are certain women who will tell you, "I want to marry a pastor." Really? You should want to marry a Christian who loves Jesus, loves you, loves your kids should God give them to you. I've lectured enough Bible colleges and seminaries, the young women who come up and say, "I want to marry a pastor" my immediate default question is, "Are you a gossip? Are you a busybody? Are you a drama queen?" "No. No, I feel called to serve the Lord." Well, you can serve the Lord without being called to be a pastor's wife in fact, take it from me, it's easier to be a woman and serve the Lord than being married to a pastor. You single guys, you gotta be careful, man. There are some women, they want to marry the pastor so they can be the center of power, authority; they can be the first lady; everybody knows them, everybody wants to be their friend, everybody wants to tell them everything; and they can be the center of all the drama. Run for your life. Run for your life. Run for your life. It's Satanic.
See? I need you women to really search your own heart. Are you Satanic? Is this still part of your flesh, this sick desire in you to know everybody's business? I'm not saying you don't have friends but how much are you on the internet? How much time do you spend emailing? How much time do you spend crying and freaking out and knowing everybody's business and on the phone and having to meet with people because, "Did you know so-and-so did such-and-such and so-and-so is feeling this way and did you--?" Are you the center of LOTS of activity? Why? It's Satanic. It's Satanic. I think I've made my point.
So on the best of all possible days NOBODY could have construed ANY of that as even POTENTIALLY being misogynistic?
That Mark Driscoll regarded gossip as a uniquely or even singularly womanly vice seems simultaneously ironic and strange. It seems ironic because Mark Driscoll has been more than happy to share stories of things he's said in pastoral roles that would seem best left never said, let alone conveyed to hundreds or thousands for the sake of a punchline. Take the axiomatic observation that marriages improve when guys get more sex.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/mark-driscoll-in-2007-biblical-man-most.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0OWNJufdF4
The Biblical Man
2007
43:53ish...And most guys are just simply frustrated, that I have talked to, because they're not getting enough sex. I'll give you one story. Won't name his name, but I remember meeting with a--this is a lot of my marriage counseling. I don't think I'm a great marriage counselor but I do think I have one key insight that I'll share with you. Oftentimes I meet with couples and here's what I hear--the wife says, "I don't feel like we're connected. I don't feel like we're close. I feel like he's a little irritable." And then I ask, "How often are you having sex?" And she's, "What does that have to do with anything?" [slight chuckle] That effects everything. You know. Frequency is important. ...
"You guys have sex every day and then come see me again in a month and if there's still communication problems, he seems depressed, he's lethargic, THEN we'll talk because there's OBVIOUSLY a problem. But we're gonna start with what SEEMS to be the most obvious solution."
I'm telling ya, ninety-nine percent of the time they come back a month later she's like, "He's just totally a different guy. [emphasis added] ...
and there's always that Scotland sermon
Mark Driscoll | Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon
Edinburgh, Scotland on November 18,2007about 23:05https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8sNVDyW-ws&feature=youtu.be
―Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest,‖ she says, ―is my lover among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade and his fruit is sweet to my taste.‖ What is she talking about? Oral sex on her husband. That as he stands, she likes to be beneath him and his taste is sweet. It is a euphemism for oral sex, in your Bible. The Jews wouldn‘t even let men read this until they were married or thirty. Now you know why. You‘ve got Jewish boys under the blankets at night with a candle. [Laughter from audience.] Men, I am glad to report to you that oral sex is biblical. Amen? [Minimal response from audience.] No, you can do better than that. [Laughter from audience] The wife performing oral sex on the husband is biblical. God‘s men said, Amen. Ladies, your husbands appreciate oral sex. They do. So, serve them, love them well. It‘s biblical. Right here. We have a verse. The fruit of her husband is sweet to her taste and she delights to be beneath
24:17
I'll tell you a story if you don't tell anyone else of a man who started attending our church because of oral sex. Right? So many women go to church. In your country it's sixty or seventy percent. "My husband won't come to church. He doesn't have any interest in the things of God. He doesn't understand why church would apply to him." We had a woman like that in our church. She became a Christian. Her husband was not a Christian. He hated the church, wanted nothing to do with the church. She kept browbeating him about Jesus. "You need to get saved. You're gonna burn in hell."
He had no interest in that.
And so, finally, I was teaching a class on sex and she said, "Oh, so oral sex on a husband is what a wife is supposed to do?" I said, "Yes." She said, "My husband's always wanted that but I've refused him." I went to 1 Peter 3. I said, "The Bible says that if your husband is not a Christian that you are to win him over with deeds of kindness." I said, "So go home and tell your husband that you were in a Bible study today and that God has convicted you of sin. And repent and go perform oral sex on your husband and tell him that Jesus, Jesus Christ commands you to do so." [emphasis added] The next week the man showed up at church. He came up to me, he said, "You know, this is a really good church." That handing out tracts on the street thing, there's a better way to see revival, I assure you of that.
28:29
--you say, "Won't that make me dirty?" No, it'll make you a good wife, and ladies, let me assure you of this, if you think you're being dirty he's pretty happy. [emphasis added]
So if you're a Christian wife and your pastor says the Bible says you should give your husband oral sex in spite of your reservations against it there's room to be concerned about that. It's a puzzle particularly since, as we've established from "Mark Driscoll vs the Puritans" that actual Puritans would regard such a thing from a man, let alone a pastor, as depraved. We can particularly turn to Richard Baxter on a very specific question:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/baxter/practical.i.v.ix.html
let's look at page 445 in a section where Baxter discusses the duties of wives to husbands and considers various grounds for legitimate possibility for divorce.
Quest. XI. Is not the case of sodomy or buggery a ground for warrantable divorce as well as
adultery?
Answ. Yes, and seemeth to be included in the very word itself in the text, Matt. v, 31,32,
which signifieth uncleanness; or at least is fully implied in the reason of it. See Grotius
ibid, also of this.
So Mark Driscoll can blather on all he want about how the Puritans are great and he loves them and how the Bible says oral sex is great and biblical. You can still note that Richard Baxter advised that sodomy and buggery were grounds for warrantable divorce just as adultery would be. Driscoll recommended ccel.org to Mars Hill members way back in 2001-2002 so it's not like he could never look up Baxter's Christian Directory.
Driscoll not only said he told a woman she should give her husband oral sex he regaled a crowd about how he did so and what biblical prooftexts he was willing to employ.
While progressive and secular writers tended to misconstrue and misquote this one let's not forget that back in 2006 Driscoll :
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/revisiting-that-2006-post-that.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070106220656/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
•Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity [emphasis added], which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either.
A series of Driscoll's more memorable anecdotes and axioms on women, marriage and particularly about sex can be read over here.
All that is to say that Grace Driscoll is free to believe what she likes about her husband having no history of having said or done anything she would consider misogynistic. The rest of the world is free to suggest a different possibility.
There really is a lot that could be unpacked from what Smidt shared but one of a few things that her conversation reminded me of was something I considered a couple of years ago about the nature of shunning at Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/02/on-shunnings-and-social-status-proposal.html
The tl:dr version is this--shunning activity seemed to be calibrated to the level of formal authority people were regarded as having. This was probably most true about men and wives were only secondarily considered. The scant advantage that might have had for women was that wrath from above would tend to be mediated to the husband first on account of headship (retroactive sarcasm alert). The disadvantage would be that since women were expected to be under headship any concerns they had would be required to go up the chain of command. So a wife who had concerns about a leadership decision or a policy would have to mediate that concern through a husband who might or might not get heard or who might or might not accurately or adequately convey his wife's concerns.
But there's another thing that's come to mind lately hearing Smidt's story. If you've read this far notice how adamant Driscoll's denunciation of women as gossips was. It's like he was denouncing what he regarded as a saantic underground church leadership culture within a church leadership culture. Sure, Driscoll paradoxically embodied the kind of petty gossip-mongering mentality he claimed to find so loathsome in women as he talked about what stuff he heard; sure he managed to repeat and transmit the stuff he considered so shameful to other leaders in 2008 and then, again, to the entire inquiring world that may have downloaded the audio files later. But there's an additional layer to consider. The animus toward women regarded as gossips is the easiest thing to notice but there's a subtle and potentially divergent element within that concern.
What Driscoll may have been concerned about was the possibility of informal networks of influence. He may have, perhaps under the influence of covertly and overtly misogynistic biases, fixated on women as most embodying what he dreaded happening to Mars Hill, but there's nothing inherently womanly about a giant informal network of informal influence. If at times leaders of Mars Hill made it seem as though tech systems had been hacked this might have been what some of them wanted to believe. To go by the number of times (just a handful, really) WtH decided to stonewall leaders of Mars Hill it seemed that one of the conundrums Mars Hill leadership had was that they knew perfectly well who was able and willing to publish leaked content detailing policies and personalities in Mars Hill history. What they couldn't figure out was who was doing all the leaking and how they went about doing it. Who published what about Mars Hill is not that difficult to establish. It's easy to look up. Who conveyed what information in what way and at what time is another matter and may it remain opaque for a long time to come.
One of the heartening things to hear Smidt relay was how in the wake of the loss of formal status the informal network of relations and goodwill she and her husband had inspired people to raise money on their behalf. That may get to a point we should bear in mind about the power of informal connections, the informal power is dormant and not necessarily observable until a catalyzing incident or policy gets implemented. When Pharaoh decreed the Hebrew male babies be killed the midwives defied the policy. By broad analogy when Mars Hill formal leadership insisted on a rigid respect for formal chains of command as a way to obfuscate or dampen avenues of internal protest, this may have gone on long enough that it inspired people to vent their frustrations to the press or to bloggers or to all the above. That was, actually, one of the things I mentioned to a former MH pastor back around 2009 as being a likely outcome of the policies and precedents that were taking shape from the 2007-2009 period.
Where I differ a little bit with Smidt regarding Jamie Munson is on the extent to which Munson was a "buffer" between Driscoll and the church culture at large. Where the term she used is "buffer" the term I'd use is "insulation". Munson, and then later Turner, insulated Mark Driscoll from directly having to bear the animosity from the masses regarding policies and decisions in the normal or exceptional operation of governance. That's not a semantic distinction, obviously. Munson and those close to him may have felt he played the role of a buffer if the comparison point for Munson is Turner. But if there's no grading on a curve and Munson's tenure as president beginning with the termination and trials of Petry and Meyer on the one hand and, on the other hand , a closing year of being involved in the Result Source contract agreement is considered, Munson's tenure as legal president of Mars Hill may have been bookended by two or three of the more disastrous leadership decisions in the history of Mars Hill. By being the president of the organization Munson managed to bear the formal responsibility for decisions that were made that, in the long run, seemed to benefit Mark Driscoll more than others. Sometimes it can seem as if a person would have to interpret "buffer" as something like a bullet-proof vest. After all, Driscoll used to say that when you're in ministry people like to take shots at you. Perhaps, to extend Driscoll's analogy a bit, visionary leaders who know they are apt to get shot at invest in bullet-proof vests.
Sutton Turner had a leadership style that, to put it delicately, alienated a lot of people at Mars Hill. Smidt's conversation alludes to this. But it seems that there are people willing to go on record saying that Turner's leadership, though it had controversies, saved Mars Hill from the brink of fiscal ruin.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/11/reviewing-recommendations-of-mars-hill.html
http://suttonturner.com/recommendations/ (there are some new entries from former MH staff if you haven't read this page in a while)
The consensus among those willing to endorse Turner seems to be that Turner helped Mars Hill get through a situation that was nothing short of a crisis. If anyone were to contest the reliability of these accounts they would have to provide some evidence that Sutton Turner did not, in effect, salvage Mars Hill from fiscal ruin. Sure, ultimately since in the wake of Mark Driscoll's resignation the entity known as Mars Hill dissolved Turner couldn't save Mars Hill but at that point we're arguably discussing the blowback from policies that Turner implemented regarding things you've probably already read about if you're coming to this blog for any Mars Hill related anything.
In other words, whoever disagrees with the account that Sutton Turner saved Mars Hill from running over a fiscal cliff currently has no evidence whatsoever to provide a counter-narrative. It's also possible that both Munson AND Turner came to regard themselves as playing the role of buffer between Mark Driscoll as a leader and the rest of Mars Hill as a culture.
Something Smidt mentioned about reconciliation is worth noting, that it was conveyed to her that it was not possible for the Driscolls to reconcile with her on account of Phil Smidt's role in leveling formal charges against Mark Driscoll. It seems to be very easy for the Driscolls to recycle the bromides they introduced in Real Marriage over at their blog.
https://markdriscoll.org/how-to-have-a-godly-fight-with-your-spouse/
Sometimes the posts have content from Grace Driscoll, or at the very least Grace Driscoll is willing to sign off on the content
http://markdriscoll.org/what-is-a-godly-friend/
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/at-mark-driscoll-ministries-grace.html
Smidt shared in the podcast she went through a demon trial. I had to listen to the multi-hour 2008 spiritual warfare session because that was required of Theology Response Team volunteers. To keep an already sprawling blog post shorter than it could be, I became an ex-Pentecostal because I didn't like the volatile mixture of recovered memory tropes and soul tie stuff that seemed like a bad mixture of the worst pop psychology fads with inadequate scriptural interpretation. There's a long-form case to be made (and has been at this blog for those who want to trawl through it) that if Mark Driscoll's taxonomy of demonization were applied to what he's said about his own life it's an open question whether he's at some point been demonized himself.
But it's understandable why people would be reluctant to share if they had been subjects to demona trials as Mark Driscoll described them. Driscoll at this point might not be in a rush to describe conducting demon trials for a bit.
So those are the only sort of organized thoughts of the evening having heard the podcast. If you're a former Mars Hill member or leader it's worth giving the podcast a listen.
It doesn't sound like either Mark or Grace Driscoll have deigned to make any significant contact with Phil or Jen Smidt as yet, at least by Jen Smidt's account. Since Acts 29 leadership basically said Mark Driscoll had disqualified himself from ministry it seems like a live question why Christians would want Driscoll speaking at their conferences. There's a range of possible explanations for this but it's not suitable to elaborate on them in so long a post as this one already has become.
http://marshill.se/marshill/2012/03/02/a-call-for-reconciliation
Seeing as Mark Driscoll's still on schedule to speak at The Stronger Man conference perhaps people who go to the conference can give a listen to this while they wait a month-ish to hear what Driscoll has to say.
While we're at it ... anyone who read the following post:
Mark Driscoll to be a guest speaker at Stronger Men conference April 28-29 2017, plenty of time to ask Eric Mason how he's set to speak at a conference alongside Driscoll after signing off on booting MH and MD from A29
might be interested to know that Eric Mason's been on a leave of absence from being on the Acts 29 board. So, technically, an Acts 29 board member is not, strictly speaking, speaking at an event where Driscoll's also a speaker. So ... perhaps at a woodenly literal level, nobody from Acts 29 executive leadership is speaking at an event in any Acts 29 capacity, which is handy, since the Acts 29 board removed Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll from membership in Acts 29 citing that Driscoll had demonstrated disqualifying behavior.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/08/two-years-ago-today-acts-29-removed.html
Or, at least, they did a few years ago. Good luck finding any signs of that without help from The Wayback Machine now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083820/http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/a-message-from-the-board-of-acts-29-concerning-mark-driscoll-and-mars-hill-church/
It's necessary to remind ourselves that a couple of years after the Acts 29 board, which included Darrin Patrick, expressed concern that Driscoll needed to step down from ministry and seek help, Patrick himself ended up out of ministry. This was the Patrick of whom Driscoll used to say "He's my pastor, you know?"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/in-light-of-darrin-patrick-news-lets.html
The question of why Mason considered Driscoll fit to be sharing a podium or event with in spite of the Acts 29 statement from a few years ago that Mason signed off which strongly indicated (if taken literally or seriously) he felt Driscoll was unfit for ministry, could be asked by someone ... perhaps at some other time.
The social wreckage seems broad-ranging enough that it's not a surprise former leaders still feel like things need to be said. With that in mind, the podcast with Jen Smidt,which is slightly under 80 minutes long, more or less.
https://player.fm/series/pastor-with-no-answers/74-mars-hill-church-speaks-w-jen-smidt
Given the often prolix nature of this blog there's no promise that the ensuing comments will be brief.
One of the things Smidt mentioned was a story of how she said something to an executive elder and the next day her husband received a tongue-lashing and a warning that he needed to, basically, get his wife in line. That kind of story is not particularly surprising to hear or read about Mars Hill executive leadership. Smidt's comments about women seeming to have a marginal role in general but that she, paradoxically, had a significant writing and even teaching role within the history of Mars Hill is something you can hear in the podcast. What comes to mind, at the risk of still speaking too generally, is that one of the threads in the leadership culture could be described as a different set of standards for leaders and laity. This seems alluded to somewhat in Smidt's conversation, how once branded "leadership" people within Mars Hill treated leaders very differently than ordinary members.
Smidt's comments reminded me that in the Houston interview Grace Driscoll asserted that she never thought of her husband Mark as in any way misogynistic.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/revisiting-grace-driscolls-2015-ive.html
http://hillsongchurchwatch.com/2015/07/14/transcript-of-brian-houstons-nice-interview-with-mark-grace-driscoll-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSnqty0RUbU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5D9AQDfQHE
http://brianchouston.com/
Brian Houston: “So when in Australia your visits started to rise to the floor in secular Australia that word misogynistic. Uh, started being thrown around fairly liberally. I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary and it says, “dislike of, contempt for, or engrained prejudice against women.” Are you, were you ever misogynist?” (35:35-36:55)
Mark Driscoll: “No, but because of things I have said foolishly, that impression is entirely my fault, and I have no one to blame but myself. That’s now how I feel, that’s not what I think, um, but for certain, have uh, allowed that to become an impression.” (36:56-37:15)
Brian Houston: “Sure, and those are things you said when you were in your late 20’s.” (37:16-37:18)
Mark Driscoll: “Yeah, and I have a heart to see, part of this Pastor Brian is, young men aren’t going to church, young men aren’t going to college, young men aren’t marrying women young, young men are not raising their children, and I have such a deep burden and passion to see men. You know, 1 Corinthians 13 when I was a child I thought like a child I spoke like a child I acted like a child, when I became a man I put childish ways behind me. I want to compel young men to grow up to take responsibility and sometimes in doing that I have communicated that in a way that demeans women and that’s not helpful and that’s not right and in the grace of God I need to repent and do better at that. But I still want, I mean no one would say that young men are in the western world highly impressive and we’re all encouraged. There’s a lot of work to be done. And so, I regret the times that I have not communicated in such a way trying to compel them and up and it seems I’m pushing the women down and that’s my fault.” (37:19-38:20)
Brian Houston: “That’s how you feel. You can change moving forward?” (38:21-38:23)
Mark Driscoll: “I hope to with the Grace of God yeah, absolutely.” (38:24-38:27)
Brian Houston: “Good.” (38:28)
Grace Driscoll: “I mean, I’ve never seen him as a misogynist, and never even thought that him of that at all. So, I’ve witnessed the opposite and so, and I’ve known him 27 years And so I can say yes there were methods that were wrong in the beginning but I knew his heart.” (38:29-38:46)
Here's the thing, Mark Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare instruction session was a leaders-only message, not instruction made available to the masses until years later. Now perhaps Grace Driscoll was not at that teaching session and didn't hear or otherwise come into contact with the following:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-2-part_70.html
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 2: The Devil
49:58
How about this one? Idle gossip and busybodying. 1 Timothy 5:11-15. THIS one is amazing. Ladies this one is especially for you. Some of you say, "Oh, it's not me." Yeah, it is. [emphasis added] 1 Timothy 5:11-15, "but refuse to enroll younger widows for when their passions draw them away from Christ they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith. Besides that they learn to be idlers" Women learn how to make a lot of free time. Going about from house to house. Well now it would be from email to email and from phone call to phone call. Technology makes idle busybodying far more effective than ever.
And not only idlers but also gossips. They like to talk about people. How are you doing? What are you doing? And this isn't sisterly accountability, this is "I need to know what everybody's doing because I like to know what everybody's doing and then I can tell other people what other people are doing and then I can say, `Hey, you need to pray for so-and-so.' and I can make it sound spiritual so that when I'm gossiping and busy-bodying I'm doing so in a way that seems really Jesus-like." And busybodies, they need to know what everybody's doing. They need to know what everybody's doing, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children and manage their household, right? Stay busy, and give the adversary (that's Satan) no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan. Hmm.
A woman who's a gossip and a busybody; a woman who has to put her nose in everybody's business and knows what everybody's going on; know what they're doing, she's working with Satan. Now I know most women would say: "No, no, no. I'm not Satanic, I'm concerned. I'm not Satanic, I'm an intercessor. I'm a prayer warrior. I'm not Satanic, I'm an accountability partner. I'm not Satanic, I'm a concerned friend." Okay, you're a Satanic intercessory prayer warrior accountability partner concerned friend but just start the whole list with "Satanic" so that we don't misunderstand your job description.
Now there's a difference between someone inviting you into their life and saying, "I want to be friends, I want to have an accountable relationship." and you pushing yourself into everyone's life, okay? I'll tell you, in the history of Mars Hill, I mean, I have had to put up a firewall, a moat, guard dogs, and a high wall with barbed wire on the top, and snipers behind it, around my wife. There are certain women who, they just need to know what Grace is doing and they are determined, they say things like, uh, "Hey, we need to have dinner with your family."
[slight chuckle] No you don't.
"Hey, we need to have coffee."
No you don't.
"Hey, phone number."
What? Nope.
"Email." Nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
"Oh, come on." Nope.
"But I thought you were our pastor."
I am and my first lesson is to tell you you're Satanic.
"Oh, come on, in our last church the pastor's wife [sob] she was my best friend and I got to talk to her all the time."
Well, she was Satanic, too. Give me her number, I'll call her and tell her. We'll help her out.
You ladies KNOW these women. Right? How many of you ladies know these women? They will try first with the hyper-spiritual, "Oh, praise the Lord! I'd love to pray for you. Let's get together. Let's do Christian community. Let's go to heart." If you decline, then they emotionally manipulate, [inhales, sobbing voice], "I thought we were friends, I thought you loved me. I don't have anybody to talk to." It's all manipulation. It's FEMALE manipulation. Some of you ladies, right now? You think, "I can't believe he said that." It's all true. It's Satanic, Satanic.
Paul says, "Don't be a busybody, stay busy." Right? Your husband, your kids, your family, your home, Jesus Christ. You got things to do.
Busybodies stay busy inserting themselves into everyone else's life. In some churches there are certain women, if you call them, they'll know everything that's going on because, somehow, they know everything. There's a difference between being a woman who is invited into someone's life for friendship, prayer and accountability, and a woman who emotionally manipulates and is pushy and is sometimes hyperspiritual and demanding and forces herself in because she's a drama queen and has to be at the center of all the drama. That is a Satanic woman.
You need to believe that and the worst thing you can do is accomodate her. Okay, we'll have you over for dinner once. And then, the next month, it's "Okay, buddy, we haven't been together in a month. We need to get together again. I'm sure a lot has happened in your life and I don't know what it is and I need to know because I need to know everything. I have a God complex of omniscience. I want to know everything about everybody." And what you find with these people, Paul says, they tend to be gossips, meaning you don't just talk to them, then they talk to other people. "Well, did you know their marriage is struggling? Did you know that she's depressed? Did you know that she's post-partum? Do you know that, sexually, her husband's impotent?" These are the conversations I've heard in this building. Really?
Sometimes womens' ministry is the cesspool that this kind of activity flourishes in. Some have asked, "Why don't you have womens' ministry?" The answer is we do, but it's, you have to be very careful, it's like juggling knives. You put the wrong women in charge of womens' ministry, the drama queen, the gossip mama, all of a sudden all the women come together, tell her everything, she becomes the pseudo-elder quasi-matriarch; she's got the dirt on everybody and sometimes the women all get together to just rip on their husbands in the name of prayer requests. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. [emphasis added] We have worked very hard so that the women who teach here are like Wendy Alsup who I really love and appreciate and respect. She's not like that. It is not that no woman should lead, that no woman should teach, that no woman should in a position of authority over other women under the authority of their husband, Jesus and the elders it's just that the wrong women tend to want it. The wrong women tend to want it and they tend to want it for the wrong reasons. And sometimes it's the humble woman, who isn't fighting to be the center of drama, control and power; who doesn't have to be up front; she's usually the one who is most capable and qualified.
And for you single men as well I would say be very, very careful because if you're on staff at Mars Hill (everything I say sounds terrible, this will just be added to the pile) there are certain women who will tell you, "I want to marry a pastor." Really? You should want to marry a Christian who loves Jesus, loves you, loves your kids should God give them to you. I've lectured enough Bible colleges and seminaries, the young women who come up and say, "I want to marry a pastor" my immediate default question is, "Are you a gossip? Are you a busybody? Are you a drama queen?" "No. No, I feel called to serve the Lord." Well, you can serve the Lord without being called to be a pastor's wife in fact, take it from me, it's easier to be a woman and serve the Lord than being married to a pastor. You single guys, you gotta be careful, man. There are some women, they want to marry the pastor so they can be the center of power, authority; they can be the first lady; everybody knows them, everybody wants to be their friend, everybody wants to tell them everything; and they can be the center of all the drama. Run for your life. Run for your life. Run for your life. It's Satanic.
See? I need you women to really search your own heart. Are you Satanic? Is this still part of your flesh, this sick desire in you to know everybody's business? I'm not saying you don't have friends but how much are you on the internet? How much time do you spend emailing? How much time do you spend crying and freaking out and knowing everybody's business and on the phone and having to meet with people because, "Did you know so-and-so did such-and-such and so-and-so is feeling this way and did you--?" Are you the center of LOTS of activity? Why? It's Satanic. It's Satanic. I think I've made my point.
So on the best of all possible days NOBODY could have construed ANY of that as even POTENTIALLY being misogynistic?
That Mark Driscoll regarded gossip as a uniquely or even singularly womanly vice seems simultaneously ironic and strange. It seems ironic because Mark Driscoll has been more than happy to share stories of things he's said in pastoral roles that would seem best left never said, let alone conveyed to hundreds or thousands for the sake of a punchline. Take the axiomatic observation that marriages improve when guys get more sex.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/mark-driscoll-in-2007-biblical-man-most.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0OWNJufdF4
The Biblical Man
2007
43:53ish...And most guys are just simply frustrated, that I have talked to, because they're not getting enough sex. I'll give you one story. Won't name his name, but I remember meeting with a--this is a lot of my marriage counseling. I don't think I'm a great marriage counselor but I do think I have one key insight that I'll share with you. Oftentimes I meet with couples and here's what I hear--the wife says, "I don't feel like we're connected. I don't feel like we're close. I feel like he's a little irritable." And then I ask, "How often are you having sex?" And she's, "What does that have to do with anything?" [slight chuckle] That effects everything. You know. Frequency is important. ...
"You guys have sex every day and then come see me again in a month and if there's still communication problems, he seems depressed, he's lethargic, THEN we'll talk because there's OBVIOUSLY a problem. But we're gonna start with what SEEMS to be the most obvious solution."
I'm telling ya, ninety-nine percent of the time they come back a month later she's like, "He's just totally a different guy. [emphasis added] ...
and there's always that Scotland sermon
Mark Driscoll | Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon
Edinburgh, Scotland on November 18,2007about 23:05https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8sNVDyW-ws&feature=youtu.be
―Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest,‖ she says, ―is my lover among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade and his fruit is sweet to my taste.‖ What is she talking about? Oral sex on her husband. That as he stands, she likes to be beneath him and his taste is sweet. It is a euphemism for oral sex, in your Bible. The Jews wouldn‘t even let men read this until they were married or thirty. Now you know why. You‘ve got Jewish boys under the blankets at night with a candle. [Laughter from audience.] Men, I am glad to report to you that oral sex is biblical. Amen? [Minimal response from audience.] No, you can do better than that. [Laughter from audience] The wife performing oral sex on the husband is biblical. God‘s men said, Amen. Ladies, your husbands appreciate oral sex. They do. So, serve them, love them well. It‘s biblical. Right here. We have a verse. The fruit of her husband is sweet to her taste and she delights to be beneath
24:17
I'll tell you a story if you don't tell anyone else of a man who started attending our church because of oral sex. Right? So many women go to church. In your country it's sixty or seventy percent. "My husband won't come to church. He doesn't have any interest in the things of God. He doesn't understand why church would apply to him." We had a woman like that in our church. She became a Christian. Her husband was not a Christian. He hated the church, wanted nothing to do with the church. She kept browbeating him about Jesus. "You need to get saved. You're gonna burn in hell."
He had no interest in that.
And so, finally, I was teaching a class on sex and she said, "Oh, so oral sex on a husband is what a wife is supposed to do?" I said, "Yes." She said, "My husband's always wanted that but I've refused him." I went to 1 Peter 3. I said, "The Bible says that if your husband is not a Christian that you are to win him over with deeds of kindness." I said, "So go home and tell your husband that you were in a Bible study today and that God has convicted you of sin. And repent and go perform oral sex on your husband and tell him that Jesus, Jesus Christ commands you to do so." [emphasis added] The next week the man showed up at church. He came up to me, he said, "You know, this is a really good church." That handing out tracts on the street thing, there's a better way to see revival, I assure you of that.
28:29
--you say, "Won't that make me dirty?" No, it'll make you a good wife, and ladies, let me assure you of this, if you think you're being dirty he's pretty happy. [emphasis added]
So if you're a Christian wife and your pastor says the Bible says you should give your husband oral sex in spite of your reservations against it there's room to be concerned about that. It's a puzzle particularly since, as we've established from "Mark Driscoll vs the Puritans" that actual Puritans would regard such a thing from a man, let alone a pastor, as depraved. We can particularly turn to Richard Baxter on a very specific question:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/baxter/practical.i.v.ix.html
let's look at page 445 in a section where Baxter discusses the duties of wives to husbands and considers various grounds for legitimate possibility for divorce.
Quest. XI. Is not the case of sodomy or buggery a ground for warrantable divorce as well as
adultery?
Answ. Yes, and seemeth to be included in the very word itself in the text, Matt. v, 31,32,
which signifieth uncleanness; or at least is fully implied in the reason of it. See Grotius
ibid, also of this.
So Mark Driscoll can blather on all he want about how the Puritans are great and he loves them and how the Bible says oral sex is great and biblical. You can still note that Richard Baxter advised that sodomy and buggery were grounds for warrantable divorce just as adultery would be. Driscoll recommended ccel.org to Mars Hill members way back in 2001-2002 so it's not like he could never look up Baxter's Christian Directory.
Driscoll not only said he told a woman she should give her husband oral sex he regaled a crowd about how he did so and what biblical prooftexts he was willing to employ.
While progressive and secular writers tended to misconstrue and misquote this one let's not forget that back in 2006 Driscoll :
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/revisiting-that-2006-post-that.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070106220656/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
•Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity [emphasis added], which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either.
A series of Driscoll's more memorable anecdotes and axioms on women, marriage and particularly about sex can be read over here.
All that is to say that Grace Driscoll is free to believe what she likes about her husband having no history of having said or done anything she would consider misogynistic. The rest of the world is free to suggest a different possibility.
There really is a lot that could be unpacked from what Smidt shared but one of a few things that her conversation reminded me of was something I considered a couple of years ago about the nature of shunning at Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/02/on-shunnings-and-social-status-proposal.html
The tl:dr version is this--shunning activity seemed to be calibrated to the level of formal authority people were regarded as having. This was probably most true about men and wives were only secondarily considered. The scant advantage that might have had for women was that wrath from above would tend to be mediated to the husband first on account of headship (retroactive sarcasm alert). The disadvantage would be that since women were expected to be under headship any concerns they had would be required to go up the chain of command. So a wife who had concerns about a leadership decision or a policy would have to mediate that concern through a husband who might or might not get heard or who might or might not accurately or adequately convey his wife's concerns.
But there's another thing that's come to mind lately hearing Smidt's story. If you've read this far notice how adamant Driscoll's denunciation of women as gossips was. It's like he was denouncing what he regarded as a saantic underground church leadership culture within a church leadership culture. Sure, Driscoll paradoxically embodied the kind of petty gossip-mongering mentality he claimed to find so loathsome in women as he talked about what stuff he heard; sure he managed to repeat and transmit the stuff he considered so shameful to other leaders in 2008 and then, again, to the entire inquiring world that may have downloaded the audio files later. But there's an additional layer to consider. The animus toward women regarded as gossips is the easiest thing to notice but there's a subtle and potentially divergent element within that concern.
What Driscoll may have been concerned about was the possibility of informal networks of influence. He may have, perhaps under the influence of covertly and overtly misogynistic biases, fixated on women as most embodying what he dreaded happening to Mars Hill, but there's nothing inherently womanly about a giant informal network of informal influence. If at times leaders of Mars Hill made it seem as though tech systems had been hacked this might have been what some of them wanted to believe. To go by the number of times (just a handful, really) WtH decided to stonewall leaders of Mars Hill it seemed that one of the conundrums Mars Hill leadership had was that they knew perfectly well who was able and willing to publish leaked content detailing policies and personalities in Mars Hill history. What they couldn't figure out was who was doing all the leaking and how they went about doing it. Who published what about Mars Hill is not that difficult to establish. It's easy to look up. Who conveyed what information in what way and at what time is another matter and may it remain opaque for a long time to come.
One of the heartening things to hear Smidt relay was how in the wake of the loss of formal status the informal network of relations and goodwill she and her husband had inspired people to raise money on their behalf. That may get to a point we should bear in mind about the power of informal connections, the informal power is dormant and not necessarily observable until a catalyzing incident or policy gets implemented. When Pharaoh decreed the Hebrew male babies be killed the midwives defied the policy. By broad analogy when Mars Hill formal leadership insisted on a rigid respect for formal chains of command as a way to obfuscate or dampen avenues of internal protest, this may have gone on long enough that it inspired people to vent their frustrations to the press or to bloggers or to all the above. That was, actually, one of the things I mentioned to a former MH pastor back around 2009 as being a likely outcome of the policies and precedents that were taking shape from the 2007-2009 period.
Where I differ a little bit with Smidt regarding Jamie Munson is on the extent to which Munson was a "buffer" between Driscoll and the church culture at large. Where the term she used is "buffer" the term I'd use is "insulation". Munson, and then later Turner, insulated Mark Driscoll from directly having to bear the animosity from the masses regarding policies and decisions in the normal or exceptional operation of governance. That's not a semantic distinction, obviously. Munson and those close to him may have felt he played the role of a buffer if the comparison point for Munson is Turner. But if there's no grading on a curve and Munson's tenure as president beginning with the termination and trials of Petry and Meyer on the one hand and, on the other hand , a closing year of being involved in the Result Source contract agreement is considered, Munson's tenure as legal president of Mars Hill may have been bookended by two or three of the more disastrous leadership decisions in the history of Mars Hill. By being the president of the organization Munson managed to bear the formal responsibility for decisions that were made that, in the long run, seemed to benefit Mark Driscoll more than others. Sometimes it can seem as if a person would have to interpret "buffer" as something like a bullet-proof vest. After all, Driscoll used to say that when you're in ministry people like to take shots at you. Perhaps, to extend Driscoll's analogy a bit, visionary leaders who know they are apt to get shot at invest in bullet-proof vests.
Sutton Turner had a leadership style that, to put it delicately, alienated a lot of people at Mars Hill. Smidt's conversation alludes to this. But it seems that there are people willing to go on record saying that Turner's leadership, though it had controversies, saved Mars Hill from the brink of fiscal ruin.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/11/reviewing-recommendations-of-mars-hill.html
http://suttonturner.com/recommendations/ (there are some new entries from former MH staff if you haven't read this page in a while)
The consensus among those willing to endorse Turner seems to be that Turner helped Mars Hill get through a situation that was nothing short of a crisis. If anyone were to contest the reliability of these accounts they would have to provide some evidence that Sutton Turner did not, in effect, salvage Mars Hill from fiscal ruin. Sure, ultimately since in the wake of Mark Driscoll's resignation the entity known as Mars Hill dissolved Turner couldn't save Mars Hill but at that point we're arguably discussing the blowback from policies that Turner implemented regarding things you've probably already read about if you're coming to this blog for any Mars Hill related anything.
In other words, whoever disagrees with the account that Sutton Turner saved Mars Hill from running over a fiscal cliff currently has no evidence whatsoever to provide a counter-narrative. It's also possible that both Munson AND Turner came to regard themselves as playing the role of buffer between Mark Driscoll as a leader and the rest of Mars Hill as a culture.
Something Smidt mentioned about reconciliation is worth noting, that it was conveyed to her that it was not possible for the Driscolls to reconcile with her on account of Phil Smidt's role in leveling formal charges against Mark Driscoll. It seems to be very easy for the Driscolls to recycle the bromides they introduced in Real Marriage over at their blog.
https://markdriscoll.org/how-to-have-a-godly-fight-with-your-spouse/
Sometimes the posts have content from Grace Driscoll, or at the very least Grace Driscoll is willing to sign off on the content
http://markdriscoll.org/what-is-a-godly-friend/
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/at-mark-driscoll-ministries-grace.html
Smidt shared in the podcast she went through a demon trial. I had to listen to the multi-hour 2008 spiritual warfare session because that was required of Theology Response Team volunteers. To keep an already sprawling blog post shorter than it could be, I became an ex-Pentecostal because I didn't like the volatile mixture of recovered memory tropes and soul tie stuff that seemed like a bad mixture of the worst pop psychology fads with inadequate scriptural interpretation. There's a long-form case to be made (and has been at this blog for those who want to trawl through it) that if Mark Driscoll's taxonomy of demonization were applied to what he's said about his own life it's an open question whether he's at some point been demonized himself.
But it's understandable why people would be reluctant to share if they had been subjects to demona trials as Mark Driscoll described them. Driscoll at this point might not be in a rush to describe conducting demon trials for a bit.
So those are the only sort of organized thoughts of the evening having heard the podcast. If you're a former Mars Hill member or leader it's worth giving the podcast a listen.
It doesn't sound like either Mark or Grace Driscoll have deigned to make any significant contact with Phil or Jen Smidt as yet, at least by Jen Smidt's account. Since Acts 29 leadership basically said Mark Driscoll had disqualified himself from ministry it seems like a live question why Christians would want Driscoll speaking at their conferences. There's a range of possible explanations for this but it's not suitable to elaborate on them in so long a post as this one already has become.
Saturday, March 04, 2017
on the post-Cold War deadlock of American civic religions as competing visions of the telos of American cultural imperialism for the "left" and "right"
http://www.mbird.com/2017/03/another-week-ends-more-outrage-more-zoltan-more-tebow-more-busyness-plus-a-whole-lot-of-death/
...
Rod Dreher’s new book was reviewed (negatively), and Dreher quotes an Australian reader’s comments on that review, who argues that the reviewer’s picture of secular democracy is one of the great problems of liberalism: that we’re going to get there one day—that we’re going to realize the great vision of the ideal.
And then people like Bruenig who say… you can accomplish your goals through politics, you have more political power than you realize.
What that…group just don’t get (partly because you Americans have postmillennialism deep in your DNA, whatever your faith and theological commitments are, and so you really do think that history’s arc bends towards justice, and so you are so insufferably pollyannaish that you think all stories can have a happy ending if we just tried harder. I’m not sure there has ever been a culture as resistant to being theologians of the cross rather than theologians of glory as Americans) is that their advice is going to make another part of the problem worse under your diagnosis. Throwing oneself even harder into rituals of social life in a democracy on democracy’s terms will just increase the catechizing and formative effects of those rituals and liturgies.
It might be useful to quote a substantially longer segment from the Australian correspondent Dreher quoted from. All of the bold emphasis is going to be added:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-liturgies-of-secular-democracy-benedict-option/
The liberal-democratic order is founded on suspending the question of whether God exists or not (and has authority over human life) and relegating that to the level of personal opinion. This means that democracy itself functions as though atheism is metaphysically true—there is no God whose demands on people must be embraced—but gives people the freedom to shape their own lives around theism (or deism, or polytheism etc). In the short term this is a great solution to the problem of religious wars, by simply punting ultimate questions of morality and metaphysics and seeking to create a society where people can live together despite deep differences.
The problem is that this arrangement is unstable for two reasons. First, living in a western democracy catechizes people into practical atheism. Because the underpinnings of society forecloses the question of God and makes material reality the ultimate horizon, then society itself is run on atheistic presuppositions. The more you invest in being a good citizen and are part of democratic public life, the more you are shaped by the rituals of democratic life into thinking, dreaming, desiring, acting, as an atheist.
Second, as democracy goes on its horizons are increasingly limited to the individual and the state—the individual as the reason and justification of all social life, and the state as the ultimate horizon of human experience and life, accountable and subordinate to nothing beyond it. Hence why ‘government is just the word we use for things we do together’ is thought to be just common sense, and why politics is considered to be *the* vehicle for human flourishing. Everything is politics, because politics is the final horizon that shapes the conditions for individual liberty.
But making everything base around the individual will (almost) inevitably make everything be reduced down to hedonism—happiness through pleasurable experiences, and the pursuit of wealth and social status that preserves the maximum kind of individual freedom that liberalism recognizes and esteems. Increasingly democracy gains confidence in its metaphysical position (this world is the only meaningful horizon) and begins to move from a naked public square to enacting its vision of the good that expresses that metaphysical position (the good life has to be justified entirely within the constraints of this life).
As a consequence increasingly democracy actively seeks to form people as little more than worker-bees, consumers, and pleasure seekers and begins to use its authority to maringalize and harass those groups that seek to create a social life that catechizes people into a different vision of the good life based on different metaphysics. That is increasingly incomprehensible to them—simultaneously irrational and abusive. At most it can be permitted as an individual choice, but not at the level of a social choice within democracy – unless the group basically removes itself from broader social life almost completely (the Amish option). It also fuels new wars of religions—really weird ones because they are so secular, where the goal is to impose our practical atheism and vision of the good life on the world—killing people to bring our version of the triumph of the individual, to promote hedonism, to push countries towards democracy. These are crusades fuelled by the same underlying convictions that give rise to more overt religious wars.
Let's interrupt the lengthy quote at this point to propose that what secularists will probably fail to understand is that you can have a civic religion that can function pretty easily without an explicit deity. The Democratic and Republican parties have managed to pull this off in the last century, formulating civic religions in which the practical "god" is the ideology or platform of the respective parties. Walter A. McDougall might be a bit of a crackpot but since Promised Land, Crusader State he's been proposing that American foreign policy has been stymied by the ways in which American civic religions have guided foreign policy toward (you may have guessed this) an American crusader state. What McDougall may have a point about, though, is in the proposal that, regardless of the formal distinctions between red and blue parties, since the Wilson era U.S. has operated with a campaign of cultural imperialism that may formally look different from colonialism and imperialism as practiced by the European powers but that is not necessarily functionally or informally different.
In other words the ideological platforms of the red and blue state voters fulfills the telos of civic religion regardless of whether or not any formally named deities are invoked.
Now someone predicted that once modern technocratic societies embraced propaganda wholeheartedly that even ostensibly democratic societies would functionally become totalitarian cultures.
PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 1965 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
page 249
... Once democracy becomes the object of propaganda, it also becomes totalitarian, authoritarian, and exclusive as dictatorship.
pages 249-250
... This really is the ultimate problem: democracy is not just a certain form of political organization or simply an ideology--it is, first of all, a certain view of life and a form of behavior. If democracy were only a form of political organization, there would be no problem; propaganda could adjust to it. ... But if democracy is a way of life, composed of tolerance, respect, degree, choice, diversity, and so on, all propaganda that acts on behavior and feelings and transforms them in depth turns man into someone who can no longer support democracy because he no longer follows democratic behavior.
pages 251-252
...
But the creation of the etiological myth leads to an obligation on the part of democracy to become religious. It can no longer be secular but must create its religion. Besides, the creation of a religion is one of the indispensable elements of effective propaganda. [emphasis added] The content of this religion is of little importance; these feelings are used to integrate the masses into the national collective. We must not delude ourselves: when one speaks to us of "massive democracy" and "democratic participation," these are only veiled terms that mean "religion." Participation and unanimity have always been characteristics of religious societies, and only of religious societies. [emphasis added]
page 256
... A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself--of the style of democratic life, understanding of others, respect for minorities, re-examination of his own opinions, absence of dogmatism. The means employed to spread democratic ideas makes the citizen, psychologically, a totalitarian man. The only difference between him and a Nazi is that he is a "totalitarian man with democratic convictions," but those convictions do not change his behavior in the least. Such contradiction is in no way felt by the individual for whom democracy has become a myth and a set of democratic imperatives, merely stimuli that activate conditioned reflexes. The word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat indefinitely "the sacred formulas of democracy" while acting like a storm trooper. [emphasis added]
McDougall's proposal that American foreign policy has been guided by civic religion seems like a deliberately provocative claim. It is one, of course. What makes American civic religions only slightly unique is that the god is not necessarily a personal god or an infinite god but a god in the form of a principle. At this point, well, why not throw in some comments from Emil Brunner:
The Mediator
Emil Brunnerhttps://archive.org/details/mediatorastudyof013169mbp
page 25
...
Whether he adored his totem animal or the gods of the sun, the moon and the stars ; whether by the practice of magic he tries to gain control of supernatural forces; whether by the practices of asceticism and of Yoga he achieves union with the 'Wholly-Other'; or whether in union with his fellow-countrymen he brings a solemn sacrifice to the high gods, or somewhere in solitude he approaches the Ground of all being in mystical contemplation; one thing remains the same, namely, that just as man is homo faber, so also he is homo religious. He is this even when he renounces all mythology, all ideas of a supernatural being, and becomes an agnostic or an atheist. The dimension of the infinite, of the absolute, of the unconditioned, is not empty for any human being, even when he has cut himself adrift from all traditional religious ideas. If he no longer has any personal gods, all the more surely he has one or more impersonal gods-something which he regards as taboo, something which may not be touched at any cost, whether it be his Communism or his Nationalism, his civilization or 'life.' 'Man always has God or an idol.' [emphasis added]...
Or, in more contemporary American terms, the god may be the Democratic or Republican party platforms as totalizing visions of ideal human flourishing. Now perhaps in lieu of a simply identifiable external adversary such as we had in the Cold War or World War II we're stuck with the power of propaganda transforming our own neighbors, friends and family into political adversaries whose sin is not worshipping the same god we do. And as can be readily observed in blue state and red stat partisans who profess to be Christians the ease with which Americans bend the scriptures to the ends of justifying their preferred political means hardly merits a detailed explanation in a simple blog post.
In other words, Ellul anticipated what could be euphemistically regarded as the soft totalitarianism of people on the internet. Once the anxiety and dread of the Cold War has been translated from a clash of civilizations between the United States and the Soviet Union into competing visions on the part of Democratic and Republican partisans as to what the future of the United States is going to be the culture of pervasive propaganda hasn't gone away, it's merely been translated into a post-Cold War context. The partisans deploy propagandistic methods in ways that establish the competing visions of the ideal America as the basis of the totalizing conflict between two ultimately totalitarian visions of what American life should look like. The Trump voter and the Clinton voter have this totalitarian mindset in common regardless of what differences they may regard as essential and obvious between themselves and their ideological adversaries, in spite of the fact that their ideological adversaries are, strictly speaking, fellow citizens of the United States.
Which gets us back to the comments about a review of Dreher's book. It may be easier to unpack what's being proposed if we keep in mind two basic theories about contemporary American political discourse: 1) contemporary left and right ideologies exist along a spectrum of formal differentiation on position that are not necessarily different on the issue of totalitarian commitment to whatever the position of X may be within that spectrum and 2) this is so because these respective positions have transformed everything into the explicitly political because that is what civic religions (as Ellul described them) necessarily do.
Bruenig’s review shows just hard it is for people inside that framework to see it in these terms—even as an empathic and imaginative act of walking in someone else’s shoes for a mile. She’s a good reviewer, and been thoughtful and fair, but she just can’t ‘get it’. Precisely the points at where she thinks your positions are incoherent are the places where she needs to grasp them in order to have any chance of getting your position as a whole. What she fixates on is the political dimension because that’s the ultimate horizon for democratically shaped people. [emphasis original] The idea that you might somehow contribute to the common good by disengaging from politics a bit and putting something non-political up as the ultimate horizon of social life just can’t even be heard.
Because (like most of your other critics) seem to think the only problem to be addressed is the last one—the implementation of an ethical vision of the good life arising out of a metaphysics through the agency of state coercion—their reaction falls into two camps. The group you tend to lose your temper with and call ‘jacobins’—who say, nothing must impede the enshrining of an atheistic and hedonistic vision of the liberated individual as the framework of our social life, and any dissent is asking for special legal privileges that are irrational and abusive. And then people like Bruenig who say—too pessimistic, you can accomplish your goals through politics, you have more political power than you realize.
What that latter group just don’t get (partly because you Americans have postmillennialism deep in your DNA, whatever your faith and theological commitments are, and so you really do think that history’s arc bends towards justice, and so you are so insufferably pollyannaish that you think all stories can have a happy ending if we just tried harder. I’m not sure there has ever been a culture as resistant to being theologians of the cross rather than theologians of glory as Americans) is that their advice is going to make another part of the problem worse under your diagnosis. Throwing oneself even harder into rituals of social life in a democracy on democracy’s terms will just increase the catechizing and formative effects of those rituals and liturgies. [bold emphasis added, italic emphasis original ] You might shift the external pressure of the state trying to forcibly encode its view of the good life, but at the cost of being subverted from within. That’s the key part of your analysis that they just seem unable to get their heads around at this point in the conversation.
Which could be a way of saying that the postmillennialist colonialism and the imperialism that has gone with it on the red and blue sides of the same American civic religion "looks" different to the partisans who have chosen which side of the store they want to shop on, but for those who are not in the store, so to speak, they can see that all the partisans are shopping at the same store. I began to get this impression twenty years ago seeing the culture wars play out. I came to regard the religious right and their adversaries as both fighting a battle over not whether or not the United States would deploy cultural imperialism across the planet but merely what kind of cultural imperialism the empire should champion. That postmillennialist sense of obligation to remake the world into the shape of something more in line with the ideals of the American way of life might be so potent it inspired even an atheist like Christopher Hitchens to sign on to it for a while in the way he backed Gulf War 2.
In a postlude essay to the 1994 reprint of his book Music, The Arts, And Ideas Leonard B. Meyer sketched out the thought that as we continue in a world in which there is no belief in life after death or a resurrection from the dead that a baseline historical optimism would no longer be the shared human experience. Instead, as Meyer put it:
MUSIC, THE ARTS, AND IDEAS
Leonard B. Meyer
Copyright (c) 1967. 1994 by The University of Chicago
ISBN 0-226-52143-5
page 338
Though we have lost faith in a shining future, the past is still available. Not, however, the past resulting from historical research, but a past emanating from ethno-mythic fabrication. [emphasis added]
page 339
As each subculture creates its own past--magnifying its virtues, glorying in its victories, sharpening its grievances, and savoring its animosities--it defines its individuality. In so doing, it intensifies and specifies its differences from other subcultures. The search for past roots leads to the isolation of subcultures, an isolation "rationalized" by ideology. That is, the valuing of ethnic identity and community can in part be understood as a very late manifestation of Romanticism in which national cohesion is depreciated as a conventional, arbitrary creation, whereas ethnic relationships are prized as a result of natural, quasi-biological constraints. [emphasis added]
Subcultural, and especially ethnic, isolation is heightened by a vision of the future characterized by uncertainty and hazard. Put the other way around: belief in inherent historical progress directs attention to common cultural goals; and when goals are shared (as they are, for instance, in combat or in team sports) ethnic differences become irrelevant. In the absence of shared goals grounded in a vision of a better future, differences are heightened and the result is interpersonal insecurity and tension. We become uncertain how to behave, or, more precisely, about how others will respond to our behavioral norms. And so we seek the security of our own kind, of ethnic commonality. ...
The isolation of subcultures from one another is exacerbated not only by the vast increase in specialization, characteristic of late twentieth century culture, but by an overabundance of information in each area of specialization. ...
page 340
The consequences of rampant pluralism are not the same for all realms of culture. In the realms of action--of political, religious, social, and commercial economic behavior--options often appear to be mutually exclusive. Though possible in theory, compromise is hard to come by precisely because positions are conceptualized (and publicized in the media) as matters of principle. For their "Committed" partisans, pro-life and pro-choice positions are incompatible; lower taxes are taken to preclude increased social services; the goals of ecology are evidently at odds with those of commerces; and advocates of the death penalty cannot be reconciled with those who oppose it. The political, economic, and ideological differences between subcultural groups (Israel vs. Arab nations, Serbs vs. Muslims and Croats, tribal rivalries within Africa, and so on) cannot readily be resolved. And these conflicts and rivalries will be intensified by the shortage of resources that results from a combination of the plundering of land with an enormous increase in population.
Meyer went on to propose that pluralism in the arts was possible and perhaps even desirable because, entirely unlike political battles, the stakes were so ultimately low. He mused as to whether or not the emergence of critical theory had, in part, the role of elevating the arts to being described as having enough political or social content to matter enough so as to be debated as if the arts were at the same level of impact on the human condition as political or economic or religious debates. To put it indelicately, Meyer wondered whether the popularity of critical theory in the United States had something to do with artists and arts critics wanting what they do to matter as if it had any genuinely political significance in practical terms. Since the arts, as subjects of commerce and the investment of discretionary income, are for "wants" rather than demonstrable "needs", it's tough to make the case that what artists can do now in the age of Trump amounts to anything much different from what they did in earlier eras, custom-build artistic experiences of things we don't exactly need but that we very much want.
But a more important observation Meyer made is to suggest that without a belief in life after death or resurrection, and with the supplemental realization that we have something like a global cultural awareness at the "top" of human social and intellectual achievement, the zero-sum game nature of competition for resources and how to distribute or access the resources of the world will only get worse.
So in a way we could propose, contrary to Dreher's correspondent, that liberalism did not exactly table the question of whether or not a god or gods exist. It sublimated the question of what the divine will (if any) might be into civic religion. The trouble with this gambit is that it only works when the civic religion in question is sufficiently inclusive enough and vague enough (per McDougall) to invite a super-majority of those able to participate in a democratic republic to join in. To the extent that the Religious Right and the Religious Left debate these points within the formally Christian community is the extent to which this debate about the true civic religion can play out in other settings. perhaps atheists will not debate whether Jesus would be red state or blue state but the debate on the true civic religion is transmuted into a debate about the Founding Fathers as the apostles of the United States civic religion.
But for non-Americans, or for Americans who are able to step (however briefly) outside the mainstream of the Western liberal idiom, this is a debate between two modes of a common civic religion that may or may not recognize itself as such.
The trouble with reinventing Jesus in the image of your red state or blue state form of American civic religion is that there's a decent chance that the Jesus you end up worshipping isn't necessarily Jesus at all. Americans may have simply reinvented Christ to be an American patriot in the way that Enlightenment thinkers in Europe reinvented Christian doctrines into being a license for their particular colonialist or imperialist agendas.
Now there could be a post on Meyer's thoughts on the question of pastiche eclecticism and pluralism in the arts as arguably the signal challenge of our era but that is probably best saved for some other post.
Thursday, March 02, 2017
a discourse on utility music
I.
Surely, no music
is purer gebrauchsmusik
than make-out music.
II.
You are mistaken.
a purer gebrauchsmusik
rests in lullabies.
If you'd like a decade or so of speculation and debate as to how and why humanity first began to sing these two theories have been summarized in haiku. The pun is as dreadful as it is unavoidable by now, but surely you can see how the two themes are related. Indeed, the second may be regarded as a colicky descendent of the first.
Surely, no music
is purer gebrauchsmusik
than make-out music.
II.
You are mistaken.
a purer gebrauchsmusik
rests in lullabies.
If you'd like a decade or so of speculation and debate as to how and why humanity first began to sing these two theories have been summarized in haiku. The pun is as dreadful as it is unavoidable by now, but surely you can see how the two themes are related. Indeed, the second may be regarded as a colicky descendent of the first.
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
On the possibility of spatial-temporal syntactic correspondence between ragtime and sonata forms
When I was in college I got into ragtime. Not necessarily very deeply but enthusiastically, I got into ragtime. I experimented with writing rags of my own and read about how Joplin aspired to have ragtime evolve into a musical idiom able to explore more substantial concepts than was thought strictly possible in the dance forms it partook of. This did not mean I ever got around to Treemonisha or that I would necessarily regard Treemonisha as a success.
On the other hand, I did reach early the conviction that ragtime and sonata forms ought to be perfectly suited to each other. My composition teacher averred that form followed function and since ragtime was dance music, primarily, its form was not necessarily amenable to the functions of sonata form. Another professor with whom I shared a fondness for ragtime held a different view, that certainly ragtime and sonata form should, in principle, be a workable fusion of idioms. It'd just be a matter of figuring out how.
The axiom that form follows function can be flipped around, that functions can be assessed by a proper understanding of form. If I were to jettison any residual understanding of sonata forms predicated on 19th century theory or, to put it more polemically, 20th century givens as to what 19th century pedagogy on sonata form at the dawn of the century (either!) were supposed to be, I might find that it would be easier to assess the possible ways to have sonata and ragtime synthesized if I did not assume a class stratification between "high" (sonata form) and "low" ragtime as dance music).
So ... one of my lifelong projects has been, among others, to explore how a composer who loves sonatas and fugues as procedural developmental approaches and also loves ragtime might arrive at a synthesis of the stylistic idioms of ragtime with what we'd rather broadly call sonata form(s). To paraphrase Iannis Xenakis, the most ambitious forms of interstellar travel technology can provide for us may not carry us so far as liberation from our mental shackles could.
One of the gentle warnings Leonard B. Meyer had about musical analysis is that we should be careful not to forget the distinction between musical analysis as a matter of form and musical analysis as an observation of process. That these two aspects of musical analysis often overlap does not mean we won't run into trouble if we misdiagnose early on which of these two aspects of analysis will be most relevant. The kind of modular architectonics that are useful for delineating themes and transitions in a sonata form may be somewhat useless in evaluating the contrapuntal processes guiding a fugue. While linear expansion and development in a fugue "might" give us insights applicable to a sonata form the expectation of a continuously developing thematic economy may run aground in explicitly dance-derived forms, so the way we'd analyze a Bach fugue will be of little help in assessing a ragtime by Joseph Lamb.
Which is not to say that study of counterpoint and advanced forms won't be beneficial in finding relatively new ways to approach ragtime as a style. Being thoroughly steeped in both the history and literature of the sonata as well as the history of ragtime can open up possibilities for the fusion of both idioms that may remain, as yet, under-explored.
Of course to explore those possibilities we may need to establish the basic observations that may be made about these idioms. Rather than attempt to discuss ragtime in terms more suitable for the unfamiliar, I'm simply going to briefly go over the basic outline of the "Joplin" rag as it's commonly described.
AA BB A CC DD
Give or take an introduction, any transitions, and a coda, that's the basic formal outline of a ragtime.
We know that not every theme will be repeated and there are cases in which a theme that appears earlier may appear again in a modified form. For instance, the B strain in James Scott's Modesty Rag is recapitulated at the end where the "D" strain would be and it's slightly recomposed. This example alone should satisfy for the skae of this essay that recapitulating the B group as the final strain in a ragtime already opens up possibilities for a sonata form cast in a ragtime style. For that matter, where the return of the A strain would typically be could very easily be replaced with what in more traditional understandings of sonata form would be the development section. The syntactic climax of the return of the A material in a ragtime may be spatially displaced to a point later in a ragtime than we might expect it to conventionally appear but the syntactic climax of the reprise would still take place. If we bear in mind a simple proposal, that the A or B sections do not have to refer to explicit, literal repeats but may stand in for transitional material, then what we'd call the BB section or B section of a ragtime can be the space in which the second (or also third) thematic strains can be introduced with some suitable transitional materials.
This would be a way of synthesizing ragtime and sonata form in cases where we have sixteen-measure ragtime strains. Of course this would not be the only way a sonata form in a ragtime style could be composed. In fact if we were to make use of material more characteristic of early (rather than late) 19th century sonata materials we might find themes are more apt to be as short as eight measures. If our thematic strains are 12 measures or less immediate and literal repetition might be ill-advised and it might also be less effective, given the fact that so very often thematic differentiation is a weakness in ragtime compared to other styles, then any structural repetitions we might plan to introduce that could bridge the conceptual space between a ragtime and a sonata form would have to lean more toward a conventional understanding of a sonata form than a ragtime.
This basic adjustment to small-scale sonata form to resemble the style of ragtime is actually not the least bit difficult. Rather than an AA BB paradigm as we'd expect in ragtime we could substitute a short repeating exposition that would present as AB AB that could fill the commensurate durational space (George Rochberg's concept for this, called "time-space" is inelegant and bluntly literal, but it's arguably the best possible term we're looking for. After all, for the aim of this essay we ARE looking at corresponding durational time-spaces within sonata form and ragtime for any possibilities of fusion.
So that's to say this, if a ragtime strain is conventionally understood to be sixteen measures long and a conventional ragtime has an AABB procession before A returns, then the number of measures in that durational stretch would be sixty-four measures. This means that if you have a small-scale sonata exposition (something in the zone of forty measures) then you would be able to fulfill the cumulative AABB in a ragtime best with an AB exposition that has an internal structural repeat. A simple but perhaps necessary observation about sonata forms in the 18th century is to note that the repetitions should be considered structural. If you keep this in mind then an exposition with two themes can be mapped out as
exposition repetition development recapitulation
A B A B C A B
Oh, wow, what does that resemble?
verse chorus verse chorus bridge verse chorus
In strictly modular, macro-structural terms, the sonata form with a repeating exposition that's observed before the development and recapitulation can be thought of as remarkably similar in its overall concept to a standard pop song format. There are crucial, substantial differences in thematic developmental economy between a sonata form and a pop song, to be sure, but the differences are not necessarily reducible to a matter of sheer modular form. Rather, we're looking at a continuum of differences in the realm of procedural development and expansion of thematic content. When advocates of high art musical culture dismiss popular music they do not necessarily reject the elegant simplicity of pop music at the level of macro-structural considerations. They're rejecting the rudimentary presentation and repetition of thematic materials without long-form development.
Okay, fine, but who says this isn't possible in vernacular or popular idioms? Just because a majority of composers or musicians don't try out the possibilities of a fugue based on blues or ragtime vamps doesn't mean Henry Martin and Nikolai Kapustin haven't written such fugues. And even if you were to decide their attempts at a fusion of blues or jazz idioms with fugal writing don't "work" this can be a case in which the question is not whether the experiment is worth doing (at any rate I'll say directly I think it is) but why this or that experiment somehow falls short of a successful fusion of diverse musical idioms.
So we've established at a conceptual level the potential for macro-structural overlap between an 18th century sonata form and a 20th century pop song. Given the lack of redundancy we observed at the outset in the AABBACCDD of conventional ragtime don't we run into the problem of a lack of redundancy across themes? Won't we run into a problem in which it seems that the recursive interiority of ragtime strains preclude the possibility of thematic development?
Well, no. The short reason for this is to say that at a melodic and harmonic level the boundaries between a ragtime strain, as a form of late 19th century music, and a sonata form from the same period, are permeable. The long reason for this was my survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas in which I highlighted the ways in which a number of sonata themes by Giuliani and Carulli lent themselves to simple transformation from sonata material to ragtime material. For all of that go over here.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20survey%20of%20early%2019th%20century%20guitar%20sonatas
But if you still don't believe me and want a case study for how an early 19th century sonata form for solo guitar could be recomposed into the style of ragtime, here's an example I worked on this last weekend (after the break).
On the other hand, I did reach early the conviction that ragtime and sonata forms ought to be perfectly suited to each other. My composition teacher averred that form followed function and since ragtime was dance music, primarily, its form was not necessarily amenable to the functions of sonata form. Another professor with whom I shared a fondness for ragtime held a different view, that certainly ragtime and sonata form should, in principle, be a workable fusion of idioms. It'd just be a matter of figuring out how.
The axiom that form follows function can be flipped around, that functions can be assessed by a proper understanding of form. If I were to jettison any residual understanding of sonata forms predicated on 19th century theory or, to put it more polemically, 20th century givens as to what 19th century pedagogy on sonata form at the dawn of the century (either!) were supposed to be, I might find that it would be easier to assess the possible ways to have sonata and ragtime synthesized if I did not assume a class stratification between "high" (sonata form) and "low" ragtime as dance music).
So ... one of my lifelong projects has been, among others, to explore how a composer who loves sonatas and fugues as procedural developmental approaches and also loves ragtime might arrive at a synthesis of the stylistic idioms of ragtime with what we'd rather broadly call sonata form(s). To paraphrase Iannis Xenakis, the most ambitious forms of interstellar travel technology can provide for us may not carry us so far as liberation from our mental shackles could.
One of the gentle warnings Leonard B. Meyer had about musical analysis is that we should be careful not to forget the distinction between musical analysis as a matter of form and musical analysis as an observation of process. That these two aspects of musical analysis often overlap does not mean we won't run into trouble if we misdiagnose early on which of these two aspects of analysis will be most relevant. The kind of modular architectonics that are useful for delineating themes and transitions in a sonata form may be somewhat useless in evaluating the contrapuntal processes guiding a fugue. While linear expansion and development in a fugue "might" give us insights applicable to a sonata form the expectation of a continuously developing thematic economy may run aground in explicitly dance-derived forms, so the way we'd analyze a Bach fugue will be of little help in assessing a ragtime by Joseph Lamb.
Which is not to say that study of counterpoint and advanced forms won't be beneficial in finding relatively new ways to approach ragtime as a style. Being thoroughly steeped in both the history and literature of the sonata as well as the history of ragtime can open up possibilities for the fusion of both idioms that may remain, as yet, under-explored.
Of course to explore those possibilities we may need to establish the basic observations that may be made about these idioms. Rather than attempt to discuss ragtime in terms more suitable for the unfamiliar, I'm simply going to briefly go over the basic outline of the "Joplin" rag as it's commonly described.
AA BB A CC DD
Give or take an introduction, any transitions, and a coda, that's the basic formal outline of a ragtime.
We know that not every theme will be repeated and there are cases in which a theme that appears earlier may appear again in a modified form. For instance, the B strain in James Scott's Modesty Rag is recapitulated at the end where the "D" strain would be and it's slightly recomposed. This example alone should satisfy for the skae of this essay that recapitulating the B group as the final strain in a ragtime already opens up possibilities for a sonata form cast in a ragtime style. For that matter, where the return of the A strain would typically be could very easily be replaced with what in more traditional understandings of sonata form would be the development section. The syntactic climax of the return of the A material in a ragtime may be spatially displaced to a point later in a ragtime than we might expect it to conventionally appear but the syntactic climax of the reprise would still take place. If we bear in mind a simple proposal, that the A or B sections do not have to refer to explicit, literal repeats but may stand in for transitional material, then what we'd call the BB section or B section of a ragtime can be the space in which the second (or also third) thematic strains can be introduced with some suitable transitional materials.
This would be a way of synthesizing ragtime and sonata form in cases where we have sixteen-measure ragtime strains. Of course this would not be the only way a sonata form in a ragtime style could be composed. In fact if we were to make use of material more characteristic of early (rather than late) 19th century sonata materials we might find themes are more apt to be as short as eight measures. If our thematic strains are 12 measures or less immediate and literal repetition might be ill-advised and it might also be less effective, given the fact that so very often thematic differentiation is a weakness in ragtime compared to other styles, then any structural repetitions we might plan to introduce that could bridge the conceptual space between a ragtime and a sonata form would have to lean more toward a conventional understanding of a sonata form than a ragtime.
This basic adjustment to small-scale sonata form to resemble the style of ragtime is actually not the least bit difficult. Rather than an AA BB paradigm as we'd expect in ragtime we could substitute a short repeating exposition that would present as AB AB that could fill the commensurate durational space (George Rochberg's concept for this, called "time-space" is inelegant and bluntly literal, but it's arguably the best possible term we're looking for. After all, for the aim of this essay we ARE looking at corresponding durational time-spaces within sonata form and ragtime for any possibilities of fusion.
So that's to say this, if a ragtime strain is conventionally understood to be sixteen measures long and a conventional ragtime has an AABB procession before A returns, then the number of measures in that durational stretch would be sixty-four measures. This means that if you have a small-scale sonata exposition (something in the zone of forty measures) then you would be able to fulfill the cumulative AABB in a ragtime best with an AB exposition that has an internal structural repeat. A simple but perhaps necessary observation about sonata forms in the 18th century is to note that the repetitions should be considered structural. If you keep this in mind then an exposition with two themes can be mapped out as
exposition repetition development recapitulation
A B A B C A B
Oh, wow, what does that resemble?
verse chorus verse chorus bridge verse chorus
In strictly modular, macro-structural terms, the sonata form with a repeating exposition that's observed before the development and recapitulation can be thought of as remarkably similar in its overall concept to a standard pop song format. There are crucial, substantial differences in thematic developmental economy between a sonata form and a pop song, to be sure, but the differences are not necessarily reducible to a matter of sheer modular form. Rather, we're looking at a continuum of differences in the realm of procedural development and expansion of thematic content. When advocates of high art musical culture dismiss popular music they do not necessarily reject the elegant simplicity of pop music at the level of macro-structural considerations. They're rejecting the rudimentary presentation and repetition of thematic materials without long-form development.
Okay, fine, but who says this isn't possible in vernacular or popular idioms? Just because a majority of composers or musicians don't try out the possibilities of a fugue based on blues or ragtime vamps doesn't mean Henry Martin and Nikolai Kapustin haven't written such fugues. And even if you were to decide their attempts at a fusion of blues or jazz idioms with fugal writing don't "work" this can be a case in which the question is not whether the experiment is worth doing (at any rate I'll say directly I think it is) but why this or that experiment somehow falls short of a successful fusion of diverse musical idioms.
So we've established at a conceptual level the potential for macro-structural overlap between an 18th century sonata form and a 20th century pop song. Given the lack of redundancy we observed at the outset in the AABBACCDD of conventional ragtime don't we run into the problem of a lack of redundancy across themes? Won't we run into a problem in which it seems that the recursive interiority of ragtime strains preclude the possibility of thematic development?
Well, no. The short reason for this is to say that at a melodic and harmonic level the boundaries between a ragtime strain, as a form of late 19th century music, and a sonata form from the same period, are permeable. The long reason for this was my survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas in which I highlighted the ways in which a number of sonata themes by Giuliani and Carulli lent themselves to simple transformation from sonata material to ragtime material. For all of that go over here.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20survey%20of%20early%2019th%20century%20guitar%20sonatas
But if you still don't believe me and want a case study for how an early 19th century sonata form for solo guitar could be recomposed into the style of ragtime, here's an example I worked on this last weekend (after the break).
Saturday, February 25, 2017
for those interested in researching a chronicle of Mars Hill real estate expansion, leadership appointments, governance history, and public discourse: an index of tagged posts and analyses
While of late the blog has gotten back to being about the arts and music and so on, the blog has more often than not been identified as a watchdog blog or watchblog on the subject of Mars Hill. Since that's only part of what's been at this blog since 2006 it's not, strictly speaking, a very accurate description of this blog. But to be fair, a super-majority of traffic to this blog has undoubtedly been about things to do with Mars Hill history.
For a few years the plan was to eventually have a tag cloud for easier reference to any number of topics and categories of documentation for anyone interested in doing research on the movement. There's been other things to think about so that tag cloud just never materialized. On the other hand, compiling a majority of the tags by topic into an index for people who want to research the life and times of what was once Mars Hill may at least benefit from a kind of one-stop-shopping informational guide.
A few caveats. This isn't comprehensive. I didn't start actively tagging blog posts about Mars Hill until a few years ago so even if I blogged from time to time about Mars Hill between 2006-2010 I didn't necessarily think to tag stuff. For deep burrowing into this blog for stuff that may reference Mars Hill with content that's not tagged you're on your own. Sorry. I thought I'd quit blogging about MH in late 2011 because it seemed there was probably nothing much of interest to keep track of. Then early 2012 happened and controversy erupted to a greater degree than usual. It was around 2012 it seemed good to start tagging posts as I continued to document things. That could facilitate thematic continuity for people trying to keep track of what was going on in which area of the movement.
As Mars Hill began to scrub and alter its media content in response to continuing controversy the other, unanticipated, role this blog played was preserving earlier versions of content that was cleaned up in the wake of scandals of one kind or another. In the case of the 2008 spiritual warfare session this blog featured an extensive transcript and analysis of content that was intended for Mars Hill leadership only at first, made available to the public later, and then rescinded from public access for a time.
It remains to be seen whether Mars Hill has ultimately had a legacy worth scholarly inquiry. It seems that in light of the fact that the majority of the former Mars Hill campuses survived long enough to relaunch and rebrand that the story isn't over on these churches even if the brand of Mars Hill has withered.
Mars Hill did not collapse because of hostile secular/liberal media coverage. If anything hostile progressive/secular/left coverage only strengthened solidarity and brand reputation in the 1998-2008 period. Mark Driscoll could not be the right-wing Christian variation of Dan Savage if there had not been Dan Savage fans to regard Mark Driscoll as a foil. It's seemed, looking back over the last twenty years, that deliberately polarizing personas such as those wielded by a Dan Savage or a Mark Driscoll depend on foils. To put it in comics terms, you might say a Batman needs the Joker and in the case of Puget Sound it hardly matters which of the two formerly Catholic firebrands you pick.
Mars Hill didn't collapse as a brand because of hostile liberal media coverage. Thousands, even tens of thousands of people had to reach a point where they decided that they would no longer invest in or make sacrifices for this brand that had come to have a high-profile role in the Puget Sound and at a national level.
I'm going to toss out an idea for consideration. Rod Dreher's got his book coming out on the Benedict Option. Mars Hill imploded just a couple of years ago. Who wants to play with the idea that Mars Hill could be considered a high profile failure to establish a kind of Benedict Option? Dreher indicated he was considering Doug Wilson's scene as a possible candidate until certain scandals erupted. Wilson's fiefdom is still existent; Driscoll's Mars Hill collapsed. But for those who kept track of Driscoll's early vision of a movement that would start a seminary, launch a music label, found a publishing company and plant thousands of churches, if what Driscoll wanted doesn't fit Dreher's definition of The Benedict Option there's time for people to unpack why what Mark Driscoll hoped to create by way of an evangelical Christian counterculture in an urban secular setting doesn't count as a play at the Benedict Option.
Since Alastair Roberts has blogged recently over at Mere Orthodoxy about the problem he sees in defining the freedom of the press in purely negative terms, I'll say that on the subject of Mars Hill this blog has aimed at employing a "positive" definition of freedom of the press. People should be able to read about the history of Mars Hill and its leadership culture free of charge provided they've paid their internet bill recently enough and want to read about the history of the regional church that collapsed in the years 2014-2015. This blog isn't a watchblog and wasn't a watchblog but I believed it was important, to just use a media phrase, that this blog work toward journalistic responsibility and a social responsibility approach to mass media on the controversial history of a controversial religious movement. I'm a moderately conservative Presbyterian stick in the mud on religion and politics but I'm interested in reading as widely across the political spectrum as I can manage. So I try to range from the Jacobin/Vox side of things all the way over to The American Conservative and (when I work up the patience for it) The Weekly Standard. I admittedly tend to skip altogether Breitbart, The Blaze, FOX and stuff like. I admit to liking a mixture of Edmund Burke and Jacques Ellul. I'm definitely a Calvinist but I'm interested in ecumenical discussions. So, there, cards on the table.
I don't think Mars Hill collapsed because of hostile secular/progressive/liberal media coverage. I don't think Mars Hill collapsed because of bloggers. Blaming the messenger might be tempting for people who lost their jobs but the thing is I have friends who have stayed inside the churches that were formerly part of the Mars Hill orbit. For those who actually know me they know that I aimed to chronicle the movement as accurately and in as timely a way as possible. I didn't tell people to leave Mars Hill. I invited people to reconsider the narrative given to them and to reconsider whether Mars Hill's leadership culture had stayed true to its stated ideals. If thousands, even tens of thousands, of people left Mars Hill because they came to believe its leadership culture betrayed all the values its people said they stood for the only thing that had to do with blogs is that bloggers, for a time, documented what was going on in ways the press wasn't always able to keep up with. I made a concerted effort to never forget that the people of Mars Hill were always literally as well as figuratively my neighbors. For quite some time I hoped there would be serious reform in the leadership culture. That serious reform evidently did not happen in time to keep the brand from collapsing but it may yet transpire that the individual churches that have survived the collapse of Mars Hill may have introduced those reforms. Only time will tell.
And there is time, for those who may want to do some very heavy and lengthy reading, to read blog posts written while everything was going on. There's a lot we could learn from the life and death of Mars Hill. While I've considered writing a history of Mars Hill many times, and while it often seems that unless someone publishes an official book about something people don't think there's a real history there (because, let's face it, we're not at the stage where blogs or strictly online records are taken seriously as historiography for the simple reason that it's too mercurial), for now it seems best to have a bunch of stuff up with tags for blog posts by topic. People "could" one day choose to pay money for a book that describes some of the things that happened and some of the people who were Mars Hill. But at this point it seems best for the common good to have everything here here, and here for free to anyone who wants to take the time to read it because they've paid their internet bill.
So at the risk of making a bad joke, pretend Wenatchee The Hatchet is Walter Benjamin and that all the rest of these links are a kind of online Mars Hill The Arcades Project. ;)
a history of the attempts by Driscoll/Mars Hill to start a school
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20history%20of%20schools
a history of Mars Hill leadership attempting to start a workable music label
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/resound%20and%20other%20MH%20music
an associated survey of statements made by former Mars Hill pastor Tim Smith about music
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/smith
A confluence of situations
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20confluence%20of%20situations
These posts outline the historical background of what became known as the Andrew Lamb disciplinary controversy at Mars Hill in early 2012.
a call for reconciliation by Mars Hill circa March 2012 and associated analysis
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20context%20for%20a%20call
Acts 29 stuff
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a29
posts dealing with the history of a house and a contract
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20house%20and%20a%20contract
documents parallel histories of Mars Hill contracting with Result Source from the 2011 to 2012 period and the purchase by Driscoll of a house in Woodway during the same general period
posts dealing with former Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/boa
posts dealing with former Mars Hill Board of Elders tasked with investigating Driscoll ca. 2014
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/boe
posts on John Catanzaro, former naturopathic medical advisor to Mark Driscoll
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/catanzaro
posts on Craig Gross, a contact list, and an account of what transpired
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20list
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Justin%20dean
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/craig%20gross
Jacques Ellul's writing on propaganda as a way to understand megachurch culture generally and Mars Hill specifically
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Ellul%20on%20propaganda%20%26%20MH
financials at Mars Hill
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/financials
year end report statements
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/year%20end%20reports
the fundraising film God's Work, Our Witness from 2011
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Gods%20work%20our%20witness
posts on the subject of Mars Hill governance (history and documents)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/governance
semi-related, posts on the Mars Hillian idea of "prophets, priests and kings"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/prophets%20priests%20and%20kings
posts on the different accounts and explanations given for why the controversial 2007 re-organization of MH governance was considered necessary
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/reasons%20for%20re-org
Gateway conference statement by Driscoll
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/gateway%20conference
historical and social context on Mark Driscoll's Thrive conference narrative
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/thrive%20in%20context
coverage of questions and background of ghostwriting in the history of MH
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/ghostwriting
coverage of questions about Mars Hill Global
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/global
on Mark Driscoll's sketchy interpretive approach regarding Esther
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Esther%20and%20Driscoll%27s%20interpretive%20mojo
and his willingness to leverage his position on stories about his daughter rather than exegesis
houston interview with driscolls
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Houston%20interviews%20driscolls
content preserved from Pastor Mark TV
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/from%20pastormark%20tv
stuff generally connected to Mark Driscoll and T. D. Jakes
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/jakes
Mars Hill logo incident
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/logo
Mark Driscoll interaction with (or talking about) John MacArthur
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/MacArthur
mark driscoll preaching from malachi
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/malachi
markulinity as distinct from masculinity, Mark Driscoll on manliness
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/markulinity
proposed in these posts is the idea that at length Mark Driscol's blue-collar shtick ended up foundering against the ultimately white collar donor cultivation goals he began to make more central to his organizational approach.
things related to Janet Mefferd and Mark Driscoll
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mefferd
These three series are more concise and organized and deal with particular elements of Driscoll's public ministry and thought:
MARK DRISCOLL AND THE INFLUENCE OF PORN
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20influence%20of%20porn
largely from 2014
MARK DRISCOLL AND THE POWER OF THE SOB STORY
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20power%20of%20the%20sob%20story
from 2016
MARK DRISCOLL AND THE GOSPEL OF [ESCAPING] WHITE TRASH
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20gospel%20of%20white%20trash
real marriage
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20marriage
posts related to significant resignations in the history of Mars Hill
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/resignation
resurgence 2006 (website, Driscoll blogging)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/resurgence%202006
thematically similar, former Mars Hill elders doing their thing on Twitter
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/twitter%20tales
resurgence (publishing company or conference stuff)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/resurgence
robots (i.e. when used to preclude use of WayBack Machine and other archive tools to research Mars Hill)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/robots
a history of sermon editing/redaction of Mars Hill/Mark Driscoll content
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/sermon%20editing
blog post coverage regarding former executive elder Sutton Turner
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/turner
specifically about the leaked 2012 memo discussing the precarious fiscal situation at MH at that time.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20memo%20from%202012
William Wallace II stuff
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/William%20Wallace%20ii
specifically Pussified Nation stuff
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/pussified%20nation
Driscoll sounding off on gender stuff and particularly about women
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Driscoll%20on%20gender%20and%20particularly%20women
Mark Driscoll on spiritual warfare in general
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/spiritual%20warfare
Mark Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare teaching session transcript and commentary on it
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/spiritual%20warfare%202008
REAL ESTATE AND MARS HILL (any and all)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20estate%20and%20Mars%20Hill
tags for specific campuses
Albuquerque
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/albuquerque
ballard
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/ballard
bellevue
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/bellevue
downtown
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/downtown
olympia
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/olympia
portland
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/portland
rainier valley
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/rainier%20valley
sammamish
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/sammamish
shoreline
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/shoreline
spokane
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/spokane
tacoma
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/tacoma
Wedgewood/Lake City
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/08/mars-hill-wedgwoodlake-city-open-and.html
west seattle
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/west%20seattle
University District
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/U%20district
posts generally related to the transition from the era of Mars Hill to its end
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/transitions
All of that is, believe it or not, not actually a comprehensive list of tagged posts dealing with Mars Hill.. It would be difficult to summarize more than half a decade of journalistic blogging on the life and times of a religious movement that originated in the Puget Sound area.
For a few years the plan was to eventually have a tag cloud for easier reference to any number of topics and categories of documentation for anyone interested in doing research on the movement. There's been other things to think about so that tag cloud just never materialized. On the other hand, compiling a majority of the tags by topic into an index for people who want to research the life and times of what was once Mars Hill may at least benefit from a kind of one-stop-shopping informational guide.
A few caveats. This isn't comprehensive. I didn't start actively tagging blog posts about Mars Hill until a few years ago so even if I blogged from time to time about Mars Hill between 2006-2010 I didn't necessarily think to tag stuff. For deep burrowing into this blog for stuff that may reference Mars Hill with content that's not tagged you're on your own. Sorry. I thought I'd quit blogging about MH in late 2011 because it seemed there was probably nothing much of interest to keep track of. Then early 2012 happened and controversy erupted to a greater degree than usual. It was around 2012 it seemed good to start tagging posts as I continued to document things. That could facilitate thematic continuity for people trying to keep track of what was going on in which area of the movement.
As Mars Hill began to scrub and alter its media content in response to continuing controversy the other, unanticipated, role this blog played was preserving earlier versions of content that was cleaned up in the wake of scandals of one kind or another. In the case of the 2008 spiritual warfare session this blog featured an extensive transcript and analysis of content that was intended for Mars Hill leadership only at first, made available to the public later, and then rescinded from public access for a time.
It remains to be seen whether Mars Hill has ultimately had a legacy worth scholarly inquiry. It seems that in light of the fact that the majority of the former Mars Hill campuses survived long enough to relaunch and rebrand that the story isn't over on these churches even if the brand of Mars Hill has withered.
Mars Hill did not collapse because of hostile secular/liberal media coverage. If anything hostile progressive/secular/left coverage only strengthened solidarity and brand reputation in the 1998-2008 period. Mark Driscoll could not be the right-wing Christian variation of Dan Savage if there had not been Dan Savage fans to regard Mark Driscoll as a foil. It's seemed, looking back over the last twenty years, that deliberately polarizing personas such as those wielded by a Dan Savage or a Mark Driscoll depend on foils. To put it in comics terms, you might say a Batman needs the Joker and in the case of Puget Sound it hardly matters which of the two formerly Catholic firebrands you pick.
Mars Hill didn't collapse as a brand because of hostile liberal media coverage. Thousands, even tens of thousands of people had to reach a point where they decided that they would no longer invest in or make sacrifices for this brand that had come to have a high-profile role in the Puget Sound and at a national level.
I'm going to toss out an idea for consideration. Rod Dreher's got his book coming out on the Benedict Option. Mars Hill imploded just a couple of years ago. Who wants to play with the idea that Mars Hill could be considered a high profile failure to establish a kind of Benedict Option? Dreher indicated he was considering Doug Wilson's scene as a possible candidate until certain scandals erupted. Wilson's fiefdom is still existent; Driscoll's Mars Hill collapsed. But for those who kept track of Driscoll's early vision of a movement that would start a seminary, launch a music label, found a publishing company and plant thousands of churches, if what Driscoll wanted doesn't fit Dreher's definition of The Benedict Option there's time for people to unpack why what Mark Driscoll hoped to create by way of an evangelical Christian counterculture in an urban secular setting doesn't count as a play at the Benedict Option.
Since Alastair Roberts has blogged recently over at Mere Orthodoxy about the problem he sees in defining the freedom of the press in purely negative terms, I'll say that on the subject of Mars Hill this blog has aimed at employing a "positive" definition of freedom of the press. People should be able to read about the history of Mars Hill and its leadership culture free of charge provided they've paid their internet bill recently enough and want to read about the history of the regional church that collapsed in the years 2014-2015. This blog isn't a watchblog and wasn't a watchblog but I believed it was important, to just use a media phrase, that this blog work toward journalistic responsibility and a social responsibility approach to mass media on the controversial history of a controversial religious movement. I'm a moderately conservative Presbyterian stick in the mud on religion and politics but I'm interested in reading as widely across the political spectrum as I can manage. So I try to range from the Jacobin/Vox side of things all the way over to The American Conservative and (when I work up the patience for it) The Weekly Standard. I admittedly tend to skip altogether Breitbart, The Blaze, FOX and stuff like. I admit to liking a mixture of Edmund Burke and Jacques Ellul. I'm definitely a Calvinist but I'm interested in ecumenical discussions. So, there, cards on the table.
I don't think Mars Hill collapsed because of hostile secular/progressive/liberal media coverage. I don't think Mars Hill collapsed because of bloggers. Blaming the messenger might be tempting for people who lost their jobs but the thing is I have friends who have stayed inside the churches that were formerly part of the Mars Hill orbit. For those who actually know me they know that I aimed to chronicle the movement as accurately and in as timely a way as possible. I didn't tell people to leave Mars Hill. I invited people to reconsider the narrative given to them and to reconsider whether Mars Hill's leadership culture had stayed true to its stated ideals. If thousands, even tens of thousands, of people left Mars Hill because they came to believe its leadership culture betrayed all the values its people said they stood for the only thing that had to do with blogs is that bloggers, for a time, documented what was going on in ways the press wasn't always able to keep up with. I made a concerted effort to never forget that the people of Mars Hill were always literally as well as figuratively my neighbors. For quite some time I hoped there would be serious reform in the leadership culture. That serious reform evidently did not happen in time to keep the brand from collapsing but it may yet transpire that the individual churches that have survived the collapse of Mars Hill may have introduced those reforms. Only time will tell.
And there is time, for those who may want to do some very heavy and lengthy reading, to read blog posts written while everything was going on. There's a lot we could learn from the life and death of Mars Hill. While I've considered writing a history of Mars Hill many times, and while it often seems that unless someone publishes an official book about something people don't think there's a real history there (because, let's face it, we're not at the stage where blogs or strictly online records are taken seriously as historiography for the simple reason that it's too mercurial), for now it seems best to have a bunch of stuff up with tags for blog posts by topic. People "could" one day choose to pay money for a book that describes some of the things that happened and some of the people who were Mars Hill. But at this point it seems best for the common good to have everything here here, and here for free to anyone who wants to take the time to read it because they've paid their internet bill.
So at the risk of making a bad joke, pretend Wenatchee The Hatchet is Walter Benjamin and that all the rest of these links are a kind of online Mars Hill The Arcades Project. ;)
a history of the attempts by Driscoll/Mars Hill to start a school
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20history%20of%20schools
a history of Mars Hill leadership attempting to start a workable music label
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/resound%20and%20other%20MH%20music
an associated survey of statements made by former Mars Hill pastor Tim Smith about music
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/smith
A confluence of situations
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20confluence%20of%20situations
These posts outline the historical background of what became known as the Andrew Lamb disciplinary controversy at Mars Hill in early 2012.
a call for reconciliation by Mars Hill circa March 2012 and associated analysis
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20context%20for%20a%20call
Acts 29 stuff
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a29
posts dealing with the history of a house and a contract
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20house%20and%20a%20contract
documents parallel histories of Mars Hill contracting with Result Source from the 2011 to 2012 period and the purchase by Driscoll of a house in Woodway during the same general period
posts dealing with former Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/boa
posts dealing with former Mars Hill Board of Elders tasked with investigating Driscoll ca. 2014
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/boe
posts on John Catanzaro, former naturopathic medical advisor to Mark Driscoll
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/catanzaro
posts on Craig Gross, a contact list, and an account of what transpired
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20list
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Justin%20dean
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/craig%20gross
Jacques Ellul's writing on propaganda as a way to understand megachurch culture generally and Mars Hill specifically
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Ellul%20on%20propaganda%20%26%20MH
financials at Mars Hill
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/financials
year end report statements
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/year%20end%20reports
the fundraising film God's Work, Our Witness from 2011
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Gods%20work%20our%20witness
posts on the subject of Mars Hill governance (history and documents)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/governance
semi-related, posts on the Mars Hillian idea of "prophets, priests and kings"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/prophets%20priests%20and%20kings
posts on the different accounts and explanations given for why the controversial 2007 re-organization of MH governance was considered necessary
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/reasons%20for%20re-org
Gateway conference statement by Driscoll
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/gateway%20conference
historical and social context on Mark Driscoll's Thrive conference narrative
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/thrive%20in%20context
coverage of questions and background of ghostwriting in the history of MH
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/ghostwriting
coverage of questions about Mars Hill Global
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/global
on Mark Driscoll's sketchy interpretive approach regarding Esther
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Esther%20and%20Driscoll%27s%20interpretive%20mojo
and his willingness to leverage his position on stories about his daughter rather than exegesis
houston interview with driscolls
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Houston%20interviews%20driscolls
content preserved from Pastor Mark TV
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/from%20pastormark%20tv
stuff generally connected to Mark Driscoll and T. D. Jakes
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/jakes
Mars Hill logo incident
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/logo
Mark Driscoll interaction with (or talking about) John MacArthur
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/MacArthur
mark driscoll preaching from malachi
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/malachi
markulinity as distinct from masculinity, Mark Driscoll on manliness
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/markulinity
proposed in these posts is the idea that at length Mark Driscol's blue-collar shtick ended up foundering against the ultimately white collar donor cultivation goals he began to make more central to his organizational approach.
things related to Janet Mefferd and Mark Driscoll
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mefferd
These three series are more concise and organized and deal with particular elements of Driscoll's public ministry and thought:
MARK DRISCOLL AND THE INFLUENCE OF PORN
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20influence%20of%20porn
largely from 2014
MARK DRISCOLL AND THE POWER OF THE SOB STORY
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20power%20of%20the%20sob%20story
from 2016
MARK DRISCOLL AND THE GOSPEL OF [ESCAPING] WHITE TRASH
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20gospel%20of%20white%20trash
real marriage
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20marriage
posts related to significant resignations in the history of Mars Hill
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/resignation
resurgence 2006 (website, Driscoll blogging)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/resurgence%202006
thematically similar, former Mars Hill elders doing their thing on Twitter
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/twitter%20tales
resurgence (publishing company or conference stuff)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/resurgence
robots (i.e. when used to preclude use of WayBack Machine and other archive tools to research Mars Hill)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/robots
a history of sermon editing/redaction of Mars Hill/Mark Driscoll content
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/sermon%20editing
blog post coverage regarding former executive elder Sutton Turner
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/turner
specifically about the leaked 2012 memo discussing the precarious fiscal situation at MH at that time.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20memo%20from%202012
William Wallace II stuff
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/William%20Wallace%20ii
specifically Pussified Nation stuff
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/pussified%20nation
Driscoll sounding off on gender stuff and particularly about women
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Driscoll%20on%20gender%20and%20particularly%20women
Mark Driscoll on spiritual warfare in general
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/spiritual%20warfare
Mark Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare teaching session transcript and commentary on it
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/spiritual%20warfare%202008
REAL ESTATE AND MARS HILL (any and all)
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20estate%20and%20Mars%20Hill
tags for specific campuses
Albuquerque
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/albuquerque
ballard
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/ballard
bellevue
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/bellevue
downtown
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/downtown
olympia
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/olympia
portland
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/portland
rainier valley
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/rainier%20valley
sammamish
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/sammamish
shoreline
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/shoreline
spokane
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/spokane
tacoma
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/tacoma
Wedgewood/Lake City
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/08/mars-hill-wedgwoodlake-city-open-and.html
west seattle
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/west%20seattle
University District
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/U%20district
posts generally related to the transition from the era of Mars Hill to its end
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/transitions
All of that is, believe it or not, not actually a comprehensive list of tagged posts dealing with Mars Hill.. It would be difficult to summarize more than half a decade of journalistic blogging on the life and times of a religious movement that originated in the Puget Sound area.
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