The Wartburg Watch takes up the sad story of disgraced pastor Mark Driscoll’s latest headache — a RICO suit contending his former Mars Hill Church was nothing but a criminal enterprise.
Driscoll’s thuggish behavior makes that plausible, but proving it in court is a whole ‘nother thing. Good luck to the plaintiffs.
I want to draw attention to just a brief passage near the end of the post.
In 2009, when we started this blog, we were critical of Mark Driscoll. And boy did we ever get hammered. Our local seminary, SEBTS and professors were quite supportive of Driscoll. We were told, point blank, that something was wrong with the two of us since we were down on Driscoll when so many seminary leaders supported him. We were called, get this, prudes for being concerned with the *trajectory (a really cool Calvinista term)* of his lectures on college campuses which often brought up the gospel™ subjects of anal sex and pole dancing.
It is my opinion that these professors and leaders were secretly delighted with Driscoll’s garbage because they thought it made them appear cool. What it really made them appear is uninformed and biblically weird. As time has gone on, it is patently obvious that we two women knew more than many seminary professors, leaders, celebrity Calvinista pastors and good old boys looking for an excuse to indulge in porno jokes.
Mark Driscoll has embarrassed the Christian community. It is now clear that many seminary professors don’t understand the Gospel as much as two middle aged women without seminary training. It is the Driscoll fiasco that has convinced the two of us that seminary training does not prepare these men (since women are rarely listened to) to accurately spot a loose canon or was that cannon?
Enjoy the Mafia references, gospel™ leaders. You egged him on.
The crude thuggishness of Mark Driscoll has much in common with the crude thuggishness of The Donald; they operate in different spheres, but are otherwise interchangeable.
And both have enjoyed broad support from evangelicals.
Why do evangelicals gravitate toward crude, ham-handed, mafioso-like men? Short answer: Because once you look past the marketing lies about love-love-love, you see a lot of resentment, envy, and malice simmering at the bottom of Christian thought — and that’s who they, themselves, wish they had the nerve to be.
Oh, when you were young
Did you question all the answers
Did you envy all the dancers who had all the nerveLook around you now
You must go for what you wanted
Look at all my friends who did and got what they deservedWasted On The Way
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
A lot of the evangelical subculture consists of people who never got past the envy and found their own path, and then turned their failures into tokens of exceptional virtue. This is what you get.