Angry in Seattle

Something has me baffled. In my new home town of Seattle, there’s this popular church that seems very un-Seattlelike. I’m having trouble squaring the place, and especially its pastor, with the Seattle I have come to know.

Over many years, I have found Seattlites, across different venues, to demonstrate the egalitarianism and tolerance for which the city is famous. That has been reinforced over the past three months, during which I’ve made Seattle my home. Respect for difference informs people’s attitudes and fills their conversations.

I am therefore fascinated by the prominence of one particular Christian church thriving in the heart of the city. Mars Hill Church was founded in 1996 by its pastor and leader, Mark Driscoll. Driscoll’s brash, informal style has earned him a wide local following, just as it has brought him fame and notoriety nationwide. The renegade culture of Seattle’s Ballard district, home of Mars Hill’s first and main location, has infused the pastor’s style. In his writings and interviews, Driscoll talks openly about sex, referring directly to masturbation and fellatio. He and his congregants cut a decidedly hip appearance. Driscoll himself can be found in t-shirt and sweatshirt, and he has at times worn a Mohawk-type haircut. Many of his congregants sport body piercings and tattoos. Among those who are drawn to Driscoll—and there are thousands—some cite his cool, dressed-down style, as well as the edgy rock that fills Mars Hill’s pews, as the basis for their attraction.

Driscoll has drawn widespread attention for more than his style. Notoriety has come Driscoll’s way on account of his crude, antigay, anti-woman, testosterone-driven pontificating. Ugliness is his standard fare. Much of it appears in print or on video. His crude, tough-guy persona speaks especially to young men, whom Driscoll aims to rescue from a mainstream culture that supposedly feminizes them. In a 2009 in depth analysis of Mars Hill, historian Molly Worthen 

found that

what bothers Driscoll—and the growing number of evangelical pastors who agree with him—is [the standard] portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”

Molly Worthen, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?,” Jan. 6, 2009.

At the center of Driscoll’s theology is “complementarism,” the notion that God intends women to serve their husbands as helpmates—to “complement” men rather than live as their equals. To empower women, Driscoll believes, is to offend God. Thus, the Episcopal Church, in anointing a woman as a bishop, had ventured down a slippery slope toward naming “a fluffy baby bunny rabbit as their next bishop to lead God’s men.”  

Craig Welch, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church,” September 13, 2013.

Apparently, misogyny makes for good theology. In a 2001 blog post signed pseudonymously but later claimed as his own, Driscoll informed readers that

the first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while. . .

Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.  

Jenny Kutner, Evangelical Megachurch Begins Closing Branches after Pastor Calls Women “Penis Homes,” September 8, 2014. 

Homemaker indeed.

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The vulgar Driscoll has recently come upon hard times. Large numbers of his congregants have become troubled by him, and many have departed the church. As a result, Mars Hill has been forced it to close some of its satellite churches and reduce its staff. This has prompted Driscoll to step down from his position as pastor of Mars Hill Church.

A number of factors combined to bring relentless scrutiny and then discredit to the popular preacher. Driscoll has come under fire for plagiarizing sections of his book, _Real Marriage,_ and for devising a complicated scheme to exaggerate sales numbers. He has been widely accused of misusing church funds. A group of twenty-one former Mars Hill pastors resigned and wrote an open letter calling for Driscoll’s removal, charging him with spiritually abusive tactics. Outed as a bully and a cheat, Driscoll chose to diminish his public visibility—at least for a while. Warren Throckmorton, “Twenty-One Former Mars Hill Church Pastors Bring Formal Charges against Mark Driscoll," August 21. 2014.

Enough background about Driscoll and Mars Hill. Scads of blogposts and articles abound.

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Most noteworthy to me is that ground zero for Driscoll’s ministry has been Seattle. What’s up with that? Seattle is often identified as the gay-friendliest city in the U.S. It is the city that housed the famous 1999 uprising against the World Trade Organization. A 2011 study identified Seattle and Portland (Maine!) as the cities containing the highest per capita number of atheists. Here, radicals of all stripes fill the coffee houses and pubs. No Mississippi, this town!

How is it that Seattle provided Mark Driscoll a large, boisterous, and outspoken support base? Should we simply rest assured that Mars Hill is not a representative voice amid Seattle’s chorus, but simply a loud and dissonant one? Could there be there two Seattles, one progressive and one reactionary?

These explanations might perhaps be valid. Driscoll’s supporters are certainly not typical Seattlites. Apparently, there does exist a reactionary element among the city’s residents. But I wish to point to another factor, one that exerts a subtle but real influence on the city’s political culture.

Seattle is unquestionably a liberal city. On display here is a key element of liberalism: egalitarianism, including the tolerance for difference that typically accompanies it. Yet, while egalitarianism dominates Seattle culture, it entwines with a rather different ideology, one that sometimes combines easily with it and sometimes does not. That different ideology is anti-establishmentarianism. For some Seattle radicals, “the establishment” is the Enemy One. They complain that the autonomy of ordinary people is always under siege by those who exercise the lion’s share of power. Such sentiments surfaced colorfully during the WTO protests and in the local initiatives of Earth First!. In Seattle and elsewhere, anti-establishmentarians celebrate the “uncorrupted” grassroots and resent the powerful elites who would squash the grassroots under their heavy heel.

Anti-establishmentarianism cuts either toward the left or the right, depending on the kind of elites who draw its ire. Some anti-establishmentarians conceive power primarily in political terms; others focus on economic power; still others understand power mostly as a cultural phenomenon. These differences matter, because they determine where on the ideological spectrum one is likely to fall.

Critics who focus on the economic establishment tend to sit on the left. This has been the case in the U.S. at least since the 1880s, when radical labor and farm unions advanced the cause of poor laborers by denouncing the corrupt “plutocrats” who used their unconscionable wealth to control the nation. By the turn of the century, left-wing anarchists would play important roles in the more radical unions.

Yet, even when anti-establishmentarianism cuts leftward, it differs from other left-wing ideologies. This is demonstrated by the left’s complicated reaction to Lyndon Johnson. For those with a social democratic bent, the Great Society epitomized government’s proper role of helping increase economic equality. But for anti-establishment leftists, the Great Society’s intrusion into private life signaled an improper grab for power. The latter generally maintained that people could do more good by organizing themselves than by signing their power away to the state. Anti-establishmentarians, even on the left, tend to mistrust government, to view it as part of the power elite—along with the military, the university, and the corporations.

Given Seattle’s anti-establishmentarian strain, it is not shocking that one can find, among some residents, a disdain for those in political and cultural power. And that disdain potentially alienates them from the city’s dominant liberalism. Anti-establishmentarians who focus their ire on the state fall somewhere between the left and right; their orientation is more toward libertarianism than toward the social democracy more typical of the American left. Meanwhile, those anti-establishmentarians most concerned with culture register only disgust for liberal “elites.”

Mark Driscoll and his flock evince anti-establishmentarianism of the cultural breed. They mistrust “over-education” and the “political correctness” to which it gives rise, including gender and sexual-orientation equality. Driscoll’s diatribes are red meat to his followers, many of whom hunger for brute, unsentimental leadership. When he stokes men’s sexual aggression toward women (within the bounds of marriage, of course), he enacts revenge-by-proxy against effete liberals and their libertine morals. He vindicates those for whom morality emanates outward from the gut, for whom love is raw rather than cultivated. No “hippie, queer Christ” for these Christians.

Driscoll’s masculinity-run-rabid contradicts nearly all that Seattle represents. His mistrust of women and disdain for LGBT folks may seem anathema to Seattle culture—and, overwhelmingly, it is. But not entirely. The anti-establishment impulse that runs through the city’s culture manifests occasionally as conservative populism. When it does, it can provide fertile ground for the sort of right-wing evangelicals who resonate with the rumblings of a Mark Driscoll. Strange, but true.

Yom Kippur Redux

I suggested in my previous post that, this year, the prayers of Yom Kippur did not speak to me. A few days after writing those words, I was again confronted by the Yom Kippur liturgy. I was forced to reconsider my verdict.

Recently, I began teaching a course in Jewish ethics to middle-school children and their parents. Last week, we unpacked a brief passage from a text read on Yom Kippur. The text came from the Haftarah, a cycle of readings taken from the Prophets, a series of late books within the Hebrew Bible. The Haftarah portion read on any given Sabbath or holiday complements other parts of that day’s liturgy, including the portion read from the Torah, the five books of Moses.

The Haftarah is often the most moving and unsettling part of the service. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible stood outside the societies in which they lived. Typically, they rebuked their contemporaries for their decadent, selfish, self-absorbed behavior. It was the mission of the prophets to alarm their fellow Israelites and exhort them to act as God had commanded them. To a modern-day reader, the prophets come off sounding ethical, insightful, and inspired, if eccentric. They seem wide awake. They seem worthy of emulation.

The Haftarah passage that my class and I examined last week was from the Book of Isaiah. In it, the prophet Isaiah describes for us what the Yom Kippur fast, in his opinion, ought to consist of. His is not the typically private, self-absorbed fast. Rather than focusing on his private prayers and his bodily discomfort, Isaiah engages with conditions outside himself.

The class then broke out into three-person groups. I joined together with one of the groups. We began our study by reading a passage from the Haftarah portion:

No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.

(Isaiah 58:6-8)

The two fathers, one student, and I examined ourselves in light of the passage. We discussed our own attitudes and practices regarding homeless people. We considered whether we personally could have “take[n] the poor wretched into [our] home.” We didn’t agree about the usefulness of Isaiah’s prescription. But we all felt challenged by the words.

Suddenly, Yom Kippur didn’t seem so beside the point. Suddenly, I found myself pushed to engage in the most important sort of action. What could be more crucial to right living than to sacrifice one’s own comfort, and even safety, so that others might share in life’s basic necessities? And what could be more difficult to do?

Suddenly, Yom Kippur felt too audacious, too difficult. A week after dismissing the day’s worship as not in keeping with my spiritual yearnings, I was confronted by exhortations too demanding for my rather timid social justice practices. And this had significance for my spiritual life. I had spoken a bit too soon.

I am probably not likely to invite homeless people into my home (especially nowadays, when my family and I don’t have enough room). But, if I can remember to bear these words in mind next year, I will be tasked to build an outward, interpersonal dimension into my fast. Yom Kippur, refracted through the day’s Haftarah reading, perhaps requires me to get out of my head—on a day when most Jews are unusually inside their own heads. I am reminded that to repent is to act differently, to do what is difficult. Next year, I hope, I will bear in mind that seeking forgiveness requires more than words. It requires that I demonstrate a readiness to live more generously, more compassionately. It requires me to wake up and love.

What was it I was saying about “idol worship”?

Present but Absent on Yom Kippur

This weekend marked the passage of Yom Kippur, the most powerful day in the Jewish calendar. Its liturgy and rituals press the worshipper, issuing fierce demands. Yom Kippur is not for the faint hearted.

On Friday night and Saturday, I observed Yom Kippur. The liturgy and rituals spoke loudly, but not to me this year. They did not seize and hold me captive. My heart, mind, and soul strayed from the prayers and occupied themselves elsewhere.

It was seventeen years ago when Yom Kippur services helped restore me to the religion of my upbringing. On that day, I was emotionally overcome, partly from abstaining from food and drink (and coffee!) for approximately twenty-seven hours, as is the custom. Fasting intensifies the solemnity we participants feel as we engross ourselves in self-reflection, examining our thoughts, words, and actions from over the past year for all traces of mean-spiritedness, dishonesty, and dishonor. We spend the day in synagogue confessing our transgressions and asking God (the Father, the King, the Deity-out-There) to forgive them. We come clean, and we pledge to behave more virtuously.

For many years, Yom Kippur’s activities have inspired me. They have invigorated me. On Yom Kippur, I have affirmed my alignment with what is right and what is good.

What made this year different? Well, throughout this entire year, I have held closely to the practice of examining my thoughts, words, and behavior. Being in the habit of self-examination robbed this year’s Yom Kippur of its singular importance.

Yet there was an even more critical factor. This year, Yom Kippur’s confessions contrasted jarringly with my deepened ongoing spiritual practice. The Yom Kippur prayers felt empty and inauthentic, foreign to my evolving mode of spiritual immersion. For the first time, I felt not at home in this liturgy that has so enraptured me.

Increasingly, I immerse myself within a loving force, a force that I enter, a force that enters me. Rarely any longer do I turn to a heteronomous God who judges me. Imagining myself as observed and judged by an external force seems only to reinforce the illusion that I am separate from the source of all power. Yom Kippur, in my experience, asks me to stand before God and quiver. At no point during worship do I feel lifted and carried by a loving current.

This Yom Kippur, I couldn’t bring myself to stand before God the Judge. I could not dam myself off from the current of love that carries me to infinite expanses.

Throughout my time in prayer this Yom Kippur, my focus drifted away from the confessions at hand. Instead, I found myself meditating, confirming my oneness with the One. Instead of begging forgiveness from the heteronomous God, I focused on my soul’s light and invited it to fill me. I did not stand before God. I melted inside God.

Inside God, the One Energy flows through me. I am powerful, a conductor for the One Energy. I do not cower before an external God who sits in judgment.

Perhaps, in upcoming years, a deeper experience of Yom Kippur will come to me and fill my worship with renewed purpose. Until then, I will annually attend Yom Kippur services and abstain from eating, in solidarity with the Jewish people. Maybe next year I will reconnect with the day’s confessional prayers. Right now, they feel absurd, an exercise in idol worship. So be it.