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CHAPTER 1
AROUSING EMPIRE
The second Mars Hill sermon I attended, in October 2006, was part 2 of the Vintage Jesus series, "How Human Was Jesus?" Pastor Mark summed up his response to this theological query in one sentence, "The first thing that I want to tell you is that Jesus was a dude." As he continued to speak on how "normal" a dude Jesus was, Driscoll offered speculation concerning his appearance to make his case: "He was a carpenter, so he may have been in fairly decent shape, callouses on his hands for swinging a hammer, there were no power tools in that day so he was a manual laborer, he walked a lot so he may have been lean and thin and rugged." He contrasted this "biblical" image of Jesus with representations found in popular culture, "If you've seen the pictures of drag queen Jesus [audience laughter], um, it's very troubling to be honest with you. He tends to have very long hair with product, wears a dress and open-toed sandals. Listens to a lot of Elton John, that kind of thing [audience laughter]. Um, and it's hard to worship him, 'cause you could beat him up even if you're a girl [louder laughter]." Then, Driscoll showed off a T-shirt peeking out from underneath his dark blazer; it was white and had a close-up of "drag queen Jesus" with "very long, beautiful curly hair, nice features, a little rouge on his cheeks" that underneath read "Jesus watches you download porn." While comparing Jesus' humanity to his own, Mark added that he is Lord over his "little kingdom" of five children: "two daughters that I love and they're very girly, so we go out shoe shopping and to tea," and three sons who "want to wrestle, pee in the yard, eat meat, or make everything into a gun [audience laughter]. ... The first thing my boys want to do [when I come home] is have an ultimate fight, 'cause we watch a lot of ultimate fighting at the Driscoll house, and that's how it goes [audience laughter]."
Pastor Mark appeared to have his audience in the palm of his hand, inspiring laughter such that his portraits of "manly" Jesus resonated. However, when Jesus' humanity became figured through a sense of humor, interference irrupted.
I'll tell you some aspects of Jesus you may not have known. The first is that he was funny. OK? Now some of you have never heard this, you've been in the wrong church. You've been told that Jesus was not funny. He was very religious, and serious [Driscoll's eyes bug out and he grimaces], and I think [his face relaxes and eyes glint with a smart-aleck grin] that's funny [burst of audience laughter]. Jesus had a sense of humor. ... Do you really think that Jesus went camping with twelve guys for three years and never told a joke [chuckles from audience]? Any of you guys ever been camping with other guys? That's basically what they did [laughter builds]. You ever been fishing with your buddies, no women around? You have the pull-my-finger marathon [loud laughter], you know what I'm talking about? Some of you are saying, are you really saying Jesus played pull my finger [loud laughter]. ... I'm just sayin,' it's possible. Ah ...
At that moment, I noticed a man standing in the center aisle. He pointed at Driscoll onstage and shouted, "I disagree!" In the dim light, it was difficult to see or hear him well. Driscoll did not visibly register the man's cry, and no one close to me reacted. He appeared to be thin, with long gray hair, and he was moving forward, but slowly. His voice and stance were confrontational, but hardly menacing. He did not get very far, if reaching Driscoll was his goal, disappearing as quickly as he appeared, smothered and dragged out by phantom men. Pastor Mark continued his patter without skipping a beat:
How do you hang out with twelve guys, mainly blue collar, for three years and not tell a joke or laugh at one? Can you imagine telling a joke and Jesus saying [he points with an angry face at the crowd], you knock it off, we are religious men [audience laughter], this is serious business, and I will not tolerate shenanigans [loud burst of prolonged laughter]. I believe that Jesus had a perfect sense of humor, and a perfect sense of comedic timing.
It was clear that Driscoll thought the same of himself. After that Sunday, there was no word from the pulpit concerning any disturbance, but the sight of security guards monitoring the Mars Hill Ballard entryway with the impassive self-importance of club bouncers became routine. Before sermons, service opportunities flashed onscreen, including the need for male volunteers to "protect the body." While Pastor Mark preached, two unsmiling men wearing Bluetooth headgear and black T-shirts embossed with the Mars Hill logo and "security" etched in white flanked the stage, surveying the audience like a private militia ready to pounce. Years later, after Mars Hill received criticism for its surveillance tactics, Director of Security Nathan Finn responded: "On Sundays, we keep watch on the premises, mostly in an effort to deter any potential threats by being proactive not just reactive." In his post, Finn makes no reference to a particular antagonist, rationalizing the presence of Mars Hill's security team according to a preemptive logic, which Brian Massumi argues "takes threat, which has no actual referent, as its object." As Finn explains why Mars Hill's security team was hypervisible in specific spaces, we glean insight into how the affective reality of future threat was cultivated by and at the church.
If you are saying to yourself, "aren't they exaggerating this whole thing? I didn't see or hear of anything," it is because our security teams are doing a fantastic job mitigating threats we see regularly throughout the year. ... Ever wonder why there are two security team members who sit at the front of the sanctuary while Pastor Mark preaches? Because several years ago, a man charged the stage with a large knife while Pastor Mark was preaching. In general, there is a higher potential of threats when the sermon topic is on spiritual warfare.
The security team spectrally haunted rather than strictly policed the sanctuary. While physically protecting Driscoll's body from faceless assailants, they materialized spiritual warfare in the emergent present, a duty that involved but also surpassed their stance of surveillance. In the most basic terms, spiritual warfare is understood as an ongoing worldly battle between Satan and God, demons and angels, and good and evil. Scholar of American religion Sean McCloud, writing on contemporary Third Wave Evangelicalism in the United States, says, "Spiritual warfare entails fighting real demons who occupy physical spaces — including human bodies, objects, places of residence, tracts of land, even entire cities and countries." At Mars Hill, the terrain of spiritual warfare was a social imaginary of visceral tenor — not located in objects or territories per se, but nevertheless tangible, embodied, and real. While the story of the man rushing at Pastor Mark with a knife became Mars Hill folklore sutured to his preaching on spiritual warfare, it was an affect-event precipitated by a joke about Jesus' humor and no more than a minor glitch at the time. Years later, when I read mention of this demonic dissenter in a local media source, he was said to be wielding a "machete" as he "charged the pulpit" with a "heart full of rage." While my sightline was not optimal, I never saw a weapon in the man's hand, nor registered rage in his tone. When I spoke with a member about this incident, I was told that the so-called machete was no larger than a Swiss Army pocketknife.
The security team flanking either side of the stage served as more than a reminder of the man who supposedly rushed the pulpit with a knife; they conjured the felt reality of future threat while bodily conscripting Driscoll's audience into a past event with prophetic reverberation. Although Finn linked a state of alarm to services during which Driscoll preached on spiritual warfare, the actual presence of the security team on any given Sunday normalized the perception and cultivated the affective reality of emergent threat regardless of the sermon topic. Thus, spiritual enemies could take myriad demonic forms as religious, racialized, and sexualized "others," infecting porous bodies within and outside the congregation. Driscoll considered teaching on spiritual warfare "incredibly controversial," but also "incredibly vital," "because there's an enemy who hates God, hates you, and has set his army against you because you're a citizen and servant of Jesus' Kingdom ... every Christian is a soldier in this war." This teaching was reinforced through the church's use of military rhetoric and militarized imagery, particularly in its men's ministry, conflating spiritual and worldly warfare while affectively animating amorphous yet immediate enemies. Collective yet embodied processes of militarization went viral via a social imaginary that networked menace potential, converging the demonic with antagonists such as "Islam," Christian leaders who transgressed Driscoll's "biblical" theology, sexualized single women, and effeminate men putting the church and nation at risk.
The church's priming of a mood of unending battle agitated what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart calls "atmospheric attunements," which "attend to the quickening of nascent forms, marking their significance in sounds and sights and the feel of something's touch or something penetrating." At Mars Hill, fear, in the words of Sara Ahmed, "play[ed] a crucial role in the 'surfacing' of individual and collective bodies." Such uneven immaterial circulation overrides self-monitoring and exceeds the intentional subject, bodily networking emotion as affective value. Nebulous yet urgent threat manifested through the mobilization of what affect theorist Jasbir Puar calls a "terrorist assemblage." This social imaginary propelled nonwhite "foreign" and hypersexualized "domestic" terrorist-bodies into phenomenological and ecological relation as congregants became "affective and affected entities that create fear but also feel the fear they create." Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was affecting and affected by the vitality of this atmosphere; despite myself, I laughed.
PROTECTING AND INFECTING THE BODY
In 2007, as the church re-architected to accommodate its plans for further physical expansion, Driscoll preached through the Book of Nehemiah, a sermon series that ran for twenty-two weeks. The series was assigned a tagline, "Building a City within a City," that in typical fashion blended biblical and local idioms such that Seattle became Jerusalem and Driscoll an amalgamation of Ezra and Nehemiah as they built walls and preached to fifty thousand. Nehemiah, as Driscoll often portrayed himself, endured "great opposition," including "death threats." However, due to perseverance and God's grace, Nehemiah succeeds in rebuilding the walls that fortified the city and organizes its first church service. After this introduction to the story unfolding in Scripture, Pastor Mark contemporizes it to suit his purposes circa 2007, dubbing the church's ecclesiological architecture the air war and ground war:
And so what you'll see this week is two things we like to call at Mars Hill, the air war and the ground war. The air war is going to be the preaching of a six-hour sermon. ... In addition to that, then you'll see a ground war, where one-on-one and in small groups, leaders meet with people and follow up with their questions. ... Churches need to have both. ... In the air war, you're dealing with the masses. That's what I do. That's what the bands do. That's what the media technology opportunities we have do. Sermons go out to four thousand, five thousand, six thousand people on a Sunday, and then podcasts, vodcasts, tens of thousands more. ... What we see is that the air war leads. It goes first, and the ground war follows. And the air war is very visible. This is a very visible event.
I attended the Nehemiah sermon series throughout that spring and summer into early fall, and noticed a difference in Mark's preaching. He was yelling a lot more. There was also a lot more laughter and affirmation by way of "amens" from the audience. The color scheme onstage set a somber, angry tone of deep red and black. The video introduction for the series began with a grainy view of an industrial plant pumping smoke into the sky. This shot jumped to a sidelong angle of the glass exoskeleton of the Seattle Downtown Library, scanning over gray city streets until flushing out to a helicopter view of skyscrapers overlooking Puget Sound, their lights glowering in the dusk as the density of buildings took the shape of a fortress. During this montage Mark intoned, "The hope of Mars Hill since the beginning is that Seattle is a great city and what it needs is a great city within that city. A city that loves Jesus, a city that believes Scriptures, a city that lives for the good of the whole city and not just its own self-interest." Nehemiah was stark and stridently militant in its presentation of a city under siege and in need of defense. According to Driscoll, what Seattle needed most of all was to hear the Word as preached by him. Ezra may have been the "Billy Graham of the Old Testament," but Pastor Mark was the Billy Graham of today: "I like to open the Bible and preach God's Word ... what God historically uses to change people's hearts, minds, lives, to transform cities and nations and bring about revival."
It was during this sermon series that I was suddenly overcome by waves of nausea during a service. As my discomfort intensified, I broke into a cold sweat. Sitting in the middle of a long row of chairs at the center of the sanctuary made it difficult to leave. Eventually, Driscoll's sermon wound down and the people in my row stood in order to receive communion. I quickly headed for the back entrance, opened the door, and immediately threw up. While the reasonable next move was to alert someone at the help desk and apologize for the mess, I went with my first instinct, which was to flee the scene of the crime. The flu symptoms that I was convinced would surface never did. When I repeat this story, I am often asked what Driscoll said that prompted me to feel ill, the presumption being that there was a cause and effect relation between the content of his sermon and my nausea. I have no satisfactory reply. When I look over my field notes nothing screams, "I was really angered/saddened/confused (or otherwise oppressively interpellated)." No identifiable moment or message caused me to feel sick that day.
Though I could not articulate it at that time, the atmosphere of spiritual warfare had infected me in ways that I could not make intelligible. I was participating in and contributing to collective affective labor beyond my ken. Interpreting "my" vomit as a sign of disgust did not do it social justice or register its affective dimension. Instead, this physiological repulsion signaled what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart describes as an "intimacy with a world [that] is every bit about that world's imperative," such that "the things in it have a force and a say. We sense out what affects us, and the sentience of a situation is filled with tracks of labor and attunement." I was not the only one who sensed an ominous shift in mood during the Nehemiah series. Years later, as former members spiritually and emotionally harmed by church administration posted their stories online, one of the first women to openly testify to such abuse, and her contrition in its contagiousness, was Jonna Petry: "Mark was preaching through the book of Nehemiah, utilizing it to promote his future vision for the church. And now, into summer, an oppressive heaviness began to overshadow everything. There was a real sense of spiritual warfare and I fasted and prayed under the burden on multiple occasions."
Driscoll wound down his sermon on the air war–ground war with a story in which a "Muslim friend" who carefully placed the sacred Quran at the top of an otherwise messy stack of books had convicted him that "We should at least do that with the Scriptures that tell us about the real Jesus," since "[the Quran] is a book written by a guy inspired of demons that sends people to Hell." As his audience took that comment in, Pastor Mark made a joke of it: "Did he say that?"
"Yeah, I think he did."
"So he's not a Muslim?"
"I don't think so. I think he's a Christian."
"Is there really a difference?"
"Yeah, there's a huge difference."
"Isn't somebody gonna get mad?"
"Oh yeah, definitely." Staging this conversation in mockingly muffled tones to much hooting, hollering and applause from the congregation, Driscoll then concluded with a quip known to any familiar with his sermonizing: "Just trying to put the fun back into fundamentalism."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Biblical Porn"
by .
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