Hip fundies with cool tattoos are spreading the gospel in my lovely, liberal hometown of Seattle. But this isn’t the earth-loving, soup-kitchen-running, “consider your personal relationship with Jesus” hippie-church that a lot of Seattlites are used to. No, this is a “trifecta of indoctrinating, voting, and breeding.”
Following Driscoll’s biblical reading of prescribed gender roles, women quit their jobs and try to have as many babies as possible. And these are no mere women who fear independence, who are looking to live by the simple tenets of fundamentalist credo, enforced by a commanding husband: many of the women of Mars Hill reluctantly abandon successful lives lived on their own terms to serve their husbands and their Lord. Accountability and community is ballasted by intricately organized cells — gender-isolated support groups that form a social life as warm and tight as swaddling clothes, or weekly coed sermon studies and family dinner parties that provide further insulation against the secular world. Parents share child care, realtors share clients, teachers share lesson plans, animé buffs share DVDs, and bands share songs.
Wow.
I read a study a while ago saying that Seattle has one of the highest numbers of people who consider themselves “religious” in the country. It surprised me at first, but then I took a look around at my family, friends and acquaintances. Many of them attend church services fairly regularly, and almost everyone would consider themselves as least “spiritual.” Nearly everyone holds some sort of belief in God. Church-related activities were very much a part of social life in high school and middle school.
But the culture of Christianity in Seattle is incredibly diverse. My family isn’t big into church-going, but we would at least go on Christmas and Easter every year. My mom would purposely choose a church with a female pastor, and the sermons were always about love and charity. Some of the most religious friends I had in high school were also some of the most liberal — and they were some of the most active volunteers in our community.
Of course, there were also the fundies and the crazies, and I have a very clear memory of one Evangelical girl at my high school saying that, for every student she doesn’t convert, “their blood is on [her] hands!” So while Seattle may be a place where Dennis Kucinich signs were more common than any others during the presidential primaries, and where many people feel a connection to God through the water and the mountains and the forests instead of through institutionalized religion, it is certainly not free of extremists. Mars Hills is proof of that:
After Driscoll prays for the continued fertility of his congregation, and the worship band cranks out a few fierce guitar licks, the sermon begins. Pacing the stage like a stand-up pro, blending observational humor about parenting with ribald biblical storytelling, Driscoll peppers his message with references to his own children as midget demons and recalls his own past in stories about duct-taping and hog-tying his own siblings. He riffs about waiting in a supermarket checkout line behind a woman who said to him, “You sure got a lot of kids! I hope you’ve figured out what causes that.”
“Yeah,” he flipped back. “A blessed wife. I bet you don’t have any kids.” The congregation hoots and hollers. “That shut her up,” he mutters.
In today’s sermon on Genesis, chapter 37, Snoop Dogg, the man who penned the memorable lyric, “Now watch me slap ya ass with dicks, bitch,” plays a supporting role. Driscoll conjures Joseph’s famous coat by showing an image of Snoop in the coat he wore to play a pimp in “Starsky and Hutch.” “The next time you read Genesis, think of Snoop,” he chuckles.
Deep-seated anger towards women. Institutionalization of that anger, including the tacit approval of violence and sexual abuse. Channelling that anger and hatred into a model where women are merely vessels to carry your seed and help you deal with your daddy issues.
It’s like Patriarchy’s wet dream.
And daddy issues indeed:
Driscoll’s mood darkens as he discusses how Jacob shunned Joseph’s brothers, and imagines their pain at not being anointed the favorite son. Pausing a studied beat, he looks out over his rapt charges and lowers his voice. “Some of you know what it’s like. You were the one that wasn’t loved. I can see it on your face and I’m sorry,” he practically whispers. “Some of you are still living life in reaction to your father. I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to. There is a providential God who can fix you, and his name is Jesus. He’s your only hope.”
And by “you” I actually mean “me,” in case that wasn’t entirely clear.
The new disciples are ripping down their parents’ white steeples and tearing apart the lumber to build a half-pipe. Christian youth is deinstitutionalizing the American church for the first time in about 400 years. This evangelical movement isn’t just about internally held principles, it’s a matter of lifestyle. Young evangelicals look so similar to denizens of every other strain of youth culture that, aside from their religious tattoos, the difference between them and the unsaved is invisible.
After all, shared culture is an opportunity for people to connect and gain one another’s trust. Culture — your favorite music, sport, pastime, style, you name it — presents an opening for evangelism. Once bonds are forged over a beloved band or football team, then the Evangelical “message” can work its way into a relationship. Once the message is heard, a world opens in which God’s love, as well as your cultural predilections, provide spiritual isolation from the secular world. It’s hard to imagine an aspect of secular culture lacking a Christian counterpart: one can choose from Christian hip-hop ministries, Christian military intelligence classes, or Christian diet groups in this mirror society.
It seems to me that these Evangelicals are the kids who always desperately wanted to be cool, but never quite made it. They feel alienated, and they look up to the edgier people who hang out on Capital Hill and pierce their faces and have sleeve tattoos, so they try and emulate that culture with the addition of Jesus Christ. Which is fine, since those things aren’t necessarily incompatible. But here’s what they’re missing: You aren’t a counter-culture hero if all you’re doing is reinstating dominant cultural norms and adding a skateboard. And natalism, misogyny and male aggression aren’t exactly earth-shatteringly new ideas.
One June evening, I arrive at the small, pleasant home of Dietz and his wife Sarah to meet their kids and join them for dinner. Sarah is clearly exhausted from caring all day for two children, cleaning the house, setting the table, and preparing a nice meal complete with thoughtful touches like organic strawberries in the salad and fresh mint in the iced tea. As Dietz carries on about church affairs and lectures about the importance of children’s obedience, Sarah serves the meal, cuts the children’s food, minds their behavior and eating, and clears the table. Every Wednesday the Dietzes’ community group assembles in this living room, where vintage touches and contrasting paint colors suggest discipleship to Martha Stewart. Here they participate in Dietz’s Bible study and a discussion of Driscoll’s most recent sermon; afterward Sarah serves dinner for 12 on an average week, 25 if the entire group shows up.
How alternative.
Like every woman I’ve gotten to know at Mars Hill, Sarah talks about her appointed role within the church not in terms of subjugation but in the language of difference feminism. She tells me a sisterhood forms between women who celebrate their domestic roles and talents as offered from God, delivered unto their children, marriages, and community as part of his “perfect plan.”
At the end of the evening, when I go into the kitchen to help Sarah with the dishes, she confesses that she’d love to go back to school for her master’s degree, but she just can’t see finding the time. “I guess it’s just not part of the plan,” she says in a soft, distracted voice. It’s hard to imagine that just a few years before, Sarah was a single girl tooling around the Seattle rock circuit in an old MG, spending her days studying Carol Gilligan. These days, Sarah’s old copy of “In a Different Voice,” a text you’ll find on most women’s studies syllabi, gathers dust on the secular bookshelf (Penguin classics and psych textbooks) that faces off against the Christian bookshelf (Bibles and theology textbooks) in the living room.
Few things irk me more than “difference feminism.” Now, I hesitate to be the feminist police, but screw that: If your “feminism” tells you that women collectively have a particular place in life, and that men and women are meant to occupy different realms of life (with the women occupying the private sphere and the men dominating the public), then you are not, in my mind, a feminist. And you are not forwarding feminist ideals.
But as much as I’m irritated by people who attempt to use feminism to justify women’s oppression, I can’t bring myself to feel any animosity towards these women (I can, however, feel that animosity towards women who make entire careers out of telling other women to submit to oppression. These are not those women). These women, though they are still people with individual agency, have a lot of their options stripped from them. And by their own accounts, their existance is fairly bleak:
For Judy Abolafya, a young mother in her early thirties, it was harder to come around to the Driscolls’ version of what a woman should be. As she sets out coffee cake on the kitchen table in her Seattle apartment, straining to be heard over her infant daughter’s cries, Abolafya tells me without apology that she never wanted to have children. She shudders as her daughter wails, shaking her auburn ponytail. “Listening to her like that just grates on me.” She grimaces. In a high chair at the table, her toddler, Asher, glumly pokes at blocks of cheese with grubby fingers, periodically mashing them into a paste he rubs into his black Metallica T-shirt. “Let’s face it. Asher is whiny and clingy and talks back. It’s dull and tedious here — there are myriad things I don’t enjoy about being at home, but it’s a responsibility.”
This life of homebound wifely submission is the opposite of what Abolafya thought she wanted, and the opposite of what she had. Before she met her husband, Ari, Abolafya toured all over the world with bands like Bush and Candlebox, staying at four-star hotels, living life on her own terms. She made a great income heading up merchandising on tours, managed it well, enjoyed her freedom, and was confident and outspoken. Now she defines that behavior as prideful, even if she misses it. “Everything was great when my conversion happened. I was making money, I was about to take a trip to Mexico, I was totally in control of my life,” she tells me. “My life is much harder, not easier, now that I’m a Christian,” she says, clenching her teeth against Asher’s droning whine. “We had originally planned not to have kids, but now we have to do our best to repopulate our city with Christians.”
Sounds… awesome. At least she’s honest, though, even if her story is strikingly sad:
At a weekly Bible study class at a Mars Hill pastor’s home, Abolafya first heard about the doctrine of wifely submission. The pastor’s wife gave Abolafya a book to study called “The Fruit of Her Hands,” which can essentially be summed up in Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord.” When Abolafya stretched out on her couch one evening to read the first chapter of the book, she screamed and threw it across the room. But she prayed to God and was led back to the Bible, to understand Wilson’s perspective. In the Bible, Abolafya found story after story about women being willfully deceived, following their own desires, wreaking travesty in their relationships and homes. In these stories she saw signs of her own past, her mother’s behavior, her friends’ actions. She began to submit to Ari about purchases and plans she wanted to make.
Abolafya no longer reads secular books or speaks to her old friends, She is now a deacon at Mars Hill and is responsible for planning the weddings held there, which always include a biblical explanation of marriage and gender roles; each year Mars Hill averages about one hundred marriages between couples within the congregation, all of whom must agree with this doctrine. Between her marriage ministry, the women’s Bible study she runs, her two small children, and taking care of her husband and her home, Abolafya says she doesn’t have time for many relationships anyway, and when she starts to home-school her kids soon, her time will be even tighter. “It’s not what I ever imagined,” she tells me, “or even what I ever wanted, but it’s my duty now, and I have to learn to live with that.”
She sounds absolutely miserable. I can’t imagine continuing to live a life I hated simply out of a sense of duty, but I can see how she would feel that way. That’s one thing that some cult-like religious organizations (yes, I’m calling this church cult-like; no, I do not think that most churches are cult-like) are particularly good at: Alienating their followers to the point where they feel both trapped and indebted. Where could she go if she left her husband? She’s cut off all her connections with friends. Her entire social group is in her church. Her children and her husband are deeply wrapped into that social group. Her occupation is in the church. Her husband controls all of the family finances. Certainly there are always options, but I can see how, from her perspective, it wouldn’t feel that way.
And this isn’t relegated to Seattle:
Radical conversions like Judy’s aren’t what Driscoll has in mind just for Seattle, but for the entire nation. During the late ’90s, a number of young people approached Driscoll for advice about starting their own churches. His response was to establish a church planting network called Acts 29, which has been growing rapidly ever since. The book of Acts tells of the first Christians’ evangelism in 28 chapters, thus the idea behind Acts 29 is to continue their legacy. Through the network, new churches from San Diego to Albany have grown to follow Driscoll’s strict orthodoxy and views. Acts 29 sponsored 60 new churches in the last year alone; 120 applications now wait in the queue for consideration.
While cultural specifics — media, music, dress, attitude, and so on — vary widely in the churches that Acts 29 encourages nationwide, cultural politics do not. Most significantly, in founding the network, Driscoll has established a nationwide apparatus to push back women’s rights through the “liberation theology” of submission. The online application for church planting is an extremist screening device to this effect. It begins with a lengthy doctrinal assertion that every word of the Bible is literal truth; the application plucks out the examples of creationism and male headship of home and church to clarify this doctrine. “We are not liberals,” it says. “We are not egalitarian.”
Thanks to Amanda for sending me this article.
*As long as Salon is going with the Nirvana-related titles, I will too.