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[podcast rec] The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
Apparently, back in the late-1990s-to-early-2010s, Seattle had its very own bona fide megachurch—a fact that shocked me when I learned about it, a few years after the collapse of said megachurch, because you'd be hard-pressed to find a less churchy city in the US. Where I grew up in Kentucky, "where do you go to church?" was considered a perfectly normal, polite question to ask someone at a barbeque or a book club, roughly equivalent to "so what school do your kids go to?"—Christianity was so culturally assumed that this was just a way of making conversation and orienting someone in space, and there were plenty of megachurches (and smaller churches) to choose from. In the circles I run in in Seattle, though, asking that kind of question would earn either an icy glare or total bafflement—it's just not part of the mainstream culture here.
Which is how I prefer it, all else being equal, but apparently Mars Hill, during its 18-year run, managed to attract over 10,000 attendees per week at its main Seattle location alone, preaching a distinctly "macho" brand of Christianity that would seem pretty at odds with the surroundings. (The church's founder and head pastor, Mark Driscoll, wasn't even doing this in the suburbs, which tend more conservative than Seattle proper, but in the Ballard neighborhood, which tends to be younger, queerer, and more progressive than the city as a whole.)
And then it collapsed, almost at quickly as it rose—it turned out the superstar pastor, behind closed doors, had been a bully, had been abusive and manipulative toward his staff and his wider congregation, and had badly mismanaged church funds. The church elders finally bit back, compelling Driscoll to leave abruptly, and he never returned to Seattle again. (The church, being largely a cult of personality, fell apart soon thereafter.)
So when I saw The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, I was curious to hear about how this historic curiosity took root, and why it fell apart, and I got that—but, man, I got so much more.
Turns out that this podcast was produced, not by a "true crime" sort or a Behind the Bastards-style dunker, but by Christianity Today, which I wasn't previously familiar with, but seems to be a somewhat-more-progressive-but-still-solidly-evangelical organization. The host lays his cards on the table early in the first episode: he, himself, founded a "hip", fast-growing church in Louisville during a similar time period, and while his church didn't have nearly the same issues that Mars Hill did, he was still troubled by how badly some of the church governance went, and was searching for an answer to questions like: was Mars Hill a one-off, or are these systemic issues all evangelicals should be guarding against? what went wrong? who got hurt and how?
This framing is largely to the show's benefit. I'd expected a punchy hit job by some outsider (and that would be a perfectly fun lens; Driscoll is a very punchable guy)—but instead I got this unexpectedly thoughtful, probing, sometimes-meandering (okay, often meandering—this is a pretty good podcast to assemble some furniture to, let's put it that way) exploration of what this whole vast community looked like and how it functioned, with plentiful interviews with leadership as well as laypeople.
The host's evangelical perspective does lead to him being occasionally a little blinkered. I think it'd be fair, for instance, for the show to drill harder into the question of "how much of what happened here was a natural consequence of the church's theology"—like, the host spends some time emphasizing that the way in which people spread the "good news" is just as important as the message itself, but I don't actually think that's a given if you take Reformed and/or fire-and-brimstone theology to be true! (And this was, in fact, a thing I specifically struggled with intellectually when I was a Southern Baptist teen!)
But it also means he's vested in tackling the church's worst and weirdest excesses on its own terms. Like, take the episode about "demon trials," which interviews people who essentially had exorcisms during their time at Mars Hill, and found the experience helpful-in-some-ways-but-also-pretty-violating. I appreciate that, instead of taking the attitude of "wow this exorcism shit is CRAZY, what weirdoes," the host actually goes and interviews a minister/theologian in the charismatic tradition, who's had experiences of demonic possession in his own congregation, and who then describes how his church handles those situations—and it's miles apart from how Mars Hill was doing it, and (imho) sounds a lot less manipulative and stilted, whether you believe in literal actual demons or not.
(The podcast is also exhaustively, hilariously well-researched. If Mark Driscoll wrote something in his college student newspaper in 1991 that actually contradicts something he said in a sermon in passing in the 2010s, you can bet the host will be all Phoenix-Wright-style "OBJECTION!" about it.)
I particularly appreciate the host's clear and persistent concern for the women of the church. (It was a very "women should stay at home and raise kids" kinda church, which, y'know, has some Problems TM as you might imagine.) I have no idea the host's specific theological beliefs, but he comes across as pretty unselfconsciously and non-condescendingly feminist here, with a pretty sharp eye. E.g., he'll play a clip from one of Driscoll's raunchier small-group lectures (it's clear from the clips why Driscoll attracted such a huge following; he's charismatic as hell), in which Driscoll tells a "funny" anecdote in passing about how, when a congregant of his learned that oral sex is Biblically permissible, she told Driscoll that she'd never felt comfortable doing that for husband before, so he told her "well go ahead and do it for him, and tell him Jesus said it's fine," so she decided to try it and then her husband indeed started coming to church—ha ha , laughs all around—and then the host will pause to be like, hey, this was being played for laughs, but didn't this minister in essence pressure this woman to do a sex act she'd never been comfortable with? with the implication that she needed to do this for the good of the church? and isn't that fucked up? (Yeah dude, it is! Wish someone eagle-eyed as you had been around in my childhood church for, uh, so many slights of that variety!)
The overall picture that emerges is roughly what you might guess. Driscoll saw himself as a reaction against a Seattle's liberal culture (he's fond of claiming Seattle has "more dogs than kids" lolllolllol). He was an edgy gen-Xer "bad boy" in the sense that he drank beer, loved UFC/MMA, and would swear and talk frankly about sex in his sermons... but he also encouraged dudes to "man up," get good jobs, start families, and become leaders in the church. Very "trad" stuff.
But that culture did seem to help a lot of unfocused, hurting young dudes who might've struggled otherwise. Drug addicts and military veterans, in particular, seemed to find refuge from their addictions and PTSD by getting involved with Mars Hill.
And it also was a refuge for for a lot of women coming from really bad situations—Driscoll viscerally hated guys who he felt disrespected women, who cheated on their wives, who beat their wives or ran out on their wives, who treated their girlfriends badly, and so on. And was there something paternalistic in that ("men should treat 'their' women better" versus "maybe women should be free of all that shit")? Yeah! Was Driscoll's help manipulative and/or more focused on feeding his own ego than doing a kindness? Probably!
But, y'know. You hear an interview with some woman who left an abusive marriage, and she'll talk about how she had literally no one, so she reached out to the church for help, and Driscoll gave her a place to stay and money for groceries for months, without blinking an eye or asking anything in return, and she'll talk about how she eventually found the church's treatment of women really gross, but at the time all she needed was someone to say she deserved to be respected and safe, and if she had it to do over she'd do it again and it's like... yeah, I get it.
So yeah, I liked that the former members of this congregation were allowed to be conflicted or ambivalent or "of two minds" about their treatment by the church. (They're also allowed to be hurt and vengeful and entirely ex-Christian, to be clear—there's a LOT of content.) The host would interview people who'd been badly hurt by this church, badly deceived, and yet they'd also have space to describe the experiences that were positive; they'd tear up describing, for instance, how deeply moved they were by the day their daughter decided to become baptized. (Again, it's a point in favor of the longishness of the podcast—letting people say the whole of their piece takes a really long time. Nothing has been more frustrating to me in my life than when someone wants to bully a story of mine into whatever framework they think is most fitting. The host has a perspective; he thinks Mars Hill had a fucked-up culture; that much is clear. But he's never talking over anyone or shoehorning anyone to make his case.)
I was kinda left thinking about... what's the gradient between cultishness vs clannishness vs partiality vs independence vs totally-atomized isolation hell, right. Mars Hill was repellent to many Seattle-ites not just because of its sexism and homophobia, but because of how interdependent and clannish and "cultish" its members seemed—I was actually surprised to learn about the homophobia and sexism, actually, because all I'd heard about it from Seattle folks who knew it during its heyday was "oh they all hung out together the time it was really weird" and "well your friend would start going to Mars Hill and they wouldn't have time to talk to you anymore." Which seems a little weird but... short of objectionable? Like, people stop hanging out with their old friends sometimes for any number of reasons, and sometimes it might be "you joined a cult and they're pressuring you into cutting all outside ties," but it can also be, like, "I like my church friends better" or "I just had a kid and don't have a ton of time to go drinking with my old bros right now whereas the church has childcare and is easier to hang out at" or, y'know, any other number of reasons. Knowing now that the church's problems go so much deeper (there's also the blatant misappropriation of church funds! probably-embezzlement! firing people the second they stepped out of line!), it's fascinating to me that the main thing Randos Not In The Know seemed to find objectionable was not those aspects, but the simple fact that they seemed a little bit too buddy-buddy.
There's something to be said about bla bla the general mainstream-liberal norms and expectations around Healthy Boundaries TM and how overall these are a GREAT INVENTION but also we shouldn't act shocked when people sometime crave something with more structure, or that people will in fact make sacrifices for family or community they are a part of, and the world is a complicated muddle where we all gotta figure out for ourselves what The Good TM looks like, and I typed up a bunch of words and they included liberal quotations wrt the question of autonomy from the Le Guin short story "Solitude" and then I realized it was a bad unfocused tangent so HERE'S A STRIKETHROUGHED PARAGRAPH INSTEAD.
I was also left vaguely noodling over how the structure of various church denominations seem to lend themselves to different types of failure modes. The curious paradox of independent protestant congregations is, while they're free from e.g. the lugubrious centuries' worth of bureaucracy of something like Catholicism, and thus can be more responsive to the needs, hungers, and desires of their specific congregants (there's no Book of Common Prayer dictating anything in a particular top-down fashion)—they also seem more susceptible to replacing that rule-by-bureaucracy-and-tradition with rule-by-charismatic-asshole. (Imagine the pastor version of some blowhard middle-aged dude slinging HARD TRUTHS about how INDEPENDENT and FREE they are, while acting as lord and tyrant of their family and the local car dealership they run, while benefiting from generous government tax breaks, and you get the idea.) And that smallness can lead to more pressure to conform—I was surprised, when I went to an Episcopal service a few weeks ago, how little actual preaching there was, and how little of that preaching consisted of asserting church dogma. You could go to church every week there just for the music and feel pretty comfortable, in a way that simply wouldn't work in the megachurch model, because in the latter you're listening to a dude go on for a while!!! about very specific alleged truths!!!
And there's an entirely different kind of thing happening in e.g. Quakerism, which tries to distribute authority as generously as possible, by holding their meetings in silence, all equally receptive to the Holy Spirit—which, I'll admit, is the most aesthetically appealing to me of all these options, but, well, there aren't many Quakers around nowadays, are there?
And yeah, the church as a whole is a pretty appalling clusterfuck in its end days, so if you DO like watching things explode, the podcast has that for you, too! Just, it's got a lot more, too, and I really enjoyed it all.
Funny tangents that didn't fit anywhere else:
* Did you know Christianity has, historically, always been kind of majority-women (sometimes HUGELY so)? Because I did not, until quite recently! And that bit of church history makes Driscoll's "macho" Christianity pretty funny in hindsight; sorry, dude, turns out your religion has always kinda been a "girl thing," cope n seethe
* Early on, the host interviews someone who was like "yeah, Driscoll was a cool and fun guy, but my god he was just such a bullshitter you know," and they specifically mention Driscoll's oft-repeated claim that he reads a new book EVERY SINGLE DAY and has done so for YEARS, and the guy's like "come the fuck on, no one actually does that." This turns out to be an extremely entertaining recurring theme in the series—some of his bullshitting is merely annoying, if understandable and harmless (e.g. making the neighborhood he grew up in seem way more rough-and-tumble than it actually was), and some of it's just FUNNY and "god how did you let yourself get caught" (e.g., he posts a picture to Instagram of the Bible his wife gave him when they started dating... but turns out the Bible's translation is clearly visible and, uh, oops, that translation wasn't published until a decade later...!) Also, because the show is SO RIDICULOUSLY THOROUGH, we often get a portrait of how the bullshit accumulates over time... e.g., the host will find a recording from the mid-90s where Mark describes his childhood, and then another one a few years later, then another one a few years later and he gets more and more self-aggrandizing each time.... this show is not TARGETED at messy bitches who love the drama but, as a messy bitch who loves the drama, there were some real gems like this, targeted at me specifically haha
* There's an episode where the host draws parallels between Driscoll and Bobby Knight, the famously dickish coach of Indiana University's basketball team during their heyday... and, okay, I say "dickish," but, after listening to that episode, I'm pretty comfortable upgrading that assessment to "abusive?" It's interesting—the host is a Kentucky guy, same as me, and thus also grew up steeped in the mythologies of the sport. I remember my dad telling me about Bobby Knight versus Phil Jackson in tones almost like that of a fairy tale or a morality play—here's one coach who gets results by screaming at his team and throwing chairs; here's a different coach who gets results by having Zen meditation sessions with his team and talking softly and holding book clubs; who can say who is right? And, yeah, my reaction as a kid was "ok Jackson's clearly better," but I thought that was because I was a weenie who cried easily and didn't like being yelled at.
Probably some people liked Knight's macho approach? But, uh, there's "macho" and then there's "literally choking your players during practice" and "not letting any outsiders into your practices ever (because you're doing fucked-up shit like choking players)" and "enforcing a culture of secrecy" that is all... I mean, what the fuck. And I feel like this was all glossed over at the time? The podcast host goes over all the shit Reed went through, just for daring to speak out against Knight, how much he got dragged in the press as a whiner and a traitor, and... man, I have a lot of critiques about the language we use to describe abuse nowadays, but turns out the norm we had in the 90s was really really fucking bad and I'm glad we're marginally better at calling this shit out nowadays.
Which is how I prefer it, all else being equal, but apparently Mars Hill, during its 18-year run, managed to attract over 10,000 attendees per week at its main Seattle location alone, preaching a distinctly "macho" brand of Christianity that would seem pretty at odds with the surroundings. (The church's founder and head pastor, Mark Driscoll, wasn't even doing this in the suburbs, which tend more conservative than Seattle proper, but in the Ballard neighborhood, which tends to be younger, queerer, and more progressive than the city as a whole.)
And then it collapsed, almost at quickly as it rose—it turned out the superstar pastor, behind closed doors, had been a bully, had been abusive and manipulative toward his staff and his wider congregation, and had badly mismanaged church funds. The church elders finally bit back, compelling Driscoll to leave abruptly, and he never returned to Seattle again. (The church, being largely a cult of personality, fell apart soon thereafter.)
So when I saw The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, I was curious to hear about how this historic curiosity took root, and why it fell apart, and I got that—but, man, I got so much more.
Turns out that this podcast was produced, not by a "true crime" sort or a Behind the Bastards-style dunker, but by Christianity Today, which I wasn't previously familiar with, but seems to be a somewhat-more-progressive-but-still-solidly-evangelical organization. The host lays his cards on the table early in the first episode: he, himself, founded a "hip", fast-growing church in Louisville during a similar time period, and while his church didn't have nearly the same issues that Mars Hill did, he was still troubled by how badly some of the church governance went, and was searching for an answer to questions like: was Mars Hill a one-off, or are these systemic issues all evangelicals should be guarding against? what went wrong? who got hurt and how?
This framing is largely to the show's benefit. I'd expected a punchy hit job by some outsider (and that would be a perfectly fun lens; Driscoll is a very punchable guy)—but instead I got this unexpectedly thoughtful, probing, sometimes-meandering (okay, often meandering—this is a pretty good podcast to assemble some furniture to, let's put it that way) exploration of what this whole vast community looked like and how it functioned, with plentiful interviews with leadership as well as laypeople.
The host's evangelical perspective does lead to him being occasionally a little blinkered. I think it'd be fair, for instance, for the show to drill harder into the question of "how much of what happened here was a natural consequence of the church's theology"—like, the host spends some time emphasizing that the way in which people spread the "good news" is just as important as the message itself, but I don't actually think that's a given if you take Reformed and/or fire-and-brimstone theology to be true! (And this was, in fact, a thing I specifically struggled with intellectually when I was a Southern Baptist teen!)
But it also means he's vested in tackling the church's worst and weirdest excesses on its own terms. Like, take the episode about "demon trials," which interviews people who essentially had exorcisms during their time at Mars Hill, and found the experience helpful-in-some-ways-but-also-pretty-violating. I appreciate that, instead of taking the attitude of "wow this exorcism shit is CRAZY, what weirdoes," the host actually goes and interviews a minister/theologian in the charismatic tradition, who's had experiences of demonic possession in his own congregation, and who then describes how his church handles those situations—and it's miles apart from how Mars Hill was doing it, and (imho) sounds a lot less manipulative and stilted, whether you believe in literal actual demons or not.
(The podcast is also exhaustively, hilariously well-researched. If Mark Driscoll wrote something in his college student newspaper in 1991 that actually contradicts something he said in a sermon in passing in the 2010s, you can bet the host will be all Phoenix-Wright-style "OBJECTION!" about it.)
I particularly appreciate the host's clear and persistent concern for the women of the church. (It was a very "women should stay at home and raise kids" kinda church, which, y'know, has some Problems TM as you might imagine.) I have no idea the host's specific theological beliefs, but he comes across as pretty unselfconsciously and non-condescendingly feminist here, with a pretty sharp eye. E.g., he'll play a clip from one of Driscoll's raunchier small-group lectures (it's clear from the clips why Driscoll attracted such a huge following; he's charismatic as hell), in which Driscoll tells a "funny" anecdote in passing about how, when a congregant of his learned that oral sex is Biblically permissible, she told Driscoll that she'd never felt comfortable doing that for husband before, so he told her "well go ahead and do it for him, and tell him Jesus said it's fine," so she decided to try it and then her husband indeed started coming to church—ha ha , laughs all around—and then the host will pause to be like, hey, this was being played for laughs, but didn't this minister in essence pressure this woman to do a sex act she'd never been comfortable with? with the implication that she needed to do this for the good of the church? and isn't that fucked up? (Yeah dude, it is! Wish someone eagle-eyed as you had been around in my childhood church for, uh, so many slights of that variety!)
The overall picture that emerges is roughly what you might guess. Driscoll saw himself as a reaction against a Seattle's liberal culture (he's fond of claiming Seattle has "more dogs than kids" lolllolllol). He was an edgy gen-Xer "bad boy" in the sense that he drank beer, loved UFC/MMA, and would swear and talk frankly about sex in his sermons... but he also encouraged dudes to "man up," get good jobs, start families, and become leaders in the church. Very "trad" stuff.
But that culture did seem to help a lot of unfocused, hurting young dudes who might've struggled otherwise. Drug addicts and military veterans, in particular, seemed to find refuge from their addictions and PTSD by getting involved with Mars Hill.
And it also was a refuge for for a lot of women coming from really bad situations—Driscoll viscerally hated guys who he felt disrespected women, who cheated on their wives, who beat their wives or ran out on their wives, who treated their girlfriends badly, and so on. And was there something paternalistic in that ("men should treat 'their' women better" versus "maybe women should be free of all that shit")? Yeah! Was Driscoll's help manipulative and/or more focused on feeding his own ego than doing a kindness? Probably!
But, y'know. You hear an interview with some woman who left an abusive marriage, and she'll talk about how she had literally no one, so she reached out to the church for help, and Driscoll gave her a place to stay and money for groceries for months, without blinking an eye or asking anything in return, and she'll talk about how she eventually found the church's treatment of women really gross, but at the time all she needed was someone to say she deserved to be respected and safe, and if she had it to do over she'd do it again and it's like... yeah, I get it.
So yeah, I liked that the former members of this congregation were allowed to be conflicted or ambivalent or "of two minds" about their treatment by the church. (They're also allowed to be hurt and vengeful and entirely ex-Christian, to be clear—there's a LOT of content.) The host would interview people who'd been badly hurt by this church, badly deceived, and yet they'd also have space to describe the experiences that were positive; they'd tear up describing, for instance, how deeply moved they were by the day their daughter decided to become baptized. (Again, it's a point in favor of the longishness of the podcast—letting people say the whole of their piece takes a really long time. Nothing has been more frustrating to me in my life than when someone wants to bully a story of mine into whatever framework they think is most fitting. The host has a perspective; he thinks Mars Hill had a fucked-up culture; that much is clear. But he's never talking over anyone or shoehorning anyone to make his case.)
I was kinda left thinking about... what's the gradient between cultishness vs clannishness vs partiality vs independence vs totally-atomized isolation hell, right. Mars Hill was repellent to many Seattle-ites not just because of its sexism and homophobia, but because of how interdependent and clannish and "cultish" its members seemed—I was actually surprised to learn about the homophobia and sexism, actually, because all I'd heard about it from Seattle folks who knew it during its heyday was "oh they all hung out together the time it was really weird" and "well your friend would start going to Mars Hill and they wouldn't have time to talk to you anymore." Which seems a little weird but... short of objectionable? Like, people stop hanging out with their old friends sometimes for any number of reasons, and sometimes it might be "you joined a cult and they're pressuring you into cutting all outside ties," but it can also be, like, "I like my church friends better" or "I just had a kid and don't have a ton of time to go drinking with my old bros right now whereas the church has childcare and is easier to hang out at" or, y'know, any other number of reasons. Knowing now that the church's problems go so much deeper (there's also the blatant misappropriation of church funds! probably-embezzlement! firing people the second they stepped out of line!), it's fascinating to me that the main thing Randos Not In The Know seemed to find objectionable was not those aspects, but the simple fact that they seemed a little bit too buddy-buddy.
I was also left vaguely noodling over how the structure of various church denominations seem to lend themselves to different types of failure modes. The curious paradox of independent protestant congregations is, while they're free from e.g. the lugubrious centuries' worth of bureaucracy of something like Catholicism, and thus can be more responsive to the needs, hungers, and desires of their specific congregants (there's no Book of Common Prayer dictating anything in a particular top-down fashion)—they also seem more susceptible to replacing that rule-by-bureaucracy-and-tradition with rule-by-charismatic-asshole. (Imagine the pastor version of some blowhard middle-aged dude slinging HARD TRUTHS about how INDEPENDENT and FREE they are, while acting as lord and tyrant of their family and the local car dealership they run, while benefiting from generous government tax breaks, and you get the idea.) And that smallness can lead to more pressure to conform—I was surprised, when I went to an Episcopal service a few weeks ago, how little actual preaching there was, and how little of that preaching consisted of asserting church dogma. You could go to church every week there just for the music and feel pretty comfortable, in a way that simply wouldn't work in the megachurch model, because in the latter you're listening to a dude go on for a while!!! about very specific alleged truths!!!
And there's an entirely different kind of thing happening in e.g. Quakerism, which tries to distribute authority as generously as possible, by holding their meetings in silence, all equally receptive to the Holy Spirit—which, I'll admit, is the most aesthetically appealing to me of all these options, but, well, there aren't many Quakers around nowadays, are there?
And yeah, the church as a whole is a pretty appalling clusterfuck in its end days, so if you DO like watching things explode, the podcast has that for you, too! Just, it's got a lot more, too, and I really enjoyed it all.
Funny tangents that didn't fit anywhere else:
* Did you know Christianity has, historically, always been kind of majority-women (sometimes HUGELY so)? Because I did not, until quite recently! And that bit of church history makes Driscoll's "macho" Christianity pretty funny in hindsight; sorry, dude, turns out your religion has always kinda been a "girl thing," cope n seethe
* Early on, the host interviews someone who was like "yeah, Driscoll was a cool and fun guy, but my god he was just such a bullshitter you know," and they specifically mention Driscoll's oft-repeated claim that he reads a new book EVERY SINGLE DAY and has done so for YEARS, and the guy's like "come the fuck on, no one actually does that." This turns out to be an extremely entertaining recurring theme in the series—some of his bullshitting is merely annoying, if understandable and harmless (e.g. making the neighborhood he grew up in seem way more rough-and-tumble than it actually was), and some of it's just FUNNY and "god how did you let yourself get caught" (e.g., he posts a picture to Instagram of the Bible his wife gave him when they started dating... but turns out the Bible's translation is clearly visible and, uh, oops, that translation wasn't published until a decade later...!) Also, because the show is SO RIDICULOUSLY THOROUGH, we often get a portrait of how the bullshit accumulates over time... e.g., the host will find a recording from the mid-90s where Mark describes his childhood, and then another one a few years later, then another one a few years later and he gets more and more self-aggrandizing each time.... this show is not TARGETED at messy bitches who love the drama but, as a messy bitch who loves the drama, there were some real gems like this, targeted at me specifically haha
* There's an episode where the host draws parallels between Driscoll and Bobby Knight, the famously dickish coach of Indiana University's basketball team during their heyday... and, okay, I say "dickish," but, after listening to that episode, I'm pretty comfortable upgrading that assessment to "abusive?" It's interesting—the host is a Kentucky guy, same as me, and thus also grew up steeped in the mythologies of the sport. I remember my dad telling me about Bobby Knight versus Phil Jackson in tones almost like that of a fairy tale or a morality play—here's one coach who gets results by screaming at his team and throwing chairs; here's a different coach who gets results by having Zen meditation sessions with his team and talking softly and holding book clubs; who can say who is right? And, yeah, my reaction as a kid was "ok Jackson's clearly better," but I thought that was because I was a weenie who cried easily and didn't like being yelled at.
Probably some people liked Knight's macho approach? But, uh, there's "macho" and then there's "literally choking your players during practice" and "not letting any outsiders into your practices ever (because you're doing fucked-up shit like choking players)" and "enforcing a culture of secrecy" that is all... I mean, what the fuck. And I feel like this was all glossed over at the time? The podcast host goes over all the shit Reed went through, just for daring to speak out against Knight, how much he got dragged in the press as a whiner and a traitor, and... man, I have a lot of critiques about the language we use to describe abuse nowadays, but turns out the norm we had in the 90s was really really fucking bad and I'm glad we're marginally better at calling this shit out nowadays.
no subject
* i love that i get the sense of the same even-handed approach in your review of the podcast as the podcast itself, in a very meta way. you state your biases/context of where you come from (which imo incidentally only enhances your review both with your baptist upbringing + the inclination for seattle vibes), and then step back to paint the review itself. good shit, would subscribe if i wasn't already here, etc.
* it is weird/tragic how cults of charisma are such an effective glue... kind of thinking of a documentary dad and i watched recently on alexander the great i think and how his empire sort of fell apart after he passed. feels like they're kind of partially required to be bullshitters but there's a sense that if there's enemies that want to take them down, that's the easiest knife to reach for.
* i'd wonder if there was a megachurch that would take its place? have you seen any like that? :o actually a little surprised one hasn't already sprung up given a lot of the reactionary uhhh culture pendulum swings, to put it mildly.
no subject
* re: quakers: oh yeah, quaker meetings for worship are NEAT. when i lived in Boston there was a really big one & i went a few times—the whole idea is, you sit in silence together, trying to focus on the presence of the Holy Spirit, and no one speaks until & unless they feel they are moved to do so by said spirit.
which in practice made for a really nice/peaceful kind of service—when i went, usually the first half-hour or so passed in just silent contemplation, and then maybe 1-4 people would feel moved to speak during the last half hour. and when people spoke, it would be like—some kind words about a member of their congregation who'd recently passed, or some insight they'd had during their morning commute, or some meditation on the nature of peace/war, stuff like that. no pressure whatsoever to speak if you didn't want to / didn't feel moved to, and no expectation / need to clap or react or anything after someone spoke—people would nod and then you'd get back to chilling in the silence.
and quakerism in general always struck me as shockingly egalitarian for such an old tradition—they also have a thing where they try to make all decisions by consensus, rather than by simple majorities. (plus all the usual stuff you probably already know... early abolitionists/suffragettes yada yada. it's neat stuff!)
* re: as for whether there's a hot new megachurch in Seattle... if there is one, i'm not aware of it. i'd be pretty ill-suited to notice that sort of thing—i suspect the groups i hang out tend even less religious than the seattle mean—but yeah, i got nothing. like, there is a pretty theologically conservative church downtown that draws a decent crowd, but i don't think it's the phenomenon that Mars Hill seems to have been. (if i were to hazard a guess, i'd honestly bet that the 2020s-flavored reactionary surge would not ride the church's coattails but instead be an areligious phenomenon this time round. like, Joe Rogan vibes or something...? idk lol)
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and ohhhh snap good point with the joe rogan ish areligious phenomenon.... ironically you saying that kinda just made me link how talk show radio and the general conservative tone there might bleed into certian quarters of podcasts. much 2 consider and all.
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2. This podcast sounds amazing. 19 hours!! I feel like I'm in a permanent state of processing my evangelical background and what the evangelical church is today, and this sounds like exactly my jam, especially since...
3. I too am a transplant to Seattle, or at least the metro area. I for sure heard of Mars Hill back in the day, but I feel like the main thing I heard was about the macho entitled sexism. Maybe I only really started to become aware of it after it was starting to fall apart.
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2 & 3) ha, what a funny coincidence for the two of us! hope you enjoy the podcast when you get to it; it was a good ride :3
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Your side note about Driscoll's entertaining self-aggrandising bullshit makes me think you might enjoy hbomberguy's video essay ROBLOX_OOF.mp3, which starts out just examining who made a particular sound effect in a videogame and then becomes an increasingly deranged dive into the non-stop, inexplicable lies of the guy who claimed to have made it. I was once in the same room as Tommy Tallarico - he presented a videogame music concert I attended - which retroactively became very weird after I'd watched this.
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The Bobby Knight comparison makes me think of the woman who coached LSU's women's team, about whom I read a fairly thorough article in the Post not too long ago (except I don't even remember her name....Kim something?) and how she sounds a lot like Driscoll - reinventing family history and abusing her congregants (read players), and it's so wild how this reoccurs across sports as well as religion, and there's something to be said about the growth of sport along with the decline of church, probably.....
Anyway this was a fascinating read, thank you.
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(thanks for reading!)
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♥ you always have such interesting things to say.
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unfortunately this host is like WAY too earnest for that lol.... best i've got is the funny unintentional running bit where after a certain point EVERY episode opens with the host being like "hey sorry these episodes are slow in coming, people keep coming out of the woodwork to talk to me and i want to include them all," and then the show ends up with almost as many bonus episodes as regular episodes as a result lmao
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sounds super interesting, especially with how the length lets it explore the good and the bad of individual stories + some similarities from your write up alone with the common complaints (and compliments) i often see towards mormonism from people inside and outside about the unity/isolation of members from non-members.
(and a few other things. i know so little about Christianity outside my bubble, and mormonism is such a...bastard child to most of christianity, so it's always interesting to see what's exactly the same, and what is actually different.)
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(and yeah, i feel like i'm the inverse—i knew southern baptist stuff and evangelical christianity pretty well because that's what i grew up with, but knew *very* little about mormonism when i first moved out west, and i still don't know a ton about it even though it's much more common out here than back home!
i did tour the tabernacle once tho and very much admired that seagull monument outside LOL)
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i've listened to a couple episodes now, and i have to agree with some of what you said about how...noncritical the guy is about certain elements. you can really tell he's coming from the angle of a believer, albeit a more sympathetic one.
i had to stop for a while on the "the things we do to women" episode, because it all got a little too real there, because wow. yeah. it's a lot, for sure. relatable, but not in a good way. mormonism (like a lot of religions, i think) tries to play up how it treats women as okay because "it's because we respect and love you that we treat you as less/protect you/limit you!" but at the end of the day it just feels bad as a woman in that environment, or you end up doing a lot of mental gymnastics to cope and feel okay with it.
i also scrolled down to the comments (that's on me, i know) and so many people are just...agreeing with Driscol on certain episodes: saying that yes, he may have been an asshole, but he was right, and i feel that's definitely something coming from a christian perspective is going to get a lot of, because as much as people try to pretty it up/modernize the views, sexism genuinely seems to be a firm tenant of the core beliefs. (again, of many religions.)
i know i tend to take a somewhat cynical view of most all and any religions given my own experience, but man, it just seems like so often the sexism is so baked in there that most attempts to pretty it up fall flat.
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and totally agree with you wrt all the points of church & sexism; it's absolutely maddening how impossible it is to avoid if you've got at all an interest in this sort of thing haha