The Registered Runaway compares himself to the “macho Christian” image some pastors espouse, and finds neither he nor Jesus Christ measure up.
My manhood hasn’t always been a huge concern for me. I mean, occasionally I’ll experience the brief insecurity of letting Taylor Swift finish her song as I’m riding in a car full of dudes, but who hasn’t? (and honestly, who doesn’t love her?). There’s also the times when the demon incarnate baseball will roll up to my feet, and I have a moment similar to Smalls in The Sandlot, where I, uh, run it over to its owner. Oh, and also, I don’t really fall under the hetero tent either.
But I have some manly qualities about me. And, in all seriousness, I am very proud to be a man. It’s a unique part of my identity, and just for sake deconstructing stereotypes: no, not all gay men wish they were women or are feminine.
I’m practical, logical, enjoy the outdoors, love fishing, action flicks, working on my core, eating steak rare (this is starting to sound like a dating profile), anyhow, my point is, even if you were to judge me from societal standards, I think you’d consider me a man of men. But all the reasons listed above do not equate to the Biblical definition of what a man is. They are what pop culture defines masculinity as. I am not Chuck Norris nor am I Rambo. And I am no less a man than these two real/fictional characters would have you believe.
Oh, and I am also nothing like Mark Driscoll.
“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.” (http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2009/01/limp-wristed-jesus.html/)
“Latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers do not represent biblical masculinity, because real men — like Jesus, Paul, and John the Baptist — are dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes. In other words, because Jesus is not a limp-wristed, dress-wearing hippie, the men created in his image are not sissified church boys; they are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal.” (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/01/08/jesus-and-masculinity/)
Music to my ears.
According to the list, Driscoll’s list, I flunk with flying colors.
Heterosexual- Doomed from the start
Win-a-fight- Have fought, well wrestled, when I was 7, and I always lost.
Punch-you-in-the-nose- Hate seeing people bleed, next.
Dress wearing hippie- I’ve never worn a dress! Check. But, some would call me hippie-like.
Aggressive- Passive
Assertive- sort of?
Nonverbal- I like to talk about feelings.
So there you have it, I cannot be a member of Mark Driscoll’s Macho Man Club.
Additionally, I don’t make my heavenly father proud.
So, there’s that.
Hold on, let’s tap the brakes.
Jesus, Paul, and John’s turn
Heterosexual
While I have very strong doubts that John the Baptist, Paul or Jesus Christ were gay men, they never made public declarations of their sexuality, or even mention a single instance of personal sexual attraction. (perhaps because they weren’t so insecure about it… Driscoll). If this was such an important credential to being a real man, why didn’t they simply say so?
Fighters/Aggressive/Assertive
Jesus nixed our natural tendency towards self-defense by declaring that we take the hit on both sides of the face (Matthew 5:39), and by submitting to a criminal’s death undeserved. And in his instructions for evangelism, he asked us to be “harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16, NLT). Not bullies.
Paul was beaten to a pulp, unprovoked, and he refused to raise his fist. Why? Because according to him, we should not “overcome evil by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21, NIV).
John the Baptist looked soldiers in the eye and told them, “do violence to no man.” (Luke 3:14, KJV)
Dress-wearing hippie
For the sake of serious argument, I will pass on talking about how Paul, and Jesus all likely wore clothes resembling dresses, but John, on the other hand, preferred threads of camel hair (Matthew 3:4).
But the hippie charge. I’ll make this short and sweet. Jesus was raised in poverty and led an all out nonviolent rebellion against the religious order. He hung out with societal undesirables (including WOMEN), and had Woodstock-esque gatherings during his sermon on the mount, and when he fed the five thousand. In today’s context, Jesus would be a hippie.
John the Baptist, was head to toe hippie, he chose a radical lifestyle. He ate bugs, and held gatherings in rivers. His statement to the soldiers reminds me of the flower power generation placing roses in the rifles of cadets.
Paul is the perfect example of a hippie’s biography. He started out as a fundamentalist, a legalist, a persecutor, and then, a life altering talk with Christ, and boom, he abandoned the old ways. Additionally, he was a man of utter tolerance. He brought in Gentiles, women, and children. His reasoning?
“for the Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men.” (Romans 14:17, NIV)
That’s hippie talk.
Nonverbal
Perhaps the most ridiculous statement made by Mark Driscoll. Jesus turned oration into an art form. The poetic nature of his parables were sensitive stylistically, and incredibly elegant. Jesus never turned anyone away, nor did he dodge dialogue.
*Additionally, this places us in an awkward position if we are to be nonverbal, cause prayer requires the opposite (although it also requires listening!)
Paul was even more verbal and open about his story. He wrote deeply personal accounts of his own pain, regrets and struggles. He didn’t man up and shut up. He wanted to share, yes, his feelings!
John the Baptist was a preacher. Yes, a preacher. But somehow nonverbal? He engaged with the outcasts and was quite vocal about the coming Kingdom.
♦◊♦
The irony of Mark Driscoll’s statements in light of these three men (one of them, being God), would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. Tragically, Driscoll took his hate speech one step further.
He beckoned forth the bullies.
I cannot imagine what it was like for these worship pastors to be insulted so publicly. And by none other than a pastor!
I cannot understand how Pastor Mark believes this behavior is becoming of a man of God. In an age of teen suicides resulting from cyber-bullying, pastor Mark called for Christian hazing to his some 200,000 followers on twitter and facebook. It is nothing short of sickening.
And, more than anything, I am amazed that people still follow him.
Rachel Held Evans, a personal favorite of mine, wrote a response post to Mark Driscoll’s declarations.
“Godly men stick up for people, not make fun of them.
Godly men honor women, not belittle them.
Godly men love their gay and lesbian neighbors, not ridicule them.
Godly men celebrate femininity, not trash it.
Godly men own their sexuality, not flaunt it.
Godly men pursue peace, not dismiss it.
Godly men rise above violence, not glorify it.
Godly men build up the Church, not embarrass it.
Godly men imitate Christ—who praised the gentle and the peacemakers, who stood up for the exploited and abused, who showed compassion for the downtrodden, who valued women, and who loved his enemies to the point of death.” – Rachel Held Evans (http://rachelheldevans.com/mark-driscoll-bully)
This woman of God knows more about what’s in the fabric of Biblical manhood than Pastor Macho.
Finally, I am glad I do not make the cut for Mark’s Macho Man club.
Because guess what?
Christ wouldn’t either.
Photo—alfonso benayas/Flickr
About Registered Runaway
Mark Driscoll’s ‘macho Christianity’ really is an unhelpful and demonstrably unchristian model. However, Driscoll is attacking something that is no less – and probably a lot more – unhealthy and far more widespread. This is a trend that some have referred to, rather unhelpfully, as the ‘feminization’ of the Church.
By the ‘feminization’ of the Church people refer to the abandonment of themes of warfare and struggle, of themes of rule, Lordship, and authority, of discipline and challenging discipleship and a focus upon romantic themes, an excessive focus upon intimacy, subjectivity, sensitivity, emotionalism, sentimentality, inclusivity, and non-confrontation. The model of piety of many Christians is focused upon a sort of romantic relationship with Jesus. Biblical piety, by contrast, not only focuses upon a different sort of existential struggle, but far less upon the individual soul and far more upon God’s rule in the external world.
The ideal modern minister is a fairly soft man or woman who serves a sort of therapeutic capacity for the congregation. However, perhaps the primary virtue of the biblical leader is the ability to resist the urge to show pity where it is inappropriate and the strength to stand his ground in order to protect the purity of the people of God. The minister is a shepherd, but we forget that the biblical shepherd is not the gentle and harmless figure of a bucolic Wordsworth poem, but a man of strength and violence – a man who will defend the flock against predators with lethal force and lead them with strength and authority. Like the shepherd David, the Christian pastor should be able to kill lions, bears, and wolves. Like the shepherd Moses, the Christian pastor should be able to strike the enemies of God with his rod of judgment. All of the major leaders of Scripture were men of violence, who showed no mercy when judgment needed to be carried out. Almost all of them were involved in casting or personally enacting a death sentence on someone (the apostle Peter with Ananias and Sapphira, for instance) or cursing the enemies of God by the Spirit (Peter cursing Simon the sorcerer or Paul cursing Elymas the sorceror). A number of them were set apart for divine service after such sacred violence (Phinehas and the Levites being two examples here). The key identity-forging events in the lives of these men were ones in which they had to be prepared to suffer or inflict death in God’s service and not compromise. It is not an accident that Church leadership is seen as one restricted to males in Scripture – among many other reasons for this, it is male as it focuses on virtues that are especially ‘masculine’.
Now, this sacred warrior role was not the macho Christianity of Driscoll. However, it is a far cry from the hyper-sensitive and non-confrontational leadership of many Christian churches today. The fact that the Christian tradition has historically maintained all-male Church leadership is not unrelated to the martial character of the role. The shift in the direction of unisex Church leadership is a telling development away from this biblical model to a therapeutic or academic form of leadership that has tenuous claim to be rooted in Scripture.
The men of the Bible are not the macho men of Driscoll’s teaching. They speak at length about their feelings and internal struggles (the Bible is chock-full of men expressing their feelings). They can be men like Jacob who, in contrast to his hairy and macho hunter brother and father’s favourite Esau, was more attached to his mother, cooked a mean stew, and was a fairly domesticated guy, not leaving home until his seventies. They can be sensitive musicians and poets like King David. They can be characterized by a deep tenderness, loving concern, and compassion for others, like the Apostle Paul in his relationship to his churches. However, manliness in Scripture is associated with the willingness to die and, perhaps more challenging, to fight or enact judgment – sometimes extreme – on others in defence of the truth, to brook no compromise. Jesus is the ultimate man, the one who lays down his life for and later comes in judgment to destroy the enemies of his Church, while also delivering many from darkness to light. The biblical man is not someone who fights because he loves fighting, but someone who does not hesitate to fight and lay down his life, because he loves peace, the truth, and the vulnerable.
The New Testament speaks a lot about not taking vengeance for ourselves and does not endorse bullying. However, the same Scriptures that teach that Christ submitted to the death of the cross without raising a finger in his defence also teach that he will one day come with fiery vengeance upon the adversaries of the people of God. The same Paul who was beaten to a pulp delivered enemies of his churches over to Satan for destruction. The same biblical books that teach us not to take vengeance ourselves teach us to pray for God’s vengeance. The same Spirit who gave life to the dead and sight to the blind caused Herod to be eaten alive by worms and killed Ananias and Sapphira for their lies.
While people might like to portray Paul as a great man of tolerance, he really doesn’t match up to modern perceptions of what this involves. Paul is uncompromising and deeply confrontational on such things as issues of idolatry or sexual morality within his churches. He pronounces curses on people, delivers people to Satan, pronounces coming divine judgment and vengeance as an integral part of his message much as Jesus did. His message of divine inclusion was not one of bland ‘tolerance’, but a message of apocalyptic judgment and deliverance through the cross of Christ, in which the death sentence due to fallen humanity was enacted, and through which the life of alienation of sin or living outside of the covenant was overcome and a new Spirit-empowered form of life was established within the Church.
While Driscoll’s approach of ridiculing effeminate worship leaders is very unhelpful, the biblical paradigm of worship as struggle with God, warfare, judgment, and military assembly, led by the ‘holy warriors’ of the priesthood is widely forgotten in the Church today. Sappy, non-confrontational, and sentimentalized piety without either teeth or a backbone is quite far removed from biblical piety (read the prayers and psalms of Scripture and compare them with modern worship to get a good idea of the gap here). While there are points of contact between the two, the balance of biblical piety has largely been abandoned, and ‘effeminate’ worship leaders and pastors are a significant part of the problem. Our culture’s models of flaunted masculinity are, contra Driscoll, very poor and restrictive guides to follow. However, there are virtues that Scripture particularly associates with masculinity – the virtue of being prepared to ‘shed blood’ (not usually literal blood, of course), one’s own or sometimes that of others, in an uncompromising fashion to defend the boundaries (moral or social) against attack – virtues which the ‘sensitive’, ‘tolerant’, ‘passive’, or ‘non-aggressive’ male can often fall short of. This is not the sort of macho and aggressive, vaunting and swaggering, masculinity that our culture often celebrates, but a humble and firm masculinity that is defined by its willingness and ability to take a stand, not being swayed by pity, public opinion, opposition, or the threat of violence, in defence of truth, moral standards, and the vulnerable. This masculinity is defined by commitment and faithfulness to God and his people, the sort of moral and verbal self-mastery that sets the tone for one’s family and community, and standing as those called to defend their wives, children, and communities from physical but also, and more particularly, moral threat.
While most treatments of Christian virtue today focus almost entirely upon the heart and sentimental affections, the New Testament focus is arguably more upon the ‘virtues of the chest’ – courage, fortitude, long-suffering, loyalty, commitment, faithfulness, self-control, etc. – virtues that serve to resist the sentimental cast that is often placed upon Christian faith within the contemporary cultural milieu and virtues that suggest a far more ‘masculine’, externally-oriented, and non-sentimental form of spirituality than is typically enjoined in many Christian churches.
This is the sort of masculinity exemplified and celebrated within Scripture but devalued within our culture and many modern churches, which celebrate a sort of culture and society that no longer has a need for moral guardians and enforcers, focusing on tolerance, empathy, inclusivity, and sentimentality as virtues that trump all others, while God, in both the Old and New Testaments, often strongly condemns leaders for exhibiting these very traits.
I agree that self-control, fortitude, righteous judgement, courage, loyalty, and the rest of those you list – strength of spirit, in short – are masculine virtues. They may even be more common in men, though my experience shows nothing to suggest that. But if you think they’re exclusively masculine virtues, you need to meet more women.
No, they are definitely not exclusive to men. Far from it. Many women powerfully exemplify such virtues. However, they are virtues that particularly resonate with men as a general group. If we hold up a form of piety that encapsulates and elevates such virtues we may just discover that men will find it easier to relate to and feel part of the type of Church that results.
I like Taylor Swift too. As a straight dude musician, I appreciate how thoroughly she knows and writes for her core audience (pre-teen and teen girls, possibly from a conservative patriarchal Driscoll-ish family, judging from a few hints in her lyrics.)
Kudos for “liking” Driscoll on facebook. His patriarchal (again, that word) attitude is kind of interesting to me in trainwreck sort of way, so maybe I will check him out too. I think he is appealing to men who are feeling rudderless, maybe in recovery, definitely looking for answers – in another universe they would be GMP regulars. Without getting into chapter and verse (not my forte), I see Driscoll as an easy answers guy with a Calvinistic sheen. I’ve seen compelling, energetic-and-energizing female pastors, so I do not buy out of hand the proposition that modern Christianity is limp-wristed.
I haven’t listened to “Mars Hill” music specifically, but a great deal of modern evangelical music is tepid “Jesus is my emo boyfriend” stuff. It wouldn’t surprise me if: the more macho the pastor and his message, the more insipid the Christian praise rock.
One thing I love about traditional church music is: you open up the hymnal, and you see a strong cross-section of Western Civilization. Chant, Bach, Isaac Watts, Fanny Crosby, Shaker stuff, African-American stuff. Often, the vigor and worthiness of the music rings out from many centuries ago. And primarily, the music is written for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. That, to me, suggests a respect for the idea that different types of people can perform different roles, singing melody here, then singing counterpoint, and always combining to make harmony for the church universal.
I spent six years as a local preacher for the Methodist Church of The Bahamas. Here are three things that I note with dismay about the article and the first comment.
A) Two Commandments – “Love your God with all your heart, soul and strength”. “Love your neighbour as you would love yourself.” The first can only be measured by God. The second is hard enough without trying to impose some measurement. It’s not a competition that can be measured, it is a principle to live by.
B) Feminization of The Church – Around the world most churches have more women than men in attendance. As their numbers grow so does influence on how the Church behaves. Considering that the most important message of The Bible, “He is Risen!” was carried by a woman, (Apostles busy hiding at the time) do they not deserve to be involved?
Secondly, How many religious organizations are run by women. Not many. Church leaders (read men) have failed to go out into the highways and byways with the message of repentance and service that men need especially now. ‘Feminization’ is really an adaptation to keep pews (and coffers) filled. It is really a short term solution, the effects of which are now being felt.
C) Punch you in the nose Christianity – Nothing new here. George W. Bush and Nelson Mandela are both Methodist like me. Who is more respected? Whose words carry more weight even in America? Why? The Crusades, Sikh Temple Shooting, Florida “pastor’s” Burn A Koran Day all fall along the same continuum of fear and hatred of “Others” which Christians like to believe that they are exempt from but sadly they are not. The only surprising thing (not that surprising to anyone who’s been involved in church politics) about Mr. Driscoll is that he has harnessed this hatred and turned it on his fellow Christians.
A true test of Christianity that is linked to God’s commandments would be to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. I challenge anyone to a week of that and then speak of machismo, courage and endurance.