Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Author:Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Arkansas state representative Jim Bob Duggar and his wife Michelle leading their children to a polling place in Springdale, Arkansas, in May 2002. AP PHOTO / APRIL L. BROWN.

It wasn’t just junior culture warriors who were bringing militant patriarchy into the halls of power. In his investigation of the Family, the secretive group (also known as the Fellowship) that had organized the National Prayer Breakfast since the 1950s, journalist Jeff Sharlet found evidence of John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart warrior code, of knights-in-shining-armor purity culture, and of the Christian Reconstructionist-infused patriarchy of Doug Phillips’s Vision Forum. These sources fed a hypermasculine and authoritarian ethos within the organization, one that meshed well with their attempts to consolidate power nationally and globally.9

THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST was home to another extreme expression of militant evangelical masculinity. Whereas the Christian homeschool movement celebrated a quaint traditionalism, favoring modest attire and a nostalgic ethos, Seattle’s Mars Hill Church gained prominence as the leading edge of a forward-looking, tech-savvy evangelicalism. The church was founded in 1996 by twenty-five-year-old pastor Mark Driscoll, and over the next eighteen years Driscoll’s empire grew to include fifteen churches in five states along with a global ministry.

Raised Catholic, Driscoll converted to evangelicalism as a college student and quickly made a name for himself as a “theologically hard-line but culturally hip” pastor on the conservative periphery of the “emerging church” movement. Driscoll preached a verse-by-verse literal reading of the Bible and promoted conservative social teachings, but there was nothing stodgy about his style. Mars Hill had the feel of a nightclub, filled with predominantly white twenty-and thirty-somethings with a penchant for tattoos, piercings, beer, and the local indie music scene. Driscoll himself, sporting dark jeans and T-shirts, had the look of a wannabe rock star. Like celebrity evangelists before him, Driscoll mastered cutting-edge communication technologies. “The Internet is the Greek Marketplace of Acts 17,” proclaimed the church’s visitor guide. “Film and Theology Nights” featured prominently, and for those raised in conservative Baptist, fundamentalist, or Pentecostal churches, Mars Hill offered a refreshing model of cultural engagement. But Driscoll’s message wasn’t just the old-time religion communicated in a hip new way; his gospel message was infused with militant masculinity.10

In language that would have been familiar to many among his flock, Driscoll insisted that real men avoided church because they had no interest in a “Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ.” But Jesus was no “long-haired . . . effeminate-looking dude”—he was a man like Driscoll’s own working-class dad, “a construction worker who swung a hammer for a living,” a man with “calluses on his hands and muscles on his frame.” Jesus bore no resemblance to “the drag-queen Jesus images that portray him with long, flowing, feathered hair, perfect teeth, and soft skin, draped in a comfortable dress accessorized by matching open-toed sandals and handbag.” He was an aggressive, anger-filled leader who picked fights with religious authorities, slaughtered thousands of pigs, ordered his disciples around, and didn’t mind causing offense. Jesus was a hero, not a loser,

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