Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, and the Pornication of the Pulpit

6 Porn Again Christian? Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, and the Porni!cation of the Pulpit Jessica Johnson At Mars Hill Church of Seattle’s Ballard Campus, where the sanctuary still bears the high-beamed traces of the warehouse it used to be, several differ- ent screens transmit images, colors, and text at once. As Mars Hill’s founder, Preaching Pastor Mark Driscoll, sermonizes center stage, a background scrim of images shifts according to emotional register while a !at screen TV to his right !ashes Bible verses, talking points, and congregants’ questions in real time. On this night, Driscoll preached on Song of Songs 6:11–7:10, verses he dubbed “the most erotic, exotic, and exciting” of scripture, with a take-away message summed up by the “great truth claim” that “all men are visual.”1 “Our world assaults men with images of beautiful women,” he warns his audience. “Male brains house an ever-growing repository of lustful snapshots always on random shuf!e . the temptation to sin by viewing porn and other visual lures is an everyday war.” While lingering over an explicit line-by-line reading of an “ancient strip tease” called “Dance of Manahaim,” Pastor Mark encourages wives to be visually generous allies—to "ght with and for their husbands by providing an archive of redeemed images. Pre-empting critics who may have “taken a few women’s studies classes in college” and would accuse him of objectifying the female body, Driscoll retorts: “pornography turns women into parts and pieces, not image-bearers of God . a husband should be captivated by his wife, that’s what I’m talking about. I want the pro- verbial camera of his heart "xated to his wife so that his snapshots are of her.” Driscoll’s sermonizing on the everyday sins of mainstream pornography creates opportunities for the proliferation of Mars Hill’s own brand of biblical porn—a term I use to index the cultural production, online circulation, and marketing of sexualized doctrine to promote the church’s in!uence in popular culture. Throughout this controversial sermon series, Driscoll encourages wives to be naked without shame in the marital bedroom while graphically depicting biblically ordained fantasies for public dissemination. Although wives are relegated to domestic roles in Mars Hill’s complementarian gender doctrine,2 women are crucial to the production of biblical porn and play a critical role as producers themselves: Their sexual freedom works on behalf Comella_New Views on Pornography.indb 123 10/10/14 11:49 AM 124 New Views on Pornography of not only their marriages but also the church. I argue that biblical porn is a genre of social pornography,3 an antipornography discourse through which sexual fantasies are collectively engendered in overt, if mediated, forms for public consumption. Driscoll wants to distance the sinful temptations of worldly porn from the sexy abandon of its Christian expression; yet, as his sermons are shared, edited, and debated through a variety of media channels, members also submit their sexual shame and desires to scrutiny in support of the church’s propagation.4 Currently, Mars Hill boasts !fteen locations in !ve U.S. states with approximately 15,000 attendees each week, and is partnering with organizations and church planters in India and Ethiopia to build more congregations af!liated with its ministry Mars Hill Global.5 Not only do video clips of Driscoll’s frequent sermons on sexuality glean hundreds of thousands of hits on the church’s Web site, but they also pop up in titil- lating porn searches on YouTube under such titles as “Biblical Oral Sex.”6 While anonymously texting questions during services, congregants confess to sexual sins and fantasies for online distribution in “greatest hits” collections, signaling Mars Hill’s entry into the business of producing its own brand of pornography as popular culture without advertising it as such. As Mars Hill utilizes interactive media technologies and social networks to inspire audience participation in the production and circulation of biblical porn, practices of confession and surveillance commonly understood as insti- tutional mechanisms of self-empowerment and self-governance are trans- formed to capitalize on the so-called free and open market of the information superhighway. Mars Hill is an innovative leader among a group of theologi- cally fundamentalist yet technologically savvy churches whose pastors market their brand of evangelicalism through publicity stunts and sermon series that highlight a sex-positive doctrine within the con!nes of heterosexual Christian marriage. There is evidence that such cultural and political shifts within U.S. evangelicalism have been institutionally endorsed, presenting opportunities for an increasingly sexualized reading of scripture to be preached and published. Since the 1980s, texts such as The Gift of Sex promoted the orgasmic pleasure of “godly sex” while offering sex advice based on the understanding that the Bible was in fact “pro-sex” (within heterosexual Christian marriage).7 Additionally, according to Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals is now promoting a theology of sex to encourage healthy, stable marriages.8 However, Mars Hill’s discursive and digital cultural production of biblical porn does more than promote family values or offer tips on how to have hot Christian sex. While Driscoll offers frank counsel on how to embody sexual freedom within the con!nes of heterosexual Christian marriage, the political scope and value of biblical porn as a social pornography collectively engendered and virtually mediated extends beyond the discursive policing and disciplinary regulation of normative gender and sexuality. Comella_New Views on Pornography.indb 124 10/10/14 11:49 AM Porn Again Christian? Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church 125 The empirical evidence I have collected, including teaching material endorsed by the church for public distribution, indicates how the strategic use of interactive digital technology and multimodal media integrates audio, visual, and text to engage several sensory registers simultaneously. This practice is impacting the cultural politics of U.S. evangelical congregations:9 As Driscoll criticizes an evangelical establishment out of touch with popular culture to its own detriment, Mars Hill’s production and circulation of biblical porn concurrently functions as a proselytizing and marketing tool that pro- vokes and manipulates globally directed, affective political value under the auspices of sexual freedom that actually amplify control. This chapter demonstrates how the popularization of biblical porn signals shifting aims and emergent strategies in the cultural politics of conservative evangelicals. These shifts move beyond mobilizing moral-values voters over single issues, such as the legalization of gay marriage, or upholding so-called traditional family values. By couching the temptation to view porn in terms of everyday warfare, Driscoll creates a sense of urgency while suturing wives’ sexual freedom to their husbands’ visual nature. These embodiments of visual generosity by women meant for the marital bedroom circulate through vir- tual networks of technology and imagination within and beyond the church sanctuary, as Driscoll’s live and remote audiences contribute to the discursive and digital production of a biblically sanctioned social pornography to bodily affect and political effect. At once visceral and global in scope, biblical porn con!ates freedom and control to intensify and extend the cultural value of the Mars Hill brand beyond Christian markets. Concurrently, this evangelical genre of social pornography refashions the act of confession from an institutionally endorsed mode of individual expression that publicly reveals secret sin for purposes of personal transformation and healing into the voluntary labor of a collective “participatory panopticon” that supports the replication and securitization of the church network.10 A PORNIFICATION OF THE PULPIT Since the 1980s, evangelical Christian leaders have co-opted feminist antipornography rhetoric, suturing supposedly normal male sexuality to the obsessive viewing of porn and lustful aggression. For example, in his contribution to U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography Report in 1986, Focus on the Family’s founder James Dob- son reiterated Robin Morgan’s quote “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice” without citation.11 While Driscoll endeavors to “put the fun back into fundamentalism,”12 his sermons resonate with texts that explic- itly describe the spiritual bene"ts of sexual pleasure shared within Christian Comella_New Views on Pornography.indb 125 10/10/14 11:49 AM 126 New Views on Pornography marriage. However, as he paradoxically preaches an antiporn dogma using salaciously sex-focused content for online dissemination, he frames Mars Hill’s biblical position as more liberal than most churches—a stance that has led many evangelicals to not only criticize but also to censor him. In 2009, after Driscoll’s controversial sermon series on Song of Songs was widely publicized in New York Times Magazine and on ABC’s Nightline, an evangelical radio network interrupted its “Family Life” program and trun- cated the host’s interview with Driscoll once founder Dick Bott learned that he was the guest.13 In the Baptist Press, Bott said that he made the deci- sion because of Driscoll’s penchant for using vulgarity: Driscoll “interpreted Song of Songs 2:3 as referring to oral sex and

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