Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll's Evangelical Empire

by Jessica Johnson

Between 1996 and 2014, Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church multiplied from its base in Seattle into fifteen facilities spread across five states with 13,000 attendees. When it closed, the church was beset by scandal, with former attendees testifying to spiritual abuse, emotional manipulation, and financial exploitation. In Biblical Porn Jessica Johnson examines how Mars Hill's congregants became entangled in processes of religious conviction. Johnson shows how they were affectively recruited into sexualized and militarized dynamics of power through the mobilization of what she calls "biblical porn"—the affective labor of communicating, promoting, and embodying Driscoll's teaching on biblical masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, which simultaneously worked as a marketing strategy, social imaginary, and biopolitical instrument. Johnson theorizes religious conviction as a social process through which Mars Hill's congregants circulated and amplified feelings of hope, joy, shame, and paranoia as affective value that the church capitalized on to grow at all costs.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, History, Church, Christianity, Economics, Cults

249 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 19, 2018

Reviews

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 3 out of 5]

Biblical Porn looks at how Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church developed a sexualized package of Christianity that they marketed globally. Johnson writes from a curious position of insider/outsider. She attended Mars Hill for years, making deep friendships and social connections. Yet, she was an avowed nonbeliever when she started and stayed that way, keeping something of an anthropological distance. Reading this as a historian, her anthropological writing turned into terminological soup for me at times, but most passages were readable. She was occasionally too willing to theorize in the abstract rather than make concrete observations, but that’s likely the difference of our disciplines.

Lest you think the title is provocative for the sake of provoking, it comes from actual statements Driscoll preached. He encouraged wives to place boudoir photos in their husbands’ Bibles (70), literally encouraging “biblical” porn,* not to mention his intentionally titillating sermon series on the Song of Songs. Repeatedly, Driscoll promoted a female-driven yet male-serving power dynamic of marital sex: it’s the wife’s responsibility to look good for her husband so he desires only her,** and can fulfill all his fantasies upon her. The responsibility for a husband’s infidelity is always laid on his wife, a strange quirk of this strain of complementarianism, which proclaims male headship but makes females alone keepers of the marriage bed. Oh, and sex in marriage is all about the husband’s pleasure and fantasies, which he is completely free to demand from his wife at any time, and which she must satisfy lest she open the door for the devil to join them in bed. (Yes, Driscoll really said stuff like that.) After writing all of that, I feel compelled to say: fidelity in marriage is a choice made by each partner and fulfilled by each partner for the sake of both partners. Mutuality! Not, “wives are responsible not only for their own vows but also for their husbands’.”

While Johnson didn’t write about this, it struck me (as a Christian) that Driscoll never questioned pornography itself as an issue. Sure, he had plenty to say about the evils of the pornography industry. He waxed eloquently about addiction (though scientific studies haven’t confirmed that pornography use can reach the level of real addiction) and distorted views of women and all that. Instead, he assumed pornography was a given habit for any heterosexual male. The solution? Get married and make porn in your own marriage! Wendy Alsup, author and blogger at Practical Theology for Women, has written about how Driscoll’s standards for married women were just as unreachable as those set up by pornography, cultural expecations of physical beauty, et c. And this is what Johnson’s book is about: how the culture of Mars Hill, led by Driscoll and his dynamic personality, coerced and damaged its people.

I hope studies like this continue to be released about churches like Mars Hill and people like Mark Driscoll. We Christians must be better at changing our culture, which rewards controversies and bombastic personalities like Driscoll’s. This isn’t just an issue within Christianity: it’s the way social media works, too. Positive posts don’t generate nearly as much engagement as negative ones, the algorithms reward trolls, most social media platforms are hellscapes, and so forth. However, Christianity’s very heart is counter-culture, and virality may not be the best indicator of what is righteous. The meek might inherit the earth, after all, but how many followers do they have?

Recommended to anthropologists interested in megachurch culture, and to anyone looking for an academic dive into the culture of Mars Hill. For everyone else, Christianity Today’s podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill tells the whole story of the church, contextualizes it in American church history, and contains lots of interviews with former members and staff.

*Wouldn’t you just love for that to fall out of your Bible at community group?
**I just read the story of David’s rape of Bathsheba in the daily office this morning. Amazingly, in all the erroneous interpretations I’ve heard about Bathsheba “tempting” a king who spent his leisure time spying on his subjects from his roof, I haven’t heard an interpretation blaming one of David’s (many) wives for not “putting out” for him.

[Collin Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great companion piece to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Podcast. It covers a lot of the same issues and events but goes so much further in depth. Given that it is part of a doctoral thesis there is a lot to take in for someone not educated in sociology but that didn’t minimize the impact at all.

[Christen · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

This book barely scratches the surface of the problems of Mars Hill in 193 pages. But Johnson does a good job highlighting the issues that made the news and how they became problems. Cult of Personality, unfettered power, the ability to control and surveil the congregation at their own free will or out of fear because of the retribution from the Mark Driscoll himself.

This book is more textbook with lots of theories and topics that a person may not know. So be ready to either research or be willing to skim some parts. However, Johnson does immerse herself as best as she can as a non-member into Mars Hill by attending all that she can or is allowed to because Mars Hill knows Johnson is doing research - which I thought was interesting.

Interesting for those who want to know the reasoning behind particular things that went on in Mars Hill. But finishing it, I feel no closer to the hopes of Evangelical churches changing.

[lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mars Hill was even more messed up than I realized. This book focuses mostly on Mark Driscoll's obsession with sex and the impact that had on the church, congregants, and staff. This book is very academic, and I'm still don't grasp affect theory, but when it got too deep into theory, I just scanned the text until she got back to talking about Mars Hill. This book is important though. But i'd also like someone to write a book that is more accessible and delves more into other aspects of the church that she just touched on, like Islamophobia and homophobia.

SAL/SPL Book Bingo 2018 - takes place in the area where you were born

[Craig Marshall · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, I hastily put this book on reserve thinking it was a newer book on pornography. When I got it, I was fascinated that it was about Mark Driscoll’s leadership at Mars Hill. It was really eye opening, and the reason for the three stars is only because there was so much anthropological language that I didn’t really track with or find necessary - but people in that field may find it very engaging. She did an excellent job chronicling and analyzing how Mark and the culture of the Mars Hill leadership did so much harm to so many people.

[C Dumaoal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in 24 hours and I feel like it was written just for me:) this was a recommendation from Sophie Bjork-James literally wtf is my life:) didn’t agree with some of the conclusions but I think this mostly had to do with me being a theologian and not an anthropologist:)

[Vance Christiaanse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm in an "emperor's new clothes" situation with this review--especially after having just skimmed the reviews at Amazon. Do I go along with the reviewers who say it was a wonderful book, as if we could all interpret the author's arcane technical jargon to mean something useful, or do I go along with the reviewers who refused to believe there was any actual substance to the rambling jumble of obscure citations and seemingly made-up terminology. (Yes, I did some research to learn about some of the terms she threw around.)

My conclusion: I believe the author was honestly trying to say something real but, for whatever reason, was not able to make it accessible to normal humans. My rating of 3 is the average of the two ratings I was torn between: 1 and 5.

[Ket · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the shelf of "help me understand how the world looks like this, why people act that way, what is happening" books. Harding's book and Johnson's book belong together. Written in a version of English that is highly referential to other texts and comprises a specialized sociology/philosophy English dialect, so parsing sentences sometimes took extra time. Essential book in whiteness studies.

[katelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

we don’t tell evangelical men to shut the fuck up enough.
i had a stomach ache reading this book and contemplating it alongside my own experiences as an adolescent. i dont have appropriate words to post about how i feel about this.
ironically, so much about Mars Hill & Mark Driscoll remind me of a mega church i briefly worked at (when i was between jobs and desparate). they’ll have a podcast about their authoritarian spiritual abuses etc etc someday, too.

this was a difficult and fascinating analysis of Mars Hill, mark driscoll, and their theological and ecclesiastical cultural influences. It pairs well with The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, but is able to go deeper as it was written by a non-christian.

now i’m going to go take a xanax and sit in gratitude to have a big mouth, big opinions about theology and its practices (like churchwork), and multiple degrees related to theology. i’m thankful to have avoided marriage to a man who believes any of this, even in the periphery.

fuck all this. be free, siblings. be free.

[Shelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you have listened to the "Rise and Fall of Mars Hill" podcast, this is a good companion piece. That said, the writing style is academic and as a consequence does not flow well. There are also odd injections of first person observations by the author.

What comes through is Mark Driscoll's obsession with sex in his theology and teaching; something that is touched upon in the podcast episodes but not fully explained. Because the focus of the podcast is Driscoll's downfall due to his unchecked abusive management style, Driscoll's fixation on sex is not fully spelled out in the podcast. Driscoll's misogynistic teachings and abusive treatment of the female congregants are fully examined by the author. It's really astounding that women don't seem to understand how much of religion is focused on subjugating them, their sexuality, autonomy and at the most basic level, their personhood.

[Michael G · Rating 2 out of 5]

A reasonable read, from a left-wing secular perspective, of the demise of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

This is the second church ‘ethnography’ (I do not know the correct term) where the author combines a fairly decent narrative of the church with scattered quotes from academics. The scattered quotes do not improve the text. I am guessing they are in there because both books were originally PhD manuscripts and it is a requirement for them.

As to the narrative itself, it’s pretty good, but biased and left-leaning. Although, the writer is entirely honest about her perspective and doesn’t hide it. I do wonder why Christians themselves aren’t so good at church ethnography, or at least, I haven’t read a book from the that does it well.

Why two stars? Base case would have been four. One star lost due to the left wing bias, another star lost because of the academic quotes. The quoting of the repulsive Foucault, in particular, does this book no favours.

[Hank Pharis · Rating 1 out of 5]

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).

A strange book. I hoped to learn more about the Driscoll meltdown and I did some. But this reads like a dissertation done only for professional sociologists. The primary thing I did learn is that some of Driscoll's materials did seem like pornography for evangelicals.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic research went into this book. Quite scholarly, it reads much more like a post-doc work than a book for the general public. I learned a lot that hasn't been covered in other media. If you are fascinated by narcissistic pastors, narcissistic institutions, and the rot at the core of American Evangelicalism, you will get a lot out of this book.

I walk away still completely dumbfounded that anyone would have ever gone to church at Mars Hill.

[Michael J. Moody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and heavy read

Fascinating look at the rise and fall of Mars Hill and Pastor Mark. Very academic in nature and took me about five days to get through. It’s an interesting examination of how easily manipulation in the name of religion can create a cult-like atmosphere.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come...

[Радостин Марчев]

Тъжно описание от страна на невярващ автор на нещо, което лично следих отблизо.