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“Muscular Christianity” Not to Blame For Driscoll: A Response

By Jessica Johnson

When I began attending Mars Hill Church in 2006, its main facility in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood was headquarters and clubhouse—a 20,000 square foot renovated hardware warehouse seating over a thousand where young guys loitered in the parking lot and rock music from worship band practices thundered outside after gospel class. On Sundays, the sight of security guards monitoring the entryway with the impassive self-importance of club bouncers w…

Dear Timothy Keller: The “Evangelical” Problem isn’t Pollsters

By Jessica Johnson

…e racism and sexism that African American voters, who turned out in record numbers during the Alabama Senate election, rebuked with their ballots. Devon Crawford, a 24 year-old divinity student at the University of Chicago, traveled home to vote against Moore because his version of Christianity “sanctifies the truth-making power of white men” and is “really just a masquerade for white supremacy.” Why should white men define the scope of what const…

Court Rules Against Texas Education Employee Forced To Resign Over Forwarded Email

By Lauri Lebo

…ess, who testified about the Wedge Document, an internal memo in which the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading proponent of intelligent design, outlined a public-relations strategy to destroy “scientific materialism” and affirm the idea that human beings are created in the image of God. After Comer forwarded the email, Lizzette Reynolds, a TEA hire who had worked as an advisor to Gov. George W. Bush, recommended that Comer be f…

Is Downward Dog the Path to Hell?

By Andrea R. Jain

…y spooky.” Even more recently Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, told a live audience that: “Yoga is demonic… It’s absolute paganism… Yoga and meditation and Easternism is [sic] all opening to demonism… if you just sign up for a little yoga class, you’re signing up for a little demon class. That’s what you’re doing. And Satan doesn’t care if you stretch as long as you go to hell.” Similar to Islamophobic attempts to…

Denying Darwin: Another Peculiar American Institution

By Lauri Lebo

…battles over religion and science. Fundamentalist Fervor According to Ron Numbers, in his book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America didn’t really start in earnest until the early 1900s. For the most part, Christians were not biblical literalists and accepted science—including the ideas that the earth was very old and that living creatures changed through time. A typic…

Blame Muscular Christianity for Driscoll Fiasco

By Hollis Phelps

…riod of time from his pastoral role at Mars Hill Church, the megachurch in Seattle that he co-founded. Even from an outsider’s perspective, Driscoll’s gradual fall from grace has been painful to watch. Driscoll, of course, has always been controversial, which to his followers is part of his allure. But with the exception of his most stalwart defenders, recently his actions and overall persona have become almost impossible to defend. Here on RD Bec…

The Leadership Crisis at the End of the Megachurch Era

By Benjamin Dueholm

…and authoritarian rules. Mark Driscoll, the butch young fellow who built a Seattle-area megachurch, was celebrated for his strongman style, which included using juvenile language against people whose sexual orientations and gender expressions he didn’t approve of (up to and including depictions of Jesus as “a guy I could beat up”). When he was widely and credibly accused of being a domineering egomaniac, his church swiftly fell apart. These models…

Are You Doing Your Part in the Baby War?

By Katherine Stewart

…n, over the long haul, move government policy in one direction. Founder of Seattle’s Mars Hill megachurch Mark Driscoll, whom Sandler wrote about in a previous book, said, “We are in a city with less children per capita than any city but San Francisco….and we consider it our personal mission to turn that around.” What that means for the women in his church, who are instructed to assume a “submissive” role within marriage, is predictable. “My life…

Yeshiva is Likely to Win Its Battle Against LGBTQ Group — But Do Jewish Orgs Really Want to Empower a Militant Christian Movement?

By Orit Avishai

…laimed a right to pray on the football field and is currently representing Seattle Pacific University which is being investigated by Washington State for discriminations against faculty and staff for violations based on sexual orientation. These, and other cases, turned on an expansive vision of religious liberty that also includes a variety of individual and community rights to practice their religion, irrespective of competing rights. It goes wi…

Death With Dignity: Combatting Religious Opposition to Physician-Assisted Suicide

By Krista Kapralos

…d with brain cancer in 2000, he and his wife joined a support group in the Seattle area, where they lived. They watched others deteriorate. “We knew it would be a slow, painful death,” Nancy Niedzielski said. In 1997, Oregon voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, which allows terminally ill people to ask their doctors for a prescription for lethal drugs. When his pain intensified, Randy Niedzielski said he wanted to move to Oregon, where he c…