Sick of Driscoll

A few years ago, I read about a pastor/writer in the states by the name of Mark Driscoll. He’s in charge of a fairly large American church called Acts 29. Between him, Pat Robertson, Jack Van Impe and a handful of other ridiculously conservative Christians, I feel sick whenever I hear or read anything these people have to say.

What’s prompted these harsh words as of late? After watching the latest Driscoll video, A Good Soldier, I should really avoid anything that involves this man’s ideas – for the sake of my own blood pressure, and keeping away from dangerously high levels. The video is essentially Driscoll’s view on the three variables that are lacking in the areas of church planting and church growth. His 3 variables?

1. The man

2. The mission

3. The message

What does he count as most important? Well, hear what he has to say:

“The variable that makes the only difference is the leadership ability and the quality of that senior leader, of that founding pastor, of that man who is to endure hardship and then fight like a good soldier…”

What’s the problem here? He isn’t merely using the term ‘man’ to cover both men and women, but he is solely referring to men, and not women. Once again, we run into Driscoll’s misogynistic views, implying heavily in this video that the only people who are able to plant churches are men. The video is not only targeted for men in ministry, but suggesting that only men are capable of doing the job well. As the name of the video hints, Driscoll uses a battle or war theme to describe the struggle and journey of men in church planting. After stating that 60% of Christians in America are women, he goes on to say:

“If you want to win the war, you’ve got to get the men.”

“If you win the men, you win the war.”

Excellent. What are the women good for? Taking care of the children? Cooking and cleaning while their husbands are out trying to build up the church, and ‘fight the church war’? Give me a break.

I often wonder what would ever happen if Mark Driscoll suddenly woke up as a woman one day. You know, as if he would have unknowingly undergone a sex change. These nasty thoughts lead me to thinking about John Rawls and some of his philosophical ideas. Not about sex changes or anything obscure as that, but of his concept of the Veil of Ignorance.

Rawls developed his concept of the Original Position, which could be arrived at through the thought experiment of the Veil of Ignorance. Under this veil, one would imagine themselves as free of race, gender, social class, religion, etc. In other words, each person would be equal. One would then imagine what ‘place’ they would end up in society – so, wanting the best outcome possible, most people would want to have favourable circumstances no matter what position they were given (ethnicity, gender, disability, etc.). For example, if an individual were under the Veil of Ignorance, they would not know anything about their status in real life. If they put themselves in the shoes of an individual of visible minority, living in poverty, they would want access to as many resources as possible in order to potentially escape their poverty. This individual may want a free education system, free health care, and may want laws that prevent racial discrimination. These infrastructures and laws in that society would have the potential to improve that individual’s life, if they were in that situation.

Back to Driscoll – if he were to put himself under the Veil of Ignorance, what would he have to say? Surely, as he is preaching now, he favours only men to be in the ministry. What happens, if he, under the Veil, didn’t know his gender? Wouldn’t he want an equal opportunity to carry out God’s work? One would think so. The concept of the Veil of Ignorance is to encourage justice system that promotes fairness in society. Too bad the women’s movement hasn’t been able to have an impact on Markie Driscoll.

Just for kicks: Driscoll refers to ‘the man’ at least 30 times (in saying ‘the man,’ or ‘him,’ etc.) in the span of 8 minutes.

Disgrace to my Faith

For some reason, my family gets a subscription to a ridiculous Christian magazine, The Trumpet. I think it’s because someone subscribed us to it, as a gift. The other day, I came across an article called Why London Doesn’t Need a Giant Mosque. Why would I read something with such an absurd title, you ask? I was curious. The author even mentions something in the first paragraph about how the title is politically incorrect. While what he mentions is true, the article went downhill from there. Downhill with a slope of 81°. By the end, I’m pretty sure I had an unhealthy blood pressure measure.

The article opens with a description of a “giant mosque” in the planning to be built in London, England. Claiming that the mosque will fit 70,000 people, the author began to discuss the problems with a mosque that large. I did some research and discovered that the house of worship is ‘only’ planning to fit 40,000 people. Why play with the numbers? For effect? 40,000 is still a fairly large number to me.

The article throws another cheap shot with the numbers: claiming that a quarter of British Muslims (roughly 400,000 people) justified the actions of the July 7/06 London downtown bombings. 25%? That number also didn’t sit well in my mind. Hitting the good old Internet once again, I found an article from the Daily Telegraph, stating that, from a poll they took among British Muslims, 88% of them found that the terrorist attacks were NOT justified. 6% found the attacks justified. Where did the 400,000 come from? Perhaps in some massive error on the author’s part of not being able to read properly or understand the difference between the words ’sympathize’ and ‘justify.’ The author in The Trumpet uses both words synonymously. It is clear that within this poll, both terms are used in two different contexts. And, from my understanding, the words do have different meanings. Incidentally, the poll found that 13% of British Muslims sympathized ‘a lot’ with the terrorists’ intentions, and 11% sympathized ‘a little.’ The details of the actual poll can be found here. Of course, having had countless stats and research methodology components in a lot of my courses, I know well enough that there should be a disclaimer with any sort of multiple choice poll. Anyone taking a survey can interpret the questions in a variety of ways, discrediting the validity and reliability of the poll.

The author then goes on to mention and imply that if a cathedral “the size of a snow-cone stand” were to be built in Saudi Arabia, there would be no sense of reciprocity on the part of the Saudis. In other words, the British are so accepting of the Muslim faith, while the Saudis wouldn’t be of the Christian faith. First of all, what kind of comparison is that? If that’s not a non-deductive, illogical analogy of an argument, I don’t know what is. Making a comparison between a country (England) with a liberal view on religion and tolerance, with another country (Saudi Arabia) that has a very strict, almost non-existent, view of religious freedom. Why not make the comparison with another Muslim country, Pakistan for example, that does tolerate Christian houses of worship? Oh wait, I suppose that this type of example would not strengthen the author’s weak argument. My mistake.

I must mention, however, that the article did bring up some point of concern for myself. There is mention that a fairly large terrorist group, Tablighi Jamaat, is in support of the building of the mosque. If this is true, then I would find some cause for concern in the building of the mosque. I certainly don’t have a problem with a ’super mosque’ being built in London, but I assume that most Muslims would prefer if the terrorist group wasn’t involved. Of course, everything is speculation, and not many people know for sure if the group is a terrorist group, but that would be my only hesitation to support the building.

I could go on with more examples of the absurdity of the article, but I won’t. What’s most disturbing for me is that The Trumpet is supposedly a Christian magazine. If you know me, I am a Protestant Christian. I am obviously disappointed by this type of literature. Not only because it is being written in the first place, but because there is a wide audience that reads and agrees (dare I say brainwashed?) with these messages.

I was discussing this article with my parents, and in my rant, I was expressing how this fuels intolerance. To any ignorant person, my family could appear to be a Muslim family. While I have no qualms with being mistaken for a different race/ethnicity/religion, what does this article do? It fuels the closed-minded and ignorant readers into having intolerant attitudes. It fuels that one uninformed person who reads this garbage into thinking that all people who appear ‘brown,’ such as my family, are terrorists. Of course this is nonsense, but I know that there are uneducated people who hold these beliefs!In our multicultural Canadian society, tolerance is an incredibly important virtue. It seems as though it is far easier to read such biased and mis-representative articles, such as the one I’ve written about, than to read material about different religions, or cultures. It’s a shame, it really is.

I’ve just unsubscribed from the magazine. A lot of the other articles were very narrow-minded, and biased views from the far ‘Christian right.’ It’s trash, and neither myself or my family need to read it’s intolerant garbage.

As a nice alternative, CBC Ideas has a nice set of podcasts on Tolerance. I’ve only listened to the first part, and it was quite interesting.