Bullies and the Pulpit

Today I want to talk about the departure of Mark Driscoll from Mars Hill Church as an example of good corporate governance. The people who called for Driscoll's resignation share many of his views of the general depravity of people and their need to be led by an inspired man. This is part of the reason I think their intolerance for his alleged bullying is a good example for many of the workplaces I have known. My main source for this is an article in The New Republic.

Here's some background. I became interested in Driscoll because I am interested as a religionist in the exercise of sermonizing: what is the homiletic mode? what kind of psychic or epistemological subjectivities does it involve for preacher and congregation?

I have been watching Islamic Friday homilies (khuṭub, singular: khuṭba) and evangelical and charismatic Christian sermons online. I watch the khuṭub because I'm an Islamicist, but I'm interested in the evangelical ones because they are the most different from the sermons the most familiar to me: the high-church lectures on social justice and mystical metaphysics. 

At some point, I hope to learn more about conventions of giving sermons in connection to ideas about moral psychology in different traditions. But, that is another project for another time.

I got to know Driscoll from my sister- and brother-in-law, Episcopalian former evangelicals who have followed his career somewhat in alarm. I think I heard of him first in a puffy Times magazine profile. 

His abrasive, haranguing style at first struck me as crass and self-indulgent. But the more I learned about the genre, the more I saw how preachers have an expansive range and hit a number of emotional registers, from lashing to consoling. Anyone who has read Hirschkind's Ethical Soundscape should know this, of course, but that book is about hellfire preaching in Cairo, and the kinds of khuṭba I know have a different affective composition. 

Tentatively, I would say that in many Christian contexts, as the elements of worship- like the lectionary, the eucharist, the hymns- reduce, the range and expectations on the preacher increase. This is the case in many less ritual and more homiletic evangelical churches that center around a male spiritual entrepreneur. 

It would be easy for me to see these whole homiletic traditions as individualistic excess, a dilution of the spirit of communion in favor self-important male blather. I didn't know that I had this old-church prejudice until I started watching a lot of these. 

But, to think about something seriously, one has to be as open-minded as possible. A question I eventually came up with is how particular communities have an understanding of homiletic rules of engagement. These are a lot like Aristotle's tragedy, with a range of dispositions targeted in the audience and expectations for a conclusive force collectively experienced. 

What the community of Mars Hill decided was that despite their belief that people are generally corrupt and in need of biblical discipline, Driscoll's way of dealing with others was demeaning.

I was struck by the relative moderation of his offenses, detailed in the article. He was a bully, but it didn't sound like he made the place so toxic that the church had to stop him to save its reputation. Indeed, their organizations took action before much of this was widely known. How many universities or NGOs act this way? It seems like too few.

As tempting as it is take joy in seeing a mean blowhard go away, it is more tempting to imagine it's a corruption in his ideology that breeds such an entitled and exploitative worldview. But, the actions of the congregants make that case harder.

I hope someday that different progressive spirits can come together to make a meaningful rejoinder to the position that cisheteropatriarchy and market capitalism are grounded in the universal validity of a particular tradition's scripture, whether on Christian terms or not. But, I hope that this rejoinder comes with the opposing interlocutors on their best terms rather than as authoritarian bullies liberals are tempted to dismiss.

We learned in the late 20th century that their tradition is nothing if not capacious and regenerative, and a new Driscoll will soon be scandalizing the likes of The New Republic and The New York Times. He can be at his most persuasive and engaging if he is responsible to the burdens and norms of exhortation and direction left open in the wide charismatic way.