Brad speaks with Dr. Jessica Johnson, research fellow at the College of William and Mary and author of Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll's Evangelical Empire. They discuss the ways that Christianity Today's podcast, "The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill," primes its audience using similar tactics to Driscoll and other megachurch pastors, how it refuses to center abuse victims, and how it acts as a covert reclamation project for evangelicalism.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I am joined today by Dr. Jessica Johnson, who has graciously hung with me as the parent of a newborn who's totally messing up his schedule.
Anyway, we had a snafu, and I'm now in Dr. Johnson's debt for life because they were willing to stick with me.
So, Dr. Johnson, thanks for being here.
How are you?
I'm well, I'm well.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate your grace and patience.
We're going to talk today about your recent piece at Religion Dispatches on Christianity Today's The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast.
But before we do that, I want to make sure people know who you are.
So you're a visiting scholar at William & Mary, and you're also the author of Biblical Porn, Affect Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll's Evangelical Empire.
And so, obviously, right on topic for what we're going to talk about, I kind of think you're the scholar best positioned in the world to talk about the rise and fall of Mars Hill, the podcast from Christianity Today.
Let me ask you this.
You wrote Biblical Porn a couple years ago.
Your research obviously started before that.
What kind of work did you do to kind of embed yourself within, you know, the Mark Driscoll evangelical empire?
So it's a long story.
I'll try to be as brief as possible.
But basically in 2006 is when I started my ethnographic fieldwork.
I'm trained in anthropology.
And I was actually not there to investigate the evangelical empire that would be.
I was there actually doing dissertation fieldwork for my doctorate research on same-sex marriage politics.
And I was looking at both sides of the issue, not advocating for or against one way or another, but interested in different groups mobilizing around that issue in Seattle.
And I heard about Mars Hill because it's an interesting place.
People were saying that it was a somewhat liberal church at the time that I started my fieldwork.
So again, early 2000s, they'd had some local coverage that was fairly positive.
They were attracting really young congregants, a nice blend of both men and women, university students.
So I was curious just to see what they were about because they weren't actually protesting against the legalization of what was then called same-sex marriage or gay marriage, right?
So I was just like, all right, let me go to this church and see what's happening.
And the story that I tell on occasion and that starts off my book or comes comes a little bit later into the book, but basically is the first service I attended, the Talladega Nights, Bobby, you know, that that joke, right, about his wife, his smoking right, about his wife, his smoking hot wife.
And I saw the gesture of Driscoll talking about his own wife.
And I've told this story before.
So I'll just like skip ahead and just say that, you know, the sexualized environment, basically, of the church really fascinated me.
And, you know, not only just because I wasn't expecting it, but I was thinking, wow, what an interesting way to think about what I'm investigating with marriage, right?
So here you think of this very conservative, theologically speaking, church, you know, then invested in this really kind of, you know, somewhat seemingly sex positive, of course, within heterosexual Christian marriage, sex positive kind of teaching.
And so I thought, well, this will be a fascinating place for me to spend some more time.
And long story short, I basically just became very invested in it because it turned out to be in some ways more interesting than my actual dissertation research.
So there's a really long chapter in my dissertation about Mars Hill.
And I wound up, once I finished my doctorate work in 2010, I was in CL for a year and then moved away on a visiting fellowship, teaching fellowship in Miami.
And while I was away, I kept looking at the church and looking at what they're doing online, downloading sermons, downloading different kinds of men's ministry, women's ministry.
And when I was doing my fieldwork, by the way, I was not only going to sermons every Sunday, but I was also going to gender and sexuality seminars, most of which were women-only in the spaces that I was in.
Every now and again there would be a both men and women event, as well as gospel classes, which were required for membership at that time, Bible classes to learn about the way that the church was teaching about Calvinism, So, I was really interested in just sort of, like, immersing myself in that place.
And I did not have the ability through my institution to do any kind of formal interviews, so everything I was doing was in the public realm.
But what was really interesting about Mars Hill, because they were so Good and sophisticated in terms of their media content and the way that they would disseminate it.
I was able to just kind of download and keep track of so much online, so much.
So all the men's ministry teaching, right?
All these film and theology nights that they would do.
I mean, just tons and tons of content.
It was really overwhelming, but was a boon for someone who was doing ethnographic field work and research.
Anyway, then I returned from Miami back to Seattle in 2012, and that's when things started getting extremely interesting because some pastors started coming forward and publishing things on their own websites, or sometimes on blogs, about some dissent, some disciplinary problems, getting shunned, their families getting exiled from the church.
Fireings happening, etc.
And some of this was happening while I was actually there.
It was kind of under the wraps, you know?
So if you were in an insider unit, it was happening.
But basically in 2007 is when a lot, a big kind of upheaval happened whereby bylaw changes within the church changed the governance structure such that there was an executive board.
And so all of this power, basically decision-making power within the church was concretized between three people.
You know, Driscoll, of course, and then two hand-picked men by him.
So when that happened, one pastor got fired, a couple others that were prominent at that time got severely marginalized and basically just kind of faded into the background.
And in 2012, 2013, more and more pastors and also members started coming forward with their stories about controlling disciplinary practices, about Again, these shunning practices about just really bullying leadership within the church.
And so the good press that had been happening was starting to unravel a bit.
And so, you know, it turned into, it turns out, an opportunity for me because here I was back in Seattle and I was able to finally get the interviews that I wanted around 2014.
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