At Aaron’s suggestion, I recently began listening to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast from Christianity Today. It’s a biased account, the whole game being to smear conservatives with Driscoll’s bad behavior. Nevertheless, it is well-produced and can spur useful reflection among those of us who remain committed to a Biblical understanding of sexuality.
A clever trick the podcast sometimes uses is that of misdirection. If they want to make a point, for example, and Driscoll’s admittedly voluminous amount of raw material doesn’t lend itself to the point, they will pivot to feature someone other than Driscoll. One example of this was when Driscoll claimed that a woman propositioned him in the communion line.
For those of us familiar with hypergamy, or just people with common sense, it’s entirely plausible Driscoll was being truthful. He was the most famous pastor in the world at the time, and he was specifically famous for being dangerous / controversial and he is an attractive, athletic guy. It’s not a surprise that women would be attracted to him, and since women are sinners too, it’s not implausible that someone in his gigantic church propositioned him. And, indeed, it is to Driscoll’s credit that his controversies have never involved a shred of personal sexual misconduct despite probably more opportunity than any pastor of the last twenty years. Necessity isn’t virtue, so his soy-faced critics probably can’t relate to the temptation he constantly faced.
The podcast, however, wanted to cast doubt on whether a woman had ever propositioned Driscoll. Sneakily, they immediately pivot to an unrelated story of James Dobson telling some anecdote about how he thought a woman was propositioning him with her eyes, while they were both in their vehicles at a stoplight. So they undermine Driscoll’s entirely plausible claim with a…