The Failure of Macho Christianity

n an era of things coming undone—families from their traditional bonds, populations from their places of origin, genders from their longtime roles—the impulse to retreat into the lifestyles of steadier times is detectable in discourse and media, from our fascination with costume dramas to our encounters with ever more reactionary conservatisms. It’s within this tendency that Pastor Mark Driscoll has become something of a parable. A man of extreme aspirations, Driscoll set out to revive Christianity and the American family with good old-fashioned machismo. But for all his charisma and virility, something went badly wrong.

On January 1, 2015, the Seattle-based network of Evangelical church campuses known as Mars Hill dissolved into a series of independent churches. Boasting an average weekly attendance of some 12,329 souls at its height in 2013, Mars Hill now struggles to bring in 9,000 on any given Sunday. With revenues in precipitous decline, the worship syndicate has closed several locations and laid off numerous employees. But it was the mid-2014 resignation of controversial founder and lead pastor Mark Driscoll that sounded Mars Hill’s death knell.

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