Written By Jamie Taylor

Variants & Mars Hill

Have you noticed that variants are everywhere? Viruses, anti-heroes in the MCU, memes?

I’m starting to dread the sound of greek letters on the news. It’s like some ghoulish list of fraternity houses hell-bent on extending the misery of the global pandemic. And yet, despite the rising numbers, the good news is that we know what we’re fighting. The protocols and behaviors we’ve used before will work this time too, even better if we are vaccinated. So far, it’s all the same disease.

My apologies in advance; I’m about to beat this metaphor to death. Some things are more important than style.

Social Variants

There are all sorts of metaphorical, unnamed disease variants floating through our social media conversations every day. The latest hot take, controversy, or scandal is alarmingly similar to the last hot take, controversy, or scandal. They emerge from the miasma of the culture wars in endless iterations, new forms of the same old virulent content, yielding nothing but wave after wave of toxic and often fruitless debate. They can infect any issue seemingly out of nowhere. These variants of our chronic cultural diseases leave people fed up, nauseated, and wondering, like the narcissistic god of mischief himself, if the arc of our species is even capable of redemption. I think it is but I understand the skepticism.

When we use every subject, every piece of news (and I do mean every ) as a proxy for our culture wars, important issues get lost in the outrage barrage. As an advocate, I’ve watched in horror as issues that should have reached an easy consensus among people of goodwill wind up in no man’s land, embroiled in faux outrage.

I want to try to pull the subject of abuse away from the culture wars for a moment. I believe something truly significant is happening right now, something that could help a lot of people in all parts of the culture.

To my non-Christians readers: I’m going to focus on a story of abuse in a church, but I promise that this concerns you too. You’ll see why. If you’ve gone with me into the minutiae of the evangelical world before, you know I try my best to be a good tour guide. I’ll have to leave some things for you to google, though, and my apologies for that. There’s a lot to say.

Now, let’s catch everyone up.

Mars in Retrograde

A story of systemic, narcissistic church abuse is currently dominating the online discourse among evangelicals, thanks in large part to an excellent Christianity Today podcast called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. It tells the story of a polarizing megachurch pastor named Mark Driscoll. If you don’t know who he is or what he’s famous for, google his name plus “how dare you.” Then…maybe turn your volume down.

Driscoll is the apotheosis of a particular type of gen x pastor. He was famous for building a hyper-masculine, extraordinarily successful ministry in Seattle that, I kid you not, took philosophical and aesthetic cues from David Fincher’s Fight Club. It collapsed in 2014 in the wake of multiple scandals, like the array of buildings in that movie’s third act. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, Driscoll was a thrill ride masquerading as a shepherd. He was also spiritually, emotionally, and verbally abusive.

While Driscoll was ascendant, a lot of important people and platforms inside the Evangelical Industrial Complex supported and promoted him, including Christianity Today. He was the first pastor to harness the power of the internet age and would later become a best-selling author. As Christians like to say, God was building his church through this man. That is if all you looked at were the numbers. Then the scandals broke, Driscoll resigned, Mars Hill closed, and the story came and went among American Christians, just as these things often do in the secular culture. Driscoll even got a job at another church. I think it’s safe to say that there was no serious attempt at a public post mortem.

Until now. 

Podcast Prograde

The first five episodes of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast are on the same level as S-Town or Serial, with impeccable production, a slightly salacious feel, well-written and well-narrated by someone who knows the people involved personally, Mike Cosper. I don’t mean that last part to disparage him. I think he is taking great care of his subjects and I have no problem with the explicit nature of some of the reporting. It’s what happened. Those calling it gossip are working from a poor definition of the word.

I think Cosper hopes to create a robust public conversation around this terrible story, to press evangelicals to work out why we keep platforming narcissistic, abusive men and yet continue to be shocked by their sudden collapse. It’s working. We are definitely talking about it. It helps that the podcast is filled with compelling, nuanced, and excellent journalism, but it also feels a lot like watching a trainwreck in slow motion. It’s more than a little gross and yet hard not to want to listen each week. It should win whatever podcast awards they give out these days. 

In these first episodes, listeners experience a steady push and pull between two points of view. Sometimes, it feels more like whiplash. Overt examples of ridiculous behavior give the impression that Driscoll was an obvious charlatan, someone who should have been bounced from his pulpit immediately. We are in disbelief. Then, we hear earnest testimony from members about extraordinary blessings, gracious generosity, all the “good things” they witnessed at the church, tempering our first reaction. We are understanding. Then, we hear the deep pain of spiritual trauma caused by his catastrophic teaching on sex and marriage. We are furious and grief-stricken. I think Cosper has done well to highlight this confusion and refuse to resolve the ambiguity lightly, though it has proved challenging for listeners who are struggling to process what it all means. We are uncomfortable.

That back and forth structure is even reflected in the opening credit sequence.

Cosper makes it clear in episode one that they mean to show us in great detail exactly how this abuser rose to such heights, how he deceived people, and why people were fooled for so long, even after many whistleblowers had come forward. To do that, they have to talk about the confusion, the “two sides”, and that focus is exactly why I’m so engaged. Confusion is a critical tool that helps abusers gain and hold power. This series has enormous potential to help (particularly white) evangelicals see and understand their own variant forms of narcissistic abuse, something you can barely even name to a lot of church leaders, much less discuss in such minute detail from the perspectives of both victims and enablers.

For someone who has watched good people twisted and harmed by this issue, I cannot help cheering for Cosper. But I’ve begun to worry that the episodes are asking too much of listeners in more than one way, teetering on a knife’s edge. I’ll start with a concern for abuse survivors which will also take you through some perhaps lesser-known aspects of recovery work. I’ll finish with a plea to both sides of the theological/ gender debate.

Consider this my contribution to the larger conversation, regardless of where the podcast goes from here. These are things I know about abuse and narcissistic leaders that might be helpful to you, even if you never hear an episode of the podcast.

Naming Abuse

A general note for the following sections: I’m a layperson with lots of experience around recovery. I’m speaking as a layperson, an advocate, and recalling my experiences and resources. I am not an expert on anyone else but me, and my observations are just that.

There are things the podcast has said, and things it has not yet said, that make me fear it will be cast aside by survivors very soon simply because it is too activating. Let’s start with what is missing to my ears: naming the abuse. While some things have been plainly spoken in some episodes - I’ve heard the term narcissistic multiple times, and other words like toxic and shaming - other clarifying labels have not yet been applied to some of the descriptions of abusive patterns. I’m a reader and a writer. I know why these labels aren’t there. It’s a narrative and it’s not even halfway through. “Show me, don’t tell me.” And yet I can barely make it through an episode at this point.

I love this podcast and think it is likely to be very important. I had to stop it a dozen times this week. It is particularly hard to listen to people describe certain “good stories” and that’s because I don’t believe they are good. They are something else.

I wish I could easily describe why naming the abuse throughout the story would help. I’m going to try, but first… I’m just going to do it. So, content/spoiler (?) warning: I’m going to clearly label the abusive behavior covered in the podcast so far. I’m not going to be explicit, but skip the italicized paragraphs if you prefer. They aren’t necessary to follow my argument. If you are going to read on, take a few breaths first, looking away from your screen, and spend a moment thinking about how you feel. Try to notice if you feel any changes as you read. We will check in after.

Mark Driscoll was and is a narcissistic abuser. He built an abusive church that spiritually and emotionally abused women and men. He gave cover in his teaching for sexual exploitation in the home, including a justification for marital rape. He exhibits typical patterns of narcissistic, controlling, and manipulative behavior.

Driscoll groomed his community. He was often kind to people, impulsively generous, even overwhelmingly supportive. He gained trust and loyalty through lavish displays of affection which were later exploited. That’s grooming. He was also outrageous, testing boundaries constantly to see what people would let him do. He desensitized his people to hyper-sexual and aggressive commentary, to screaming, and escalated those behaviors over time. That’s also grooming.

After grooming individuals and his community over many years, he escalated his antics as boundaries eroded and enmeshment grew. There were weird, unhealthy entanglements among the staff and elders. Unsurprisingly, according to recent accounts, his behavior has not changed. All of this would match the MO of any other perpetrator of abuse.

He built a complicit, enabling community around himself, consolidating power, and targeted vulnerable people (particularly women) just like any other abuser in any other context. He isolated those he targeted and ostracized people who pushed back. Enablers routinely justified his increasingly outrageous behavior to themselves and others by citing “all the good things”. His grooming worked. He gaslit and spiritually abused members, pastors, leadership, and staff, attacking them verbally even in counseling sessions. He used his power and position to maintain control over every aspect of the church and its wider ministries. His behavior, helped along by his many enablers, has made a shipwreck of his soul.

Okay. How are you feeling? Take another few breaths, particularly if you are feeling worse. I feel better after writing this but that’s me. I know many will feel better after reading it. Most of you will feel essentially neutral.

I know it may seem odd that anyone would want to hear these plain statements repeated in the middle of the story (we are on ep. 6 of 12), but I promise you that people would be soothed by their presence. I believe many are distressed by their absence and you can see them tweeting about it each week. The ambiguity can leave them feeling like excuses are being made or worse, that the abuse is being minimized, denied, and rationalized.

If you can float back and forth in the ambiguity created by the podcast with relative comfort, that’s awesome. And, once again, I think this is part of Cosper’s explicit purpose as stated in the thesis of episode one. I admire it and I expect him to be more explicit about naming the elements of the abuse over time. I also think people with trauma backgrounds may continue to have extremely distressing responses to the episodes. I’m worried they won’t make it to the end and that losing their input and perspective on the patterns revealed in the story would be a shame.

A story of abuse is going to be triggering, that’s a given. I’m just not sure it needs to be this triggering.

I think this intense reaction could be mitigated specifically by framing the “good” stories using the proper terminology for abuse where applicable. If the story is an example of grooming, say so. If the story is an example of broken boundaries, say so. You don’t even have to use abuse terminology, you can just make a point to say the bad things are bad, even if you are also saying how some people thought the good things were good. A lot of the “good” behavior described so far was actually quite obviously grooming. Why not say so?

There’s an excellent example in episode 3. The story starts at 40:26 and goes on for about 7 minutes. The victim, Racheal, tells of being targeted from the pulpit, even after she was fired by Driscoll for daring to suggest he needed more accountability and mentorship. She struggles to say unequivocally that she was targeted and it’s obvious why. She can’t prove Driscoll meant to hurt her because her only proof was the repetition of a phrase he had spoken to her privately. But listen to how she reacted the moment he used those words again. She fled, cried in the bathroom, and then left the church for good. Even if she can’t say for certain, her mind and heart knew at that moment that she was a target. This is such a classic narcissistic move, placing her in a lose-lose situation and leaving himself plausible deniability. Years later, and she still has to concede that it was a phrase “he said often”.

Cosper helps her out by applying a clear label to what happened. He simply says she was “shamed from the pulpit.” That may seem like nothing compared to the earlier story of being called a heretic but friends, when I heard him say plainly and clearly that Driscoll meant to hurt her in his sermon, taking away the ambiguity for her and all of us, it offered such profound validation to my own experiences that I cried. Half the pain caused by narcissistic abusers comes from their ability to hurt you and then silence you, either through threats or situations like this, where they can easily deny what they’ve done, count on their enablers to protect them, and thus paralyze you. But your mind, your body, and your heart still take the hit they meant for you to take.

Teasing out the confusion of abuse, the distorted thinking from grooming and gaslighting, and, yes, even debating the contributions of certain theological positions (I’m getting there), are all important steps for processing this story, especially because this is a pattern that has repeated across the wider evangelical community, sometimes in direct imitation of Mark Driscoll. This story of abuse has many variants. But I think some sacrifice to style is warranted in order to name the abuse a little more often, to clarify events without leaving room for that uncertainty. It would help to keep as many survivors as possible in this conversation.

So, why does clarity like this help and ambiguity harm?

Recovery

After reading multiple threads this week on the latest episodes, I had a funny and terrible vision of the online discussion: we’re like a very large family that has collectively, noisily, begrudgingly entered abuse recovery counseling. It’s the worst group therapy session imaginable and it’s happening on Twitter daily. Yikes. But let’s pretend we are all starting at the beginning of a recovery process.

At some point, both victims and enablers have to painstakingly separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. They have to sort the “good” memories and positive feelings they have about their abuser away from the abuse. It’s hard work to untangle things but it’s critical to address the confusion. In a way, I think Mike Cosper has been able to simulate this part of recovery and processing in the podcast. The trouble is that this part never comes first.

The first thing most recovery programs have a victim do is name the abuse. Not tell their story, just say the abuse happened in no uncertain terms. That is harder than it sounds. At this early point in recovery, the brain and body can be basically screaming at a victim, telling them that recovery is unnecessary - “None of it was real”, “It wasn’t that bad”, “we don’t want to look at that”, “recovery will hurt”. For some people, the brain thinks it will die and tells the body so. Imagine what that might feel like for a moment. Deep ruts in our neurology push hard to protect us against the pain it thinks could destroy us. It doesn’t matter how long ago it happened. Naming it can feel like turning the world upside down, going through the looking glass, or passing some disorienting plot twist; all that you once thought true is undone. It is very hard to get your feet down on the ground at that moment. It can cause profound grief.

Naming the abuse keeps a person grounded so that as they begin to process the more confusing parts, they don’t go back into self-doubt, justifying and denying the behavior or, worse, become retraumatized. They can sit with the ambiguity without distress or minimizing the abuse. After a while, the new reality becomes safe and it can be very painful to walk backward into doubting what was real again. Your nervous system can send a big, loud signal of, “Nope!” if triggered in that way. These things have deeper technical explanations and definitions; again, this is just a layperson’s guide. But I promise you that no recovery book I’ve seen begins with processing the more ambiguous experiences. They begin with something akin to, “So, you were abused...” Clear statements tethered neatly to reality.

You could argue the scandal of Mars Hill itself named the abuse, but I don’t think so. Not like this. You could argue some of the blunt statements in the podcast are enough, that each behavior doesn’t need to be so clearly defined. I would argue the activated responses you see on Twitter say otherwise. This week’s episode included some downright chilling moments with Josh Harris and others. The tone sometimes sounded like guys reminiscing about old college antics or esoterically analyzing cultural movements at 30,000 feet. But they are describing how they enabled an abuser who wrecked people’s hearts, minds, and spirits.

Whether or not survivors feel like they can keep listening, we can all still name what happened at Mars Hill and keep saying it to ourselves and to each other.

Do The Next Right Thing

Okay, it’s time to talk about gender and theological issues in the latest episodes, and this is where I may lose all of you. It was a good run while it lasted.

I have my layperson advocate hat on right now, not my church lady hat. This is the one I wear when I talk to school districts, to my representative, to researchers, to gatekeepers, and friends. I have one goal: I want to stop abusers. I’ve got over 21 years of experience being inside two awful systems of abuse and I know what it was like to exit both. I want y’all to be able to glean as much as you can from the conversations around this podcast. Why? So you can be better prepared to recognize, prevent, or end narcissistic, abusive leadership in your community. Speaking solely as an advocate, I want you to be able to do the next right thing and to do it right now, not after we resolve 100 years of theological debates. We do not have to wait for that. There’s already common ground.

Okay, my church lady hat is back on.

Some of the digressions in the recent episodes edged the entire conversation toward the culture war. I think that was inevitable and it’s been okay so far; There’s room and need for a larger theological conversation to take place. But there’s absolutely no room to tie the typical patterns and cycles of abuse we see in Mark Driscoll solely and completely to any particular ideological framework, personality type, nor to reduce it all to one theological camp. That would be a mistake, one I saw many people making online this week. I know a lot of you are aware that abuse can happen anywhere. But lots of other people still don’t know that, including secular people. It was a wrench for someone like me, who knows abuse in the secular world and across many denominations, to see this harmful piece of mythology show its foolish head again. I first saw this distorted thinking twenty years ago when protestants were blaming the Catholic scandals on celibacy.

Abusers are like a disease variant. Same sickness, different approach. It doesn't matter that they were “young, restless, and reformed.” It really, truly doesn’t. They can do what they can do because they know how to create opportunities and how to break through defenses. They know most people can’t tell when someone is testing and moving their boundaries, that normal people don’t realize they are being groomed, or can’t acknowledge they were enabling. This is true across any number of contexts in any part of the culture.

Any theological position, system, polity, or cultural movement can play host to a variant and produce a particular shape. The trappings of the variant are not the same thing as the disease. We have to get that right.

No Sacred/Secular Divide

Think of all of the big abuse and harassment stories over the last 20 years: Catholic Church, Matt Lauer, Weinstein, USA Gymnastics, Boy Scouts of America, Fox News, Penn State, Epstein, RZIM Ministries, Bill Cosby, Jerry Fallwell Jr., Louis CK, and the SBC. I want you to ponder the scope of this list for a minute. What part of our culture is unaffected? None. I picked things that likely have top-of-mind awareness for most people, whether you’re Christian or not. Christians can add a lot of names and organizations to this list and so can non-Christians.

I think it would be practical and helpful to remember that when we talk about systemic abuse in one context, we are always talking about a variant of the same disease from others. We need to hold that disease and its predictable symptoms in our mind, name them as such without caveat. Once you have those labels and categories clear, you can avoid the trap of thinking abusive and toxic systems only happen “over there”, to those heathen Hollywood people or those weird religious people; to the mainline churches or just the conservative protestants; in the SBC or just in Catholicism. Because the truth is, it’s all of them. It has happened to all of them. It can happen anywhere, and that includes this type of narcissistic abuse we see from Driscoll. If we forget that then we will fail to notice the wolves among us.

(Heartbreaking aside: Have you seen the DOJ report on the Larry Nassar investigation? Even the modern FBI enabled the abuse of hundreds of Olympic athletes. Children. Survivors have gotten a very loud message that their lives mean less than nothing compared to the interests of almost any institution. They’ve gotten that message from every corner of the culture, even from the highest sources of power and achievement in the land, from people who are supposed to protect and support them. What if churches of all sorts could be the first to truly, finally repent and change this? I wonder what might happen…)

My point is not to eviscerate your trust in all people nor to say all contexts of abuse are made equal. They are not. We know from law enforcement and researchers that some places and people are more attractive to these personalities. Nor am I saying that the unique social, cultural, and theological causes of any particular variant of abuse don’t need analysis. I think that’s critical work. But I also know from personal experience that the disease of abuse doesn’t care about your politics, denominations, theological fads, or institutions. It just uses them. Your particular variant of abuse in your organizational culture or denominational context is not some new or novel disease but the same one from Mars Hill. It will have different trappings, of course, reflective of whatever dominates the culture of a community, family, or organization. It can be quiet and covert, loud and obnoxious, and everything in between. But it’s always going to have those common elements of abuse and that, honestly, is great news. We can fight to disrupt and change the patterns we can see.

The Main Thing

Non-Christian friends, I need a word with my people. My apologies for the obscurity. This part is definitely insider baseball.

Okay, family, let’s lay this on the table: Mark Driscoll’s status in the Reformed and complementarian movements enabled him and gave cover for his abuse. It would be dishonest of complementarians to say otherwise. Who am I to say that? A (light) complementarian. The movement was foolish.

We can dispute what Driscoll taught and say that it was not substantively complementarian, and that’s an argument people should hear with grace and understanding. Narcissists often use mirroring as a tool, so it doesn’t surprise me that someone like Driscoll would mirror the content of the most powerful or influential movement in the culture to suit his own purposes. We can even grant that it would be hard for leaders far outside the organization to know what to do, even if they were certain something was wrong. But the fact is that Driscoll used complementarian language, reformed platforms, and other pastoral endorsements to grow his brand, which ultimately expanded the scope of his abuse. So far, I don’t see too many of those same institutions or individuals apologizing for their support. I believe it is completely fair to expect them to say something publicly that isn’t just analysis but that takes responsibility for failing to be wise.

I also want egalitarians to note that some complementarians saw the problems early on and spoke candidly about their deep concerns with what language and evidence they had at the time. People as theologically diverse as Rachel Held Evans and Heath Lambert from CBMW both knew something was seriously wrong with Mark Driscoll. Nobody listened. Nobody was prepared to listen. They didn’t know abusive patterns so they didn’t know to look for them.

The only thing harder than learning to recognize narcissistic abuse like this will be whatever you choose to do about it. That’s a whole other conversation about character, courage, and deep sacrifice. But we can’t hope to manage serious institutional or personal change if we aren’t able to repent of past mistakes, nor even talk about the patterns of abuse at their most basic level, matters where even experts from the secular world have consensus.

The fear I have is that while addressing the theological controversies and gender, people on both sides could carry focus away from the main things. I see us falling back to familiar, unproductive positions in this eternal culture war. But I truly don’t believe that you need to resolve theological or gender debates to know what grooming looks like.

Stay with me. We’re nearly there.

Prevention

One of the most frustrating things for advocates is to watch leaders, particularly church leaders, use the expediencies of the culture war to avoid or derail hard conversations. The topic of abusive, narcissistic pastors and leaders is ready-made for this type of avoidance. They leap to big picture analysis and leave the practical, helpful language behind. Some think they are safe from this problem because they have the “right doctrine” and good polity. I know that most of you would never say such a sentiment out loud but you can guess that lots of people think this way, even if only a little. Some just think abuse prevention is all a liberal construct designed by Marxists. They make me tired.

Pastors, leaders, teachers, please hear me: Abusers are opportunists to their core. Good prevention takes that fact to heart and never lets it go. It can happen to you. It can be you. You need to know how abuse works, how narcissists behave, and why. We can’t just sit back doing cultural analysis and having theological debates while obvious symptoms pass right under our noses. It is hard to call these things out. It’s even harder if you don’t have other examples clearly labeled in your mind for comparison.

Ecumenism, For the Win

I don’t want to watch the conversation around this podcast become yet another casualty of the culture wars. If that happens, all sides could lose much-needed perspective and humility, and so lose progress toward recognizing narcissistic abusers among them. The deeper theological and cultural analysis - AGAIN, I THINK THAT STUFF IS REALLY IMPORTANT - will be easier if we can at once establish that we all, without equivocation, see that Mark Driscoll abused his church and we understand what that means.

Let’s learn and use the real words to talk about the things we hear in the podcast. Let’s apply them first and often. Say grooming when it’s grooming. Say enmeshment and enabling. Say gaslighting. Say boundary testing. Say emotional and spiritual abuse. Let’s help each other see what happened, listen to survivors give other examples, and try to understand how we are all vulnerable to this same disease, regardless of its variant. This will also help us be ready, if called, to sacrifice everything we have to stand up to it. We will know the stakes because we will have seen and understood the damage caused to both the sheep and the shepherd who has become a wolf.

We will find our way through the confusion, I promise you. I’ve done it and so have others. We can do it. God is merciful and he loves his people.

Bravo to Mike Cosper and his team. This is important work, though I know it is extremely upsetting to many and they are likely taking a lot of flack right now. But despite my concerns, I’m cheering them on.

I Love Resources…

If you want some practice naming specific abusive behaviors, check out this helpful video from the wonderful humans at Cinema Therapy. I also recommend their videos on gaslighting and bullying. They also recently released a video on Mean Girls that delves into triangulation and other patterns that appear inside unhealthy communities.