Earlier this year I posted a piece on the liberal baby bust about the declining fertility rates in Seattle versus Salt Lake City which may have something to do with cultural religious identity.
Salon.com published a story, Come As You Are, by Lauren Sandler. The article covers Mars Hill, a church in Seattle geared toward the hipster crowd and is preaching a conservative Christian message. The piece reads like an editorial and Sandler clearly doesn't like what is happening at Mars Hill. Journalistic merits aside, the piece raises some interesting questions for me.
The way Driscoll sees it, the more babies his conservative Christian congregation can produce in this child-poor city, the more they can redirect local politics, public education, and culture in one of the liberal capitals of the world. To complete his trifecta of indoctrinating, voting, and breeding, Driscoll has developed a community that dwarfs any living experiment of the '60s. To say that Mars Hill is just a church is to say that Woodstock was just a concert.
Mars Hill wrests future converts searching for identity and purpose from the dominion of available sex and drugs that still make post-grunge Seattle a countercultural destination. Driscoll promises his followers they don't have to reprogram their iTunes catalog along with their beliefs -- culture from outside the Christian fold isn't just tolerated here, it's cherished. Hipster culture is what sweetens the proverbial Kool-Aid, which parishioners here seem to gulp by the gallon. This is a land where housewives cradle babies in tattooed arms, where young men balance responsibilities as breadwinners in their families and lead guitarists in their local rock bands, and where biblical orthodoxy rules as strictly as in Hasidism or Opus Dei.
Following Driscoll's biblical reading of prescribed gender roles, women quit their jobs and try to have as many babies as possible. And these are no mere women who fear independence, who are looking to live by the simple tenets of fundamentalist credo, enforced by a commanding husband: many of the women of Mars Hill reluctantly abandon successful lives lived on their own terms to serve their husbands and their Lord. Accountability and community is ballasted by intricately organized cells -- gender-isolated support groups that form a social life as warm and tight as swaddling clothes, or weekly coed sermon studies and family dinner parties that provide further insulation against the secular world. Parents share child care, realtors share clients, teachers share lesson plans, animé buffs share DVDs, and bands share songs.
If Sandler’s depiction of conservative theology and strictly defined gender roles is accurate, why is it that Mars Hill is wildly successful by church attendance standards? They have loads of people attending regularly and have multiple campuses in the city and have a significant membership of young adults in the hipster neighborhoods of Seattle? What is it that makes them so attractive? Sandler answers:
To young evangelicals, our secular world is devoid of the type of love they seek, not parental love or fraternal love or even erotic love, but an even bigger love -- a love called agape. When Christians describe God's love for his children this is the word they invoke, a love so powerful one is moved to proclaim it on car bumpers and coffee mugs. Hand in hand with certainty, agape is what this generation longs for today -- a love that will soothe the pain of breakups and breakouts, heal the wounds from shattered families, make bearable the awareness that we are each a solitary speck in an illimitable world. It's the emotion that secularism, enraptured by its logic and empiricism, refuses to engage…
The way Driscoll sees it, America has been marketed to so constantly and shamelessly that it has produced a generation of jaded cynics desperate for what feels real. It is his edgy Jesus, he says, who best reaches a searching crowd. Likewise, he points out, this generation has grown up rootless and unparented, yearning for discipline within the very orthodoxy that Driscoll makes relatable and relevant. "They know there's more to life than waking up, eating what's in the fridge, watching what's on TV, and then going back to bed, than the rest of their porn-addicted, video-game-playing, loser friends," he tells me. "That's what I give them through the Bible. I say, let me give you some rules, not to be a jerk, but to help you out. And when was the last time that anyone in their busted-up family did that?"
Driscoll has built a fundamentalist empire by blending this stern-father sensibility with the savvy of a pop mogul mainstreaming alternative culture while maintaining its underground appeal.
Mars Hill offers members love, community, and a rule of life in a way that is culturally and personally accessible. That makes plenty of sense, but what about the gender roles and fertility issues that seem to go against the grain of Seattle Culture? Is it that people are finding something they deeply love in defined gender roles and nuclear family systems? Or is it, as Sandler seems to suggest that, women were somehow loved into or duped into accepting these roles? (See the section in which she writes about Judy Abolafya. See also a response written by Judy here.)
It seems that in the U.S. those churches that are growing significantly and quickly have two things in common: conservative theology and highly refined and culturally sensitive community systems. (This is anecdotal and not linked to any formal study). If you want to start a wildly successful church, do you need to have both or are highly effective community systems enough?
