"The Things We Do To Women"
Mark's Vision for Women: if women wanted to have a good life and raise happy and healthy children, she should not work outside the home and should raise her children personally while her husband went out and made a living for them both. Families should buy houses, grow deep roots, and have lots of kids if possible. If women were interested in working outside the home, the advice was to get married, have another kid, and for men to lead their wives better. If a man's wife worked outside of the home, it was a disqualification to be in church leadership or to be an elder. Women were told to drop out of college because their job was to stay home and sexually satisfy their husbands. If they denied their husband it was a sin. Men go to strip clubs is because their wives have not stripped enough for them and they have to get their fill somewhere. If women didn’t keep their husbands sexually satisfied, men would look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction. So, if your husband cheated on you, it was really your fault for not being sexually available.
This response was an echo of our fight against communism which was anti-family, anti-God, and anti-America and also the sexual revolution, which was also perceived as anti-family.
“There is an intense femininity that has crept into Christianity. Islam is a masculine religion. That’s why they run an airplane into the World Trade Center and we meet in Central Park in New York and we get men like Elton John to play the piano and cry. That’s our response as a nation. Gay men with wigs cry because mean men with facial hair beat them." -Mark Driscoll
Mark posed everything as a war and conflict. This was not only with the outside world but with the inside world of men and women. Someone had to dominate and men should be the ones. To be a woman meant to except that you would have to submit to a hierarchical structure. “You’d either be dominated by a good man or a bad one“.
Mark did seem to have a very genuine care for women. He would drop everything to help a woman in need or a woman who had been abused, but what he put back in its place was being dominated by a good man as opposed to being dominated by an abusive one.
Mark screams during a sermon and says, "How dare you! Who the hell do you think you are? Some of you guys are just so frustrating. Some of you guys have been coming here for years and you’re still not praying with your wife. Some of you guys have been coming here for years and you still have your hands all over your girlfriend. Some of you have already whispered in her ear and said, 'I’m sorry. I’ll do better.' Abusing a woman, neglecting a woman, being a coward, a fool, being like your father Adam. Who do you think you are! You are not God! You’re just a man! You’re not an impressive man! Some of you will hear this and your response will be, 'how dare you tell me how to live my life', but that’s the Holy Spirit telling you you need to change, little boy. You shut up, put on your pants, get a job, grow up and maybe one day you can love a woman." He did this at every service that day 5 times. It was planned and rehearsed and meant for tv in hopes to go viral.
Mark would say things like, "thank God for my smoking hot wife." Teaching from Song of Solomon, Mark exclaims, "oral sex is Biblical!"
"I am glad I was a part of a church that could speak openly about sexuality, but I am ashamed that we were a church that went beyond Scripture, with the same amount of authority, and the damage that it did to marriages and women." -Tim Smith pastor at Mars hill
"To me it was a rape culture that was promulgated using Christianity as a means to create a culture where women are subservient sexually in a way that was totally evil." -Jeff Becker