Overview

Between 1996 and 2014, Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church multiplied from its base in Seattle into fifteen facilities spread across five states with 13,000 attendees. When it closed, the church was beset by scandal, with former attendees testifying to spiritual abuse, emotional manipulation, and financial exploitation. In Biblical Porn Jessica Johnson examines how Mars Hill's congregants became entangled in processes of religious conviction. Johnson shows how they were affectively recruited into sexualized and militarized dynamics of power through the mobilization of what she calls ""biblical porn""-the affective labor of communicating, promoting, and embodying Driscoll's teaching on biblical masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, which simultaneously worked as a marketing strategy, social imaginary, and biopolitical instrument. Johnson theorizes religious conviction as a social process through which Mars Hill's congregants circulated and amplified feelings of hope, joy, shame, and paranoia as affective value that the church capitalized on to grow at all costs.

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9780822371533

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Reviews

Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill churches in Seattle took Calvinist insecurity to new levels, producing an everyday world of acute affective precarity. His church people lived in a slurry of shame, fear, threat, care, intimidation, hope, joy, and paranoia. Wives were exhorted to be their husbands' porn stars 24/7, and men-the victims of a nation `pussified' by feminists-should man-up, have sex on demand with their wives, and pursue air and ground war campaigns of `riot evangelism.' After nearly a decade of summary dismissals, shunning, demon trials, disciplinary interrogations, mass surveillance, and financial scandals, Driscoll's evangelical empire imploded. Jessica Johnson was there for the long haul and provides us with a theoretically rich and evocative reading of this traumatic episode of pastoral governance. -- Susan Friend Harding, author of * The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics * Much ink has been spilled over the scandals surrounding American evangelical megachurches, yet little of it engages the phenomenon of Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill with the elegance and sophistication of Jessica Johnson's work. Sharp, creative, and theoretically adroit, Biblical Porn offers a complex unpacking of an important dimension of contemporary evangelicalism. A wholly impressive book. -- Jason C. Bivins, author of * Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism *

With deep insight and an absence of judgment, Johnson interprets the driving forces behind Driscoll's rhetoric, and the toxic effect it had on the believers who followed him. -- Claire Foster * Foreword * The saga of Mars Hill Church and its founder/pastor/charlatan Mark Driscoll . . . is treated to a thoughtful, scholarly dissection in this essential book by UW lecturer Jessica Johnson. It's almost impossible to discuss Driscoll's ignominious legacy without letting one's language be infected by ideological zeal (guilty). That's why Johnson's ethnographic approach, which focuses on the shrewd process by which Mars Hill recruited, flattered, and manipulated its herd, with special attention paid to issues of class, race, gender, and socialization. -- Sean Nelson * The Stranger * The enthralling story of the rise and fall of Mark Driscoll, former pastor of the defunct evangelical megachurch Mars Hill in Seattle. . . . Johnson is a talented storyteller. . . . * Publishers Weekly *

Much ink has been spilled over the scandals surrounding American evangelical megachurches, yet little of it engages the phenomenon of Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill with the elegance and sophistication of Jessica Johnson's work. Sharp, creative, and theoretically adroit, Biblical Porn offers a complex unpacking of an important dimension of contemporary evangelicalism. A wholly impressive book. -- Jason C. Bivins, author of * Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism *

Author Information

Jessica Johnson teaches in the Departments of Anthropology and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

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