#1563: Mark Driscoll

Mark Driscoll is the disgraced founder and former head of the Seattle-based Mars Hill Church, a megachurch with distinct cult-like traits. He’s also the founder of The Resurgence, which sought to train church leaders in conservative reformed theology, co-founder of several other organizations, author of several books, and writer e.g. for the “Faith and Values” section of the Seattle Times and the Fox News website.

Among his books, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship & Life Together, written with his wife Grace, raised some controversy (also because the sales figures were manipulated to get the book onto bestseller lists). Fundies missed the point and criticized it for describing sex; more enlightened critics (including some evangelicals) rather highlighted its rank misogynism. Driscoll is a “complementarian” about gender roles and accordingly endorses “male headship of the home and church”. According to Driscoll many modern spiritual and social problems are to blame on the emergence of female leadership and feminism, which is a doctrine originating in the serpent’s temptation of Eve – her eating the fruit was “the first exercising of a woman’s role in leadership in the home and in the church in the history of the world. It does not go well.” Not only that, but Christianity has been “feminized”: “The problem with the church today, it’s just a bunch of nice, soft, tender, ’chickified’ church boys. Sixty percent of Christians are chicks, and the forty percent that are dudes are still sort of chicks … The whole architecture and the whole aesthetic [of church buildings and services] is really feminine.” By contrast, Biblical figures like Jesus, Paul the Apostle, and King David, “... these guys were dudes. Heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose, dudes.” There’s some serious theology going on there. Driscoll doesn’t like gays either, obviously. Nor masturbation: According to Driscoll, if you engage in such acts you’re gay.

When Ted Haggard fell from grace Driscoll went after his wife, arguing that a “wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.”

He is, of course, also a Biblical literalist and inerrantist, and hence also a creationist according to whom Christians are not free to assent to evolution; that is, “the yet unproven and highly suspect thesis of macro-evolution” – no, he really doesn’t get neither evolution nor science, but what did you expect? An equal sensitivity to science, reality and evidence was demonstrated in 2014, when the Mars Hill Church announced that it would cure mental illness through “demon trials”. Driscoll is also a defender of the doctrine that Christianity is not a religion (“religion” only encompasses superstitious belief systems) and presumably hence not encompassed by any sort of separation between church and state.

In 2014, The NY Times wrote that Driscoll’s “empire appears to be imploding” under public criticism and formal complaints from Mars Hill staff members and congregants, and in October Driscoll announced his resignation from the cult. Two weeks later it was announced that Mars Hill Church would be dissolving by January 1, 2015. Among the factors leading up to the decision was (none other than) Janet Mefferd accusing Driscoll of plagiarism – 14 pages of Driscoll’s A Call to Resurgence quoted “extensively and without citation” two books by crazy fundie Peter Jones, including Gospel Truth/Pagan Lies: Can You Tell the Difference? (do we need to comment on the intellectual bankruptcy of someone who resorts to plagiarizing Peter Jones?) – Mefferd later apologized for catching Driscoll plagiarizing and the interview in which the issue was raised was deleted from Salem Radio’s webpage since Salem Radio unsurprisingly doesn’t possess a single shred of intellectual honesty. More plagiarism accusations soon followed.

Diagnosis: Deranged madman, hopefully to an extent neutralized by now.

#1562: Raymond Drake, Michael Drake and the TFP

Yes, yet another wingnut organization, this time something called the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), and it’s precisely the same as, and just as idiotic, as all those other Family™ organizations. The American TFP is a ”special campaign” of The Foundation for a Christian Civilization, Inc.,which forms ”the world’s largest anticommunist and antisocialist network of Catholic inspiration,” according to themselves. (It claims to have more than 120,000 members.) The organization is based on the ideas of crazy Brazilian fundamentalist Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, and their goal is to oppose what Oliveira believed was an anti-Christian process that had undermined Christian civilization since the 14th century, a three-stage “revolution” that would progressively undermine the Church and social order as follows:

1. The Protestant “Pseudo-Reformation” and its rejection of religious authority and inequality.

2. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution and its rejection of temporal authority, in particular the King and nobility.

3. The Communist Revolution and its rejection of economic inequality, which also seeks to eradicate the Church and Christian civilization in favor of neo-paganism.

Oh, yes – there be conspiracy, and America is already headed for communist tyranny and persecution of Christians and all the associated terror: equality, freedom, science (they’re staunch creationists), and so on. Their president is Raymond E. Drake (the vice president is one John Horvat II).

As you can imagine, the TFP isn’t fond of gay marriage (the tornadoes in Illinois in 2013? The state’s recent approval of a marriage equality bill, of course, at least according to executive director Robert Ritchie, who apparently was just JAQing off). A good example is the comments by Michael Drake (whom I assume to be closely connected to President Raymond Drake), who said that conservatives must fight against marriage equality because the real reason behind efforts to “destroy marriage” through marriage equality is to bring about socialism (Karl Marx’s target was apparently marriage all along, for instance) … just like during the end of the Roman Empire.

Diagnosis: Utterly deranged conspiracy theorists – this is whale.to and Icke forums level batshittery – the group is relatively obscure but apparently economically relatively well-oiled. Thoroughly insane, and although their actual level of influence remains to be determined they're definitely dangerous.

#1561: Steve Drain

Unlike most members of the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Drain is not related to the Phelpses and was not born into the cult. In the 1990s, however, he made a documentary film involving extensive interactions with the group, and upon the completion of the film he and his family joined the church. His initial role seems to have been to handle multimedia, design and website maintenance (including their usual segments “Beast Watch,” “Jews News,” and “WBC Video News,” in which Drain, Fred Phelps and his son Timothy offer their take on the latest news – “God Hates Malaysia” being a typical example), but he quickly rose to power and was, allegedly, one of the main forces behind the excommunication of Fred Phelps from his own church right before he died. Drain is, after outmaneuvering Shirley Phelps-Roper (a woman!) now apparently the de facto leader of the WBC, no less.

There is a portrait of Steve Drain, based to a large extent on the book by his estranged daughter, here. Brent Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church responded to the book’s allegations by identifying passages in the Bible that indicate that “a man’s enemies are of his own household” and that “in almost every case where you have a father or mother properly believing in Christ, they will be contradicted, opposed, or persecuted by their own son or daughter.” (He didn’t address any of the content.)

Diagnosis: Yup. It’s the heir of Fred Phelps, no less (though in fairness, the WBC seems to have lost a bit of their momentum after Fred Phelps’s demise).

#1560: O'Neal Dozier

I suppose many associate the Ft. Lauderdale area with relatively liberal attitudes. I guess it might be, which means, of course, that the local fundamentalist crazies have cranked their volume up several notches in response. One such is Rev. O’Neal Dozier of Pompano Beach’s Worldwide Christian Center (no, but Dozier certainly possesses a streak of megalomania), who attracted some attention during the 2012 Republican primaries when he called on Mitt Romney “to openly renounce his racist Mormon religion.” It is, in fairness, not too hard to see where he is coming from. His claim that Romney’s Mormonism would “taint the Republican Party” is still, shall we say, a bit … off.

For Dozier’s anti-equality campaigning there is no possible excuse, however. Tensions in the Ft. Lauderdale area ran high for awhile in 2007 when then-Democratic-mayor Jim Naugle – who said that the American Civil Liberties Union acronym ACLU means “Atheists and Criminal Lobbying Union” and that a proposal for reducing greenhouse gases was “hate-America stuff” concocted by “a bunch of scientists meeting in Paris who’ve had too much wine” – launched a rather aggressive anti-gay campaign. Naugle, who regards homosexuality as a sin, defended rather quaint anti-sodomy laws, and Dozier was one of several bigoted lunatics who emerged as his allies (the group from Koinonia Worship Center in Pembroke Park led by Elder Mathes Guice even donned paramilitary attire for one of the press conferencse with Naugle). “We love the homosexual people,” said Dozier for the occasion, and was apparently suffering from the delusion that the campaigns for “Healthy Public Places” were really attempts to reach out to gays “in the spirit of love.” To try to clarify: “Our coalition is not anti-gay. We are anti-sin” (one of the negative impacts of the “abomination” that is homosexuality, said Dozier, is the spread of HIV/AIDS). Dozier just doesn’t “want to see God destroy America in the way he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.” Gays also “make God want to vomit,” according to Dozier. You probably don’t want to meet him when he’s not in his “spirit-of-love” mood.

Dozier is concerned with social issues beyond gay rights, however. A staunch dominionist, Dozier has declared that “[w]e should take control of every facet of society” (adding, for good measure, that God was “100 percent for capital punishment. Oh, yeah, God knew some were going to slip through, a few innocent ones. He knew that. But you cannot have a society without capital punishment”). In 2006, he also declared war on a local Islamic group trying to build a mosque: “One day,” claimed Dozier, “our grandchildren will live under the grips of sharia law. It’s coming our way. Islam has a plan, a 20-year plan, to take over America from within. And they’re doing it.” Moreover, Darwinism is a liberal plot, and teaching evolution in school is an obvious violation of the Constitution: “Why is it that no one ever challenges the teaching of this Darwinian religion on constitutional grounds?” asked Dozier, without checking whether anyone has, in fact, tried to do precisely that. It is also racist. 

Diagnosis: So full of hate, bigotry and impotent rage that it’s almost fascinating. Stay well clear of this one.

#1559: Patrick Doyle & Kristen Luman(?)

Ghost Mine is an exceptionally idiotic – perhaps the most idiotic – paranormal “reality” TV series on Syfy channel. It features a group of miners together with paranormal investigators Patrick Doyle and Kristen Luman. The idea is that some old mine in Oregon is so haunted that no one will work there, so while the workers are working Doyle and Luman will run around and interpret literally everything that happens – from power outages to mislaid equipment to non-mislaid equipment as signs from the spirit world. In the process, they use a number of items with blinking lights (“ghost busting technology”) that purportedly indicate whether an area is safe or filled with gold.

Even paranormal fans have complained about how fake the show is. Partially because Doyle has more or less admitted that all paranormal shows are staged, and Luman’s claim to have studied “paranormal psychology” at Portland University is dubious (she does have a background from low-budget horror movies, though).

Diagnosis: Probably not loons at all, but whatever: They deserve to be shamed as much and as often as possible.

Note: I’ve pinched this entry mostly from rationalwiki’s entry on “Ghost Mine”. You won’t get me to actually watch that show.