Happy Fourth of July from Seattlest
Seattlest Pix: 09Jul04
Seattlest Pix: 09Jul05
Seattle Int'l Beer Festival Ends at 7 p.m.
Why is it that all the of the really seductive ideas that are flowing out of Seattle right now and gaining currency around the country come from groups that we barely acknowledge the existence of, much less revere as city institutions? First, intelligent design has its fifteen minutes in the sun, and now Mars Hill is taking over the planet, at least according to Salon this week.
Mars Hill is a Ballard Megachurch which practices the kind of cultural imposterism that's been floating around forever and Salon tells us is on the rise. Dress yourself in the wolf's clothing, apparently, and you can make people swallow anything. They're ostensibly against consumerism and corporatism run amok, but, you know, why do anything about it if Kirk Cameron is going to come down from the sky and fuck shit up at any moment? Meanwhile, let's timewarp women back to the Fifties (which the Salon article talks a lot about) and de-gay all the gays (which the Salon article doesn't mention).
She made a great income heading up merchandising on tours, managed it well, enjoyed her freedom, and was confident and outspoken. Now she defines that behavior as prideful, even if she misses it. "Everything was great when my conversion happened. I was making money, I was about to take a trip to Mexico, I was totally in control of my life," she tells me. "My life is much harder, not easier, now that I'm a Christian," she says, clenching her teeth against Asher's droning whine. "We had originally planned not to have kids, but now we have to do our best to repopulate our city with Christians."Abolafya's conversion was a total surprise to her. She was a nonbeliever who accompanied her husband, Ari, to a service at Mars Hill -- he was curious to check out the "tattooed punk-rock church" he had heard about.
Wait, is this a cult?
Abolafya no longer reads secular books or speaks to her old friends, She is now a deacon at Mars Hill and is responsible for planning the weddings held there, which always include a biblical explanation of marriage and gender roles; each year Mars Hill averages about one hundred marriages between couples within the congregation, all of whom must agree with this doctrine. Between her marriage ministry, the women's Bible study she runs, her two small children, and taking care of her husband and her home, Abolafya says she doesn't have time for many relationships anyway, and when she starts to home-school her kids soon, her time will be even tighter. "It's not what I ever imagined," she tells me, "or even what I ever wanted, but it's my duty now, and I have to learn to live with that."
It is a cult!
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Oh, yeah. That sounds like a recipe for long-term success. Unfortunately, it probably won't be until she pops out the third or fourth kid in five or six years time that she really starts getting in touch with that niggling little voice in the back of her head that keeps telling her maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.
Oooh--I went on a date with a girl who was in this thing. She said it was a cult and they tried to get you to stop talking to your friends. Weird!
Consumerism and corporatism indeed: you have to click on an Acura advert just to read the damn Salon article. Mars Hill, sign me up! (just kidding)
Seriously though, I fail to see how Christians having tatoos and the like equate with "cultural imposterism." People from all walks of life have been drawn to organized religion; this is nothing new.
Perhaps you were being tongue-in-cheek, but it's also unfair to pigeonhole a whole church as a cult because of one attendee's life choices (that whole non-secular book thing is pretty creepy). If Mars Hill wouldn't let the lady leave the church, that would be a cult.
This is from one of wikipedia's many definitions of "cult":
And the way the Salon.com portrays Mars Hill in this article seems reminiscient of that, particularly with regards to the isolation of the faithfull from the non.
Yeah, I've been to service at Mars Hill. I went a few times and then it started getting weird. The person I went with stopped talking to me when I stopped going. I am very wary about that church.
I was pretty suspicious of the Salon article; it smacked of sensationalism. But based on the comments above, perhaps it's not far from the truth. I dunno, I guess you just expect a church pressuring its members like that to exist somewhere in West Texas, not Ballard.
The whole part about "we have to do our best to repopulate our city with Christians" is pretty scary. Hopefully those kids will do what kids do best ... rebel against their parents and question their world rather than accept it wholeheartedly like a robot.
Interested observers may wish to note that MH is NOT just a "Ballard" megachurch. It's expanding, with a Shoreline location and a soon-to-open (as we've been following on WS Blog) West Seattle location.
From the Salon article: "'We are in a city with less children per capita than any city but San Francisco,' he declares, 'and we consider it our personal mission to turn that around.'"
How can anyone who has sat in traffic on a Friday evening, or paid any attention to the massive Artic icecaps breaking free and the increase in hurricanes look around and say that what the world needs is more people?
Church sucks.
There was a post a couple of days ago on the (occasionally drama-ridden) Seattle Livejournal Community, Putting the Fun in Seattle Fundamentalism. It spawned some mostly good discussion, including some oddball dissent from church members.
There's also a post directly following it from a person who described herself as the manager of the Paradox, in which she declares that the Church has zero impact or presence (aside from the obvious juxtaposition) in the club. Dunno about that.
I think the main question isn't whether it's a cult, but whether it's a fundamentalist church – and if it is, what to do about it. Former president Jimmy Carter has a great definition of Fundamentalism in his book, Our Endangered Values: