Mars Hill Protest Approaching
Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll is blowing up. His recent blog post on Ted Haggard, the meth smoking, gay prostitute hiring Colorado pastor displayed all of Mark's trademark bravado and bluster and unfortunately it probably made him as many new friends as new enemies and his apology for that post in no way apologizes for anything. And why should he? It's a very orchestrated campaign that presupposes, fosters and needs opposition.
Enter People Against Fundamentalism, the group that plans to protest Mark Driscoll's attitudes towards women outside Mars Hill services this Sunday and seems to have drawn as much criticism from some quarters as Mark Driscoll himself has. Check out this post or this one for the thoughts of some other local Christians, or the People Against Fundamentalism blog itself for more commenty goodness.
We've talked to People Against Fundamentalism previously, but we didn't really cover that group's thoughts on homosexuality in that interview and someone asked us about it this week so we sent Paul Chapman at People Against Fundamentalism another email. We're a day late, but his response is after the jump.
People Against Fundamentalism is not an anti-gay group. However, for the sake of the clarity of our message, we are keeping our protest specifically about Mark Driscoll's demeaning comments about women. Note also that we are protesting Mark's actions/rhetoric concerning women, *not* his theological beliefs about women. There is a particular theological view called 'complementarianism' which holds that women have particular rolls and are to submit to men. While it may seems like splitting hairs, even though we do disagree with that theological position, the focus of the protest is not of his theology but the way he uses feminine terminology as a pejorative.He similarly uses (or has used) as pejoratives terminology that society
has associated with gays, such as 'limp-wristed' and 'faggoty'. I think
reasonable people can (should?) agree that such rhetoric is not acceptable
to use either of gays or as slams against heteros.
