This at least seems to be the consensus amongst his defenders on my last post.
While you ponder this, I’ll offer some more Mark Driscoll gold courtesy of Relevant magazine: Mark Driscoll Says Just Grow Up (H/T Smithborough). Fortunately for us, he has cracked the code on our epidemic of unwed motherhood. Thanks to Mark we now know it isn’t the fault of the unwed mothers themselves, and it certainly isn’t due to feminism or our creating direct incentives for unwed motherhood. Men made them do it (emphasis mine):
The number one consumer of online pornography is 12- to 17-year-old boys. What that means is he’s home eating junk food, drinking Monster energy drinks, downloading porn, masturbating and screwing around with his friends. That really doesn’t prepare you for responsible adulthood. That’s a really sad picture, especially if you’re a single gal hoping to get married someday. You’re like: “Seriously, that’s the candidate pool? You’ve got to be kidding me.” That’s why 41 percent of births right now are to unmarried women. A lot of women have decided: “I’m never going to find a guy who is actually dependable and responsible to have a life with. So I’ll just get a career and have a baby and just intentionally be a single mother because there are no guys worth spending life with.”
What causes these young men to be unsupervised? you might ask, why unwed motherhood. What originally caused unwed motherhood? Divorce, which as we know from his Washington Post Op Ed piece is driven by men trading in their 40-year-old wife for two 20-year-old girlfriends, regardless of what the lying data shows:
Part of it is the unintended consequences of divorce. Forty percent of kids go to bed at night without a father. Not to be disparaging toward single moms, but if you’re a single mom and you’re working 60 hours a week, and you’ve got a boy, and he’s home all by himself with no parents and no dad, he’s just going to be hanging out with his buddies, feeding himself pizza rolls.
Phew, I was afraid he was going to disparage heroic unwed mothers.
It would be unfair of me not to mention the defense others have provided for Pastor Driscoll at this point. Sure he is saying incredibly foolish things now, but if you look at his past writings and sermons he has said some really great stuff. They touched on this in the interview:
Several years ago, you were regularly in the press for your controversial statements on gender roles, but now it seems like you’re steering away from those conversations. Was that intentional?
I don’t know, I’m always getting in trouble for something. I’m just really focused on, at this point, men and women. It’s really interesting because if you took all the women in my church who were sexually abused, raped, molested, assaulted in some way, I’d still have a megachurch. I’d have a couple thousand victims. So a lot of my time is spent with women who are abuse victims, it’s a huge part of what we do, and guys who are totally responsible and part of the problem. That’s where my focus has gone in part because of the demand that’s in our church and because of the people who I’m dealing with.
Forget all of that stuff he wrote and said in the past. Now he knows that women are really just innocent victims of mean men, who are driving all of the dysfunction in our sexual marketplace. They ask him if he regrets “any of those statements about gender roles and Jesus’ masculinity?” Here is his reply:
Oh my gosh. I have been preaching and teaching now for 13, 14 years. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, he says it takes 10,000 hours of something to become an expert. Preaching and teaching, I’ve gotten in about 10,000 hours. I’ve published I don’t even know how many books, blogs—it’s a crazy amount of content. If I could hit control-alt-delete and go back and do like they used to in Men in Black and just hit a button to make certain people forget certain things, that would be awesome.
My hope, my prayer, my goal is to do better, by God’s grace, to learn, to grow, to be sanctified and mature—to be less shock-jock and more Jesus-centered. I’m turning 40 this fall, so I can’t get away with, “Oh, he’s young.” I’ve got five kids, I’m not young anymore, I’m a tired old man. But I’m hoping God gives me enough years, maybe 30, 40 more years of service, that when it’s all said and done, I will have had enough time to correct some mistakes I’ve made and learn how to more clearly articulate some things I believe. So I’m trying to learn as I go.
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