Disgraced Pastor Mark Driscoll recently referred to President Joe Biden as Ahab, said a Jezebel spirit “cancelled” Easter during the pandemic. And he claimed “neutered, compromised, beta-male” pastors who don’t call out “demonic,” “woke” agendas are to blame for society’s ills.
The in-your-face rhetoric was aired in an early August podcast with conservative activist and unapologetic Christian nationalist, Charlie Kirk.
Driscoll, who seems to be fashioning himself as an activist, as well, claims he’s looking to the prophet Elijah—a “man’s man,” who didn’t just carry a weapon, but “is a weapon”—as his model.
On Driscoll’s website, called “Real Faith,” he’s selling a hat picturing a skull with fire coming out of it using the acronym WWED for “What Would Elijah Do?”
“Imagine the pastor today that had the stones to pick a fight and then slaughter 400 denominational leaders, slit their throats as a public event,” Driscoll said. “That’s Elijah.”
Your tax-deductible gift helps our journalists report the truth and hold Christian leaders and organizations accountable. Give a gift of $30 or more to The Roys Report this month, and you will receive a copy of “Hurt and Healed by the Church” by Ryan George. To donate, click here.
In response, Kirk quickly interjected, “Stay peaceful.” But on the podcast, Kirk also called most pastors these days “cowardly eunuchs” and claimed Kamala Harris slept her way to the top. In contrast, Kirk said Driscoll—a pastor known for his alleged unrepentant bullying, cult-like tactics, and conspiracy theories—is “one of the best, most important Bible teachers in the country, in the world actually.”
Driscoll did not respond to a request by The Roys Report (TRR) for comment.
Driscoll was on Kirk’s podcast to promote his book called “New Days, Old Demons.” The book is described on Amazon as a “prophetic message for pathetic times” and likens “woke” politics and progressive Christianity to ancient paganism.
Driscoll’s book, recent sermons, tweets, and interviews reveal an increasingly power-hungry, violent, conspiracy-obsessed, Christian nationalistic message, experts told TRR.
“In the nation of Israel, they were supposed to be like us—a nation founded under God—and they weren’t,” Driscoll said on Kirk’s podcast. “Anytime you have a passive leader and a controlling, domineering, overbearing partner, the point is this: If you tolerate, they will dominate . . . It’s always God versus government.”
Driscoll’s recent teachings are both a scary pivot and an unsurprising progression, said Jessica Johnson, anthropologist and author of “Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire.”
“The language of weapon and the graphicness of the language that they’re using is really striking to me,” said Johnson. “It’s a call to arms.”
Is ‘political’ Mark in character or just desperate?
Driscoll has long used provocative imagery. Driscoll famously called women homes for men’s penises under his pseudonym William Wallace II.
“When Driscoll was preaching, he absolutely played off of certain notes about a crisis of masculinity that was happening at that time in the mid to late 90s and into the early 2000s, when the war on terror began,” Johnson said.
The church Driscoll founded, Mars Hill Church, closed in 2014 following a church investigation into Driscoll’s bullying behavior and Driscoll’s refusal to submit to the elders’ restoration plan.
Driscoll’s popularity, especially among mainstream evangelicals took a major hit, Johson said. But since 2020, he has been popping up with conservative favorites such as Kirk and Steven Crowder.
And his following on X, formerly known as Twitter, has grown to 434,000 followers. In comparison, the recently deceased Pastor Tim Keller, well respected by evangelicals, has 511,000 X followers.
“The reason he talks so much about power is because Mark is all about power,” said Lance Ford, author of “UnLeader: Unimagining Leadership—and Why We Must.”
Driscoll’s new book title is ironic and could be true—not of the U.S. government or American church—but of Driscoll’s new ministry, using old tactics, Ford said. Driscoll is pastoring a new church, Arizona-based Trinity Church, where allegations of abusive and cultic leadership have been reported.
“His machismo, his focus on the flesh—he can’t help himself,” Ford said.
In the historically Republican Arizona, either his far-right views can be less ”cloaked,” or he’s re-platforming to cater to a white alpha-male, anti-government, QAnon-obsessed following, Johnson said. Or perhaps some of both.
“I see this as a little bit of a desperate gambit to gain that kind of follower count, to try to reclaim the popular platform he had when he was at Mars Hill,” Johnson said. “That’s a dangerous combo.”
In the podcast with Kirk, Driscoll said if he’s going to be “cancelled,” then “make it fun.” He also used the concept of “cancel culture” to connect the days of Elijah with current times.
“In the days of Ahab and Jezebel, they were dealing with drag queens overtaking,” he said. “What you had then was the Jezebel spirit takes over the government, closes the churches—as we saw globally during COVID—took over the Christian schools, took over the economy, cancelled, deplatformed, and killed anyone who disagreed.”
Driscoll shrugged off criticism that he’s becoming too political.
“Everything is political,” he said. “Truth is political. Life is political. Freedom is political. Church being open is political.”
But Driscoll is using terms that seem to be specifically targeting white males who are engaged in conspiracy theories, such as Pizzagate and Qanon, Johnson said.
He calls weak men “beta-males” which has been a term trending on Reddit, and referred to open borders as “Ahabianism,” an anti-immigration stance propagated by the Great Replacement Theory. He also brought up “child sacrifice,” a central idea of a conspiracy from 2016 that claimed Democratic Party leaders were involved in a child sex ring. Then as a pastor, Driscoll is legitimizing these ideas with spiritual language, Johnson said.
“This updating and recontextualizing the Bible in terms of whatever is happening now is a very Driscoll move . . . to have an effect on his audience hat is recurrent and very timely,” Johnson said. “Everybody sort of feels on mission. It’s a move to inspire people as well as help them feel like they are actually living in biblical times.”
Johnson has argued that violence-laden Christian nationalist ideas have influenced recent white terrorist acts and mass shootings. And recently, Driscoll isn’t holding back.
“(The podcast) goes into a very violent, off-kilter direction, combined with political and religious or spiritual and this demonic agenda language that comes up over and over and over again,” she said. “It’s scary and needs to be taken seriously.”
Men, you’re either with Driscoll—or you have to castrate yourself
Driscoll hasn’t repented for his past abusive leadership, and therefore, Christians shouldn’t continue to follow and promote him, said Ford.
“What Mark has done to others—the trail of tears that he left behind—you don’t get a platform,” Ford said.
But the fact that he has one points to ongoing systemic issues in evangelical churches, church growth theory, and Christian leadership, Ford said.
First, Americans continue to be enamored with celebrity. Second, modern American Christianity, in general, has become consumeristic, with the churches as vendors of services meant to attract people, and the members buying the flavor they want, Ford said.
“Most consumers are not concerned where the product comes from,” he said.
Third, Christian leadership culture has been largely shaped by secular thinking on the matter.
“It comes from corporate management theories that started in the industrial age, and it’s all about managing others and dominating others, the very thing Jesus said not to do,” Ford said. “Mark really conflates politics and social power with the way that you change things and change the world. You just don’t see Jesus doing it that way.”
Driscoll mentioned castration several times in his interview with Kirk, saying that men who worked for Jezebel had to “cut your junk off.”
“Everywhere there has been a dominant feminine female deity and spirituality in the history of the world—all religions, all cultures, all times and places—the men who are serving her have to castrate themselves and become transgender,” Driscoll said.
These Jezebel women “sleep their way to the top” and require the men in their kingdom to castrate themselves, Driscoll said. Kirk mentioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s name as an example, and Driscoll said he didn’t disagree. Later, Driscoll called Hillary Clinton a Jezebel.
Transgenderism, and men who “emasculate themselves” is not only one of today’s biggest ills but was something church father Augustine deemed the “greatest threat to the spread of Christianity in the early Roman Empire,” Driscoll claimed in the podcast. This is because of demons, according to Driscoll.
“People come and go, but the spirits remain the same,” he claimed. He added that pastors who aren’t preaching like himself are “cowards.”
“They took the job because it’s indoors and doesn’t require heavy lifting,” Driscoll said. “Some guys were over-mothered and under-fathered . . . Some guys, they have church hurt and they’re bitter and they’re deconstructionist and they need to just get over their hurt and grow up and be a grown man. For some of them, they’re just poorly-read and they spent more money on their wardrobe than they have their library.”
According to Driscoll, the only alternative to not being castrated seems to be to become Elijahs, Johnson said.
“He makes it sound like we’re in this culture now where this is what men have to do in order to just survive,” Johnson said. “. . . You have to be a man like Elijah. You have to be willing to be a weapon. It’s very violent. It’s very scary stuff.”
Rebecca Hopkins is a journalist based in Colorado.
English 
Spanish
36 Responses
This isn’t surprising. Driscoll has been on this trajectory for a long while. I suspect that he misses the fame of his Mars Hill Days and is willing to settle for infamy by going completely to the dark side.
Some of the things you are offended by healte are just blatantly true
Sadly he is just another in a long line of religious hucksters. The real tragedy lies within the hearts and minds of the people that consume this rubbish.
Please lord God, do not let this be mainstream Christianity thought
Maybe listening to the podcast will offer a better context to the quotes in the story. Mark has such a strong personality that attracts believers, in many ways he’s like a Trump who’s taken bible classes. He had such a great opportunity at Mars Hill at the end to know what it is to be accountable in the body of Christ, instead he passed on it, prefering to continue unchecked. I expect who he is will continue to be the unspoken focus of his books and ministry.
Where is the fruit of the Spirit in his teaching?
They are preaching another Jesus and another gospel If we go down this path of creating straw men, we are aligning ourselves with the fundamentalists of other religions.
We have a simple and straightforward truth – we are sinners deserving of God’s wrath, Jesus Christ, the Son of God died in our place taking God’s wrath on Himself, we are justified and redeemed from the bondage of sin, now we are called to love and obey Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour, we are dead to the world and the world to us, we await the coming of the Lord Jesus and our inheritance in Him.
This article offers a responsible and carefully articulated commentary on Mark Driscoll. It usefully considers what might be motivating him currently. It touches on what in others and circumstance might see him regain adherents and platform. It is however viewing MD in reductive terms, from points of view informed by comprehensive and established ideological critique of him. Where the threat posed by Mark might need to be also reviewed from the point of view of the ideological struggle between MD and those critics of him. A struggle for ownership of the Biblical thesis.
Both MD and his here represented critics, rely on the Biblical hermetic. Jessica Ford touches on this in reference to MD being unlike “Jesus”. The issue here, is that MD seems to be more relying on the hermetic of the Old Testament, whereas JF may be more leaning more into the NT.
One link between the two testaments is Paul, and his attitude towards “flesh”. Where it might be possible to understand MD’s rhetoric about men, in relation to Paul’s attitude towards “flesh”. Where Paul is arguably crucial to a Christian view of Jesus, and MD might be seen as resisting that Pauline Jesus-centred turn. Again, the experience of spirit that can be secured by faith in this Pauline evoked Jesus, might be considered different from the experience of spirit offered up by the OT, and it revisited and recycled by MD.
What does MD have to say about Paul?
Unfortunately, it’s very common for professing Christians to label un-Christlike behavior as “biblical.” One can find a “biblical” pretext for virtually any type of behavior or attitude. Calling fire from heaven on one’s enemies “like Elijah” is a prime example. Jesus rebuked his disciples for this spirit, even though it was “biblical.”
With Mark this is not surprising. He’s found a niche and has decided to market to it to make his living.
There was pushback from listeners to the interview posted on Charlie Kirk’s channel on Telegram.
Of 66 comments the majority were warning Charlie he had not done due diligence.
One commenter aptly recommended listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill ( TRR).
Those MD blind devotees with cognitive dissonance will not want to listen to anything which questions their idol.
He doesn’t understand the SSH, Gammas are the issue, not Betas (or Bravos if you use the updated label). Alpha, Bravo, Delta, Gamma, Omega, Sigma
“And he claimed “neutered, compromised, beta-male” pastors who don’t call out “demonic,” “woke” agendas are to blame for society’s ills”
Hilariously labeling himself by using a demonic image and not worshiping God ” … a hat picturing a skull with fire coming out of it using the acronym WWED for “What Would Elijah Do?”.
It is funny how quickly these people pivoted from WWJD, because Jesus’s ministry exposes them for what they are, and who they serve. Then they went to Paul to allow them unchecked power and wealth.
” If you tolerate, they will dominate . . . It’s always God versus government.”
What happened to Romans 13? How they (MD, JMD, TDJ, JMC, etc …) rammed this passage down our throats for the past 3 years or more years, when they were challenged on their behavior, or bowing to government when their 501c3 status was in danger when the federal gov required churches to provide abortions, or birth control?
” “What you had then was the Jezebel spirit takes over the government, closes the churches—as we saw globally during COVID—took over the Christian schools, took over the economy, cancelled, deplatformed, and killed anyone who disagreed.””
So Romans 13 is now the Jezebel spirit? They want it both ways and not accept any responsibility for their own actions.
More evidence that he has become unhinged and needs to enlist the services of a good emotionally focused therapist… In my opinion.
Wasn’t it the Israelite’s in the Old Testament that lost the plot and really wanted a King and made up all kinds of reasons why they had to have one?
Going back to at least 2014, Mark Driscoll has exhibited zero integrity and zero accountability. He left Mars Hill in shambles, simply walked away, landed Phoenix and picked up where he left off. Research his current model of church governance at Trinity Church if you can even call it that!
Shame on Charlie Kirk for giving him a platform. Driscoll is unqualified to be a pastor based on 1 Tim. 3:1-7. At best he exhibits narcissistic qualities. At worse, he’s a preying sociopath who leaves a trail of destruction behind him.
What’s been missed in all this discussion is that firebrands like MD are filling a spiritual void, albeit in a dysfunctional and malignant way. Progressive and egalitarian churches have failed to offer anything of Biblical substance, but instead encourage narcissism and faulty, self-serving theology. Meanwhile, Evangelicals are addicted to abusive Rock Star pastors and faulty, self-serving theology laced with plenty of jingoism.
We miss the whole counsel of God, really. We are cherry picking themes to push forward our agendas.
All this chest thumping Alpha male posturing would be humorous if not for the damage men like Driscoll inflict on the church, and society. Furthermore, the hyper fixation on male genitalia demonstrates a profound insecurity in their own sense of self worth.
These men need our sympathy and at the same time they need to be placed in check lest they continue to rampage through the church.
I have concerns about Driscoll. The agenda here is clear with colorful adjectives. Rooted in judgment, not reporting the context and content.
I’m tired of this “Christian Nationalist” label. Individuals who are actually “Followers of Christ” have a primary purpose of His glory and His truth. At the same time and this is not a perpendicular but a parallel truth. Uphold the laws and the constitution. As a soldier, my job is to defend the constitution and follow laws. Charlie Kirk is not a Christian nationalist as this article paints. There are legal ways to enter the country and illegal ways. I have worked border security. I’m pro immigration. But by a legal channel. So this is a quasi narrative, not rooted in research. It is repetitive not researched as to the actual reality of one’s perspective. The ideal of ignominy is true for us all. Even for some of these reporters as been documented.
Charlie Kirk is very openly a Christian nationalist. See this article: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/charlie-kirk-turning-point-usa-pivots-to-christian-nationalism-1234740083/
I agree with you. Charlie Kirk is a Christian nationalist.
And so isn’t Wade Burleson….
I have been labeled a Jezebel quite a few time in the last 15 or so years. For at least 45 years I have been told by many Evangelicals that my church is the Whore of Babylon.
Today I read this:
“Apparently one of Locke’s latest stunts was to take a baseball bat with a Bible taped around the end of it, and bash a Barbie dollhouse.”
You can watch a video of him committing this atrocity on X, formerly twitter.
For all the name calling from certain Evangelicals, the nuns in my grade school taught us as children that would be considered blasphemy.
I wonder, do right wing Christians not understand the meaning of projection? Just keep destroying education…… it won’t be long before Idiocracy is life in the United States.
Sadly today we have too many Evangelicals who are behaving badly and rationalize such behavior as being ‘biblical’.
I hope such juvenile behavior is exposed for what it is and more people wise up. We need more men and less boys in the church.
PS. I wonder if Driscoll can define what being ‘woke’ means and explain why it’s a bad thing?
My goodness, you really couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
Can anyone be masculine enough for him without being violent?
driscoll absolutely believes that manliness=violence. he always has.
“Imagine the pastor today that had the stones to pick a fight and then slaughter 400 denominational leaders, slit their throats as a public event,” Driscoll said. “That’s Elijah.”
Yup… Kirk, Driscoll and many evangelicals who are just part of the violent Trump cult….
Driscoll would fit right in with the Jan 6 mob. How un-Christ like. ” If My kingdom was of this world My servants would fight ” says Jesus.
This is American Evangelicalism. What a crock!
Oooh Mark Driscoll, the shock jock of preachers! Looks like his whole young, restless and reformed deal has turned into: old, bat crap crazy and Christian Nationalist. A guy like this will do whatever it takes to make sure he stays in the headlines even if it’s with the likes of Charlie Kirk.
Also, to question if Charlie Kirk is a Christian Nationalist is like asking if Rudy Guiliani’s hair color is fake…
The sad truth is that exegetically speaking Driscoll is 100 percent accurate. The ironic truth is that the responses on here prove many of his points.
The burden on you is to provide the truth. Please do so.
Mark’s view of what happened at Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18 is “Imagine the pastor today that had the stones to pick a fight and then slaughter 400 denominational leaders, slit their throats as a public event,” and you say that’s 100 percent exegetically accurate?
The best commentary on this article is a comparison with Tim Keller’s memorial service. Prior to his recent death, the late pastor carefully planned the program to minimize himself and instead highlight God’s attributes.
Thank you for your important work, as a follower of Christ, to report truth, with high journalistic commitment and substantiation. It is courageous of you to tackle the sordid behaviors of those who, seemingly without shame, profess to be Christian leaders. May God guide and protect you and bless your very vital work in every way.