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• Confidential to Mark Driscoll: Your earthliness is showing.

I'd like to add a personal footnote to this story that I wrote in this week's paper about Pastor Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, and its troubling slide from benign faith community into authoritarian doctrine-factory.

First, a little about my religious orientation, if only because pretty much everyone I interviewed for this week's story immediately asked me about my faith and whether I had "found Jesus." Normally, I'd consider that an off-limits question to strangers, more deeply intimate than asking about the intricacies of my finances or my relationship with my wife. But I was asking them about their religious orientation, so I figured turnabout is fair play: I was raised Catholic and am now deeply agnostic.

(This story I wrote in 2009—about the systematic, institutionally protected child abuse of Alaskan Native children by Catholic clergy—stomped whatever lingering embers I had for the institution into cold ashes.)

I am not a strident Dawkins/Hitchens/Ditchens anti-Christianist, which Mars Hill people might find hard to believe since I work at The Stranger. But this is America, a free country where religion should be treated like sex—believe and do whatever freaky shit you like in private, as long as a) it's consensual and b) you leave children and animals out of it.

Second, from my study of Driscoll and his sermons, it's clear he's a verse-slinger who selectively culls from a big, complicated book that's been written and re-written over thousands of years and says all kinds of things. I'm well familiar with this legalistic strategy of grabbing the moral high ground—I spent a chunk of my childhood in the South among people who sling verses, sometimes for amusement and sometimes for their profession. According to the ex-members I interviewed, Driscoll and his people are particularly fond of Hebrews 13:17:

Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no benefit to you.

What a convenient, self-serving passage for a pastor to keep on the tip of his tongue. But whenever I hear verse-slinging, it brings to mind my favorite verse: The Merchant of Venice, act one, scene three, lines 96 to 103:

The devil can cite scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

Third, my fundamental problem with Mars Hill Church...

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