Action alert: Lead is an essential nutrient!! Ask EPA to remove lead from toxins list!!


OK, that was definitely satire. The EPA is, in fact, considering removing lead from its air pollutants list. Lead battery manufacturers and other industry groups may have pressured them to do so. Removing lead as a toxin would be a spectacularly idiotic thing to do, and we should write the EPA right now (link below) and tell them so.

Lead has been described as the archetype toxin. It's the most well-studied environmental pollutant. Its harmful effects (nervous system and brain damage, kidney damage, developmental damage in kids) have been well documented. In addition, large amounts of lead used to be released into the atmopshere by burning leaded gasoline. It was once used in paint. Even today, underprivileged kids in developed nations may still be at risk of lead exposure from paint in old houses. When cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors and TVs are dumped in developing nations with lax environmental controls like China, India, and numerous African coastal nations, the lead in the CRT glass may leach into groundwater, and put more people at risk. It is true that worldwide atmospheric lead levels have decreased significantly, which is why the EPA claims it is time to reconsider restrictions.

This would be an act of monumental stupidity. True, if average lead levels go up by just a tad, the average person will have not much to worry about. The problem is, there is no 'average' person. Underprivileged communities will suffer the greatest additional lead exposure - they are already disproportionately exposed to environmental toxins. They will suffer the most if we relax pollution standards for lead.

Write the EPA now!
Environmental Action petition:
http://www.environmental-action.org/enviroaction.asp?id=2052&id4=ES

Yahoo news story:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061207/ap_on_go_pr_wh/epa_lead_pollution

PS, "Lead is an essential nutrient!!" comes from my priest, Padre Hamilton, who has an excellent sense of humor.

Unjust Imprisonment Monthly: Nazanin Fatehi

Nazanin is an 18 year-old, Kurdish Iranian girl who is under sentence of death for murder in Iran. There are two problems. One, she was under 18 when she committed the alleged offense. Two, she claims that the man she stabbed was trying, with two accomplices, to rape her and her niece, Somayeh.

Nazanin, her niece, and their boyfriends were spending some time in a park in May 2006. Apparently, the three assailants started to throw stones at them. Their boyfriends fled (f*&%ing idiots). The three pushed Nazinin and Somayeh to the ground. Nazinin stabbed one of them in the hand, and she and Somayeh fled. The men attacked them once again, and Nazanin stabbed one in the chest, later killing him.

In many other jurisdictions, she would have got a slap on the wrist at worst. Iran's justice system has miscarried a lot, especially in the field of women who are raped or nearly raped. She was re-tried on August 30, but no verdict was given, and it seems she will be tried again. It was discovered that some evidence was faulty; apparently in the first trial it had been entered as evidence that her father had told the court she was a run-away and to go ahead and sentence her to death. Her father spoke in court at the second trial to repudiate this 'evidence'. And by the way, had she allowed she and her niece to be raped, she could very well still be charged with adultery.

I'm not sure if any Muslims are reading this, but if so, you must speak out. Iran's laws are the products of outdated and biased readings of Islamic law. Don't accuse me of anti-Muslim prejudice, I've lambasted my own religion enough.

There's a petition below, started by an unrelated namesake, Nazinin Afshin-Jam. She's an ex Miss World Canada and a singer, and she has spoken out worldwide on behalf of her namesake.

Sign the petition here: http://www.petitiononline.com/Nazanin/petition.html

And join me in prayer:
For all people of the world who suffer persecution, unjust imprisonment, illnesses of all kinds, for those who are without a homeland and who live in constant danger,
Lord protect and heal them.
(Credit to the Episcopal Network for Evangelism for the prayer)

Help! The Episcopal Church is Falling Apart!!!

I never intended this blog to deal solely with Episcopal Church matters ... but it is my newly-adopted church, and it seems that as many as eight churches, some of them quite large, in the Diocese of Virginia have voted to leave the Episcopal Church. Rev. John Yates of the Falls Church claims that "The Episcopalian ship is in trouble." The focusing issue here is attitudes towards (gasp!!) homosexuality. A broader issue is the interpretation of Scripture.

In addition to Virginia, the Diocese of South Carolina has elected a bishop who seems to be leaning towards leaving the church. Several other Dioceses area leaning that way also, having established relationships with foreign provinces.

Frankly, in the very long run, none of this matters. We Christians believe - I hope! - that we will all be reconciled before God. Christianity has survived hundreds of splits over what now seem to be trivial matters. In the very long run, we will move beyond this. Heck, in the very long run, the first female Pope will offer apologies for the Church's treatment of LGBT people*.

In the shorter run, though, there is reason to be gravely concerned. The Falls Church and Truro Church are considering becoming part of the Nigerian church's mission in the US. They would report to Archbishop Peter Akinola. The Nigerian government is currently considering a bill that would make it illegal for LGBT people to form organizations, for churches to bless same-sex marriages, or for any public or even private celebration of a "same-sex amorous relationship." The law would propose a penalty of five years in prison. Homosexuality is already punishable, I believe, by up to 14 years in prison. The US State Department, no bastion of liberalism, has condemned the legislation. Archbishop Akinola has supported this legislation. He is either blind to the suffering of LGBT people in Nigeria, or he doesn't care. Neither of these traits is becoming of a Christian, especially not an ordained Christian minister, and certainly not a man who is leading a whole province.

If the Falls Church and Truro Church associate with Nigeria, they will be willfully turning a blind eye to a major violation of human rights. It is incredible that people could fear homosexuality so much that they would resort to government repression, or associate with those who do. If you don't like the thought of homosexual sex, then NO ONE IS FORCING YOU TO DO IT.



* This isn't my line. I stole it from someone at a rally I attended. It was a while ago, and I don't remember his name. But I do remember that he was gay and Roman Catholic ... not that that narrows it down very much.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/us/17episcopal.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=9f3d9e1203c119e1&ex=1324011600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Please pray for CPL Gilad Shalit of the Israeli Defence Forces

In all the furor over the invasion of Lebanon, I had forgotten about CPL Gilad Shalit, whose kidnapping helped start the war. He is still being held by Hamas, and Hamas says they will only release him in exchange for Palestinian prisoners sentenced to extended terms.

CPL Shalit is just a kid. He wears spectacles and, if I remember correctly, is some sort of math genius. He deserves to go home. Some of his Palestinian counterparts go to blow themselves and Israeli civilians up because they feel they have no choice, because they want to punish the Israelis for the occupation, and they see every Israeli, civilian or military, as complicit. They deserve better.

God doesn't want God's children blowing each other up in a cycle of hatred. It's time for Hamas to unconditionally acknowledge Israel's right to exist and cease military action, and for Israel to withdraw unconditionally to the Green Line, settlements and all. And it's time for both sides to let their prisoners go - as I recall, Hizbollah is holding some other Israeli servicepeople captive.


http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1164881901882&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe



Mary, ‘the Virgin,’ has been held up as an example for all women to follow - chaste, meek, and gentle. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that Mary remained a virgin for her whole life, and uses her as an example of fidelity, purity and motherhood. However, I have a big problem with this traditional depiction of Mary! Aside from the Magnificat, Mary doesn’t say very much in the rest of the Gospels. She is a background character at best. She is also passive – God chooses her to bear Jesus, Joseph takes her out of Israel when Herod is massacring the children, she witnesses her son’s crucifixion.

Unfortunately for us Christians, Mary is the closest thing to the divine feminine that we have. She has therefore had to carry a lot of spiritual and psychic weight. We humans seem to have some need to see God as being like us. As Rousseau famously quipped, “God created man in his own image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.” More serious, though, is the power of our images of God: if we limit our depictions of Mary, then we risk limiting the roles that are permissible for women.

In the long history of Marian apparitions, from Međugorje to Conyers, Georgia, ‘the Virgin’ has mostly conformed to the gender roles that the Church has traditionally supported. However, in one image at least, Mary has taken a more active role.

This particular story begins with Hernando Cortez in 1519, when he started the conquest of Mexico. The conquistadors would read defiant Indians the requerimiento, a proclamation that asserted that Jesus Christ and his papal successors had authority over the Earth, that the Spanish monarchs had received title to the Americas, and that the Nahuatl were to submit to their rule. It was read to them in Spanish, which they did not speak. Bernal Diaz, who fought alongside Cortez, summarized his motives as “to serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do.”

Spanish soldiers were granted land, under a system called encomienda, where conquistadors were granted “trusteeship” over the inhabitants of land. They were authorized to collect tax, and required to maintain order and provide Catholic teaching. The system rapidly degenerated into slavery and cultural destruction. The Spanish clergy failed to speak out. They were too busy debating whether the Indians had souls.

On December 9, 1531, some ten years after the conquest of Mexico, Mary appeared on a hill to an Aztec craftsman named Juan Diego Cuauhtlacuatzin. His last name means, “Eagle that talks.” Mary appeared as an Aztec, not a Spaniard. She addressed Juan Diego not in Spanish, but in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. She spoke to him not as a slave, but as one would speak to a prince. She commanded him to build a shrine to her on that spot, among the conquered. She sent him back to the Spanish clergy, they who thought they knew everything about God, who thought they had been sent to save the heathen.

The bishop rebuffed Juan Diego, and demanded a sign. Discouraged, and afraid to go back to the bishop, Juan Diego sought to avoid further visions of Mary. Some time later, while rushing to a nearby town to get a priest to confess his uncle, who was gravely ill, he passed the hill where he had met Mary. He tried to go around the other side, in order to avoid her, but she came to him and stopped him. She assured him that his uncle would be healed. She asked him to go to the top of the hill to pick some flowers to take back to the bishop. To his astonishment, Juan Diego found Castillian roses, which were rare in Mexico and nonexistent during the winter. He gathered some back in his tilma, or cape, to present to the bishop. When he found the bishop and gave him the roses, there was an imprint of the image of Mary on Juan Diego’s tilma. The garment has been preserved until this day.

The image as preserved on Juan Diego’s tilma is resonant with meaning to the indigenous people of Mexico. The turquoise of her mantle, for example, is the color reserved for the divine couple Ometecuhti and Onecihuatl, considered to be the creator and unifying force of all creation; and the angel who carries the Virgin denotes her as nobility. To Europeans, her posture and clasped hands seem to indicate that she is sumbissively bowing in prayer, but indigenous Mexican people would have seen her as making an offering. And uniquely among Marian apparitions, Our Lady of Guadalupe is pregnant. She wears a cinta, or maternity band, around her waist. There is a small flower, nagvioli, just above her womb, which the Nahuatl would have read as a sign of pregnancy.

The Christian tradition has associated the pregnant apparition with the Woman of the Apocalypse described in Revelation (Rev 12:1-10, NIV) “…a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth … she gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule the nations…”

The Divine Mother-to-be, as an image of God, is disturbing to many. Our new Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, declared in her investiture sermon that “our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation.” She was of course quoting the famous Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich; but some accused her of deliberately trying to provoke conservatives in the church. The Diocese of Michigan recently paid for a series of billboard advertisements, one of which said “God is my Mother.” Several churches denounced the advertisement. One suspects that some men fear that if they acknowledge a feminine side to God, they will lose their status and their power. Similarly, the Spanish clergy feared the effect of a Marian apparition among the indigenous people. To their credit, they relented.

David Abalos says that, in order to be whole, we all have to claim and re-claim four aspects, or “faces,” of our cultural being. They are the personal face, the political face, the historical face, and the spiritual face. The Spaniards saw God with a Spanish face, and they preached that God to the Nahuatl. But in doing so, they defaced the Nahuatl, personally, politically, historically, and spiritually, and made them less than whole. If you have a God forced upon you, who doesn’t look or talk or think like you, who indeed bears the face of your oppressor, how can you worship such a God?

Jeanette Rodriguez, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Seattle University, says that “God is always pregnant.” Think again about the time and the context in which Our Lady of Guadalupe appeard to the Mexicans. The world was falling apart. The Aztecs were facing invasion, genocide, and slavery. And still, God is always pregnant! God’s revelation to the Israelites did not stop when She led them out of bondage in Egypt. God sent Mary, in the guise of an Aztec, to liberate and reclaim the spiritual face of the Mexicans. God sees the disenfranchised and, in Rodriguez’s words, is “always there to transform, to transmute an experience of pain into an abundance of life … Empowered with their own dignity and humanity, they can then move to transform the world…”

In her great song of liberation, the Magnificat, (Luke 1:46-55), Mary says that God exalts the humble and meek, and scatters those who are proud in the imagination of their hearts. But God does not exalt the meek at anyone else’s expense. If we put aside our pride, we can be enriched as they are exalted. Jesus, after all, came among the Jews, but not at the expense of the Gentiles. In the same way, those of us who are not Mexican are enriched as this Mexican image of Mary speaks to us, thanks be to God!

(There is one last thing. Professor Rodriguez did a study with several Mexican-American women, and found that indeed, Our Lady of Guadalupe was a source of strength in their lives. She also found, however, that they did not know the full story of the apparition. They had been taught only about an image, and flowers, and a miracle. Their priests had made Our Lady vague, undifferentiated, and no different from any of the other Marian apparitions, save that she was Mexican. You now may know more about the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe than many Mexican-Americans.

The Christian tradition is very deep and rich, and replete with images of many faces of God. Those images can be sources of liberation for us. But sometimes, our worship is an attempt ‘tame’ God, or to hide the divine from our sight. Sometimes, like the Mexican-American women in Professor Rodriguez’s study, we are not able to access the image of the divine. And sometimes, we just don’t look. When Jesus tells to love our neighbors and even our enemies, he’s telling us that we always have to look. And if we do, we might just see that God is pregnant once again.)

http://www.trinitystores.com/main.php4?detail=52&artist=1


I should add: Reid Hamilton, my priest at Canterbury House, helped with editing this piece.

Augusto Pinochet, 1915-2006

As many of you know, Augusto Pinochet, whom I profiled on 9/11 on this blog, died yesterday at the age of 91. He had admitted "political responsibility for everything that was done," meaning the numerous human rights abuses that he and his government were accused of. Normally, we would be advised to consider him innocent until proven guilty. However, he forced constitutional amendments that protected himself and his associates from prosecution.

We Christians believe that Pinochet will stand before the Supreme Judge, and will answer for his crimes. But, frankly, his death was a defeat for justice on earth. The international community was not able to call him to account for his crimes.

The US, despite claims to lead the world in the area of human rights, has lagged severely in the area of international law. The US ignored the decision of the International Court of Justice in the case Nicaragua vs United States; the US was found to have trained and supplied the Contras, guerilla forces fighting the legally elected leftist government, and to have placed mines in Nicaraguan territorial waters, both of which are violations of sovreignty and which should be acts of war. The US has also opposed participation in the International Criminal Court, unless the Court is dealing with enemies of the US. Congress has also passed legislation allowing the use of force to free US personnel held for trial at the Court, and allowing the US to deny military aid to countries that have ratified the treaty.

These actions are reprehensible. They will help people like Pinochet to conduct their depredations, and will shield them from punishment. The US cannot reasonably claim to be a human rights leader if this goes on. Yes, there is the possibility that US servicepeople could be unjustly prosecuted. However, combatants from any nation could be maliciously prosecuted, and the US could minimize the risk of malicious prosecution by not maliciously intervening in other countries.

A small but powerful minority of Christians are opposed to the UN and other international bodies because they interpret the Book of Revelation to refer to these bodies as being associated with Satan's rule on earth. Such a reading is based on faulty theology and poor scholarship, and is propogated by quack theologians.

Prayers for the victims of Augusto Pinochet, many of whom have been 'disappeared' with no evidence of death. Prayers also for Pinochet himself.


PS
I would like to single out two individuals who supported Pinochet. Margaret Thatcher, long-time UK Prime Minister, visited him during his house arrest and offered verbal support because he allied with Britain during the Falkland Islands conflict. The late Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, also supported Pinochet because of his free-market reforms in Chile, making it the most prosperous country in Latin America.

Needless to say, I would gladly condemn Baroness Thatcher to her face. I would do the same for Mr Friedman, except that he's dead.


Hamilton Spectator article
http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1165792210567&call_pageid=1020420665036&col=1112101662670

"Homebound wifely submission", pronatal theology, and boorish masculinity


Article in Seattle Times: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/09/13/righteous/index_np.html


Sept. 13, 2006 | SEATTLE -- It's Father's Day and Mark Driscoll is blessing babies. A stocky, square-headed figure in a black shirt and jeans, with a leather cord around his thick neck, Driscoll stands against a backdrop of a giant brushed steel cross and a phalanx of electric guitars, praying over the "lovely wives and godly husbands" lined up on the stage of Mars Hill Church. Located in a former warehouse in Seattle's hip Ballard neighborhood, where drive-through espresso joints out-number churches ten to one, Driscoll's megachurch is a sprawling industrial space of corrugated steel, painted charcoal and muted taupe. Inside, the walls are hung with a member's graffiti art, lit by Starbucks-style colored glass fixtures blown by a congregant.

In a husky voice, the 35-year-old pastor prays for the continuous fertility of his congregation. "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."

The way Driscoll sees it, the more babies his conservative Christian congregation can produce in this child-poor city, the more they can redirect local politics, public education, and culture in one of the liberal capitals of the world. To complete his trifecta of indoctrinating, voting, and breeding, Driscoll has developed a community that dwarfs any living experiment of the '60s. To say that Mars Hill is just a church is to say that Woodstock was just a concert.

Mars Hill wrests future converts searching for identity and purpose from the dominion of available sex and drugs that still make post-grunge Seattle a countercultural destination. Driscoll promises his followers they don't have to reprogram their iTunes catalog along with their beliefs -- culture from outside the Christian fold isn't just tolerated here, it's cherished. Hipster culture is what sweetens the proverbial Kool-Aid, which parishioners here seem to gulp by the gallon. This is a land where housewives cradle babies in tattooed arms, where young men balance responsibilities as breadwinners in their families and lead guitarists in their local rock bands, and where biblical orthodoxy rules as strictly as in Hasidism or Opus Dei.

Following Driscoll's biblical reading of prescribed gender roles, women quit their jobs and try to have as many babies as possible. And these are no mere women who fear independence, who are looking to live by the simple tenets of fundamentalist credo, enforced by a commanding husband: many of the women of Mars Hill reluctantly abandon successful lives lived on their own terms to serve their husbands and their Lord. Accountability and community is ballasted by intricately organized cells -- gender-isolated support groups that form a social life as warm and tight as swaddling clothes, or weekly coed sermon studies and family dinner parties that provide further insulation against the secular world. Parents share child care, realtors share clients, teachers share lesson plans, animé buffs share DVDs, and bands share songs.


After Driscoll prays for the continued fertility of his congregation, and the worship band cranks out a few fierce guitar licks, the sermon begins. Pacing the stage like a stand-up pro, blending observational humor about parenting with ribald biblical storytelling, Driscoll peppers his message with references to his own children as midget demons and recalls his own past in stories about duct-taping and hog-tying his own siblings. He riffs about waiting in a supermarket checkout line behind a woman who said to him, "You sure got a lot of kids! I hope you've figured out what causes that."

"Yeah," he flipped back. "A blessed wife. I bet you don't have any kids." The congregation hoots and hollers. "That shut her up," he mutters.

In today's sermon on Genesis, chapter 37, Snoop Dogg, the man who penned the memorable lyric, "Now watch me slap ya ass with dicks, bitch," plays a supporting role. Driscoll conjures Joseph's famous coat by showing an image of Snoop in the coat he wore to play a pimp in "Starsky and Hutch." "The next time you read Genesis, think of Snoop," he chuckles.

Driscoll's mood darkens as he discusses how Jacob shunned Joseph's brothers, and imagines their pain at not being anointed the favorite son. Pausing a studied beat, he looks out over his rapt charges and lowers his voice. "Some of you know what it's like. You were the one that wasn't loved. I can see it on your face and I'm sorry," he practically whispers. "Some of you are still living life in reaction to your father. I'm here to tell you, you don't have to. There is a providential God who can fix you, and his name is Jesus. He's your only hope."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Driscoll and his Mars Hills followers epitomize the mounting evangelical youth movement in America. Within this movement lies something as old as America itself, and as terrifying and alluring as anything Orwell predicted; something that is at once political, emotional, deeply anti-intellectual, and more galvanized than you can imagine. I call this population of fierce young evangelicals the Disciple Generation.
The Disciple Generation is an ever-growing population of people ages 15 to 35 who are equally obsessed with Christ and with culture as a means to an evangelical end. People within this age bracket are defined by a shared culture, whether Christian or secular: if you own an iPod, know Green Day is a band and not a Nader rally, and ever considered getting a tattoo, you're probably within the boundary. This is an age group whose transgressive actions -- regardless of faith or demographic, whether in the form of an inked bicep, high school detention, or a fundamentalist credo -- are easily slapped with the label of rebellion.

But for Christians within this generation, behavior and beliefs are unlike those of any archetypal rebellion that has come before. For every member of the Disciple Generation raised secular in a car or a commune, or had a lesbian mom or a pothead dad, plenty more grew up in traditional Christian homes, whether that affiliation took the form of an occasional Sunday service or a father who was an active church elder. There's a three-piece suit for every freshly shaved mohawk in this subculture.

Yet wherever they began their individual walk with Christ, and however they choose to outwardly identify themselves within the subculture, members of this movement all talk about a meaningless and bankrupt society; a world that offers no anodyne culture outside their faith. Their lives are in fact a criticism of our own. This youth movement isn't one that merely defines itself against its parents' generation; it exists in opposition to all culture and history that excludes evangelicalism.

To young evangelicals, our secular world is devoid of the type of love they seek, not parental love or fraternal love or even erotic love, but an even bigger love -- a love called agape. When Christians describe God's love for his children this is the word they invoke, a love so powerful one is moved to proclaim it on car bumpers and coffee mugs. Hand in hand with certainty, agape is what this generation longs for today -- a love that will soothe the pain of breakups and breakouts, heal the wounds from shattered families, make bearable the awareness that we are each a solitary speck in an illimitable world. It's the emotion that secularism, enraptured by its logic and empiricism, refuses to engage.

The new disciples are ripping down their parents' white steeples and tearing apart the lumber to build a half-pipe. Christian youth is deinstitutionalizing the American church for the first time in about 400 years. This evangelical movement isn't just about internally held principles, it's a matter of lifestyle. Young evangelicals look so similar to denizens of every other strain of youth culture that, aside from their religious tattoos, the difference between them and the unsaved is invisible.

After all, shared culture is an opportunity for people to connect and gain one another's trust. Culture -- your favorite music, sport, pastime, style, you name it -- presents an opening for evangelism. Once bonds are forged over a beloved band or football team, then the Evangelical "message" can work its way into a relationship. Once the message is heard, a world opens in which God's love, as well as your cultural predilections, provide spiritual isolation from the secular world. It's hard to imagine an aspect of secular culture lacking a Christian counterpart: one can choose from Christian hip-hop ministries, Christian military intelligence classes, or Christian diet groups in this mirror society.

The evangelical culture is rooted in place, and it's expanding every day to swallow a generation whole. Shattering the perceived blue state–red state dichotomy, epicenters of this Evangelical movement are even swelling madly in leftist zip codes of cities like Boston, Denver and Seattle.

Mark Driscoll's Jesus is no sandal-wearing pacifist. When Driscoll invokes his Lord, he describes an uncompromising disciplinarian who demands utter obedience from his followers in exchange for rescue from an eternity in hell. "Jesus pissed people off, so he got whacked," he tells me. "That's a guy with some edges. Marketing firms and spin doctors have been trying to round out those edges for centuries. Look at politicians, entertainment: Jesus has probably become the most marketable brand in the country. But here we just talk about him like a person, edges and all. And people know the difference; they know what's real."

The church's slogan articulates exactly what young evangelicals are seeking in Christianity today: truth, meaning, beauty, community. To Mars Hill members, these words function as a mission statement more than a sales tool, but to the uninitiated who see the slogan painted over the church entrance, it's a pitch or, more kindly, an invitation. Driscoll never views evangelism as a form of marketing.

Because Mars Hill members frown on the traditional techniques of Bible thumping on the street corner, begging on televangelism programs, and threatening eternal hellfire on talk radio, they've had to consider missionary work of a different flavor, which they call "missional living." This is the notion that living well in strict accordance with the Bible, while reaping the benefits of a deeply supportive community, advertises the faith to the heathens by demonstration. "It's like Jesus chilling with prostitutes and tax collectors," young Evangelicals tell me, defending what could be construed as blatant manipulation if their Savior hadn't done it first.

The way Driscoll sees it, America has been marketed to so constantly and shamelessly that it has produced a generation of jaded cynics desperate for what feels real. It is his edgy Jesus, he says, who best reaches a searching crowd. Likewise, he points out, this generation has grown up rootless and unparented, yearning for discipline within the very orthodoxy that Driscoll makes relatable and relevant. "They know there's more to life than waking up, eating what's in the fridge, watching what's on TV, and then going back to bed, than the rest of their porn-addicted, video-game-playing, loser friends," he tells me. "That's what I give them through the Bible. I say, let me give you some rules, not to be a jerk, but to help you out. And when was the last time that anyone in their busted-up family did that?"


Driscoll has built a fundamentalist empire by blending this stern-father sensibility with the savvy of a pop mogul mainstreaming alternative culture while maintaining its underground appeal. The word "alternative" still held a fading flicker of sway in 1999, when former savior Kurt Cobain's body had been cold only a few years, thrift-shop clothing wasn't quite yet "vintage," and Jesus was someone worshiped by virgins and grandparents. Within this culture, Driscoll launched a radio call-in show, which discussed Jesus in accessible slang and brought new members into his fold. He befriended some musicians who were writing loud music to worship God, and began to grow a church where members could watch Tarantino movies, drink beer, and live by strict biblical rule.

These days, Driscoll's reach, which began with his small-time call-in show, has evolved far beyond his Seattle base; people from Chicago to Denver to North Carolina listen to his preaching every week via podcasting. In his voice, they find what their broken families, secular friends, or traditional churches have failed to give them: a home and a reciprocal commitment -- if you swear by Driscoll's fundamentalist reading of the Word, his church will swear by you.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The community Mars Hill members have built is truly utopian -- this indeed is its great allure -- and the allure that cemented Ted Dietz to Driscoll. Dietz was raised by a nonreligious mother; his father was at best absentee. In July 1992, when he was about 20, bored, curious, and still living with his mom, Dietz started listening to Christian radio in his room late at night or on his way to the mall where he worked in a dead-end job selling televisions. Every day he'd hear a preacher named Tony Evans bellow on about hell and sin, delivering warnings about coming judgment, depicting a tableau of fire and brimstone, frightening Dietz to his very marrow.
Dietz came home from a party one night, switched on his radio, listened to a few minutes of hellfire talk, and knelt beside his bed. For the first time in his life he prayed, fervently though cluelessly, a novice impelled by terror. "Fear is an entirely appropriate way to be born again," Dietz tells me. "If we ever encountered God it would crush us. If you're in danger of being destroyed forever, that should strike fear in you. That's where all this starts for me."

Some friends in Seattle introduced Dietz to Driscoll a few years later. Dietz and Driscoll discussed a new type of church -- one that embraced the larger culture but was orthodox about biblical laws and values. Soon after, Mars Hill was inaugurated, the group houses were rented, and Dietz moved in. Around the same time, a counseling psychology student claimed a room in the women's house. When I first met Dietz, he had yet to take notice of the sturdy blonde. But when I returned to Seattle six years later, Dietz had married her and was supporting their family with income earned as a real estate broker within the Mars Hill community.

Evangelical Christianity in America today is a grassroots movement grown up. New churches pioneered by young believers have set roots as formidable institutions, "the new establishment," John Vaughn, from megachurch research center Church Growth Today, tells me. What began as experimental living and spiritual exploration has cemented itself in the traditional American modes of commitment to marriages and mortgages. Now in his early thirties, Dietz, a compact but burly man in a dark Amish-style beard, is a force behind this solidifying community, using his real estate license for ministry and moneymaking.

In the past couple of weeks, Dietz has sold five houses within the church membership -- "making our community more permanent," he says. The group houses were dismantled four years ago, when the landlord wanted to sell the rentals the community had long outgrown. Realtors like Dietz replaced the group houses with title deeds, garages, and lawns that would quickly expand to form a new and intricate network across the city. Now there are no less than 50 neighborhood hubs that form centers for prayer, Bible study, and dinner parties throughout Seattle -- local axes for Mars Hill's global reach. A megachurch of thousands threatens the deeply personal experience the church relies upon for intensive active membership. These cell groups keep the church intimate even on its mammoth scale.

Most houses are owned by young married couples who rent their basement apartments to unwed members of the congregation, whom the couples "mentor" until God delivers a spouse. Dietz and Sarah recently reclaimed their own basement after they adopted two foster kids; adoption, Dietz says, is another form his "missional living" takes. On one side of the city, the houses tend to belong to the Goths in the congregation, or the members of the Moped Army that buzzes around town in matching leather jackets, lining up their collection of Vespas outside the church for the late service every Sunday. Another side of town is home to most of the church pastors as well as a more mainstream set of congregants who wouldn't look out of place outside the city limits in their uniforms of standard-issue fleece and denim.

Dietz and I chat with abandon as we cruise past 24 recent house sales in his pickup truck. Like many Mars Hill members, he rides the ridge of a puzzling contradiction: Dietz voted for Bush but talks like a quintessential Pacific Northwest progressive. "We're devaluing ourselves with consumerism," he warns, speeding through a red light. "The future is bleak for the United States if we don't free ourselves from corporate tyranny," Dietz continues, now railing against Wal-Mart, sweatshop labor, the threat of globalism, and other standard leftist grievances. He sees mass liberation from America's fearsome consumerist and labor trends in the current religious "Reformation," as he calls it, but imagines this current trend to be a temporary one -- not because he imagines secularists gaining ground, he says, but because the apocalypse is right around the corner.

Dietz is extraordinarily well informed in matters of domestic politics and foreign policy, but he interprets all he learns through the book of Revelation. "I don't know if you know about this," he tells me, "but there's a new organization in Israel completing plans for the new temple. Jesus will come back and he'll take us -- well, at least us," he says, looking at me with a straight face, "and there will be an end to all things."

One June evening, I arrive at the small, pleasant home of Dietz and his wife Sarah to meet their kids and join them for dinner. Sarah is clearly exhausted from caring all day for two children, cleaning the house, setting the table, and preparing a nice meal complete with thoughtful touches like organic strawberries in the salad and fresh mint in the iced tea. As Dietz carries on about church affairs and lectures about the importance of children's obedience, Sarah serves the meal, cuts the children's food, minds their behavior and eating, and clears the table. Every Wednesday the Dietzes' community group assembles in this living room, where vintage touches and contrasting paint colors suggest discipleship to Martha Stewart. Here they participate in Dietz's Bible study and a discussion of Driscoll's most recent sermon; afterward Sarah serves dinner for 12 on an average week, 25 if the entire group shows up.

During a community group evening, a couple of weeks before I visited, Dietz was hanging out with the men in the backyard, while the women were inside cooking and watching the kids. Scrutinizing the dilapidated fence that had come with the house, Dietz began talking about how he'd really like a new one, but wasn't sure how much the whole endeavor might cost.

A few days later, the men in the group pulled up in front of the house with a pickup truck full of lumber and set about building a new fence on the spot. Now whenever the Dietzes look out their kitchen window, they see a proud and solid reminder of the strength of their community, and the unity of their faith in God. Dietz recounts this story sitting squarely in his big chair in the living room, his eyes set on mine over the rim of his coffee cup. I tell him the truth: I have wonderful friends who I have considered close as family for many years now, and I can't imagine any of them helping me lug the wood, much less building me a fence. He pauses and sets down his coffee cup in a motion that is about to put a definitive end to a delightful evening. "Listen," he says. "We have a really nice rapport. But we believe different things. And let's face it, because of that, you're never going to feel like family to me. So, what I'm saying is, this is as far as it goes." Stung at first, upon reflection I can't blame him. I have nothing like his shared faith to connect me to other people. It's no wonder Dietz and Sarah glow when they talk about their group with the same tones of veneration in which they join hands and say grace before dinner.

The Mars Hill community resembles the shared-land communes of the '60s far more than any traditional society of churchgoers. It's a little shocking to see this experimental model exploded into a megachurch that is rolling back the achievements of the '60s generation, its current emphasis on connection and meaning a tool to convert purpose-seeking postfeminists into self-described proud submission.


Like every woman I've gotten to know at Mars Hill, Sarah talks about her appointed role within the church not in terms of subjugation but in the language of difference feminism. She tells me a sisterhood forms between women who celebrate their domestic roles and talents as offered from God, delivered unto their children, marriages, and community as part of his "perfect plan."

At the end of the evening, when I go into the kitchen to help Sarah with the dishes, she confesses that she'd love to go back to school for her master's degree, but she just can't see finding the time. "I guess it's just not part of the plan," she says in a soft, distracted voice. It's hard to imagine that just a few years before, Sarah was a single girl tooling around the Seattle rock circuit in an old MG, spending her days studying Carol Gilligan. These days, Sarah's old copy of "In a Different Voice," a text you’ll find on most women’s studies syllabi, gathers dust on the secular bookshelf (Penguin classics and psych textbooks) that faces off against the Christian bookshelf (Bibles and theology textbooks) in the living room.

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For Judy Abolafya, a young mother in her early thirties, it was harder to come around to the Driscolls' version of what a woman should be. As she sets out coffee cake on the kitchen table in her Seattle apartment, straining to be heard over her infant daughter's cries, Abolafya tells me without apology that she never wanted to have children. She shudders as her daughter wails, shaking her auburn ponytail. "Listening to her like that just grates on me." She grimaces. In a high chair at the table, her toddler, Asher, glumly pokes at blocks of cheese with grubby fingers, periodically mashing them into a paste he rubs into his black Metallica T-shirt. "Let's face it. Asher is whiny and clingy and talks back. It's dull and tedious here -- there are myriad things I don't enjoy about being at home, but it's a responsibility."

This life of homebound wifely submission is the opposite of what Abolafya thought she wanted, and the opposite of what she had. Before she met her husband, Ari, Abolafya toured all over the world with bands like Bush and Candlebox, staying at four-star hotels, living life on her own terms. 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. That Sunday, one of the church's worship bands was playing an electric version of "Amazing Grace" toward the end of the service, its loud and powerful sound filling the giant space. Suddenly Abolafya realized she was sobbing and couldn't stop. That night she gave her heart to Jesus. "It wasn't like I was looking for a solution, or that my life was a problem in any way," she explains. In fact, the problems were just beginning.

At a weekly Bible study class at a Mars Hill pastor's home, Abolafya first heard about the doctrine of wifely submission. The pastor's wife gave Abolafya a book to study called "The Fruit of Her Hands," which can essentially be summed up in Ephesians 5:22: "Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord." When Abolafya stretched out on her couch one evening to read the first chapter of the book, she screamed and threw it across the room. But she prayed to God and was led back to the Bible, to understand Wilson's perspective. In the Bible, Abolafya found story after story about women being willfully deceived, following their own desires, wreaking travesty in their relationships and homes. In these stories she saw signs of her own past, her mother's behavior, her friends' actions. She began to submit to Ari about purchases and plans she wanted to make.

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."

Radical conversions like Judy’s aren’t what Driscoll has in mind just for Seattle, but for the entire nation. During the late '90s, a number of young people approached Driscoll for advice about starting their own churches. His response was to establish a church planting network called Acts 29, which has been growing rapidly ever since. The book of Acts tells of the first Christians' evangelism in 28 chapters, thus the idea behind Acts 29 is to continue their legacy. Through the network, new churches from San Diego to Albany have grown to follow Driscoll's strict orthodoxy and views. Acts 29 sponsored 60 new churches in the last year alone; 120 applications now wait in the queue for consideration.

While cultural specifics -- media, music, dress, attitude, and so on -- vary widely in the churches that Acts 29 encourages nationwide, cultural politics do not. Most significantly, in founding the network, Driscoll has established a nationwide apparatus to push back women's rights through the "liberation theology" of submission. The online application for church planting is an extremist screening device to this effect. It begins with a lengthy doctrinal assertion that every word of the Bible is literal truth; the application plucks out the examples of creationism and male headship of home and church to clarify this doctrine. "We are not liberals," it says. "We are not egalitarian."

As Ted Dietz noted to me when we were cruising in his pickup truck, discussing Driscoll’s effectiveness in sowing his evangelical orthodoxy nationwide, "You know the Ben Folds Five song 'Stan'? It's just like he sings in that song, really. Once you wanted revolution, now you're the institution."