I doubt Mark Driscoll has had the privilege (or good fortune) to meet Wendell Berry. In fact, it would not surprise me if Driscoll had never heard of him.
More’s the pity, as Driscoll could learn much from Berry. When Driscoll was a seven year-old boy, Berry described the insidious messages that our society had begun to send to women, especially homemakers, regarding their work and worth as housewives:
Such a woman [housewife] must be told–or subtly made to understand–that she must not be a drudge, that she must not let her work affect her looks, that she must not become “unattractive,” that she must always be fresh, cheerful, young, shapely, and pretty…What was implied was always the question that certain bank finally asked outright in a billboard advertisement: “Is your husband losing interest?”
Compare that with Driscoll’s unfortunate commentary a few years ago:
It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.
Wendell Berry, a lifelong Baptist, has nonetheless seen the destruction that Protestantism’s dualistic separation of soul and body has done to the earth, to agriculture, to humanity. In fact, the quote is from The Unsettling of America in a chapter called “The Body and the Earth” which convincingly demonstrates the damage caused by a mentality that thinks the soul and body can be isolated from each other, the body (and then the earth) devalued while the soul remains valued.
This separation is seen in Protestantism’s denial of the sacraments. The physical act of Baptism, so we are told, does nothing. It gets the body wet and perhaps sends some message to the community that the baptized person already believes in Jesus. The important thing is the spiritual act of believing. The water and the body getting baptized are purely symbolic and the ritual itself does not have intrinsic meaning or convey God’s grace.
Catholicism maintains the incarnational truth of our persons: a substantial union of body and soul. And so baptism is a divine institution whereby God cleanses the person of sin and regenerates them through the physical act of their being baptized in water. The soul and body are intrinsically connected and one cannot be separated from the other. The body expresses the person, as Blessed John Paul II said.
Berry goes further, however, and (incredibly) is able to see the problem of disconnecting the marital embrace from procreation/fertility. With modern households becoming nothing more than places to consume and produce garbage from, contraception follows:
A direct result of the disintegration of the household is the division of sexuality from fertility and their virtual takeover by specialists. The specialists of human sexuality are the sexual clinicians and the pornographers, both of whom subsist on the increasing possibility of sex between people who neither know nor care about each other. The specialists of human sexuality are the evangelists, technicians, and salesmen of birth control, who subsist upon our failure to see any purpose or virtue in sexual discipline.
He writes this in 1977, the hey-day of birth control, abortion, and sterilization. And remember that he’s a Baptist! Baptists of this time were embracing the Pill, reversing their teachings against abortion, and accepting sterilization as a moral act. But by studying agriculture and the demise of the agrarian homestead, he connected the problems to the demise of the family and the radical separation between sexual intercourse and fertility. He goes on to eviscerate sterilization as well.
Wendell Berry, while not Catholic, is very much Catholic in his thought, having arrived at these truths in spite of the Protestant principles he was taught through his penetrating thought and experiences in agriculture.
Mark Driscoll would do well to learn from him.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://ignitumtoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Devin-Rose.png[/author_image] [author_info]Devin Rose is a Catholic writer and lay apologist. After his conversion from atheism to Protestant Christianity in college, he set out to discover where the fullness of the truth of Jesus Christ could be found. His search led him to the Catholic Church. He blogs at St. Joseph’s Vanguard and has released his first book titled “If Protestantism Is True.” He has written articles for Catholic News Agency, Fathers for Good, Called to Communion, and has appeared on EWTN discussing Catholic-Protestant topics.[/author_info] [/author]
6 thoughts on “Wendell Berry Schools Mark Driscoll”
This article defends itself from criticism by its incoherence and superficiality, but I’ll nonetheless venture upon at least one point. Driscoll is right and he is not necessarily in conflict with Berry. One hardly needs to embrace the cult of eternal youthfulness or promote contraception in order to aver that one has a duty to try to meet the sexual needs of one’s spouse and that part of that duty will be fulfilled in being attractive to him or her. That age will take its toll upon our bodies does not justify indifference to them–that sort of quasi-gnostic attitude would be an expression of the ostensibly Protestant dualism you attack. Indeed, because we are not only our souls but also our bodies, it is degrading to both men and women to think that a wife fulfills her sexual duty to a husband simply by having a vagina available for him to cum in.
Nor does this apply only to women. Just as it would be wrong for me to ignore my wife’s sexual pleasure when we have intercourse, it would be wrong for me to gain 100 pounds and otherwise let myself go. And I say this not because I have no struggles on these points, but because I do. I always need to strive to be concerned with her needs and pleasures as well as mine, and to maintain my body for her sake as well as my own health. That we will age and be unable to retain the physical peak of our youth must be recognized; it would be wrong to expect a 45-year-old to look as they did at 25. But it would also be sinful to use that as an excuse to neglect giving pleasure to each other through bodily appearance.
Perhaps you had in mind this balance of recognizing our aging and morality along with with our duty to give our bodies to one’s spouse for his or her pleasure, but it wasn’t present in your writing.
Nathanael,
Social media platforms being fragmented as they are, unfortunately the discussion of this post on facebook, which had a ton of comments, doesn’t carry over here. But I’ll make the same admission and point here as I did over there.
Driscoll could be right or wrong here–his statements about a wife letting herself go are ambiguous: they imply a wife deliberately gaining weight, wearing frumpy clothes, etc., which would be wrong. However how does Driscoll know that the women he has met (who he categorized in this way) have deliberately done such a thing? Rather, he could only be going on a woman’s weight, his opinion of her appearance, etc.
So there are two extremes: the media and society say look like this beautiful model (which Berry decries) vs. “letting oneself go” (which Driscoll decries). A healthy balance is found in the middle: taking care of your body as best you can (since it does express the person and is the temple of the Spirit), while not giving in to the temptation to try to make an idol of it or become stressed because despite your efforts you don’t look like a model.
I think that your comment is getting at this healthy balance. So we are not really in disagreement, even though you are right that my post didn’t explain this objection.
However, I’m familiar more broadly with Driscoll’s ideas about sexuality, which fall victim to the very same evils of societal pressure that Wendell Berry denounces.
I’m not on Facebook.
Letting oneself go is usually a sin of omission rather than commission. It consists of a bunch of small choices that, in the aggregate, can be taken as deliberate in the sense that one has neglected what one knows is an important end (being attractive for one’s spouse). That is, one chooses through a variety of small decisions to neglect something that is often important in marriage.
Mark Driscoll is a man obsessed with sex to the point that he listed a link to a Christian “nympho” site in one of his articles. He counsels women to accept marital s-d-my and other perverted acts. He presents the idea that marriage is s-x and nothing else can possibly be as important in the life of a couple. He openly discusses things that ought never be openly talked about, he rips off the veil of what is sacred and defiles and it desecrates it by his vulgar crassness. His sermon to a church in Scotland was so pornographic in its detail that he himself removed it from his website. Fortunately, the content has been preserved in writing online available by a simple search on Driscoll and Scotland. I only recommend a glimpse of it for those who deny this man’s sexual perversion. Driscoll is not right either by Catholic or Protestant evangelical standards.
So pornographic that you recommend reading it, eh?
Oh, Nathanael. I think sometimes people don’t realize how the tone of a few comments gives such a window onto a person’s overall tenor/outlook. You risk marginalizing yourself by the hostility that seeps between the lines. Maybe you could reign that in a little.
You know,I can think of a whole BUNCH of situations where letting oneself go (I’ll speak from the female persepective) may not be at all related to a sin of omission OR commission. My sister-in-law had to have her female organs removed and ever since then what used to be a cute little body morphed beyond her control and she bears the burden of basically, obesity. She doesn’t overeat, and this is a common issue for women whose hormone production has been disrupted. It’s hard to get it right artificially. Also, what about women who perhaps have experienced sexual abuse and never received proper or effective counseling? Shall we blame them for an instinctive response that comes about because of fear? The gap between Driscoll and Berry is one of gentleness, and also emphasis. Driscoll has elevated the physical above and also below, what it should be. Berry understand that both are of equal sacredness.