In an era of things coming undone—families from their traditional bonds, populations from their places of origin, genders from their longtime roles—the impulse to retreat into the lifestyles of steadier times is detectable in discourse and media, from our fascination with costume dramas to our encounters with ever more reactionary conservatisms. It’s within this tendency that Pastor Mark Driscoll has become something of a parable. A man of extreme aspirations, Driscoll set out to revive Christianity and the American family with good old-fashioned machismo. But for all his charisma and virility, something went badly wrong.

On January 1, 2015, the Seattle-based network of Evangelical church campuses known as Mars Hill dissolved into a series of independent churches. Boasting an average weekly attendance of some 12,329 souls at its height in 2013, Mars Hill now struggles to bring in 9,000 on any given Sunday. With revenues in precipitous decline, the worship syndicate has closed several locations and laid off numerous employees. But it was the mid-2014 resignation of controversial founder and lead pastor Mark Driscoll that sounded Mars Hill’s death knell.

At only 25 years old, the freshly graduated seminarian Driscoll, along with friends Lief Moi and Mike Gunn, founded Mars Hill in 1996 with the hope of reaching out to a “postmodern” generation blighted by divorce, abortion, and dissolute sexuality. A 1998 Mother Jones profile of Driscoll presented the pastor as a pop culture savvy quasi-rockstar with the “purest of intentions,” but even in his nascent days the pathologies that would later define his ministry were detectable: "I'm very confrontational," Driscoll remarked, "not some pansy-ass therapist." Driscoll’s rhetoric, with its robust tolerance for the fleshly but never for the pansy-assed, instantly appealed to his target audience of “young, urban men whom he [sought] to reach with his message of the masculinity of Jesus and the need for strong, godly men to lead families and the church.” During its formative years Mars Hill grew steadily—from 160 congregants in 1996 to 350 in 1999—but once Driscoll settled upon his gender-focused approach and began to use emerging technology to blog and livestream his sermons, attendance jumped. Between 2011 and 2012 alone, Mars Hill’s size and growth rate each soared from 43rd to 3rd place in Outreach Magazine’s church ranking.

A plain but thickly built man, Driscoll hailed from North Dakota, where he was raised Catholic. His broad shoulders and stocky build gave him the physical presence to command the masculine mission and persona of Mars Hill, which he evidently equated with himself, informing Church elders in a 2012 meeting that the brand of Mars Hill was “me in the pulpit holding a Bible.” As an emblem of his mission Driscoll was convincing: he wore jeans and hoodies and leather accessories, and hit his stride when he thundered on stage, frequently deploying a seething-and-shouting style of delivery that echoed the intensity of men’s motivational speakers. And by all accounts, a men’s motivational speaker is precisely what Driscoll was. Though Mars Hill never released demographic data about its congregations, Professor Jim Wellman of the University of Washington concluded based on his research that Mars Hill’s rapid expansion was due in large part to its appeal to a typically church-averse cohort of young men, especially those “who are trying to figure out who they are in terms of their purpose in life." Driscoll’s sermons had a touch of the fiery bombast of spirit-filled churches and always pressed the need to spread the message, which eventually led to the expansion of Mars Hill’s original campus to a network of fifteen locations in four states.

Mars Hill’s self-enumerated four pillars: reformed theology, spirit-empowerment, and a missional purpose are listed alongside gender complementarianism as the church’s core beliefs. True to form, Though professedly Calvinist, matters of justification and salvation always seemed only secondarily important to Driscoll, who focused instead on the notion that contemporary American men are sissified, Jesus has been misconstrued as a “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” and good Christian wives need to “serve [their husbands] and love them well” by performing frequent acts of oral sex, especially to wake sleepy husbands in the stead of an alarm clock. To refuse such kindness, Driscoll averred, is a sin.