Month: September 2018

The Tim Clinton Saga: Twitter Plagiarism is Still Plagiarism

I’ll just get right into this. Here is a tweet from American Association of Christian Counselors president and Trump evangelical advisor Tim Clinton (I have screen caps of all of these):

Who do you think came up with this pithy quote? Doesn’t it look like Tim Clinton who is now affiliated with James Dobson’s Family Talk Radio is taking credit for it?

Actually, it comes from a chapter by Everett Worthington on forgiveness. The chapter was in a book Clinton helped edit but he didn’t write the chapter. Ev Worthington did. The quote is verbatim from Ev’s chapter.

Lest you think Clinton didn’t know about this tweet, he retweeted it (or at least someone managing his account did).

Here’s another one.

This quote posted on Clinton’s AACC Twitter account actually comes from the same chapter by Ev Worthington on the next page.

One might protest and say surely Clinton doesn’t keep up with his social media pages. His interns and underlings are probably doing this. Allow me to point out that in many of these tweets his Twitter account is included in the tweet: @DrTimClinton. Unless he doesn’t do anything for himself, he has to wonder when he said or wrote the things attributed to him. Here is another example of a quote attributed to him and brought to his attention via his Twitter account.

Note the quotation marks and the attribution to @DrTimClinton. However, this was really written by Ed Stetzer in Chapter One of a book edited by Clinton. Again, Clinton is listed as an editor but Stetzer wrote the words which are quoted here verbatim and attributed to Clinton.

The sleuth who sent these to me has uncovered 14 more of these, some of which involve taking sole credit for quotes from books where Clinton had one or more co-authors. It would be proper to give all authors credit for a quote unless it was clear in the book that the quote came from a specific author.

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(In the image, Tim Clinton is above Donald Trump’s head, to the right of V.P. Pence, Image: Johnnie Moore’s Twitter feed, )

Book Review: Mark Driscoll’s Spirit-Filled Jesus

In this guest post, freelance writer Becky Garrison reviews Mark Driscoll’s new book Spirit-Filled Jesus with a focus on what is missing from the book.

The Revisionist Rebranding of Mark Driscoll from Calvinist to Charismatic

By Becky Garrison

Mark Driscoll’s latest book Spirit-Filled Jesus: Live by His Power slated to release on October 2, 2018 represents his first major public offering since he resigned from Mars Hill Church (MHC) in October 2014 amid allegations of plagiarism, financial mismanagement, and abuse. Backed by the PR muscle of A. Larry Ross Communications, who represents such Christian powerhouses like the Billy Graham Legacy, Saddleback & Rick Warren, and The Family aka Fellowship), Driscoll appears poised to rebrand himself from “young, restless and reformed” to older, wiser and spirit-filled.

One could see signs of Driscoll’s move from Calvinist to Charismatic when he appeared with Robert Morris of Gateway Church on DayStar TV the same month he left MHC. However, by publishing with Charisma House, Driscoll’s transformation into a spirit-filled pastor appears to be complete.

Throughout this breezy book, Driscoll offers simplistic step-by-step instructions for how one can live a spirit-filled life by following Jesus’ teachings. Those well versed with charismatic teachings might find this book of interest as Driscoll mentions Jesus with far greater frequency than most charismatic authors, who tend to focus on the Holy Spirit. However, those well versed in the Mars Hill saga will find his whitewashing of his past telling.

For example, his bios on both his website and the Spirit Filled Jesus website make no mention of his role in founding and pastoring MHC. Nor does Driscoll reference his connections with Antioch Church or the Young Leaders Network, two entities that played a seminal role in Driscoll’s formation as a pastor. (On a side note, Brad Sargent aka Futurist Guy offers this timeline of the US emergent church. A review of this timeline along with Wenatchee the Hatchet’s detailed history of MHC point to the similarities in both entities in terms of their histories of abuse.)

Throughout the book, he makes vague allusions to his pastoral endeavors prior to establishing Trinity Church in Scottsdale, AZ without mentioning Mars Hill Church by name.

When describing his departure from Seattle, he states, “We moved to Arizona for a hard reset of life and ministry after years of feeling like a crash test dummy in a car with no airbags. After about two decades in ministry, I took some time off to heal up before entering the next season of God’s will for our life. For some months, we had church in our home on Sunday mornings before we relocated for safety reasons.” (pp. 31-32)

Later in this book, Driscoll describes how he healed from this unnamed ordeal. “After roughly two decades of teaching, I took a break for healing and learning during the most difficult season of my life for my family and me.” (p. 162) He alludes to this difficult season again with tears as the family gathered for Sunday church in their living room. (p. 185) One familiar with MHC’s history could presume Driscoll is describing the period after he resigned and before he moved to Arizona. But once again, he remains fuzzy on the details.

Then as he proclaims how his church plant in Arizona would be a “family ministry,” he makes this observation. “The first church my wife Grace and I planted, we were just twenty-five years of age with no children.” (p. 32)

While discussing his 2009 preaching services on Luke (available online at the Mars Hill Church website), he does not mention the specifics of where his preaching took place. “It took me roughly two years to preach that book to an audience comprised largely of college-educated singles who attended late night services because they had a hard time getting up by the crack of dinner.” (p. xi)

He later references pastoring a church prior to Trinity Chruch without delving into specifics. (p. 154) In fact, a reader unfamiliar with Driscol’s past would only know he has visited Seattle when Driscoll noted, “We were traveling from Seattle to Orlando” (p. 60). No mention anywhere in this book of his years living and pastoring in this city and the surrounding environs even though as Wenatchee the Hatchet documented most of the Mars Hill Church campuses have survived albeit under new names.

Continuing his revisionist retelling of his over two decades of ministry, Driscoll fails to acknowledge any of the carnage left behind after he departed MHC. Case in point, his chapters “Forgiven People Should Forgive People” and “Seven Reasons to Forgive” make no mention of the Facebook page established by MHC parishioners to air their grievances after Driscoll claimed he could not reconcile with those wronged by MHC because he could not address what he termed anonymous complaints. So one wonders about the validity of his forgiveness challenge designed as part of the book promotional campaign given that Driscoll appears unwilling to practice what he preaches.

Furthermore, given past revelations Driscoll plagiarized sections of Real Marriage and other works, one would think he would be more judicious in citing his sources in this book. His Jesus-filled index is quite sparse with one chapter ironically titled “Facing Foolish and Evil People With the Spirit’s Wisdom” having no citations at all. So just who came up with the “Six Kinds of Relationships” involving wise, evil, and foolish people described in detail in this chapter? Was Driscoll inspired by the Holy Spirit to pen these concepts? After all, he’s now playing in the Charismatic stream where personal revelation trumps traditional scholarship.

Given Les Parrott endorsed his book, I presume he does not object to having his work used by Driscoll without proper citations. However, since Parrott also lives in Seattle, I wonder why he would endorse a book that omits any reference to Driscoll’s controversial Seattle past. While Les Parrott and his wife Leslie are not connected directly to MHC, they co-author a range of relationship books that are represented by Sealy Yates, who was also Driscoll’s agent prior to the Real Marriage fallout. And like Driscoll, the Parrotts utilized Result Source to guarantee their book would chart on the New York Times bestseller list.

Most of Driscoll’s other 24 endorsements appear to be minor players in the Charismatic church scene. However, I am struck by the inclusion of Eric Metaxas, a Fox News pundit and one of the earliest and most stalwart Trump supporters, as Driscoll has never veered into faith based political debates.

I ran down this list of endorsers with Wenatchee the Hatchet to ascertain those individuals who had connections to Driscoll during his Mars Hill days. Here’s his assessment.

  • Larry Osborne was credited by Driscoll with advising him in a way that catalyzed the notorious 2006-2007 reorganization of MHC.
  • James MacDonald is a BoAA member and Executive Elder who helped Driscoll crash John MacArthur’s anti-charismatic Strange Fire conference.*
  • Craig Groeschel was another guy Driscoll name-dropped as someone he consulted with for the 2006-2007 reorganization of MHC.
  • Greg Laurie was a speaker at Resurgence 2013, and a client of A. Larry Ross.
  • Gerry Breshears was Driscoll’s advisor at Western Seminary and co-author of a few of his books, most notably Doctrine and Death By Love.

In a blog posting addressing the rise and fall of MHC, Breshears writes about those in MHC leadership repenting of their past actions as they replant many of the former MHC churches. So why would he then endorse a book by Driscoll who obliterates Mars Hill’s history with no sign of Driscoll repenting of his actions to date? Furthermore, why did four other individuals who had connections to Driscoll during his MHC days decided to endorse this book, thus participating in Driscoll’s rebranding efforts?

While the teachings of Jesus feature prominently throughout this book, upon further examine, suffice to say this book appears to be full of something other than Jesus.

(Note: The quotes from Spirit-Filled Jesus are from an uncorrected proof, not final copy.)

Becky Garrison is a freelance storyteller/satirist currently based in Portland, OR. Follow her travels via twitter and Instagram @Becky_Garrison

 

*Editor’s note: An earlier version of this review said James MacDonald might have had a “gambling habit” and racked up real estate debt for his church. Although there wasn’t an intention to link the two ideas, at least one reader did so and others may have.  To avoid confusion, I decided to remove this sentence. There was no intent to suggest that any poker playing led to church debt. 

On the point of MacDonald’s gambling, there is a credible report that MacDonald gambled with Jerry Jenkins in the past, but there is no intent in this article or evidence presented that he does now.  Wenatchie the Hatchet added a postscript to a recent article which also addresses this issue.

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About The Master’s University #1 Right Choice Ranking

Yesterday, Dee Parsons from Wartburg Watch tweeted a question about the The Master’s University’s claim that the school was ranked as a #1 “right choice” school by the Wall Street Journal. Here’s what The Master’s University said about their rating by the WSJ in 2016.

In the September 29 edition of The Wall Street Journal, The Master’s University was ranked #1 for being the “right choice” of institutions rated among the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities.

Congratulations to President John MacArthur and the faculty and staff of The Master’s University for your exemplary work. And to the students and their families, congratulations on choosing TMU and making the “right choice.”

In 2017, TMU proclaimed:

the Wall Street Journal recently recognized TMU as #1 Right Choice University amongst all U.S. colleges/universities for the 2nd year in a row

In Medium, TMU wrote this:

The Wall Street Journal has ranked TMU number 1 in the country for two years in a row as the top “right choice” university.

Indeed the WSJ did mention TMU in 2016 and 2017 but the ranking was more of a rating by the students. WSJ asked 100,000 students a series of questions about their college including “if you could start over, would you still choose this college?” On that question, TMU students gave their school ratings higher than students at any other school. Lancaster (PA) Bible College ranked second on that question. LBC’s write up about the survey more clearly explains the significance of the rating.

The Wall Street Journal surveyed students and asked them a series of questions to determine each institutions ranking. For the Right Choice category, students were asked, “If you could start over, would you still choose this college?” LBC earned a score of 9.46 out of 10.

The WSJ articles are behind a paywall but the 2017 article on the college rankings described the category as students’ response to being asked “if they would choose their school again.” According to the WSJ,

The Master‘s University, a small Christian liberal-arts school in Santa Clarita, Calif., topped all comers in that category, despite not cracking the top 500 schools in the overall ranking.

In a related article, the WSJ said,

The survey also asked students three questions that weren’t taken into consideration in the rankings, including whether students would choose their school again. Highest marks again went to schools with a religious affiliation, including The Master’s University in Santa Clara, Calif., Lancaster Bible College and Brigham Young, Hawaii.

Obviously, TMU’s students believe they made the right choice, so I don’t mean to take anything away from TMU. However, there is a difference between WSJ ranking a school and students rating a school via a survey. When TMU portrays an average score on a student rating as a merit-based ranking by the WSJ, there is potential for their audience to be misled.

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Image: The Master’s University, by Lukasinla [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons 

Researching Hidden Populations: The Littman Study and Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

In academia, a very hot topic now is Brown University’s response to criticism of Lisa Littman’s PLOS One paper on rapid onset gender dysphoria (see here and here). Brown initially promoted Littman’s paper which reported on her survey of 256 parents of children with late onset gender dysphoria. However, when transgender activists raised criticisms, the school pulled their press release about the study from distribution.

One of the key criticisms is that Littman posted her call for respondents on three websites which are frequented by parents who describe rapid onset gender dysphoria in their children. Critic Julia Serano called this “begging the question.” Diane Ehrensaft was quoted in the Economist as saying Littman’s recruitment “would be like recruiting from Klan or alt-right sites to demonstrate that blacks really are an inferior race.”

If Littman was trying to generally study gender dysphoria in adolescent or make a claim that the onset of all gender dysphoria in adolescence was rapid, then these criticisms might be more on point. However, Littman’s interest was more specific. She wanted to understand the relatively recent experience of rapid onset gender dysphoria in social groups where the prevalence is much greater than expected. Thus, she went where the subjects were.

The analogy offered by Ehrensaft is off because Littman wasn’t studying gender dysphoric teens in a general sense. She was trying to get a look at a subset of teens who reported gender dysphoria in the context of social groups where many such teens were reporting it. The analogy also fails because the websites Littman used for recruitment do not have negative attitudes toward transgender people in general. They do seem defensive in the face unrelenting attacks by transgender activists, but I can’t blame them for that.

Hidden Populations Are Hard to Reach

The history of research in sexuality is filled with studies of activist groups and websites. Early GLBT studies were populated by appeals to secret groups and it is still common to reach out to activist groups. In thinking about this study, I thought of the one by Ariel Shidlo and Michael Shroeder on harm done by conversion therapy. When they first recruited for subjects, they went to GLB activist groups with the following message:

Homophobic Therapies: Documenting the Damage

The National Lesbian & Gay Health Association is sponsoring an investigation of the outcomes of so-called treatments of the so-called disorder of homosexuality.

In the press release was this call for subjects:

You can be of help in the long process of getting the message out that these “conversion” therapies don’t work and do the opposite of healing *by informing your lesbian/gay/bi communities of our search for participants to be interviewed.* Please announce our project in any upcoming lesbian and gay community meetings and spread the word.

This study was a pilot study but helped to shine some light on the reactions of clients to sexual orientation change efforts. The study was widely criticized but it never claimed to be a representative sampling of all people who had tried change therapy. Therefore, the most careful interpretation of the work was focused on people who felt harmed. By analogy, that is what can be said about Littman’s study. One cannot generalize to all trans teens, nor does Littman do that. Anything that can be said can only be said about the parent reports and that is a valuable contribution at this stage of research.

Opponents Should Talk Less and Research More

Parents who see their children changing suddenly often feel struck by lightning and need empathy and support. They get some of that from talking to other parents via these websites. Critics do not help their cause by disregarding the experience of parents who know their children well and feel adrift.

For the record, I understand that the trans regret rate is less than one percent and I am not anti-trans. At the same time, I am pro-academic freedom and challenge critics to research more and criticize less. The answer to research you don’t like or disagree with is more research and academic inquiry.

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Image: Public domain

Former Dean of Harvard Medical School Criticizes Brown University’s Actions Regarding Gender Dysphoria Study

At Quillette, former Dean of Harvard’s Medical School Jeffrey Flier provides a scathing review of Brown University’s lack of support for Assistant Professor Lisa Littman and her study of rapid onset gender dysphoria (see my summary of this issue). Setting the stage for his review, Flier makes it clear that this issue is relevant to academic freedom for all:

This week’s controversy surrounding an academic paper on gender dysphoria published by Brown University assistant professor Lisa Littman—brought on by the post-publication questioning of Dr Littman’s scholarship by both the journal that published it, PLOS One, and Brown’s own School of Public Health—raises serious concerns about the ability of all academics to conduct research on controversial topics.

Flier spends the bulk of his article taking apart Brown University’s rationale for removing their press release about Littman’s PLOS One paper.  He then concludes with this stinging call for a defense of academic freedom:

At a time such as this, when a university’s academic mandate is under threat from diverse ideological actors, there is simply no substitute for a strong leader who supports academic freedom and discourse. The dean’s letter raises serious questions about whether the dean of Brown’s School of Public Health is willing to be such a leader.

For centuries, universities struggled to protect the ability of their faculties to conduct research seen as offensive—whether by the church, the state, or other powerful influences. Their success in this regard represents one of the great intellectual triumphs of modern times, one that sits at the foundation of liberal societies. This is why the stakes are high at Brown University. Its leaders must not allow any single politically charged issue—including gender dysphoria—from becoming the thin edge of a wedge that gradually undermines our precious, hard-won academic freedoms.

I certainly agree. There is a process for bringing research to the community of scholars and Littman followed it. Brown’s administrators should stand for the principle of academic freedom by leaving up the press release. The study can easily be criticized but at the same time it is similar to many pilot studies of hidden populations. Unless some kind of academic misconduct is found, Brown University should defend the work of this professor.

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