Tag: patheos

Did Mark Driscoll Get Me Kicked Off Patheos? (UPDATED)

On May 21 2018, I received an email from COO of Patheos Jeremy McGee that I no longer met the “strategic objectives” of Patheos and therefore would be removed as a blogger from the site. Recently I learned from more than one former staff member of The Trinity Church  about a possible reason why I was evicted without a reason given.  If Mark Driscoll’s bragging is correct, Patheos management decided they would rather have Mark Driscoll’s traffic over mine.  According to the story that I have been told from two sources independently, Mark Driscoll told Patheos that he would not bring his substantial social media traffic to Patheos if I was allowed to stay on the site. In effect, he bragged, he got me kicked off the site.

At the time, the “favored advertiser theory” was one which made some sense. Obviously publishing is a business and if an advertiser/blogger promised to bring in lots of ad money and traffic (more than I was bringing in), then a management mainly in it for the profit would have to consider that. I could never get confirmation of the theory or prove who would be vindictive enough to actually pursue that gangster move.

As far as who might consider such a move, I thought of several candidates. Driscoll’s name did come up. After all, he told Tim Gaydos if Tim moved away from Mars Hill and planted his own church, Driscoll would tear it down brick by brick. You can hear that quote from Gaydos in the opener of every Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast episode. However, at the time, I could only speculate. Now, I have more than one reliable source with the same story of Driscoll bragging about getting me kicked off the site.

Not only was I told I had to stop blogging, my blog  was taken down so that all links throughout the web which pointed to my Patheos address no longer work. In effect, there was an effort to silence the writing.

Let it sink in a minute: Mark Driscoll met Patheos’ “strategic objectives” while I did not.

At the time, no reason was given beyond my blog no longer met their “strategic objectives.” I was given my blog content and allowed to host it on a friend’s server. That is the arrangement to this day. There are still numerous weblinks pointing to Patheos.com/wthrockmorton which are dead and lead to “410 Gone” on their site. I don’t get any reporting of the page views, but I would sure like to know how many views they have forfeited.

The irony is that Driscoll hasn’t posted on Patheos since July 2020. Forgive me for laughng about that.

I contacted Phil Fox Rose who was one of the Patheos editors at the time and who communicated to other Patheos bloggers about the decision. He is no longer with Patheos, however he wouldn’t tell me anything except he didn’t talk to Driscoll personally. That doesn’t mean much since he wasn’t a decision maker. He must have signed a non-disclosure agreement since he said he can’t talk about anything else at Patheos.

I also wrote the former COO of Patheos McGee to see if he could confirm or deny Driscoll’s bragg. I waited several days but haven’t heard anything.

So I am just putting this out there. I don’t know if it is true or not but this is the story Driscoll has told according to some of his former staff.

PS – If anybody else knows anything about any of this, my DMs are open so to speak.

UPDATE: Just talked to someone today who spoke to Grace Driscoll as The Trinity Church was opening during the summer of 2016. According to my source, Driscoll said her husband was trying to get Patheos to kick me off the platform back then. It took him a year but he made it on the site by late 2017. I was gone by May 2018.

 

Patheos Evangelical Blogger Says El Paso and Dayton Shootings Appear to be False Flag Operations (UPDATED)

UPDATE: That was fast. Just hours after I published this post (but a day after Blankley’s article was published on Patheos), the “false flag” claim was pulled from Bethany Blankley’s blog. If you want to see it, you can go to the archives here and here. She also posted it at her personal website here.

……………………………… (original post)

Patheos blog Hedgerow written by Bethany Blankley yesterday called the massacres at Dayton and El Paso “false flags.” She wrote:

Unfortunately the tragic events of shootings in El Paso or Dayton increasingly occurring in America appear to be False Flag events perpetrated by conspirators to get rid of the Second Amendment. Once you’re familiar with the pattern, you’re able to identify them.

According to Blankley, other tragedies may be false flags, including Sandy Hook.

Some investigators point to 9/11 terrorist attacks, the NORAD drills of 9/11, the 7/7 London Bombings, the 2011 Norway shooting, the Aurora shooting, Sandy Hook, and the public shootings in Orlando, South Carolina, West Virginia, California, Nevada and many more as False Flag attacks.

Is Alex Jones an investigator? Jones also called the Sandy Hook massacre of school children a false flag and is in the middle of a defamation suit brought by families of Sandy Hook victims. Jones has been removed from several web platforms.

 

Jeff Breakfast Knows What Happened to My Blog

Comedian and CEO of Pathymnal Jeff Breakfast reveals the reasons for my recent demise.

Whatever it was, we know Warren did it, and that’s final. Okay—It’s not so much what he DID DO as what he DIDN’T DO. But hey, you didn’t hear it from me. Fine, you did—He DIDN’T SHUT HIS MOUTH is what. How dare he blow the whistle we gave him! Where I come from, If a “truthteller” keeps calling out fraud and injustice like some jackass, he’s bound to get a taste of fraud and injustice all right—homegrown style. Stings like a really large amount of bees, don’t it? All of this is of course invisible and uninteresting to the public and as such, neither he nor anybody else will think to “sing” about our dubious dismissal in public.

That seems clear.

Being from the Seattle area, the Rev. Breakfast has had things to say about Mark Driscoll before. And he has something to say about him here:

Say, speaking of which, how would you like to hear a spanking new hymn composed by Mark Driscoll? These sweet strains of praise from a former record company executive will fill your soul with the feeling that his new full-priced hymnal just might bridge the gap between you and God. We’ll just go ahead and start playing it three seconds ago and oops you are already listening to it so might as well not stop now. From his sharpie to your ears, don’t you just feel like it would be great if you tried to love it? After ten seconds you can click away it if you don’t have the faith of a mustard seed that your life or private parts could use an authoritarian man ordering them around.

So go read the rest of Rev. Breakfast’s explanation, it will bewilder and amuse.

 

Anxious Bench Asks Patheos: What’s Going On?

Today, Anxious Bench, a group blog at Patheos, featured two posts which questioned the termination of my blog. I will take them in the order posted today.

So, what is going on at Patheos?

Written by Kristin Du Mez, she wonders who was behind the move to end my blog at Patheos.

With so little information, it wasn’t hard for Throckmorton—and many of the rest of us—to jump to some conclusions. Throckmorton, of course, is known for writing on some of the biggest scandals in the Christian subculture. “A Christian whistleblower,” he’s blogged about Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, K.P. Yohannan, and Gospel for Asia. Connecting the dots, Throckmorton explains: “Patheos was at the center of the Mars Hill Church and Gospel for Asia stories and now they host Mark Driscoll and K. P. Yohannan.” (Throckmorton has moved his blog to www.wthrockmorton.com, though Patheos has not responded to his request to migrate comments on his posts to his new site).

She then quotes Dan Wilkinson who provided an overview of BN Media’s connections. Go over and read the rest. I am not sure how long she will be there.

Can Patheos Continue to “Host the Conversation on Faith”?

I’m going to say, probably not.

It wasn’t always that way according to Chris Gehrz who wrote about his attraction to Patheos:

Perhaps most of all, I was impressed that Patheos recruited Warren Throckmorton in 2013. A psychology professor at a conservative Christian college who has publicly rethought his views on sexual identity therapy, Warren is even better known for his investigations of popular evangelical figures like David Barton and Mark Driscoll. That Patheos’ Evangelical channel would host someone as unflinchingly honest and potentially controversial as Warren spoke volumes to me as I considered the Anxious Bench offer. This was a “big tent” evangelicalism, open to self-criticism and dissent and not afraid to challenge readers.

So I was troubled to learn that Patheos abruptly endedWarren’s blog last month, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious. Warren first reported that he was simply told that his blog no longer met the “strategic objectives” of Patheos…

Once you start getting rid of material because someone is offended or bothered by it, then it isn’t long before other bloggers bother someone else. Apparently, I bothered an investor, an owner, an advertiser, a potential writer or someone who wanted content erased. I still don’t know. Until it the “objectives” are made clear, the bloggers on the platform can’t feel secure that the conversation on faith will continue.

 

 

On Being Booted Off Patheos: Patheos Bloggers Speak Out

Patheos blogger Fred Clark (aka Slacktivist Fred) says I may have been “Throcked.” He offers this term to describe being fired to appease far-right donors and to warn others not to anger those donors.

Whatever the reason or reasons, some Patheos bloggers have bravely taken to their Patheos blogs to criticize the move to dismiss me from the platform.  This post serves as a summary of those posts.

Slacktivist

If it’s good enough for Andre Braugher, it’s good enough for me

Some excerpts:

Warren Throckmorton’s fine blog is no longer here on Patheos. He got booted off, with no coherent explanation. That was rude — rudely disrespectful toward someone whose long presence here has enormously enriched every conception of Patheos as a community or a conversation.

And it was a radical departure of the entire premise and ethos of Patheos as a platform for writers and bloggers from every imaginable religious perspective. It’s a violation of explicit and implicit promises made to everyone whose blog is hosted at this site. Not cool.

Two big points. One, Patheos didn’t treat me right. Two, what was good about Patheos is now in question.

In a previous post, Clark wondered why Patheos simply didn’t offer to move the blog to the Progressive Channel:

Patheos’ evangelical channel has changed its shape and tone quite a bit over the years since it first started with the strange duo of me and Scot McKnight. I fully understood when they booted me over to the “progressive Christian” channel — an awkward, we-need-to-call-this-somethingcategory that has since become a widely used term. But I can’t imagine a defensible notion of the “strategic objectives” for that channel that wouldn’t have room for Warren Throckmorton’s terrific blog.

Maybe the ever-shifting, perpetually negotiated boundaries of “evangelical” have reached a point where Doc Throck no longer fits into the now-Driscoll-friendly shape of that channel here at Patheos. OK, fine, then move him over to another channel. That was the whole idea of Patheos in the first place — there’s a channel for everyperspective, right? Not doing that just … smells bad.

Also too: It’s never a good sign when people start talking about “strategic objectives.”

Mercy Not Sacrifice: The Blog of Morgan Guyton

Early out of the gate was Morgan Guyton with this question:

Why Did Patheos Evangelical Push Out A Whistleblower Blog?

Some excerpts:

I’ve just been informed that the Patheos Evangelical channel has closed down the blog of evangelical whistleblower Warren Throckmorton, who was most renowned for his exposes on the plagiarism and abusive leadership of Mark Driscoll at the former Mars Hill Bible Church. Recently, Patheos Evangelical started hosting a blog for Mark Driscoll. It’s very hard not to see these events as interrelated.

They may be related. Driscoll is coming out with a new book and it could help him to get rid of all those Patheos links to his past difficulties with publishing and citations. However, I am not convinced. The material remains active on the web and my articles on The Daily Beast are more visible than the blog posts.

Guyton concludes:

There is nothing Christian about maneuvering in the shadows. Patheos Evangelical owes an explanation to all the bloggers in the Patheos community because these kinds of actions impact all of our credibility.

Preventing Grace with Anne Kennedy

One evangelical blogger mentioned the event without much comment. Anne Kennedy wrote:

Was curious and sad to see that Warren Throckmorton is no longer blogging at Patheos. You can read what he says here. He has moved all his content to a new cyber home if you want to bookmark his page.

UPDATE:

Anne added a post on May 30 with a more specific lament:

I do not pretend to be able to understand why Dr. Throckmorton does not meet “strategic purposes.” I didn’t know we had any. I was under the impression that we were all wandering around the internet every day, talking about faith, theology, politics, movies, books, food, culture, news, and whatever else happened by. Dr. Throckmorton is brilliant on the breaking news part. I have often been, I am sorry to say, jealous of his ability to dig out the news. Would that jealousy had compelled me to work harder. It is a great loss that he is no longer here. I don’t know how to make sense of it.

Other mentions

One occasional Anxious Bench writer had a lot to say although it was on his own blog. John Fea did three posts on the incident (here, here, and here).

I do know that many bloggers are discussing the issues involved (e.g., here) and are quite concerned about their futures at Patheos. They should be. I had no warning and was under the impression that my work was valued.

If you have written about this and don’t see your post here, please let me know.

Unfundamentalists

Former Patheos blogger Dan Wilkinson wrote a nice piece examining who owns Patheos. After examining those individuals, Wilkinson ends by writing:

Though Patheos continues to remain silent on the issue, it’s not hard to imagine why Dr. Throckmorton’s evangelical watchdog blog failed to meet the “expectations” of Patheos’ conservative Christian owners. Perhaps the only thing that’s surprising is that they let his blog last as long as it did.