Campaigning for Real Marriage on “The Porn Path”: Reality Programming and the Affective Labor of Conjuring a Pornographic Imaginary
Jessica Johnson University of Washington
Media, Gender and Religion Conference 2016 Abstract
Based on eight years of gathering empirical and discursive evidence on the evangelical megachurch formerly known as Mars Hill in Seattle, this paper investigates Pastor Mark Driscoll’s marketing of ‘authenticity’ through the staging of a reality TV talk show to publicize the tell-all book Real Marriage and elicit donations for the first of several “campaigns” during which sermon materials were advertised as “free” but came at a cost. I examine this media strategy in relation to the financial scheme that erroneously elevated Driscoll to New York Times “Number One Bestselling Author” status on its “How-To/Advice” list, analyzing the church’s misappropriation of tithes to promote brand name recognition in tandem with his preaching on porn addiction. This paper investigates how Driscoll campaigns for Real Marriage by sermonizing on the evils of pornography and freedom of biblical sexuality to augment the affective value, monetary profit, and cultural influence of his celebrity image as “Pastor Mark.” As he sets out to define pornography in lucid terms, Driscoll’s exposition demonstrates how slippery and difficult to contain cultural meanings and expressions of pornography are, indexing the necessity and critical potential of examining ‘porn’ not simply as image or text but also as imaginary and industry; or, more precisely, imaginary as industry—an assemblage of virtual, visceral, and visual processes at once global and deterritorialized circulating paranoia as affective political and economic value. In turn, this paper analyzes intrafaces of body, brain, and technology so as to investigate how a pornographic imaginary is conjured through the media convergences and affective labor of performing and visualizing “biblical” discourse concerning porn addiction that integrates idioms of neuroscience and tropes of reality programming fetishized in U.S. cultural politics writ large.
