(CP) Mark Driscoll, the outspoken Senior Pastor of Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, says he was briefly suspended from the popular short-form video hosting service TikTok for declaring on the platform that "men can't have babies."
"What happens on TikTok when you say that men can't have babies," Driscoll tweeted Saturday with an image of a notice on his suspended TikTok account stating that he was prevented from posting due to "multiple violations" of the hosting service's community guidelines.
The suspension of the account ended on Thursday.
In his reaction to the restriction by TikTok, Driscoll cited Romans 1:18 which says: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth."
Driscoll, who recently kicked off a new nine-week teaching series at his church called Real Men: Act Like a Man, said Wednesday that "the problem in our day is not toxic masculinity; it's the complete LACK of masculinity."
"In a world void of strong men and fathers, we want to build you up to bless women and children, and transform legacies for generations to come," he said about the nine-week teaching series.
The former leader of the wildly successful but now defunct Seattle-based Mars Hill Church has also been an outspoken critic of the transgender movement and recently interviewed Dr. Michael Miller, former chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at The Ohio State University, about "the epidemic of transgenderism and what that means for the future of our civilization."
What happens on TikTok when you say that men can’t have babies.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.”
Romans 1:18 pic.twitter.com/QIHswG79g8
"This has existed since antiquity. You can find statuary from ancient Rome, you look at one side of the statue it looks female, you look at the other side of the statue it looks male. They have male organs with breasts that are beautifully carved," Miller told Driscoll. "There has been gender confusion for as long as there has been human beings, I believe. What's new now is the emphasis on it and part of the emphasis that's being placed on it, in Western culture anyway, is the shift that's occurred between some fundamental ways that we think about the world."
Among these fundamental ways that people think about the world, Miller said, is the idea now among some people that reality is malleable.
Driscoll founded Trinity Church in 2016 after he was forced to dissolve Mars Hill Church in 2015 over leadership failures.
Last summer, he was accused by a former employee of "immoral, unethical and unbiblical actions."
Chad Freese, who said he attended the church for nearly three years and served on Driscoll's security team for eight months, said in an open letter at the time that he resigned after witnessing alleged abuses that went on behind the scenes under Driscoll's watch. Freese was director of security at the church for seven weeks.
"I served on the security team for eight months. I served as the director of security for only seven weeks (Feb. 27 – April 18, 2021,) until I resigned due to the pastor's immoral, unethical, and unbiblical actions," Freese wrote at the time.
"I did not see these issues until I became part of the inner circle where I attended meetings and participated in 'top-secret conversations.' I acknowledge I was complicit in executing the duties of my position. I did not get fired, nor was I kicked out of the church as others have been. I could not continue down the same path as the 'leadership' of the church, as that is not who I am, nor who God called us to be."
