Pathetic Emergent Hipsterism and Christianity

A friend and church member recently passed along to me Brett McCracken’s Wall Street Journal article titled “The Perils of ‘Wannabe Cool’ Christianity,” and if you’ve not read it yet, it is definitely worth the time. McCracken begins the piece by citing a stat from a 2007 Lifeway Research study that concluded that a full 70% of Protestants between the ages of 18-22 stop attending church on a regular basis. The reason for this jettisoning of church, McCracken argues, stems from what he dubs “Hipster Christianity.”

And just what is Hipster Christianity?

McCracken identifies it as the various attempts on the part of church leaders to make the Christian faith appear hip, edgy, and relevant, and which are (ironically) the very factors that will bring about its undoing. He writes:

Increasingly, the "plan" has taken the form of a total image overhaul, where efforts are made to rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant. As a result, in the early 2000s, we got something called "the emerging church"—a sort of postmodern stab at an evangelical reform movement. Perhaps because it was too "let's rethink everything" radical, it fizzled quickly. But the impulse behind it—to rehabilitate Christianity's image and make it "cool"—remains.

There are various ways that churches attempt to be cool. For some, it means trying to seem more culturally savvy. The pastor quotes Stephen Colbert or references Lady Gaga during his sermon, or a church sponsors a screening of the R-rated "No Country For Old Men." For others, the emphasis is on looking cool, perhaps by giving the pastor a metrosexual makeover, with skinny jeans and an $80 haircut, or by insisting on trendy eco-friendly paper and helvetica-only fonts on all printed materials. Then there is the option of holding a worship service in a bar or nightclub (as is the case for L.A.'s Mosaic church, whose downtown location meets at a nightspot called Club Mayan).

In addition, there is the sexing-up of Christianity as a means of retaining the younger crowd:

But one of the most popular—and arguably most unseemly—methods of making Christianity hip is to make it shocking. What better way to appeal to younger generations than to push the envelope and go where no fundamentalist has gone before?

Sex is a popular shock tactic. Evangelical-authored books like "Sex God" (by Rob Bell) and "Real Sex" (by Lauren Winner) are par for the course these days. At the same time, many churches are finding creative ways to use sex-themed marketing gimmicks to lure people into church.

Oak Leaf Church in Cartersville, Georgia, created a website called yourgreatsexlife.com to pique the interest of young seekers. Flamingo Road Church in Florida created an online, anonymous confessional (IveScrewedUp.com), and had a web series called MyNakedPastor.com, which featured a 24/7 webcam showing five weeks in the life of the pastor, Troy Gramling. Then there is Mark Driscoll at Seattle's Mars Hill Church—who posts Q&A videos online, from services where he answers questions from people in church, on topics such as "Biblical Oral Sex" and "Pleasuring Your Spouse."

McCracken then adds by way of response to such techniques:

If the evangelical Christian leadership thinks that "cool Christianity" is a sustainable path forward, they are severely mistaken. As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don't want cool as much as we want real.

For my own part, I think that those who engage in such gimmickry should not only be ashamed of themselves, but should be run out of the ministry altogether. Now, I understand that in a free market society with no state church, many feel the need to package and peddle the faith in whatever attractive wrapping will draw the biggest crowds. In other words, things would be much easier if we didn’t have a choice where to worship. But our consumer culture doesn’t give us carte blanche to employ any tactics we want under the guise of furthering the kingdom.

Take Paul’s argument with the Corinthians as an example of what I’m trying to say. His readers desired Christian leaders who were eloquent and dynamic, who could present the gospel message in a way that would wow the world with its wisdom and relevance. Paul’s response was not to say that such tactics should be avoided because success is a bad thing. Rather, he uses a simple argument from the relationship of form and content. In the same way that a sieve cannot be used to carry water, or smoke signals cannot be used to communicate the Pythagorean Theorem (since that kind of content can’t be conveyed using that form), so a message about the foolishness and weakness of the gospel cannot be delivered by means of worldly wisdom and power. In other words, the only way you can tell the heavenly story in a worldly language is if you first change the story, which only puts the stylish cart before the substantial horse (so much for the hermeneutic of translation).

No, the only tactic a church is permitted to employ for the communication of the faith is one that avoids at all costs the altering of the message on the altar of method. If a church appears in the eyes of the culture to be out-of-date or irrelevant, it may very well be due to the fact that it is being faithful with the gospel (which itself was dismissed by its first-century hearers for the exact same reason).

And yet for all my fist-pounding and sanctimony, I still can’t escape the nagging feeling that, despite my desire to distance myself as much as possible from the Driscolls, Warrens, and Bells of the American church, I am still more like them than I care to admit.

And it annoys me.