admin @ Thu, 2006-03-02 09:00
BY phone from Nashville Bryan Norman was talking about rebellion, God and the mullet haircut. Mr. Norman, 26, is the editor of a gothic scripted, visually hyperactive book called "The New Rebellion Handbook," and he took a particular line on the romance of the rebel.
Anyone looking for the spirit of American counterculture — as a romance, identity or marketing principle — need look no further than the nearest evangelical bookstore, youth ministry or clothing line. A decade and a half after Nirvana's success exposed the strength of secular alt-culture tribes, their evangelical counterparts are having their own coming out in rebel gestures that sometimes recall the early church, sometimes ... well, early Nirvana.
"There's a charm in being the rebel," said Edmund Gibbs, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of books on alternative Christian culture. Besides, he said, rebellion is consistent with the lessons of the Bible.
"If evangelicalism means a commitment to the radical doctrine of Jesus, you have to be a subversive. Jesus was a subversive." In the increasingly clamorous Christian marketplace rebellion is where you find it: in full-contact skateboard Bible study groups; in Christian punk, Goth and hip-hop CD's; in evangelical tattoo parlors; in sportswear brands like Extreme Christian Clothing and Fear God; in alt churches or ministries called Revolution, Scum of the Earth and Punk Girl; in a podcast called Xtreme Christianity, which turns out to be a fairly conventional weekly sermon delivered by a Baptist minister in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.
If this rebellion is not exactly the sexy shrug of Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" or of Kurt Cobain in "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the come-on is very much the same. "It's the nonconformist's view of Christianity," Mr. Norman said. For a demographic that is used to being marketed to as rebels, he added, the new rebellion "is really a new installment of the original rebellion." He continued: "It's hearkening back to a raw faith not encumbered by the American dream, enslavement to a career or having to have two kids and a two-car garage. It gets to what's worth living for."
The claim of a Christian counterculture, which recurs periodically in American Protestantism, cuts in two directions, defining itself as counter to the consumer-driven secular culture and to mainstream church culture. For Shane Claiborne, 30, the author of "The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical" (Zondervan), it has meant living for a decade in a monastic community in North Philadelphia, whose members make their own clothing, refrain from sex outside marriage and minister to the homeless and poor.
When he applies the language of rebellion to his faith, Mr. Claiborne said: "I'm trying to reclaim the language. I think it resonates with people because Christianity has been anything but radical. It's been stale. When you ask people what they think about church, it's sad. But Jesus doesn't have the bad reputation that Christianity has.
"What we do looks extreme because it's an indictment of the idea of Christianity that so many of us have settled for. When we look at the early church, it was very revolutionary. Jesus sat down to rethink revolution. He was able to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free."
For historians of faith-based rebellion, the new shagginess strikes a familiar American chord, tapping an anticlerical tradition that dates back to colonial times, when ministers like John Henry Goetschius excoriated high churches for "their old, rotten and stinking routine of religion."
Larry Eskridge, the associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Illinois, compared the current stirrings to the Jesus People, a movement that began in Costa Mesa, Calif., in the late 1960's, borrowing heavily from the hippie counterculture and mixing beach baptisms, conservative theology and grooming habits that were not always welcome in the churches of Orange County.
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