Poser Christianity: A Review of Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity

Poser Christianity: A Review of Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity - The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School

Poser Christianity: A Review of Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity by
James K. A. Smith 2010-10-04 01:09:05

Brett McCracken. Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010. 255 pages. $10.87 paperback (Amazon).
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http://theotherjournal.com/www.amazon.com/dp/0801072220/?tag=theothejour-20When
I was a teenager, I was religiously devoted to freestyle BMX: flatland, street,
vert, all of it. It was my first real experience of something like a spiritual
discipline. Every spare moment was spent on my bike; even in long Canadian
winters, I carved out a space in our basement to keep riding. I custom-built a
bike from select components, studied all the magazines, constructed my own
quarter-pipe in the backyard, even published a zine for the emerging community
of riders in my town. In my senior yearbook, my photo was accompanied by a
cheesy maxim lifted from a Harley-Davidson ad: “I live to ride. For those who
understand, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t, no explanation is
possible.”

For the small tribe of religiously devoted BMX freestylers, for whom riding was
a way of life, there was nothing more grating or irritating than an even larger
tribe that grew up around us: the tribe of posers—that band of kids who were
taken more with the accessories than the experience. The posers were the group
of rich kids who had all the best equipment, wore the latest shoes, sported the
latest styles, and then generally spent their time sitting on the sidelines
while the rest of us actually *rode *our bikes. They would scramble
their bikes to the top of the ramp, but never actually drop in for a round.
They’d be using all the right lingo on the deck of the pool, but never inch over
the coping. They’d mull around the parking lot talking a big game, but never
actually ride. They didn’t really want to ride; they were just after a look, an
identity by association.

I invoke this scene because I think poser is a relevant, important
term missing from Brett McCracken’s lexicon in Hipster Christianity: When
Church and Cool Collide. And in very important ways, McCracken’s project is
lexical. He spends several preparatory chapters amassing a catalog of terms that
will be regularly used in the book: cool, hip, trendy, fashionable, relevant,
savvy, stylish, even “supercool.” But because this lexicon doesn’t
include poser, McCracken’s analysis ends up being reductionistic: he thinks
anyone who looks like a “hipster” is really just trying to be “cool.” This, I
think, tells us more about Mr. McCracken than it does about so-called hipster
Christianity.

The general upshot of McCracken’s book seems to be remarkably similar to Tullian
Tchividjian’s Unfashionable—namely, that Christians should be wary of
trying to be au courant lest the desire to be “with it” trump the
peculiarity and strangeness of the gospel.1 In short, being cool is
dangerous because, in the process, the peculiar people of God become assimilated
to the status quo. In this respect, the conclusion to Hipster
Christianity reads like a gentler rendition of the more strident rants
we’ve heard from people like D. A. Carson and David Wells (who is generously
cited in the last three chapters of the book). The only difference is the
target: whereas Wells and Carson (rightly, I should add) criticized the
therapeutic, seeker-sensitive Willow Creeks and Saddlebacks of the boomer
generation, McCracken sets his sights on his own generation: hip millennials who
are taken with incense, hemp clothing, Wendell Berry, and Amnesty International.
McCracken is worried that this is just the next generation of cultural
assimilation in the name of relevance.

But his analysis only works if, in fact, all hipsters are really just posers.
That is, McCracken effectively reduces all hipsters to posers
precisely because he can only imagine someone adopting such a lifestyle in
order to be cool. Let me say it again: this tells us more about McCracken than
it does about those young Christians who are spurning conservative, bourgeois
values.

I would think McCracken is too young to be this cynical. So I suggest something
else is at work here: what we have in Hipster Christianity is a jaded
ethnography written by someone who spent a youth-group-lifetime trying to be one
of the cool kids. As such, it seems he can only imagine someone adopting a
hipster lifestyle in order to strike a pose. This is confirmed by a crucial turn
in the book: McCracken identifies the “birth of the Christian hipster” in 2003,
“when the first issue of Relevant magazine was released” (88). Well,
this explains quite a lot. Did I mention that McCracken was also a longtime
contributor to Relevant magazine? IfRelevant magazine is the
epitome and embodiment of Christian hipsterdom, then pretty much everything
McCracken says makes sense. Relevantmagazine is simply the latest
in a long line of evangelical subcultural production: derivative, secondary,
reactionary, and dependent on wider cultural trends, all with the hopes of
showing that following Jesus doesn’t really require one to be a loser. Indeed,
the magazine’s very title is a signal that this is just the continuation of the
seeker-sensitive project of the megachurch. Its edgy rendition of evangelical
faith doesn’t really displace the fundamental, core values of a constituency
still comfortable with the status quo of bourgeois American individualism,
consumerism, nationalism, and militarism. In other words, being
a Relevant-hipster is the sort of thing you can add to your life
without really disrupting the rest of it. It’s a style, not a way of life.

But let me be very clear now: Relevant-magazine hipsters are really just
posers. Like all the posers hanging around the half-pipes of my youth, these are
people looking for cool by association, with a slight thrill of rebellion as a
side-effect. And while McCracken’s analysis perhaps pertains to a bunch of
suburban kids who have adopted hipster as a style—just as they might have
adopted “urban” as a style—his analysis doesn’t even touch those students I know
who, from Christian convictions, have intentionally pursued a lifestyle
that rejects the bourgeois consumerism of mass, commercialized culture. They
shop at Goodwill and Salvation Army because they have concerns about the
injustice of the mass-market clothing industry, because they believe recycling
is good stewardship of God’s creation, and frankly, because they’re relatively
poor. They’re relatively poor because they’re pursuing work that is meaningful
and just and creative and won’t eat them alive, and such work, although not
lucrative, gives them time to spend on the things that really matter: community,
friendship, service, and creative collaboration. And despite McCracken’s
misguided claims about autonomy and independence (192-193), the Christian
hipsters I know are actually willing to sacrifice the American sacred cow of
privacy and independence, living in intentional communities as families and
singles, working through all the difficulties and blessings of “life together”
as Bonhoeffer describes it.2 In short, the lives of the Christian hipsters
I know are a gazillion miles away from being worried about image or trendiness;
they live the way they do because they are pursuing the good life characterized
by well-ordered culture-making that is just and conducive to flourishing—and
this requires resisting the mass-produced, mass-marketed, and mass-consumed
banalities of the corporate ladder, the suburban veneer of so-called success, as
well as the irresponsibility of perpetual adolescence that characterizes so many
twentysomethings who imagine life as one big frat house.

This is why I think McCracken needs to revitalize another term in his
lexicon:bohemian (he mentions it early on, confusing it
with dandyism). Although he generically talks about Christian hipsters,
there is a qualitative difference between a Shane Claiborne and the latest
rendition of the megachurch youth pastor who slums it by buying a few things at
Goodwill (to accessorize his jeans from the Buckle) and who presses his kids to
donate to the ONE Campaign. Those who really deserve to be described as
Christian hipsters might be better described as Christian bohemians who have
intentionally resisted the siren call of the status quo, upward mobility, and
the American way in order to pursue lives that are just, meaningful, communal,
and peaceable. The Christian hipsters I know are pursuing a way of life that
they (rightly) believe better jives with the picture of flourishing sketched in
the biblical visions of the coming kingdom. They have simply discovered
a biggergospel: they have come to appreciate that the good news is an
announcement with implications not only for individual souls but also for the
very shape of social institutions and creational flourishing. They have come to
appreciate the fact that God is renewing all things and is calling us
to ways of life that are conducive to social, economic, and cultural flourishing
as pictured in the eschatological glimpses we see in Scripture. They resonate
with all of this, not because it’s cool, but because it’s true.

To be blunt (because I’m not sure how else to put this), the Christian bohemians
I’m describing are educated evangelicals. So when McCracken lists (not
so tongue in cheek) “ten signs that a Christian college senior has officially
become a Democrat” (159), I’m sorry but the list just looks like characteristics
of an educated, thoughtful Christian (and believe me, I’m no Democrat). Or when
McCracken, in a remarkably cynical flourish in the vein of “Stuff White People
Like,” catalogs the authors that Christian hipsters like (Stanley Hauerwas, Ron
Sider, Jim Wallis, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, N. T. Wright,
G. K. Chesterton, and others; 97), he does so as if people could only “like”
such authors because it’s “cool” to do so. But perhaps they’re just good.
McCracken seems unable to really accept whatPaste magazine editor Josh
Jackson emphasizes: “It’s not about what’s cool. It’s about what good” (92). And
if that’s true, then it should be no surprise that Christian colleges and
universities are shapers of Christian hipster culture: if McCracken is lamenting
the fact that Christian colleges are producing alumni that are smart and
discerning with good taste and deep passions about justice, then we’re happy to
live with his ire. The fact that young evangelicals, when immersed in a
thoughtful liberal arts education, turn out to value what really matters and
look critically on the way of life that has been extolled to them in both mass
media and mass Christian media—well, we’ll wear that as a badge of honor.

In contrast to the Christian bohemian commitment to a good life that reflects
the shape of kingdom flourishing, McCracken’s concluding chapters read like a
naive, slightly whiny appeal to protect Jesus-in-your-heart evangelical
pieties—which, of course, can sit perfectly well with the systemic injustice
that characterize “normal” American life. While McCracken is focused on what he
takes to be the hipster fixation on appearance (do we really need any more
confirmation that McCracken doesn’t get it?), he calls us to remember
“what *really *counts: our inner person” (203). This is the beginning
of pages of tired evangelical clichés (“People should look at us and want what
we have” [209]) that culminates in his individualist account of “being a
Christian” which means “being transformed,” et cetera. So “how can we go on
living like we did before once we have become Christians? And how can we
possibly live like everyone else in the world when something so radical and
transformative has happened in our lives?” (212) Yes, Mr. McCracken, that is
indeed the question. And that’s exactly why my Christian bohemian friends refuse
to live like all of those American evangelicals who have just appended a
domesticated Jesus to the status quo of the so-called American Dream. Whereas it
turns out you’re just worried that young Christians might be (gasp!) smoking and
drinking a bit too much and have not sufficiently considered injunctions about
dress in 1 Peter 3. Well, yes, indeed: those do seem like quite pressing matters
for Christian witness in our postsecular world. By all means, let’s get our
personal pieties in line. For as McCracken sums it up, “the Christian hipster
lifestyle has become far too accommodating and accepting of sin” (200)—and by
this, he means a pretty standard litany of evangelical taboos (did I mention
sex?). It’s funny: my Christian hipster friends think conservative evangelicals
have also become too accommodating and accepting of sin, but they tend to have a
different inventory in mind—things like the Christian endorsement of torture and
wars of aggression, evangelical energies devoted to policies of fiscal
selfishness, and lifestyles of persistent, banal greed.

I think the reason these concerns don’t show up in Hipster
Christianity is because McCracken lacks a theology of culture, and because
of that, he has a tin ear for the issues of systemic (in)justice that really
define the bohemian lifestyle of what we might call authentic hipsters. Indeed,
while he tries to berate Christian hipsters for being individualists,
McCracken’s understanding of Christianity is almost hopelessly individualist,
fixated on matters of personal piety and individual salvation. Within that
frame, authentic Christian hipsters don’t make much sense; such a life could
only be a style, a pose. But precisely because McCracken lacks a sufficient
theology of culture, and hence lacks any attention to systematic (in)justice,
most of the Christian hipsters I know will never read this book; but all of the
posers will.

**Notes

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1. See Tullian Tchividjian, Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the
World by Being Different (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 2009).
2. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of
Faith in Community (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1954).

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