Jesus Was a Hipster

Since the Jesus freaks of the ‘60s, Christianity has seen its share of churchly types who just want to be down. So this Salon article by Lauren Sandler (NB: you might have to sit through an ad) about a fundamentalist hipster church in Seattle seems kind of like old news — until you start looking at the details. Pastor Mark Driscoll preaches about Snoop Dogg to a congregation of boho types with permanent body art. But his message is deeply old-fashioned: men should be in charge, women should be judged entirely on the fertility of their wombs, and everybody should work as hard as they can to make more Christian babies. In a way, Driscoll and his flock are pretty savvy about the relationship between their hipster lifestyles and their fundamentalist beliefs. They get that "counterculture" signifiers like tattoos don't actually run counter to any prevailing culture, while following Jesus to the letter genuinely does. But what’s so mind-boggling to me about this scene—I mean, other than the incredibly depressing way that it treats women—is their failure to recognize that they’re using the exact same “tattoos=revolution” fallacy to define their church. Sandler writes: "The way Driscoll sees it, America has been marketed to so constantly and shamelessly that it has produced a generation of jaded cynics desperate for what feels real. It is his edgy Jesus, he says, who best reaches a searching crowd." So basically, these hipsters are sick of being sold a bill of goods. They’re fed up with MTV telling them that Fall-Out Boy is edgy, with Mountain Dew telling them that Yellow Dye #47 is edgy, with edginess being defined by shelling out $60 for an artist-designed t-shirt. But that Jesus guy? Totally edgy. If he lived today, he’d, like, play bass and wear eye make-up.