In Friday’s Wall Street Journal there was an article by Brett McCracken entitled, “The Perils of ‘Wannabe Cool’ Christianity.”
It’s not often that I see a Baker press author turning his book (Hipster Christianity) into a mainstream media editorial, so I was intrigued to see what the article would say. I left hoping that the book McCracken has written shows 
more awareness of the issues he purports to be discussing than this article does.
McCracken describes “emergent” as an attempt to “rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant”. At best, this is a thin assessment at worst, it is completely false. Emergent did arise out of cultural awareness, but recognizing that culture is shifting from modernity to postmodernity, and striving to articulate the gospel accordingly, is not the same thing as trying to be hip and relevant.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine a worse description of Emergent than “to rehabilitate Christianity’s image and make it ‘cool’”.
The article later goes on to accuse any Christian who has talked or written about sex of using shock tactics. So Lauren Winner’s Real Sex is nothing other than a way to shock people and look cool by talking about sex in a Christian setting.
And all this from a person who has written a book called Hipster Christianity–if the article is any reflection of what McCracken means by “Hipster,” he doesn’t even understand the word used in the title. He means “Hip” Christianity. (Next time, you might check out the definition of your “movement”on Wikipedia–you’d end up with better data.)
I can only hope that this article is a mulligan and that the book shows actual awareness of the movements he thinks he’s critiquing rather than rumors, hearsay, and other misrepresentations to make McCracken’s own positions look better.
I’ll have a follow-up on this tomorrow, dealing with the larger question that I think is behind McCracken’s critique: what does Christianity have to do with contemporary culture?
Pretty cynical. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was ghost written by John MacArthur.
I don’t know. I’d say much of what he’s saying lines up with much of my experience in the emerging church and megachurch scene. Using labels and branding a whole movement is a bit dangerous, but certainly there are more examples than any of us would wish of churches shallowly desperate to seem cool, authentic, or whatever.
On the other hand, I found his conclusion totally theologically empty: “If we are interested in Christianity in any sort of serious way, it is not because it’s easy or trendy or popular. It’s because Jesus himself is appealing, and what he says rings true.” If you’re going to make the argument he’s making, that the emerging church movement errs by trying to make Christianity seem too cool, relevant, authentic, or whatever, then the corrective I’d think you’d want to push is the offense of the gospel, the reality that the Word of God makes its own audience and doesn’t require any kind of spin or marketing technique, even that of “the plain old stripped down gospel” that McCracken seems to be advocating here. In that light, the church is freed from having to worry about how appealing its message is, that is, as long as its message really is the Word of God from beyond itself.
i’m thinking somebody is an unrepentant square. also didn’t get laid… ever. oh, and doesn’t know what PBR even is. i’m just sayin’.
Emerging did not in fact “quickly fizzle out” as much as many would have wanted it to. And if Bell’s “Sex God” is considered a shock tactic Brett either judged it only by the title or is against almost any discussion of sexuality at all. Poor form. The issue isn’t whether or not we happen to like our beer ironic.
The link between the gospel and culture has been around for awhile. In the church father period, “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” and in the colonial period with missions traveling outside Europe and the Middle East. These have generally been successful, so why not take new cultural movements going on at home into consideration? I’ve found in most Christians contexts postmodernism is a dirty word. I think this has more to do with resistance to the emergent church than the sake of gospel purity. I am not interested in the emergent church scene and don’t enjoy postmodern culture outside of music but I would not go so far to say that it hurts the gospel.
Potential problems with re-branding to get wayward people back that I’ve seen through my experience of working at church:
1. You change into something the good and faithful do not connect with, thus punishing people for being faithful to you and rewarding the people who left who only might return.
2. Signaling “coolness” is like a magic trick and when people see what is going on the spell is broken. You can’t look like you’re trying to be cool even if you are. (I think this might also be the cause of Brett’s aversion to the movement.)
3. These days, traditional Christianity is counter-cultural. It’s dishonest to pretend that rebranding Christianity to fit into post-modernism runs counter to our culture which is (supposedly, I’m not convinced completely of this myself) increasingly postmodern. People see this and, again, the spell is broken.
1. Sadly, the book is as bad as the article.
2. There are lots of emergent churches that Daniel and I both know of and have worshiped with that give the lie to McCracken’s cartoon characterizations. All the ones I know that have lasted and thrived are in no way about being cool for cool’s sake. That McCracken would get published or recycling old cliches is very sad.
Daniel… I am frustrated especially at the description of ‘emergent’. If anyone tried/tries to be hip, it is the seeker movement!
“we don’t want cool as much as we want real”
What’s the difference exactly?
“…recognizing that culture is shifting from modernity to postmodernity”. Shifting? Postmodernism has existed for at least 60 years, if not longer, fighting for relevance in the first twenty, had a major influence in our culture for the following twenty and into today. However postmodernism has been seriously called into question by many respected theorists (a lot of Marxists- Eaglelton, Jameson, Hardt, etc) for the past twenty. The ‘church’, that was once emerging, is again slowly slipping into irrelevancy.
Thanks for calling him out on his Winner diss. We need more quality books on Christian sexual ethics, and I think it’s a shame that such a gifted writer with good ideas would dismissed as some fool trying to get attention.
While I appreciate his overall point that some Christians try to hard to be cool (I agree), I don’t think people that actually get the thought behind the emerging church stuff would consider coolness to be useful or necessary, as in my mind, flashy attempts at relevance carry a stench of inauthenticity abhorrent to postmoderns…
I think there are many wanna-be-emerging-ish churches that focus on being cool but that set aside the more truly culturally relevant aspects of the movement.
As someone somewhere else so aptly said,
“Throw a rock in the pig pen, and the pig that get’s hit will say “Oink!”
Perhaps some of the people involved in this discusion ought to read more of McCracken’s own blog/writings before claiming he is anti-hipster. A cursory reading of http://stillsearching.wordpress.com/ will demonstrate that the book itself is a descriptive critique, not an attack. The author considers himself a hipster in many respects.
Perhaps we ought not judge a book by it’s cover story in the WSJ
Which is to say that this blog post is an ignorant critique of an ignorant critique.