May 2006 Archives

Seattle's alt-weekly The Stranger recently published a really interesting cover story by Erica Barnett about the rise of evangelical hipsterdom in that city.

They tend to meet in unconventional venues—theaters, warehouses, coffee shops—that lack the trappings of traditional churches and make younger worshippers feel at home. They use creative approaches to worship and spiritual reflection—such as pop music, dialogue (rather than sermonizing), and meditation—and lack a strong hierarchical structure. They generally start out small—often as an offshoot of a larger, more established congregation—and then grow rapidly, like Mars Hill, or multiply, as Church on the Hill plans to do. They believe in being engaged in, rather than separate from, the culture at large, as a way of both remaining relevant and winning new converts to Christianity.

The article's biggest strength is its choice of subject, Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill, who is, um, kind of a nutjob. Barnett mostly lets Driscoll's own words demonstrate as much.

"Seattle logic [says] two consenting adults can have sex whenever they want," Driscoll booms, sardonically. "This is what happens when you walk away from Scripture: You walk away from what's right and wrong." The next thing you know, he says, "You've got a rainbow on your camel. You've got pink taffeta on your toga. You've got a church float in the pride parade." Pacing the stage restlessly ("I've had a lot of Red Bull"), Driscoll continues. "The people of the church are so confused. They think that in tolerating [homosexual] behavior, they're being like Jesus. Your banners, your floats, your buttons—they're not good. It's just like letting cancer come into a body... until the cancer consumes the body and kills you... We will extricate the cancer, and if that person who has the cancer is repentant and wants to kill the cancer, then we'll welcome them back. But they have to accept that anything but one man, one woman, one God, one life, is sexually immoral.

Driscoll is loud and a bit slovenly and frequently hilarious; he uses humor to draw facile comparisons ("We all discriminate. I double-dog dare you: Don't recycle. You'll have hippies in your garbage: 'I found paper!'")—and make claims that put him far outside the mainstream—that go down easy among his young congregation. He has reportedly lost some female congregants because of his statements about the role of women in marriage ("God made the man and put him in charge and gave him a job description... and the woman was made to help him...Women will be saved by going back to that role that God has chosen for them."); in the church ("Every single book in your Bible is written by a man... Priest[hood] is reserved exclusively for godly men."); and in society ("There is no occasion where women led a society and were its heads and the men complied and followed. ... It's a matter of Biblical creation.")

As counterpoint, Barnett interviews United Methodist minister Rich Lang, who I've been lucky enough to see speak at a church conference a few years back; he stunned the audience into silence by chewing us out for having so many SUVs in the parking lot...but he's such a compelling preacher that by the time he was done he recieved a well-earned standing ovation. Lang provides a voice for progressive mainline Christians like me, who are dismayed by the dressing up of archaic evangelical theology in horn-rimmed glasses and thrift-store t-shirts. (The website for Lang's congregation, Trinity United Methodist, provides some of his really great essays and sermons, including one of the best condemnations of Bush policy on theological grounds I've ever seen.)

Barnett could be criticized for painting with too broad a brush. She doesn't seem to quite know her history and terminology--for example, that emergent churches are a post-evangelical phenomenon, not post-mainline--which is actually pretty important for understanding the social dynamics at work. She quotes Jason Hudson of Church on the Hill preaching about what Christians should do when they find themselves in positions of power and suggests that his sermon "echoes" dominion theology--in fact to me it reads like a partial refutation of dominion theology--I'd have to hear the rest of the sermon to be sure. And for Barnett to talk about the "emergent" movement without talking about the legitimately progressive voices within that movement (Brian McLaren being the most prominent) is a pretty severe oversight.

Still it's really nice to see The Stranger at least TRYING to cover religion in a way that warns us of its most dangerous manifestations but doesn't depict Christianity as a monolithically conservative entity.

Hey Portland dudes, I'm curious, how does this article jibe with what you've seen going on down there in places like Imago Dei?

UPDATE: The Stranger published my letter to the editor, thus marking the first time I've ever called someone an asshole in print! Totally embarassing, especially because I didn't say what i meant. What I meant was that the emergent church couldn't fairly be called theologically liberal, but that it does somewhat trouble the left-right binary models of politics and theology, and has led some participants to relatively progressive/moderate positions on various social and economic issues.

By now you've all seen Stephen Colbert's career-defining performance at the White House Press Correspondent's dinner, right? Okay, I want to zero in on one joke:

"And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior."

Funny, right? Colbert's satire of religion has always been especially notable because it's religiously literate satire. Here, Colbert nails Bush because he pushes his pluralistic rhetoric up against his conservative evangelical exclusivism to highlight the fundamental incompatibility of these two ideas, thus demonstrating how Bush's use of religion is at best shallow and rudimentary, at worst disingenuous and opportunistic. He's funnier than, say David Cross or George Carlin when they mock evangelicals, because Colbert's not using satire to paint a broad, unflattering caricature of religious adherents. Rather, he's making a substantive critical point about the incomprehensibility of Bush's theology.

Today I discovered that Colbert is a practicing Catholic, and it all made sense. He's able to satirize Christianity effectively because he knows it from the inside! It explains the sense of moral outrage that drives his satire--no one does moral outrage better than a progressive catholic (Michael Moore, Dorothy Day, Octavio Paz for example). It also explains his attention to labor and education issues, which are unusual topics for political comedy but key issues for the Catholic Worker movement.

As he told Time Out New York:

I love my Church, and I'm a Catholic who was raised by intellectuals, who were very devout. I was raised to believe that you could question the Church and still be a Catholic. What is worthy of satire is the misuse of religion for destructive or political gains. That's totally different from the Word, the blood, the body and the Christ. His kingdom is not of this earth.

Thanks Stephen Colbert, for demonstrating why we need the Christian Left.

Here's an NPR interview where Colbert talks about his faith, among other things.

You guys, i totally made it all the way throught Lent without ingesting any soda pop, except for a root beer float Ryland made to celebrate good Friday.

I found out something pretty funny: soda pop is actually pretty gross. It's just, like, sugar and fizzy water. I tried having one post-lent to see if i still wanted it. It was difficult to drink the whole thing. ridiculous. I even tried going back to my old love the SLURPEE. couldn't finish it. too sickly sweet. I am officially an adult! It feels good. Now i drink juice, or water, or tea.

Well this revelation was fortunately timed! The Nation just featured an incredible scary cover article on "The Case Against Coke", exhaustively researched and well-argued.

In the past two years the Coke campaign has grown into the largest anticorporate movement since the campaign against Nike for sweatshop abuses. Around the world, dozens of unions and more than twenty universities have banned Coke from their facilities, while activists have dogged the company from World Cup events in London to the Winter Olympics in Torino...Coke has fought back with ads on TV and in student newspapers, part of a mammoth advertising budget that has increased 30 percent in the past two years, to a staggering $2.4 billion [much of it going to Portland's favorite ethically-challenged ad agency Wieden + Kennedy .]"When people think of Coca-Cola, they should think about great hardship and despair for people and communities around the world."

So yeah, I'm personally giving up all Coke products indefinitely. If someone with a legendary sweet tooth like me can do it, you can too. It also means giving up Dasani, Odwalla, Minute Maid, Nestea, Fanta, Sprite, Powerade and others. But it's worth it for a slightly cleaner conscience, right? If you're in college, you can join the list of more than 130 campuses with anti-Coke campaign chapters. It's not going to save the world, but it's one concrete thing you can do.