Brett McCracken on “Cool Christianity Is (Still) a Bad Idea”
A dozen years ago I read with delight Millennial Brett McCracken’s book Hipster Christianity: When Christianity and Cool Collide. I remember thinking how fascinating it was that this young self-proclaimed hipster was skittish about making his religion, his experience of Christ’s church, another “cool” consumer commodity.
McCracken’s book appeared alongside another great book by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck entitled Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be), published during those years when Mark Driscoll (whose ministry has recently been discussed in the podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill”), Donald Miller, and Rob Bell were growing in popularity.
My friend David Williford recently reminded me of these books, and the ideas in them, when he sent me a Gospel Coalition article McCracken wrote a couple of years ago entitled “Cool Christianity Is (Still) a Bad Idea.” In it, McCracken reflects on the book and how dated and silly much of what it described—a hipster mentality that seemed to many to be inherently disingenuous in an attempt to appear cool—is today.
But, as he says, that’s just the point. The never-ending quest for relevance—the quest for cool—will always make evangelicals look terribly dated when looking back on what they did just a few years earlier. This is very much unlike the continuity with the saints and martyrs of the Christian past the church has always pursued, which is ever-relevant because it testifies to deeper doctrines and practices that can’t be reduced to—that even defy—the passing fads of pop culture.
McCracken is not advocating a “drawing of the line” at some “golden age” in the past—1970? 1950? 1850? Instead, he encourages what all Christian leaders of all ages have always advocated until very recently: maintaining continuity with the Great Christian Tradition, not being a slave to the market—to our current cultural moment.
As McCracken says, “‘Cool Christianity’ is, if not an oxymoron, at least an exercise in futility.” This is because a “relevance-focused Christianity sows the seeds of its own obsolescence. Rather than rescuing or reviving Christianity, hipster faith shrinks it to the level of consumer commodity, as fickle and fleeting as the latest runway fashion.” Furthermore, he notes, “Chasing ‘relevance’ is exhausting and unsustainable.”
The reason this approach is not sustainable is that the enduring values of the gospel, which transcend generations and times and cultures and taste groups, militate against the “inherent transience of ‘cool’ that makes ‘cool Christianity,’ unsustainable by definition. Today’s hip, cover-boy pastor is tomorrow’s has-been. This year’s fast-growing, bustling-with-20-somethings cool church is next year’s ‘I used to go there’ old news.”
I talk to Free Will Baptist pastors everyday who are seeing slow growth in their churches that’s arising more from conversions and baptisms of unchurched people than from transfer growth. Yet they’re discouraged because they’re comparing themselves to the non-denominational mega-church and celebrity ideal.
They’re ready to throw in the towel because of the slow yet genuine growth they’re experiencing in their church of fifty or seventy-five or a hundred, as they faithfully pursue the ordinary means of grace, planting and watering with God giving the increase.
It’s just this kind of pastor who needs to read this article. Reading it could help encourage discouraged pastors to continue in the ordinary means of grace that the Spirit has blessed in communities and mission fields across the ages, and, as they zealously labor in the gospel God’s way, God will give the growth. And it will be sustainable.