Blogger/writer/film critic Brett McCracken has been busy at work on a book about Christian hipsters. We know this because he’s been posting some of his thoughts on the subject at his blog The Search.
Just today, he took on the risky ritual of (the horror) defining the Christian hipster. He deserves props for opening himself up to a potential backlash from the label-jars-not-people-crowd while more or less capturing in a nutshell me and many of the other Christians I’ve known over the years. It takes one to know one, I guess.
Click HERE for the complete list of characteristics. Here’s an abbreviated idea of what he’s getting at:
1. You don’t like megachurches, altar calls and door-to-door evangelism.
2. You don’t really like John Eldredge’s Wild At Heart and pastors who talk too much about Braveheart.
3. You don’t like people like Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell.
4. You don’t like contemporary Christian music or any non-book item sold at Family Christian Stores.
5. You hate warehouse churches with American flags on stage, or churches with any flag on stage.
6. You love books like Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider and God’s Politics by Jim Wallis.
7. You tend to be fans of any number of the following authors: Flannery O’Conner, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, etc.
8. You love poetry readings, worshipping with candles and smoking pipes while talking about God.
9. You love piercings, dressing a little goth, getting lots of tattoos, carrying flasks and smoking cloves.
10. You tend to get jobs working for churches, parachurch organizations, nonprofits, or the government.
The above photo is of Welcome Wagon, a Brooklyn band Christian hipsters flocked to because of their Sufjan Stevens association when they released their debut album last December.
Tangzine 
February 27, 2009 at 5:46 pm |
i hope that it has a Jeff Foxworthy tone to the whole thing like you’re title! that would be amazing.
i’m sure there is a demand for a longer list, even though most of these describe half a billion people on the planet. nobody seems to like being called a hipster, though. i think there may be a market for such musings and most likely the market is the people who would be irritated by reading it.
hopefully he donates the proceeds of the book to a charity that christian hipsters love. christian hipsters love to give away their money.
March 2, 2009 at 8:42 pm |
Right on. I love giving money away. But am I still hip giving money away if it’s money I made selling my CD collection on Half.com?