Unto Us, A Hipster Is Born
The birth of the average hipster isn’t overnight. It is usually a long, arduous, and often painful process that takes years. It usually begins about the time that students go off to college. College is breeding ground for would-be-hipsters. For here all cultures converge and fundamentalist children encounter, for the first time ever perhaps, the larger evangelical world. This means running into different interpretations, denominations, convictions, and lifestyles. Here students are forced to reevaluate their beliefs, their practices, and their judgments. Here students meet face to face radical new ideas, and make new friendships. Here Christianity has to become more than the faith of my parents, and so students begin to wrestle with the faith in their own hearts and minds and begin asking questions they had not asked before.
For a lot of young teens these questions begin with questions about who is Jesus. As students begin to talk together and read the Scriptures, perhaps genuinely searching for the firs time, they discover a Jesus who is radical and often anti-establishment. They learn that Jesus and their church are not exactly the same. Like many of the Hippies who were converted during the revivals of the 60s, they begin to see Jesus as a subversive. The Jesus they see in the Bible would probably not be welcomed at their churches back home. After all, Jesus hung out with known criminals and prostitutes and street people, and had long hair and wore open-toed shoes. These are all big Fundamentalist “no-nos.” But the rediscovery of the true Jesus is not all that is going on for young Christians at college.
The biggest and most significant impact on potential Christian Hipsters comes in the form of new relationships. As young Christians meet new friends, particularly different kinds of Christians, they are forced to expand their definitions of Christianity. The Fundy backgrounds they come from had narrowly defined Christian in terms of inane issues of clothing, style, and conformity to man-made laws. But suddenly young Christians are meeting all sorts of nice, Jesus-loving, people who do not fit those Fundy molds. This forces them to rethink what it means to be a Christian. The results are that many of these man-made laws get pushed to the side, and in some a real sense of bitterness towards their Fundamentalist churches develops. These young college students find out that you can be a Christian and not believe in the rapture, and can enjoy a drink, and listen to non-Christian music with a beat. Suddenly there arises an assumption that their churches back home are at best ignorant, at worst dishonest.
There is one other factor, however, which we must not ignore. When it comes to the birth of the Hipster music has a huge influence. Next week we will take time to consider just that.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 