Why Hipster: My Reluctant Use Of A Bad Label

Labels aren’t usually (ever?) a good thing. Most often we create labels in order to categorize people, which allows us to assume we know them without having to make any effort. I’ve written about this elsewhere. Needless to say I don’t like labels. But many have been applied to me over the years. I’ve been called many things in my life. Some are too awful to repeat, some were just silly. Since I’ve become a pastor the labels have changed but persisted. My personal favorite is being called a “Hippie,” on more than one occasion (including the lady who left the church I served as worship pastor, saying she wasn’t coming back until the hippie quit playing his guitar in service). So, if I have all this disapproval of labels why, now, have I persisted in using the label “Hipster”? After all Hipster is a derogatory word used to classify people as eccentric, pretentious, and ridiculous. So why say it, why write a series of posts on a Theology for Hipsters, why use a label other than Christian (a label with its own baggage)? I have reluctantly utilized the label of Hipster because it allows me to point people to the value of a group of young men and women who are often overlooked and devalued.

Let me begin by saying that I have reluctantly used this label. I’ve been called a “Hipster” often, usually with a bit of tongue-in-cheek by friends. But I don’t actually think I am a “hipster.” No one does. But for whatever reason that is the way whole swaths of our culture have categorized my friends and I. That is the way people speak about the members of my church and those who pastor them. And all of this because of our interests, concerns, hobbies, and convictions. It’s ridiculous at some level, of course, but there’s not anything we can do about that. You can’t change the way people respond to you, view you, and categorize you. We are not “hipsters,” but people identify us that way. I don’t like the label but there it is.

Second, let me state that regardless of how you label my friends and church members I believe that they are all too often written off. I certainly felt that reality when I read Brett McCracken’s book a few years ago. He basically criticized and lambasted “hipsters” without considering all the ways God is using them and the things God is doing through them. Most often when people call another a “hipster” it is because they are discounting them. So I’ve been using the label too but not in the same way. My goal is to encourage people to reconsider those that they are labeling as “hipsters”. One man’s “hipster” is another pastor’s excited, passionate missionary.

Finally, I recognize that some folks are “weird.” And maybe some people do fit the real bill of “hipster” (though I am not really convinced). But weird, eccentric, even “hipster” is not a sin. And the energy that so many in our culture have put into mocking, belittling, and contemning should not be found in the church culture. I believe, as I am going to make increasingly clear in my Theology for Hipsters series, that so many of these so-called hipsters are actually some of our best missionaries, servants, and gospel-partners in the church today (I will defend this conclusion in that series). In other words just because someone is different does not meant that they are sinning…nor does it mean that they are “hipsters.”

Maybe I shouldn’t use the label at all. Maybe I should just talk about the young men and women in our church, and my friends etc. But for whatever reason culture has deemed us “hipsters” and that’s the language that cultural analysts and now churchmen are using. So in order to encourage re-evaluating their assumptions I am using the term….even if reluctantly.

Don’t forget to register for the Hipster’s Theology Gift Set…contest ends this Friday.