Today’s Christian hipsters are doing the reverse. They seek to break out of the Christian subculture. The clothes and customs they shed are nothing less than the evangelical establishment itself, formed through decades of attempts at cool Christianity.

Here’s a riddle: A young man walks into a building. From the outside, it looks like a nondescript, run-down, abandoned warehouse. Inside he finds mood lighting, music with throbbing bass, and young people wearing skinny jeans and superfluous scarves. A bar off to the side offers drinks of some sort, and a frenetically lit stage is shrouded in fog. Jumbo screens display what appear to be music videos. Everywhere people text on their iPhones.

A young woman with a nose ring and a vaguely Middle Eastern tattoo comes up and introduces herself. She makes awkward (but refreshingly earnest) small talk about her passion for community gardens and food co-ops. She asks him if he has heard Arcade Fire’s new album, and compliments him on his bushy beard and lumberjack look. Beards like that are cool, she says. Eventually she asks him for his contact information.

Question: Is the man in a bar? Or is he in a church?

It could go either way.

Welcome to the world of hipster Christianity. It’s a world where things like the Left Behind book and film series, Jesus fish bumper stickers, and door-to-door evangelism are relevant only as a source of irony or nostalgia. It’s a world where Braveheart youth-pastor analogies are anathema, where everyone agrees that they wish Pat Robertson “weren’t one of us” and shares a collective distaste for the art of Thomas Kinkade.

The latest incarnation of a decades-long collision of “cool” and “Christianity,” hipster Christianity is in large part a rebellion against the very subculture that birthed it. It’s a rebellion against old-school evangelicalism and its fuddy-duddy legalism, apathy about the arts, and pitiful lack of concern for social justice. It’s also a rebellion against George W. Bush—style Christianity: American flags in churches, the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, and evangelical leaders who get too involved in conservative politics, such as James Dobson and Jerry Falwell.

The new subculture of young evangelicals—I call them “Christian hipsters”—grew up on Contemporary Christian music (CCM), Focus on the Family’s Adventures in Odyssey, flannel graphs, vacation Bible school, and hysteria about the end times. Now all of that is laughable to them, as they attempt to burn away the kitschy dross of the megachurch Christianity of their youth—with its emphasis on “soul-winning” at the expense of everything else—and trade it for something with real-world gravitas.

They prefer to call themselves “Christ-followers” rather than “Christians.” They cringe at the thought of an altar call, and the prospect of passing out tracts gives them nightmares.

Christian hipsters alarm some church leaders and mystify others. But for many observers, hipster Christianity is an exciting development. It reassures them that not all young people are abandoning the church. They are just rehabilitating its image, making it their own.

In order to remain relevant in this new landscape, many evangelical pastors and church leaders are following the lead of the hipster trendsetters, making sure their churches can check off all the important items on the hipster checklist:
Get the church involved in social justice and creation care.
Show clips from R-rated Coen Brothers films (e.g., No Country for Old Men, Fargo) during services.
Sponsor church outings to microbreweries.
Put a worship pastor onstage decked in clothes from American Apparel.
Be okay with cussing.
Print bulletins only on recycled cardstock.
Use Helvetica fonts as much as possible.
Leverage technologies like Twitter.

This is what hipster Christianity looks like; this is what it requires. But what does it all mean? As the latest zeitgeisty Christian subculture in a long string of zeitgeisty Christian subcultures, what does hipster Christianity offer the church??

And what does it take away?

The History of Cool Faith
Before we examine those questions, we need to take a whistle-stop tour through the somewhat brief history of “Christian cool.”

By most accounts, the story of cool Christianity begins in the 1960s. Its seeds were planted in the exploding post-war youth culture, which gave rise to a new emphasis on youth ministry within evangelicalism, the growth of parachurch organizations like Youth Specialties (founded in 1969), and a general feeling that, to reach increasingly rebellious and countercultural adolescents, Christianity had to get a bit edgier and wiser to the trends of the day.

But the biggest boost for cool Christianity came in the most unexpected way—when, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, hippies started following Christ. Acid-tripping, long-haired, sandal-wearing hippies like Ted Wise and Lonnie Frisbee led the pack, as hip Christian coffeehouses and communes sprung up in San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Chicago, and all across the country.

Denominations like Calvary Chapel and Vineyard exploded, fueled by the charismatic fervor of the young hippie converts. Christian rock was born, led by people like Chuck Girard, a friend of Brian Wilson’s whose band Love Song came out of the Laguna Beach dope scene, and Larry Norman, “the grandfather of Christian rock,” whose 1969 masterpiece, Upon This Rock, is considered the first Christian rock album.

It wasn’t long, however, before the alternative/organic Jesus movement lost steam in the process of becoming mainstream. It wasn’t long before “Christian rock” the movement became CCM the industry.

Welcome to the world of hipster Christianity. It’s a world where things like the Left Behind series, Jesus fish bumper stickers, and door-to-door evangelism are relevant only as a source of irony or nostalgia.

By the 1980s, most of the Jesus People had cut their hair, shaved their beards, and traded in their tunics and sandals for argyle sweaters and penny loafers. Yet the legacy of the hippie Christian movement was alive and well. For one thing, the deeply personal, experiential, Spirit-filled emphasis of the Jesus People remained as the charismatic movement took off, as well as the “just how you like it,” seeker-sensitive approach that became common evangelical practice.

This included an emphasis on the new and an elevation of trend and cool. Following the lead of Chuck Smith, whose outreach to hippies through Calvary Chapel reaped huge dividends, more evangelical leaders in the 1980s and ’90s actively sought cool. They began to reach out to the youth culture and form churches to fit its needs—motivated by a renewed desire to be contemporary, current, and relevant.

As a result, evangelicalism in the ’90s had a firmly established youth culture, built on the infrastructure of a lucrative Christian retail industry and commercial subculture. Huge Christian rock festivals, Lord’s Gym T-shirts, WWJD bracelets, Left Behind, and so forth. It was big business. It was corporate. It was schlocky kitsch. And it was begging to be rebelled against.

Enter the age of the Christian hipster. As the ’90s gave way to the 2000s, young evangelicals reared in the ostentatious Je$us subculture began to rebel. They sought a more intellectual faith, one that didn’t reject outright the culture, ideas, and art of the secular world. In typical hipster fashion, they rejected the corporate mentality of the purpose-driven megachurch and McMansion evangelicalism, and longed for a simpler, back-to-basics faith that was more about serving the poor than serving Starbucks in the church vestibule.

They looked up to young Christian authors and pastors like Shane Claiborne, Rob Bell, and Donald Miller, read Relevant magazine, adored indie-folk musician Sufjan Stevens, and were fascinated by ancient church liturgies and prayers. They began to dress and act like secular hipsters: drinking beer, getting tattoos, riding fixed-gear bikes, and eating raw and organic foods. They took interest in a broader range of issues (the environment, HIV/AIDS, globalization) than their parents’ generation, and voted for Barack Obama.

Read More: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/september/9.24.html?start=3

Brett McCracken is author of Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide (Baker, 2010). He works at Biola University in Los Angeles.