What's with these kids today getting all pierced and tatted up for Jesus? I tried to ignore this movement and hope it would go away but of course it wouldn't, and so I turned to Lauen Sandler's Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. It turns out these kids "found" Jesus while they were looking for something that all the alienated youth of America have been looking for since at least the 1960s--authenticity above all else, but also community and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. I get that part. They're converting to Evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity (I know there's a difference, and multiple people have tried to explain it to me, but I still don't understand) but they're using an anti-establishment/hipster style and rhetoric doing it, you know turning their trucker hats sideways and skating a half-pipe for Jesus and moshing to hardcore and all that. I sorta get that too, because there is a long history of Christians in America (especially the poor and working-class ones) challenging the official dotrine of The Church, usually in the name of more authentic purity to The Word and in the process of challenging the hypocricy of the established authorities in the older generation. But it seriously baffles me that alienated kids who want to rage against the machine are then drawn to doctrines that call on them to submit to a higher power, live in complete denial and repression of their sexuality and their bodies, and renounce drugs and alcohol. I can't understand kids who aren't into sex and drugs, or maybe it's the case that they're actually REALLY INTO sex and/or drugs and they're at war with their desires and their bodies (that's sad, isn't it?) On an intellectual level, I do understand the submission to a higher power, because it recalls Erich Fromm's idea that freedom and individuality is actually terrifying for many (most?) people, and so they turn to the state and/or religion, or, in Fromm's day, the Nazis, because they desire a set of rules and a surrogate father, and they are terrified of being an individual stranded alone on the desert island of (post-)modernity. I understand it intellectually, but I just don't get it personally, I don't "feel it." Yes, the "Secular" culture does leave us stranded and alone, turns us all into numbers not names, leaves us with little cultural meaning besides celebrity trivia and absolutely devoid of any higher purpose beyond career and money. But why does this make people want to vote for George W. Bush, or caucus for Mike Huckabee, or put their bodies in front of abortion clinics with those gigantic pictures of aborted fetuses? But maybe there is hope. First of all, I just can't imagine that kids today are going to put up with that authority/patriarchy/Father bullshit for long, to me it seems like a retro-pose or an ironic fashion statement--like a "wife beater." Maybe the unintended consequence of our consumer culture will be that people are less inclined to "buy into" that top-down patriarchy nostalgia and more insistent on ideas that preserve and uphold their individuality and their rebelliousness, even if they are just imagined identities. I can see that these Jesus freaks have co-opted the 60s, but the 60s have also co-opted them, if you want to use that language (I prefer the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci's phrase that culture wars amount to a "war of position"--All co-optation presupposes some degree of infiltration). But if the kids want authenticity, individuality, creativity, and community, don't you think they'd more naturally be drawn to anarchism, communism, socialism, or any other -ism you might be to find at Ned Flanders' "Left-Orium" of political identities/ideologies/commodities? (and let's face it Lefties, there's a new equation in our society and it's identity=ideology=commodity and on that count our stock has been massively devalued)
