Abstract
The Pew Research Center (2012) reports that about one-third of young adults claim no religious affiliation at all. Thus, one might find it surprising that a growing number of Christian churches could be populated by twenty-somethings sporting skinny jeans, large-framed glasses, and sailor tattoos. Nevertheless, it appeared that this burgeoning movement had made its presence known in my backyard, almost literally, in fact; the pastors of a neighborhood hipster church both reside within two blocks of my house. I got to know them as part of my research on consumerism and Christianity.
Before starting their church, the pastors played in a band that self-identified with the musical genre of ska (the very same genre/subculture Dick Hebdige so incisively explored). The band successfully recorded multiple albums (some of which charted on Billboard) and toured widely. While musically polished and expertly played, the music otherwise mirrored that of any other so-called “third wave” ska band of the time. Significantly, the band members looked the part: mod-ish, tattooed, shaved head or mohawked at times. Like other ska bands, they aligned themselves with the punk counterculture and yet the explicit and unapologetic motivation and central message of the band was Christian proselytization. So, just like hipster religion more generally, the band represented one of late capitalism’s many contradictions; in this case: conformity through rebellion.
Hipster religion, I would contend, is merely one element in the imbrication that is aspirational consumerism. For those who are unable to attain the kind of status celebrated in American consumer culture, “cool” can function in lieu of more traditional forms of conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless hipsterism, and its putative non-conformist lifestyle, is made possible only through a global consumer market that fetishizes a niche market of commodities (i.e., the “right” clothes, music, neighborhoods, etc.). It is the same reification that occurs more generally as Ivanova (2011) describes in her article “Consumerism and the Crisis: Wither ‘the American Dream’?” She writes: “Buying things has thus become the fetish form in which the exploitative class relation between labor and capital is hidden” (p. 336). Perhaps the only difference with respect to hipster religion is the “value-added” prospect of life everlasting. So while hipster churches have co-opted cool (allowing participants to brand themselves as Christians-with-cachet) there is a cultural contradiction. Hipster churches are imbricated in a structural complacency that is leveraged by an assurance of personal salvation. After all, what is hipster cool if not a blasé shoulder-shrug combined with an ironic acceptance of the status quo? As Slavoj Zizek (2004) writes, today one finds a predominant…
Prohibition against embracing a belief with full passion [which] may explain why, today, religion is only permitted as a particular “culture,” or lifestyle phenomenon, not as a substantial way of life. We no longer “really believe,” we just follow (some of) the religious rituals and mores out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong.
It is cool to be disinterested. As a point of fact, I have now visited a number of hipster churches only to discover much that would appease the secular who are cynical of religion’s critical promise and political potential: sanctimony barely tempered by fashionable and attractive young pastors (usually male) who pay lip service to their proximity to an urban location while valorizing cultural authenticity as a proxy for community engagement. The mere fact of attending church in proximity to a blighted neighborhood becomes recourse to a kind of “decaffeinated resistance,” symptomatic of a more general, depoliticization. Indeed, the majority of the worship communities I have visited have disavowed their role in contributing to white flight and urban deconcentration (and all this takes place in metro Detroit).
Of course, hipster religion is not a monolith. A research partner recently introduced me to a hipster church that, while not explicitly addressing the historical legacies of racism and exploitation, is attempting to redress some of the current ills afflicting its Detroit environs. Unlike my experience with many other hipster churches, this congregation was relatively racially integrated and members of the surrounding neighborhood (decidedly non-hipster) are also involved. The pastor of the church, albeit young, male, fashionable, and attractive, has made community engagement a central theme to his sermons. “We’re not just in these four walls to congratulate each other for being Christian. We have to serve the needs of the community,” he once said to his congregation of almost 200. Actively working in the city of Detroit, devastated as it has been by a pronounced neoliberal ideology, is the singular recurring theme to his sermons.
Once, after learning that an insufficient number of church members had signed up to take part in a new volunteer activity, the pastor told the church that he was heart-broken. Speaking almost tearfully, he reproached the congregation for what he perceived to be a lack of commitment and dedication. “I don’t want to do church in here,” he said, “I want to do church out there,” gesturing around him. And for the most, the church has been in completely agreement. They have accomplished a variety of service projects benefitting dozens, if not hundreds, of Detroiters directly. Not the least of which included renovating an entire block of abandoned, burned out, or otherwise sacked homes. The members’ work contributed to rebuilding the neighborhood by creating habitable homes in an otherwise impoverished community.
That being said, one cannot excuse the institution of Christianity for its long history of entrenched oppressions, legacies of inflicting fear and violence, historical expressions of racism, homophobia, xenophobia and the like. But there continue to be positive religious social movements that belie the absence of people like Saul Alinsky, Dorothy Day, or Jaques Ellul. Just last year, in a move that seemed to contradict the previous papacy’s hostility toward the Marxism underlying Liberation Theology, Pope Francis issued an Evangelii Gaudium: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” In an excoriation of neoliberalism, he addressed the inanity of trickle-down economics, rampant financial speculation, and the global autonomy of the free market.
So while religion is the opium, it is also, as Stark and Finke (2000) point out, society’s amphetamine. Quite a few members of the Critical Sociology community have illustrated the liberatory and political potential of religion: Titus Hjelm (2013); Andrew McKinnon (2005); Jean-Pierre Reed (2013); and Warren Goldstein (2001), just to name a handful. These scholars remind us that organized religion is not a monolith only capable of divisiveness and congratulatory self-righteousness. However, these perspectives tend to be comparatively less salient in the leftist sociological imagination.
Instead, much attention (scholarly and otherwise) has been granted to the destructive power of neo-conservative, Evangelical religion. In the cultural consciousness they continue to propel “theo-economic resentments and entitlements” of the political right (Connolly, 2008: 35). Economistic and rational choice sociologists continue to be captivated by the counter-intuitive finding that increasing numbers of Americans have, for several decades now, joined the ranks of stricter, more demanding Evangelical churches. At the same time, a diminishing number of Americans are participating in so-called “mainline” religious organizations that are middle-of-the-road theologically and politically and demand comparatively little in the way of time, money, and labor from their worshippers.
Among these mainline churches, one is also apt to locate the progressive-oriented denominations like the Unitarian Universalists, United Churches of Christ, and Unity Church. While these organizations tend to lean left, surveys suggest that, like other self-identifying liberals, they are more reluctant to closely identify with any particular religious doctrine. “I’m spiritual but not religious” would be a likely response to the question: “What religion are you?”
These mainline religions typify a problem with left-liberalism: a kind of “to each his own” form of ethical relativism that discharges individuals from committing to a particular standpoint and conviction. It should come as little surprise then, that such religions carefully and oftentimes conspicuously avoid addressing issues of good and evil or conveying prescriptive guidelines regarding beliefs and behavior. Quite the opposite, one is quite likely to hear consumer-centric messages that focus on self-fulfillment, living a purposeful life, and therapeutic glosses on work, marriage, and the family. Rather than emphasizing connection and commitment through dialogue and engagement with one’s community, distance and personal distinction are often valorized. The legitimacy of such experiences may even devolve into what sufficiently counts as my pleasure, my beliefs, my enjoyment. James Twitchell citing a study on a popular mainline megachurches discovered that “The word ‘I’ was used more than 6,000 times… while specific Scripture was cited only 169 times” (2004: 95). And in a content analysis of Joel Osteen’s messages, the most frequent themes revolved around a selection of terms: “[A]bundance, blessing, champion, dream, expectancy, hero, hope, overcomer, prosperity, success, and victor” (Sodal, 2010: 45); all of which reveal the emphasis on the self, particularly the self as consumer.
Mainline, liberal, progressive religion is devolving into the marketing of an acquiescent lifestyle engendered by a consumerist quest for self-actualization. It is commensurate with the individualizing consumer culture, one that reflects a kind of “mass-pseudo-demassification” (Farrell 1980) in which we believe we can manufacture an identity through our “unique” consumptive behaviors, values, and habits. Rebellion, non-conformity, and individuality are made widely available through an economy that reinforces market niches while simultaneously veiling commonalities, potential intersubjectivity, and, needless to say, any hint of class-consciousness. This is a far cry from what Zizek (2009) seems to imagine when he writes: “Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms—the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks” (2). Christianity, as well as other organized religions, have empowering and delightfully contentious historically moments—ones that are inherently critical, capable of stoking fires of outrage, and overturning even the most inelastic structures of exploitation by meeting zeal with zeal. Too often, we only learn about the Religious Right, who are dominated by a trenchant fundamentalism, where women continue to be viewed as helpmates, persons of color excluded entirely, and LGBTQI considered pathological. And too often, such Christian radicalism is met by a live-and-let live liberalism—those mainline religions and “spiritual but not religious” groups who preach a sloganizing, facile, bumper-sticker gospel that is devoid of critical traction.
Hipster churches, on the other hand, are situated from their subcultural vantage point to offer political critique of the neoliberal Right. Unfortunately, the focus thus far has been to produce yet one more commodity niche: hipster and Christian. Indeed, they foster an environment wherein Durkheimean collective effervescence is crucial to undermining the boredom or angst of young adulthood. But hosting indie rock bands (in dimly-lit auditoriums complete with smoke machines) as opposed to organists who rely on hymnals (in churches with hard wooden pews) merely perpetuates a market demographic of consumers who have been entrained by a marketing apparatus to celebrate distinction and competition rather than shared interests and class-consciousness. Such collective effervescence is achieved in large part due to the nichifying consumerism that helped create the hipster identity in the first place: musical genres and fashion styles in particular. Given that, the popularity of hipster-ism relies on, among other things: a marketing apparatus that is squarely in the pockets of megalithic corporate retailers; cheap overseas labor to manufacture “fast fashion”; an abundant crop of cheap housing that is made available through the displacement of impoverished communities like the now passé neighborhoods of the Mission District, Williamsburg, or Wicker Park; or the communication technologies that help concentrate wealth and create the class of the über-rich.
Of course, many self-identifying hipsters are very aware of the privilege on which they draw. The fact remains that, in my experience, when asked why young people attend the churches they attend, if it is not because they were raised in the church or their parents attend the church, it is because they feel “comfortable” and “at home” there. This latter rationale has always seemed like a telegraphed acknowledgement of homophily—they simply want to be around others who look the way they themselves look or would like to look, and listen to the same kind of music they themselves listen to. For these individuals, “Religion has thus become an item of consumption: one may come, participate in religious communication, and then leave it behind and go back to an ordinary, everyday, secular life” (Schlamelcher 2013: 66). Inasmuch as this is the case, hipster churches are simply reproducing gimmickry, relying on artificially contrived efforts aimed at recruiting a new generation into the religion of late capitalism with its veiled theo-consumerist tendencies.