a merry rant: desperate measures of christianity

Friday night my friend Hannah and I traveled to the wilds of Chattanooga intent on The Book of Liz. When the box-office receptionist informed us that the play was sold-out, we rearranged our plans, ultimately perching ourselves at Rembrandt's Café - a lovely coffee house/bakery in Chattanooga's Art District.

As usual our conversation covered a ridiculous range of topics, from the respectable merits of genre novelists to the Augustinian revival through the Calvinist Reformation (bleh) so that our empty cups and cleaned plates must have collected a bit of dust before we surrendered to the 11pm closing chime.

One topic we wove through considerably is the Christian movement of pop/hipster culture integration (endorsed by the magazine Relevant and movie-theater-turned-church billboards that boast "a different kind of church"). As a student at a Christian liberal arts university, the topic is especially visible and, well, relevant.

Despite the claims of secular cultural integration, secular remains acceptable only when it's made applicable to the religious. This is delusional. No matter how much internal tweaking you do to make out the Gospel of John in Ok Computer, Radiohead in its un-processed form is not made of the same stuff as Christian spirituality.

Reality is a braid of innumerable strands, and one strand does not become more universally prominent by translucently (i.e., philosophically) shading over the others. The 'strand' has to become unavoidable, and ideological rehashing is very, very avoidable.

Anyway, rather than allow internal transformation via secular influence, a "reformed" follower ends up simply filtering for herself the world through already-imbedded religious worldviews, and yet Christians' lack of autochthonous ingenuity legitimizes the secular culture's dominance.

Regardless of ideological foundation, action and creativity are unavoidable forces.

Of course to propel these forces for the good of spirituality they must emanate from a strong spiritual center. Spirituality is essential. But the energy Christians use to prove cultural relevance perpetuates Christianity as a religion that focuses on identity rather than spirituality.