Hardly the Last Word

I wish I had the video-editing aptitude and the comfort in front of a camera that Callid Keefe-Perry does, but his thoughtful vlog entry (I haven’t used that neologism for years–it feels good to type it) warrants a thoughtful response, so I’ll do so in text, the medium with which I remain more comfortable.

On Ex Cathedra Pronouncements and Hipness

To take on the easiest question first, we hosts of the Christian Humanist Podcast have only ever made two ex cathedra pronouncements, one on episode 2 (the John Calvin episode) and the other on episode 5 (the New Calvinist/Emergent episode).? Not coincidentally, they both happened when I was moderating.? We do, of course, make them in jest–we’re all three aware that we’re parts of Protestant traditions that don’t recognize ex cathedra pronouncements, and even if our traditions recognized them, we’re pretty sure that they’d ask someone other than three English teachers to make them.

To give you an idea of the seriousness level, the second one, to which you refer, is that pastors ought not to be hip.? The first was that women at Christian colleges are no longer allowed to tell young men that they don’t think it’s God’s will that they should date.? Date or don’t date, but don’t pull the God’s Will card.

Now the more serious question is that of hipness.? I should first point out that the “test of hipness” was Michial Farmer’s idea.? In the course of discussion I proposed the possibility that, whereas New Calvinists separate themselves from the unwashed masses in terms of doctrinal purity, Emergent folks tended to separate themselves from the unwashed masses in terms of commitment to certain New-Left political causes like environmentalism and LGBTQI rights.? (If I’ve left a letter off of the latest rights-acronym, forgive my oversight.)? Farmer countered with the suggestion that, if Emergent folks tended to separate themselves from the masses, it was the bourgeois masses rather than the unwashed and that hipness, not political involvement, was the primary marker.? It was in that context that I made my ex cathedra statement.

Now to the question of hipness itself: Callid says in his video (I can’t write vlog more than once in a post, parenthetical asides aside) that hipness was something that some people just were, that there was no real ethical problem with hipness.? With that I’d want to quibble just a bit.? Had Callid simply said that consumer choices are value-neutral, that some people just like Macs and have no real relationship with the “make fun of the overweight bourgeois kid who looks vaguely like Bill Gates” culture that their ads invent and rely upon for their corporate image, I might have thought that his view of consumerism was a bit naive and moved on.? But if I remember the video right, he said outright that “hip” and “cool” were alright, and I want to start with a bit of thought on those signs.

Both “hip” and “cool” have their roots in jazz culture, which is great, but both get appropriated rather quickly by the music industry, which is not so great.? Both terms have come, in their brief histories, to signify a separation between working-class and leisure-class, between bourgeois and bohemian, between old and young.? What the hepi “seers” of San Francisco in the fifties could see that their company-man contemporaries could not is a question for interesting historical inquiry, but as with most “counter-culture” movements of the latter half of the twentieth century, the image-peddlers quickly enough swept up the affects and the props of the hipsters and cool cats, selling them to the children of those same bourgeoisie in the shape of movie tickets and various vehicles of recorded music, manufacturing a “generation gap” not unique in any grand, black-hole-singularity sense but also not precedented by much of anything in human history.

What does this have to do with hip pastors?? Plenty.? If a pastor owns a U2 album or ten (or Ten by Pearl Jam), great.? I’ve got no problem with that.? (If U2 doesn’t count as hip, that only goes to show that I’m on the outside of “cool” looking in.)? But if a pastor intentionally apes the culture of “cool” to demonstrate that he’s somehow superior to folks who work for a living, I think there’s a problem with that.? I write this as someone who has come to accept the utility of certain kinds of moral superiority–if there weren’t people parading their commitment to bodily health, I’d be even more of a fat slob than I already am, and if there weren’t moralizing environmentalists, I’d probably recycle even less than I do.? And don’t even get me started on all the easily available garbage on the Internet.? The point is that certain kinds of moral superiority I can live with, but the late-capitalist, store-bought hipness against which we pronounced ex cathedra can’t even rightly claim to be a moral superiority; if there is any morality in what David Brooks calls the Bourgeois Bohemian (BoBo) pattern of consumption, I’ve not been able to discern it.? Instead, the culture of cool creates artificial hierarchies among the subjects of Capitalism’s empire for the sake of keeping us blind to the real Powers (in the Pauline sense) that define us, and I’ve spent too much time combatting that particular flavor of crap among teenagers (I’m a long-time veteran youth ministry volunteer/sponsor/teacher) simply to smile at it when forty-year-olds start that nonsense.

So while I’m not going to pretend that our ex cathedra statement was anything but a moment of sophomoric humor, I’m also not ready to back down from the ethical problems that come with the culture of cool and the real nausea that I experience when pastors attempt to participate in it.

Conversations and Conversations

I’ve decided that I’m likely going to write more than one part to this response, but while I’m on a roll, I should say that I could easily get on board with the vision of the Emergent conversation that you articulate in your video.? In fact, in my years on the message boards over at theooze.com, I think I can say without crossing my fingers that, in my conversations with folks like Andrew Rens and Julie and Mike Clawson, I was in fact part of that conversation.? For that matter, what you call the Emergent Conversation–Christians from various backgrounds coming together for the sake of mutual edification without discarding the particulars of those various backgrounds–the hosts of the Christian Humanist Podcast would likely call being-a-Christian-in-a-state-university’s-English-department.? After all, even on our little show, if you remember, I tended to be much more sanguine about New Calvinism and Emergent than Michial Farmer was, and David Grubbs wasn’t even sure that New Calvinism meant anything but came down very hard on Emergent.? In other words, the ongoing open-ended conversation that Emergent prides itself on (and to some extent rightly, I’d add) is also going on in other settings by other names.

That said, I do have to agree with you that folks who split off to form their own “young people’s churches” are wrong-headed but disagree with you that Emergent has nothing to do with that.? During my years on theooze.com, I encountered over and over again an attitude that said continued involvement with “the IC” (Institutional Church”) was at best a comfortable compromise with corruption and at worst at its heart anti-Jesus.? That was not the only stance towards my being a Deacon in a relatively conservative Churches of Christ congregation, but it also was not my own fabrication.? (I’m also a Homebrewed Deacon, which just means, I reckon, that I’m ready to serve in all sorts of places.)? Now don’t read what I’m not writing: I recognize that gatherings of folks from Emergent persuasions are not the only groups that age-segregate, and most of the hipster congregations I know tend to be Evangelical or even sectarian in orientation.? And yes, most of the Emergent folks I know are older than me.? But because I take Michial Farmer’s stories seriously, I also have to acknowledge that, among college students, the urge to abandon the old in favor of segregated gatherings at least correlates with Emergent, even if the latter does not cause the former, and that segregation, which as I noted before I see as a symptom of late capitalism, is a sin that Christians should decry out loud and as often as necessary.? (There’s my moment of moral superiority, if anyone’s interested.)

So to the extent that Emergent is a conversation among people who also serve local congregations, Ich bin ein Emergent. (My German is worse than my Hipster, I know.)? But when Emergent becomes just another movement of the age-segregated, cable-television, niche-market world of Consumerism, I’m not going to pretend it’s not there, and I’m not going to pretend that it’s alright.? I don’t think Callid does either, and for that reason, I anticipate that the second part of this post is going to be a bit less strident.? I have been and hope to continue to be, after all, part of an Emergent blog, a friend of good folks like Tripp Fuller, and a fan even if not a legionnaire in an Emerging Cohort.? But until then, I do ask Callid and others to correct what oversights are in this little post.? I’m going the best I can, but after all, what I say is Hardly the Last Word.