9 minute readThis piece is intended as a direct follow-up to “Wrong from the Start: How Christian Culture Keeps Pulling Us Away from Jesus” and is the first in a series introducing Beatnik Christianity.
The more I try to follow Jesus, the more I trigger the wrath of Christian culture.
Last year a back-up priest freaked out at me over the phone. The issue was that my wife kept getting inadvertently poisoned by gluten cross-contamination while the primary priest was out on sabbatical. Rather than call or email us to inquire about the nature of our concerns, he said what we asked for was “impossible” despite it being a standard practice in The Episcopal Church.
When I gently voiced our concerns and shared my own experiences in successfully addressing this very issue, he erupted with vitriolic profanity. I warned him that his behavior was inappropriate. When he continued, I hung up. From his perspective, I disrespectfully violated a major point of social etiquette that’s dear to Christian culture: deference to spiritual authority.
The kicker was his email early the next morning.
Despite him being the one who’d spazzed while I remained civil, the stand-in delivered what was the harshest pseudo-psychological analysis I’ve ever read. It culminated in his declaring that I was operating out of my Jungian “shadow self.” It’s true that I was generally stressed at the time, but when I called him back I actually was operating out of my “authentic self.”
The trouble is, Christian culture sees my authentic self as my shadow self and vice versa. The healthier I am, the unhealthier Christian culture perceives me to be. It never fails. But, see, that gets to the very heart of the matter. It’s been my consistent experience that Christian culture has little to no room available for the counterculture even though Jesus inhabited that space.
In recent years, I’ve done a fair bit of professional therapy and spiritual direction.
I’ve worked hard at self-care, especially using the Enneagram as a lens of self-understanding and healing. I’m a 5w4, which means I’m “The Observer” who leans into “The Romantic.” This particular combination is also known as “The Iconoclast.” In Don Richard Riso‘s and Russ Hudson’s book, The Wisdom of the Enneagram, they describe the healthy 5w4 this way:
Curiosity and perceptiveness combine in this subtype with the desire to express a unique, personal vision. These people are more emotional, introspective, and creative than Fives with a Six-wing. They seek a niche that has not been explored by others–something that can truly be their own. Not scientifically oriented, they are often creative loners, mixing passion and detachment. They are whimsical and inventive: their tinkering with familiar forms can lead to startling innovations. Often drawn to the arts, they use the imagination more than the analytic, systematic parts of their minds.
The thing is, Christian culture has no room for such iconoclastic values.
Take the aforementioned situation with the substitute priest as an example. I believe in critical faithfulness whereas Christian culture usually demands uncritical loyalty. That value informs all my interactions with clergy. Here I was trying to help by charitably offering feedback from my experiences, but he interpreted it critically as a disrespectful sleight to his spiritual authori-tah.
Christians often hear stuff like this and dismiss it as untempered idealism. This I find rather ironic since one of my ideals is compromise, but I digress… My question is, to what do we aspire? Are we striving to follow Jesus or is the goal assimilation to Christian culture? C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
It seems like Christian culture only aims at earth.
Friendship was the subject of a recent episode of The Good Life Project. Jonathan Fields said one of the key things he looks for in friendship is a person whose very presence helps regulate his nervous system through this radiating sense of calm. He looks for someone whose energy makes him feel safe, inducing him to chill and feel psychologically embodied.
That is the essence of my problem with Christian culture. Even back when I was a fundie who earnestly tried to conform, I encountered persistent abuse and neglect. To this day I seldom feel at ease or peaceful around Christian culture. Instead it’s usually fight, flight, or freeze. It dysregulates my system. The whole time I’m hypervigilant as I wait for the other shoe to drop.
And all of that is before we get to the core breakdown of communication.
Have you ever had the exhausting experience of talking to someone whose thought patterns are so completely different than yours that he cannot help but imbue all of your common words with a completely different meaning? It’s like the doublespeak in George Orwell‘s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that “deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words.”
Take the word “conservative.” Many people these days claim conservatism as their ideology yet are supremely vague about what they’re actually, ya know, conserving. Theodore Roosevelt was conserving the environment and Dwight Eisenhower was conserving government spending on the military, but today’s Republicans? Apparently they’re “conservatives” who conserve nothing.
It’s the same phenomenon whenever I say, “I’m a Christian.”
By that term people, both inside and outside Church communities, usually infer a meaning that is almost the exact opposite of what I actually mean. Up is down. Left is right. Black is white. Good is bad. Day is night. Rigid is flexible. It’s as though we’re living in different realities. It’s like Bizarro World in DC Comics where things are “weirdly inverted or opposite to expectations.”
When people imagine a Christian, they seem to expect certain cultural norms and behavioral patterns that differ radically from my modus operandi. I’m busy trying to love the Lord with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength and love my neighbor as myself. Meanwhile, they’re expecting piety like Flanders from The Simpsons or hypocritical belligerence like Angela from The Office.
It’s that zig and zag thing again.
I aspire to maintain intellectual integrity in upholding balance, tension, paradox, and complexity while Christian culture pragmatically tries to Keep It Simple, Stupid. I insist upon restorative justice whereas Christian culture is content to forgive and forget. My soul needed to lament at my dad’s funeral while Christian culture demanded oppressive optimism at a Celebration of Life.
Christian culture wants to save face and sweep child sexual abuse under the carpet whereas I want to publicly defrock both the sexual predators and the institutional leaders who protect them. Christian culture wants the state to vengefully execute convicted child rapists whereas I want the state to lock ’em up for good and compassionately provide much-needed treatment.
Effective communication doesn’t take place when I say, “I’m a Christian.”
I refuse to say, “I’m not a Christian; I’m a follower of Jesus.” That’s been done and found wanting. Honestly, I find that find sentiment a tad self-righteous and historically illiterate. Not to mention most of the believers I’ve encountered who reject “Christian” in favor of “I’m just a Jesus follower” have been persons in the Restorationist, Pentecostal, or non-denominational traditions.
My sense is that it’s important to retain rather than abandon the noun “Christian.” It still does communicate that one is committed to following Jesus Christ. Whatever the glaring cultural baggage, the term provides a rich historical continuity to the Jesus community going all the way back to Acts 11. That legacy is meaningful even if it’s deeply flawed. The noun stays.
What I need is a good adjective.
There’s also no single figure I can point to that captures it like Lutheran or Wesleyan Christians have got. Yes, it’s true I’m an Anglican Christian, but here I mean something more… and different… than that. And progressive Christian is factually inaccurate as I don’t subscribe to progressivism’s underlying (capital-M) Myth of progress. I’m postliberal but that ain’t it, either.
For a bit there I was toying with “Beatitudes Christian,” reflecting my view that the beatitudes are the heart and soul of Jesus’ teaching while being merely tolerated by most Christian culture. Not gonna lie. Part of me still really likes that but, ultimately, I decided it doesn’t quite get the job done. It doesn’t rhetorically summarize the ethos I’m aiming to describe.
That left me wondering, ‘So, what am I rhetorically trying to accomplish?’
In my opinion, the problem is not Jesus, the Bible, the episcopal governance of the ante-Nicene Church, or the creedal plot points of the redemptive story. The problem is the way Christian culture has fleshed out the faith. What I’m seeking to communicate, then, is pursuing The Way of Jesus via intentionally moving away from Christian culture as it has been handed down.
I’ve spent so much precious time and energy redefining the word “Christian” for people. I need to firmly communicate that, at long last, I’m D-O-N-E. I refuse to play the game by those rules anymore, to allow Christian culture to dictate the rules of engagement. I need an adjective with a bit of an edge that communicates a countercultural expression of Christian spirituality.
What I’m trying to accomplish, then, is to disrupt the system.
My goal is to break, or at least jostle, the neural pathways with which Jesus followers process all matters of faith and spirituality. I’m looking for a term that fundamentally recalibrates and restarts conversations about what Christian spirituality entails. People hear Christian and immediately assume all these things. How do I short circuit that mental process?
Christian culture tends to enculturate people into hearing A, assuming B, projecting C, and accusing people of “logically” believing D. It’s these defense mechanisms that inhibit curiosity and creativity. I need a term that breaks that chain. I’m looking for an adjective that promotes neuroplasticity and causes people to pause, do a double take, and ask, “What’s that now?”
Thus it came to be that I now describe myself as a “Beatnik Christian.”
Right out of the gate, I’m fully aware this won’t go over well in some quarters. I grew up among Republican Pentecostals who used “liberal” and “Democrat” as epithets that were only surpassed in disparaging malice by “hippies” and “beatniks.” The O.G. beats are virtually all dead now, but their legacy is still reviled by straight-laced, White, Baby Boomer Christians.
The truth is, I had a cultural affinity for the beatniks even back when I was a dittohead who constructed his college freshman schedule around listening to Rush Limbaugh. Having repented of my raging right-wing jackassery, I’m leaning into beatnik culture like I should’ve done almost two decades ago when I chose the evangelical path, cut my long hair, and attended Bible college.
Last year I watched Aaron Sorkin‘s film, The Trial of the Chicago 7.
As with all things Sorkin, the film is excellent. It takes place in the late-1960s, so some of the characters are more hippie (and Black Panther) than beatnik. Nevertheless, it does a superb job contrasting the cultural values between oppressive mainstream institutionalists seeking to protect the status quo and the open-minded counterculture insurgents pushing for change.
Growing up I’d watch The Wonder Years and imagine hanging out with my dad at the same age. It was like Marty McFly meeting George. As I watched Sorkin’s film, it dawned on me, ‘Oh, crap. My father definitely would’ve sided with the conservatives who invoked “law and order” but actually just despised the counterculture.’ It helped me reinterpret many early life experiences.
Also, a dozen years ago I was a moderate evangelical and new to the Anglican tradition.
I affirmed creedal orthodoxy, supported women’s ordination, held to a position of “welcoming but not affirming… and don’t be a jerk about it,” affirmed radical nonviolence, leaned Open Theist-ish, and had no fondness for the Tea Party. Theologically, I aligned more with the conservative ACNA yet synced more with the liberal Episcopalians culturally and politically.
That put me in quite the pickle. Back then, however, I naively thought theological convictions were what mattered most to Christians. That’s how I entered a decade of ecclesiastical hell. What I only now realize is this: even when I earnestly tried to conform, my subconscious/latent Beatnik Christian tendencies were always gonna get me in trouble with the rigid traditionalists.
My peeps are those who have a bit more… spunk?
One of my favorite theologians, Stanley Hauerwas, acknowledged, “I’m not a pious person. It just dunnit come naturally.” Yup. I have greater cultural affinity for Shane Claiborne and Tony Campolo than N.T. Wright and Russell Moore. Nothin’ but love for the good bishop and I’m glad Christianity Today hired Moore, but my preference is Hauerwas-ian countercultural grit.
Likewise, I resonate with the badass femininity of Nadia Bolz-Weber, Anne Lamott, and Lisa Sharon Harper and not the classically feminine evangelicalism of Sarah Sumner, Beth Moore, and Stasi Eldredge. My wife is getting a Wonder Woman + Lord of the Rings crossover tattoo, which I dig. I’m just more of a Cards Against Humanity than an Apples to Apples kinda guy.
So, who were the beatniks?
More than an encyclopedia summary, it’s essential to understand the spirit of the movement. In the documentary, The Source: The Story of The Beats and The Beat Generation, the beat writer, Amiri Baraka, is quoted as saying, “The Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked.”
The Beat Generation was a bohemian movement of cultural dissent, offering a small but powerful voice of prophetic critique. If the 1950s are remembered in the cultural consciousness for their wholesome tropes, then the beats were the counterpoint. They provided the artistic, intellectual, and countercultural foundation upon which the hippies coalesced in the 1960s.
Why don’t people know about the beatniks?
The Beat Generation was overshadowed–both numerically and in terms of media coverage–by their hippie successors. As a result, they’ve been largely forgotten in popular history. As one writer put it, “Hippies were the romanticized mass media fueled movement of the late 1960s. Larger in size but stripped of much of its intellectual counterculture firepower.”
Few today would recognize names like Allen Ginsberg, William Burrough, or Jack Kerouac, but there’s no question they collectively launched the mid-20th century counterculture revolution. It’s like how George Mikan was the NBA’s first dominant “big man,” but most basketball fans think of Russell vs. Chamberlain as the league’s OG big men. Mikan is an afterthought.
Despite my affinity for the Beat Generation, I don’t idealize or romanticize them.
This isn’t revisionist hagiography. I’m well-aware of the limitations and flaws of the original beats. Quite honestly, I think many of them had sex way too indiscriminately, consumed an unhealthy amount of recreational drugs, failed to live into their professed spiritual values, and were annoying pseudo-intellectuals. Some of ’em also wrote some truly god-awful poetry.
So why on earth self-describe as a Beatnik Christian? Two short reasons. First, I’m convinced the countercultural spirit of the Beat Generation aligns with The Way of Jesus. The execution was flawed, but the impulse was right. Second, the countercultural energy of the Beatnik Generation feels safe to me. Where Christian culture dysregulates my system, beat culture brings me peace.
The forthcoming series on Beatnik Christianity is a good faith effort to rebuild.
As a young man, I possessed the zeal of the newly converted. I sincerely thought that by deep-diving Christian theology, history, and culture I’d inch ever closer to Jesus. Instead all that research led to two decades of spiritual deconstruction. The more closely I observed Jesus as described in the New Testament, the more disillusioned I’ve become with Christian culture.
In the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, there is a season for everything and a time to every purpose under the heaven. There is a time for faith and a time for doubt, a time for deconstruction and a time for reconstruction. Having thoroughly rejected the expectations of Christian culture, Beatnik Christianity is how I’m reconstructing a consciously countercultural vision of following Jesus.
