Beatnik Christianity Prioritizes Healthy Kinship Over Just About Everything Else

Allow me to ask some difficult questions. Where do you go for the holidays when you’re happily married to someone of the same sex but you’ve been disowned by both sets of parents over it? Where do you turn for help during a medical crisis when your only sibling threatened your life over political differences? Where do you find childcare during a burst pipe emergency when your spouse is overseas for work and your pastor dismisses your situation by saying, “Oh, well, that’s really not the kind of assistance this church is designed to do. We can send some meals, though.”

Scenarios like these aren’t hypothetical or exceptionally rare. These are the real-life experiences of everyday people trying to get through life. There are a ton of people out there who have little to no social support network. They live with razor thing margins, so when something fairly small goes wrong their whole life falls apart. When I was with AmeriCorps I met a young widow whose child got sick with the flu. There was no family around and her church declined to help, so she missed work. This caused unemployment, which directly led to 2+ years of homelessness.1

These kinds of situations are why I’m existentially exhausted by the cultural values and kinship structures that dominate White Protestant Christianity here in the United States. The celebration of hyper-individualism is crap. The prioritization of selfish autonomy is crap. The glorification of greed is crap. The indoctrination into primary analysis of a person’s logistics with secondary or tertiary empathy is crap. The elevation of the detached nuclear family like it’s gospel truth is crap. The repudiation of alternative kinship structures is crap.2 It’s all contrary to The Way of Jesus.

At this point, I’m all about countercultural attempts to more faithfully follow Jesus by breaking free of those dysfunctional cultural values and broken kinship structures. Celebrating the holidays with a loving chosen family after being disowned by rancorous fundie parents? That’s awesome! Elevating committed friends into surrogate aunt and uncle status in lieu of toxic and/or neglectful siblings? Rock on! Giving up on a church’s habitual over-promising + under-delivering BS to instead move into an intentional community where they’re actually there for one another? Do it!

The original beatniks were down with forcefully challenging sacred cows they found silly, so beatnik Christianity does the same.3 I say to hell with the social expectations when they clearly ain’t working. Nobody who’s lonely, exhausted, hurting, and to their breaking point should feel beholden to honoring the status quo. That’s nuts. Seriously, get creative and do whatever you have to do to relentlessly pursue healthy kinship and build a strong, reliable social support network. I sincerely believe that should be the superseding priority. Do it with wisdom, but do it.