Evangelical Youth Culture: Alternative Music and Extreme Sports Subcultures 9781350020320, 9781350020351, 9781350020344

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Evangelical Christianity and Youth Subculture Theory
2. Christian Punk in an Age of Authenticity
3. Postsecular Punk: Christianity’s Contested Inclusion in Alternative Music Scenes
4. Evangelical Extreme Sports Subcultures and Youth Development Ministry
5. Serious Leisure and Salvation Anxiety in Evangelical Youth Culture
6. Fear of a Black Magic: Evangelical Opposition to Alternative Youth Culture
Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index

Citation preview

Evangelical Youth Culture

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Also available from Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood, edited by Anna Strhan, Stephen Parker and Susan Ridgely Christian Metal, Marcus Moberg Religion in Hip Hop, edited by Monica R. Miller, Anthony B. Pinn and Bernard ‘Bun B’ Freeman The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, edited by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon, Eric Bain-Selbo and D. Gregory Sapp

Evangelical Youth Culture Alternative Music and Extreme Sports Subcultures Ibrahim Abraham

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition published 2019 Copyright © Ibrahim Abraham, 2017 Ibrahim Abraham has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2032-0 PB: 978-1-3501-0808-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2034-4 ePub: 978-1-3500-2033-7 Names: Abraham, Ibrahim, author. Title: Evangelical youth culture : alternative music and extreme sports subcultures / Ibrahim Abraham. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017036089 | ISBN 9781350020320 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350020344 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Church work with youth. | Evangelicalism. | Music–Religious aspects–Christianity. | Sports–Religious aspects–Christianity. | Popular culture–Religious aspects–Christianity. Classification: LCC BV4447 .A27 2017 | DDC 261.084/2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036089 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 Evangelical Christianity and Youth Subculture Theory 2 Christian Punk in an Age of Authenticity 3 Postsecular Punk: Christianity’s Contested Inclusion in Alternative Music Scenes 4 Evangelical Extreme Sports Subcultures and Youth Development Ministry 5 Serious Leisure and Salvation Anxiety in Evangelical Youth Culture 6 Fear of a Black Magic: Evangelical Opposition to Alternative Youth Culture Conclusion

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15 37 61 85 111 135 155 165 170 191

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Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the dozens of musicians, skaters, surfers, pastors, and youth ministry volunteers who shared their experiences and insights. I have also benefited greatly from the support of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol; the discipline of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki; and the Hip Hop in Finland research network. In particular, I  would like to thank Tuulikki Pietilä at the University of Helsinki, Lee Marshall and Gregor McLennan at the University of Bristol, Andrew Singleton at Deakin University, and Lalle Pursglove and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury. Research in South Africa in 2014 and 2015 was made possible by grant number 265976 from the Academy of Finland, for the project “Youth music and the construction of social subjectivities and communities in post-apartheid South Africa.” This book draws upon several earlier articles, reproduced here in part with acknowledgment of the Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, Taylor & Francis, and Intellect Books. Chapter  1 (“Evangelical Christianity and Youth Subculture Theory”) makes use of material previously published in “Pentevangelical Youth Subcultures:  Between Resistance and Compromise,” Youth Studies Australia, 32, no. 3 (2013): 3–12. Chapters 2 and 3 (“Christian Punk in an Age of Authenticity” and “Postsecular Punk”) make use of material previously published in “Respecting Religion in Youth Music Subcultures: Inclusivity, Individuality and Conflict Avoidance Strategy,” International Journal of Children’s Spirituality 19, no.  2 (2014):  83–96, available at http://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/full/10.1080/1364436X.2014.909388, and “Postsecular Punk:  Evangelical Christianity and the Overlapping Consensus of the Underground,” Punk & PostPunk 4, no. 1 (2015): 91–105, available at http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=21139/.

Introduction

This book offers a sociological analysis of contemporary Evangelical Christian youth culture, drawing on observations and interviews with dozens of musicians, sports enthusiasts, and youth pastors. Engaging with multiple theories of youth subcultures from sociology and cultural studies, this book also makes use of contemporary cultural anthropology, debates within social theory on the public role of religion in “postsecular” societies, and introduces the notion of “serious leisure” into the study of religion, youth, and popular culture. Focusing on the source of much innovation in Evangelical youth culture, the United States, home to the “Jesus Movement” of Pentecostal hippies and later the “Spirit-filled hardcore” subculture of Pentecostal punks, this book is also based on interviews and observations in the more secularized societies of Britain and Australia, where Christian punk bands might be greeted with chants in support of the atheist author Richard Dawkins. Data is also drawn from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa, one of the world’s most diverse and unequal societies, where Evangelical surfing and skateboarding ministries provide rare organized leisure opportunities for impoverished youth, and where Evangelical rappers combat the notions circulating in churches that their fashion is criminal and their music is demonic. The primary focus of this book is Evangelical engagements with punk, a deliberately controversial form of popular music and youth culture emerging in the mid-1970s in London and New  York, marked by an amateur rawness and “do-it-yourself ” ethic in opposition to the well-crafted stadium rock and radio-friendly pop of the time. Mutating in the suburbs and small towns of the United States in the 1980s into “hardcore” punk, swapping melody for speed and intensity, punk has become a surprisingly amenable vehicle for Evangelical youth to profess and perform their faith. Hip hop emerged in New York around the same time, evolving from “Black neighborhood party music” with an emcee rhyming over rearranged soul, house, or disco records, into a “pervasive force”

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(Banfield 2010:  173–8), a global youth culture with hedonistic “swag” and a social conscience, incorporating criticisms and fantasies about the inequalities and injustices experienced by urban youth. The key example of extreme sport in this book, surfing, is marked by a similar ambiguity between the hedonistic fantasy of an endless summer beach party and an implicit but intense spirituality that might be reoriented and subordinated within Evangelical beliefs. Once intimately linked to surfing, skateboarding is the other form of extreme sport analyzed in this book, and presents Evangelicals with an easy way to engage with young people but is also a subculture capable of entertaining itself and symbolizing values that Evangelicals are often uncomfortable with. Each of these four subcultures, therefore, presents similar challenges. Evangelicalism is adaptable and ambitious enough to find a home in secular punk scenes, hip hop club nights, surfing carnivals, and skate parks. Nevertheless, the desire to evangelize, and particularly Pentecostal anxiety over the spiritual reality of everyday life, creates hybrid youth subcultures marked by uncertainty. The following section of this introduction will outline and define the key concepts in this book, beginning with Evangelicalism and the imprecise period of life called “youth,” before explaining the methodological approach this book takes.

Contextualizing Evangelical youth culture As the constitutive elements of Evangelical youth culture are potentially ambiguous, and the precise boundaries around the cultural forms this book is concerned with are imprecise, it is worth offering a basic framework for the topics this book covers. Searching for the key difference in the lives of Evangelical youth, Bramadat (2000: 10) argues that “the emphasis on having a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus Christ” is definitive, and anyone who has spent time with Evangelicals and listened to their emic (insider) language, will probably agree. For etic (outsider) definitions, historian David Bebbington’s (1989: 1–17) outline of the four pillars of Evangelicalism—activism, Biblicism, conversionism, and crucicentrism—has been a popular starting point. These definitions typically also acknowledge that each of these pillars may be understood and enacted differently by diverse churches, cultures, and individuals. Defining Evangelicalism cannot just mean listing distinctive doctrines, however, as these four pillars inform the everyday orientations and interactions of Evangelicals in the world, establishing normative forms of belief and behavior, and laying the groundwork for sometimes complex interpersonal relationships and cultural engagements.

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In the context of the Evangelical youth subcultures studied in this book, we will see that the foundational pillars of Evangelicalism influence interactions between Evangelical and non-Evangelical peers, the particular forms that evangelism takes, and the particular sites of contestation or experiences of cultural contradiction that shape Evangelicalism in general, and in its specific alternative music and extreme sports–based forms. “Activism” refers broadly to Evangelical engagement with the world, typically through evangelism (proselytizing) but also through campaigning. The commitment of Evangelical musicians to express their beliefs in music aimed at a secular audience, “witness” a different public morality within the music scene, and maintain cohesive and welcoming music scenes, can be viewed as forms of Evangelical activism. Evangelical “Biblicism” emphasizes the authority of the biblical text above, say, tradition, reason, or personal revelation, and the term “Bible-believing Christian” is a common Evangelical expression of this commitment to the biblical text. Interpreted in different ways within different Evangelical churches (whose authority over the text is far from absolute), Biblicism is enacted through frequent Bible study, including in some unlikely places such as the punk rock Warped Tour (Heisel 2005), and the incorporation of Biblical references into song lyrics. “Conversionism” refers to the importance Evangelicals place upon the experience of being “born again,” a personal acceptance of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Retelling how one was “saved” is important for Evangelicals, as is communicating this idea of salvation to others, sometimes via passionate cries from the stage. Evangelical understandings of conversion are connected to the final pillar, “crucicentrism,” a theological emphasis on the crucifixon of Jesus, which is understood as atonement for the sins of humanity. The American high school football–focused drama series Friday Night Lights (2006–11) features a Christian band named “Crucifictorious,” the kind of afterschool project that flourished in small-town America in the late 2000s, and an illustration how crucicentrism and other Evangelical pillars can be enacted in contemporary youth culture. In his somewhat different exposition of Bebbington’s four pillars, Hankins (2008:  2–3) notes that Evangelicals have two key beliefs (Biblicism and crucicentrism), which lead to two key experiences (activism and conversionism), but beyond these pillars the diversity of experience among even American Evangelicals is “dizzying.” Defining and delineating contemporary Evangelicalism is further complicated by the fact that many Evangelicals eschew this or any other label in favor of identifying merely as “Christian.” In some cases Evangelicals have no meaningful ownership of a denominational identity,

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which is understandable if one attends church in a rented cinema or renovated Pizza Hut. In some other cases, there is a conscious rejection of differences in Christian theology and tradition, such that one is either a born-again Evangelical Christian or no Christian at all. Even the notion of Christianity as a “religion” is not uncommonly viewed as an etic distortion of what is actually a “relationship.” What is true for Evangelicalism in general is true for Pentecostalism in particular, with an added emphasis on the presence of the supernatural, for better or worse, in everyday life. As Evangelicalism continues to globalize, it increasingly does so in Pentecostal forms, as will be examined in Chapters 5 and 6 in analyzing aspects of contemporary African Pentecostalism. The exuberant worship style found in Pentecostal churches has been integral to its growth, with the pop-rock style contemporary worship music pioneered by the Evangelical fraction of the hippie counterculture called the Jesus Movement, discussed in the next chapter, being a feature of Pentecostal services around the world (Miller and Yamamori 2007: 138–41). Even more exuberant forms of worship can found in the performances of Pentecostal punk and hardcore punk/metal crossover bands, analyzed in Chapters 2 and 3 in particular. These hardcore performances are described by Quinton, an Australian metalcore musician, as events where “kids are walking on each other’s heads and throwing fly-kicks around the room, and the band’s screaming at everyone and throwing their guitars around.” The physicality of such events has an affinity with worship in Pentecostalism and its deeper sense of “toughness” that emerges from an embodied belief in the physical presence and power of the supernatural, which requires a religious passion and moral seriousness to engage with forces that “[m]odernity has taught us not to believe in” (Alexander 2009: 110–11). As it globalizes, Evangelicalism engages with, transforms, and is transformed by, the various existing belief systems and cultural practices it comes into contact with. As Casanova (2001: 437) argues, with particular reference to Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism is thoroughly open to globalization and localization, but wherever and whenever this happens it engages “in spiritual warfare with its own roots.” This is true not only for comprehensive worldviews such as the African traditional religions we will encounter in Chapters 5 and 6 but more basically for the forms of nominally secular youth culture we will encounter throughout this book; punk, in particular, but also hip hop, skateboarding, and surfing, each of which has laudable elements Evangelicals have little trouble engaging with and adopting, as well as subcultural characteristics that are harder for conservative Christianity to digest. We can place these four forms among the “global youth cultures of desire, self-expression, and representation”

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theorized by Comaroff and Comaroff (2000: 305–7). These are forms of identity and belonging, like globalized and mobilized religious subjectivities themselves, which confuse existing ideas of class and ethnicity as the basis for youth identity and mobility, as analyzed in the next chapter. Just as the idea of these syncretized religious youth subcultures, like Christian hip hop, differs from some of the basic categories circulating in the social sciences, existing studies of Evangelical youth subculture differ from the current study in focusing on political issues. Luhr’s (2009) important study of the development of contemporary Evangelical youth subcultures positions them within the broader maneuvers of the American Christian Right, Hendershot’s (2004) general analysis of Christian popular culture has a similar focus, and so does Shires’s (2006) analysis of the Jesus Movement, working backward from the political position many of its participants later adopted. As we will see in the next chapter, focusing on youth and popular culture as political phenomena is quite common; it provides intellectual weight and moral seriousness to what might otherwise be considered trivial, and it is one reason why conceivably strongly political genres of popular music like punk and hip hop have been welcome in academia. Evangelical youth subcultures are not, however, primarily conventionally political phenomena. Even Evangelical punk is focused on personal angst, in keeping with broader turns in the secular meta-genre (Azerrad 2007), and the political beliefs of individual musicians, which are rarely explicit, express ideas from the Evangelical “Left,” “Right,” and “Centre” (Gushee 2008). Despite its diverse expressions, Evangelicalism is relatively easy to define compared with another key term this book is concerned with, “youth.” Different cultures and institutions define youth differently, and this book will not offer a specific definition, simply analyzing what are generally acknowledged by its research participants as forms of youth culture in action. Since individual life courses radically differ even within relatively homogeneous cohorts, to say nothing of intersectional impacts, it is common to encounter the idea that youth can only be an emic label, essentially translating the saying “you are only as old as you feel” into social scientific jargon. It is hard to agree on the criteria for etic definitions of youth, and criteria are often chosen to illustrate some socioeconomic problem. For example, if the end of youth is defined as the establishment of an independent household, then most South Africans remain youth into their thirties (Mo Ibrahim Foundation 2012: 11) but many become adults while still in their teens because of the loss of parents or guardians (Meintjes, Hall, and Sambu 2015:  102). The vagaries of youth in South Africa, home to such inequality, point to the vagaries of the

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concept globally. There is probably no other country where the “global model of childhood,” based on universalizing the experiences of middle-class youth in the Global North, is so clearly “an ideal to which people (are expected to) aspire” (Ansell 2005: 23). As we will see in Chapter 4, Evangelical youth ministries play a role in providing organized leisure for impoverished South African youth that allows them to participate in activities like skateboarding that their more affluent peers take for granted. Within the Evangelical culture this book is concerned with, “youth” tends to be coterminous with the clinical term “adolescence,” imprecisely overlapping with teenage years and secondary education. Youth, so defined, are usually ministered to in a youth group, often overseen by a youth pastor, and some will graduate into a “young adult” ministry, which may or may not function as a dating agency. Although Evangelical youth groups are not the focus of this book, some research did take place in youth groups, and they are an overlapping field in which Evangelical youth culture’s engagement with alternative music and extreme sports takes place. Moreover, religious youth groups are significant social institutions in general; the National Study of Youth and Religion, conducted in the United States in 2002 and 2003, estimated at that time that 38 percent of American teenagers were involved with one (Smith and Denton 2005: 50). Youth groups encompass a stage of development in which a more considered spiritual subjectivity often develops, as do important personal relationships and a “personal style” (Fowler and Dell 2006: 39–40). For many young people involved with alternative music and extreme sports, these religious and cultural processes fuse, and their spiritual beliefs become linked to their personal relationships and their (sub)cultural aesthetics and identity. A good example is Jono, raised in the British Midlands and involved with Christian hardcore as a musician, promoter, and the editor of a zine (fanzine) of the kind that have been integral to punk since the late 1970s. Discussing the importance of punk in his secondary school years, he said: At the time people always associated me with my father. Being a vicar’s son I was thinking, well, not to rebel against the church or anything because that was still an important part of my upbringing, but there has to be something to say for myself. I have to find some kind of identity within this world, within this high school we’re attending.

Analyzing the history of the study of religion and adolescence, Ream (2001:  576)  observes that while religion was considered central to a young

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person’s development in the past, this is no longer the case, and religion has ceased to be a common research topic in youth studies. Although moral development is still important, this is no longer considered a necessarily religious matter. Typical youth development textbooks, such as Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood by Jeffrey Arnett (2013), who is also the author of one of the earliest scholarly books on the heavy metal youth subculture (Arnett 1995), fold religion into the broader field of culture and belief. The topic is approached in a pluralistic way, recognizing that morality can be formed within secular institutions, such as the Scouting movement, as well as diverse religious institutions. Another way to understand what is happening is to recognize that religion is being treated as a form of “subculture,” an idea that will be thoroughly examined in the next chapter. Although focusing on the experience of Evangelical youth and forms of youth culture, the four primary phenomena this book engages with—punk, hip hop, surfing, and skateboarding—are enjoyed by adults as well as youth. Music-based subcultures like punk have older adherents (Bennett 2013), and the first generation of punks will soon reach retirement age. As we will see in Chapter 4, surfing remains a passion for many adults who struggle to integrate it into the changing rhythms of their lives, and the assumption that skateboarding is an adolescent activity is resisted by older skaters. Some interviews were conducted with people in their thirties and forties, therefore, but focused on their youthful experiences and current engagements with younger people in cases in which they identified a generational divide. Just as the subcultures this book is concerned with exceed the category of “youth,” they also exceed the labels “alternative” and “extreme.” As we will see in Chapter 4, different terms are used for “extreme” sports, and those most insistent on maintaining the “alternative” status of skateboarding and surfing reject this TV-friendly term. Although “alternative music” became a marketing label in the 1990s, bringing together grunge and indie rock, it is used in this book in a generic sense, with the recognition that “alternative” is always relational. A recent collection (Dhoest et al. 2015) addressed the question of subcultures such as hip hop as alternatives to the “mainstream,” a relationship that only makes sense by decoupling subcultural studies from normative political schemas, deferring to the subjective experiences of subculturalists themselves. Rap is “mainstream,” but Christian rap remains a “problem” in secular scenes and churches (Gault 2015: 89), as Chapter 6 will show. This book focuses on youth (sub)cultures in a quite specific way, then; the concern is not with every Evangelical youth who surfs or raps, but with the

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performance and promotion of Evangelical belief within particular subcultural frameworks. Bergler’s (2012) history of contemporary American youth ministry makes this distinction clear, explaining youth ministry’s development through competition with secular popular culture. In the case of extreme sports, the distinction is clear, as the concern is with surfing and skateboarding youth ministry and Evangelically informed youth development projects. In the case of music, distinctions are less obvious. This book is concerned with aspects of the metagenre known as contemporary Christian music (CCM), discussed further in Chapter 2, which represents a primarily Evangelical example of sacred and secular competition. As Howard and Streck (1999: 11) argue, the sometimes etic label CCM reflects “market characteristics” more than musical content, and while the former regulates the latter, the label “Christian band” sometimes provokes artistic objections and fears that it will alienate non-Christian audiences. But insofar as a musician claims that their work expresses their Christian beliefs and utilizes CCM infrastructure—labels, venues, festivals, publications, retailers—the term is reasonable (Cusic 2010: xv). Such a particular focus is quite different from other approaches to religion and popular or youth culture, especially those emerging from the specific discipline of religion studies, wherein the focus is usually on locating religious expressions or analogues in secular culture (McCloud 2003; Moberg 2012). This is particularly the case for studies of religion and hip hop (Miller and Pinn 2013), but as Price (2006: 52) argues, many rappers in the secular music scene are committed Christians or Muslims, struggling to balance these beliefs with their other “personal pursuits.” In referring to the “secular music scene” here, I am referring to cultural spaces that are not regulated according to religious beliefs and values. Religion is not necessarily absent from secular scenes, therefore, just as religion is not absent from a secular society; it is simply not dominant. While it has become a professional necessity in many religion studies departments to theorize away the secular/religious divide, the distinction between Christian and secular artists is usually quite clear. The desire of audiences to seek out artists with corresponding worldviews is analyzed in Chapter 2, and this is particularly true of Evangelicals, some of whom interrogate musicians’ beliefs and behavior very closely. The existence of secular music scenes is predicated on the idea of secularization. Sociological debates around this concept are integral to understanding Evangelical youth culture in the contexts this book is concerned with, and the broader idea of an Evangelical subculture itself. The most basic model of secularization presents it an outcome of the rationalization of life in the modern

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West, ending religious control over most social spheres, including leisure and the arts, which become self-regulating according to internal values. This theory, formalized by Wilson (1966) and updated by Bruce (2011), argues for an inverse relationship between religion and modernity; the emergent features of most modern Western societies—science and technology, universal education, formal egalitarianism, diversity, and individualism—diminish the power of religion in individual and collective experience. We can add to this the impact of popular culture as a rival source of meaning and morality, for as we will see in Chapters 5 and 6, the power of popular culture in the socialization of youth is a particular Evangelical concern. The four sites of study in this book experience secularization differently; the United States is more religious than Britain or Australia, although there are uniform generational changes (Crockett and Voas 2006; Pew Research Centre 2010), and Evangelical churches attract youth at a higher rate than comparatively liberal “mainline” churches (Mason, Singleton, and Webber 2007; Smith and Snell 2009), possibly for reasons discussed in the next chapter. South Africa stands out as far more religious, but since most of the features of Western modernity discussed above were actively resisted by those in power for most of its history, this is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, Swartz’s (2009) study of the moral ecology of South Africa’s township youth suggests that compartmentalization of religion is something most young people experience, a point driven home to me in interviews with youth pastors. Indeed, despite persistent debate over the secularization paradigm in the sociology of religion, pitting micro-trends and reconceptualizations of religion against long-term conventional declines, Evangelicals themselves rarely doubt the reality of secularization. They may believe their own church will thrive, or that revival is around the corner, but pessimism about contemporary receptiveness to the Evangelical message makes the Evangelical initiatives analyzed in this book all the more urgent.

Studying Evangelical youth cultures This book is based on data emerging from two related research projects. First, from interviews and observations conducted in 2010 in Australia, Britain, and the United States, with individuals involved in various capacities with Christian punk’s various subgenres. Second, from interviews and observations conducted in 2014 and 2015 in South Africa with people involved in Christian punk, heavy metal, and hip hop, as well as with skateboarding and surfing youth ministries

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and youth development projects, primarily in Cape Town and its hinterland known as the Cape Winelands. As in similar studies with hidden or unquantifiable population groups, a representative or random sample is not possible with these Evangelical youth cultures. As Jono, the hardcore musician, promoter, and zine editor from the British Midlands said, “you could never say ‘this is my Christian punk congregation; we have a congregation of five hundred people here and they’re all on the electoral roll.’ ” Moreover, participants in studies such as mine are self-selecting, only opting in to the research if they positively identify with it, excluding those discussed in Chapter 5 who conceivably gave up all connections with secular music or sports. The study utilizes necessarily nonprobability samples—a combination of purposive, snowball, and opportunity samples—but with the exception of surfing, I believe the sample broadly captures the demographic reality of those actively involved in the various subcultures, with the obvious imbalances in the sample, especially in regards to gender, reflecting imbalances in the subcultures themselves. This lack of gender balance deserves to be addressed, however, as it positions this book within the possibly “irrevocably” male-focused approach to youth subcultures critiqued by McRobbie (1991: 16). As will be argued in Chapter 4, despite the existence of prominent female Christian surfers—especially Bethany Hamilton, whose story became the film Soul Surfer (2011)—the focus of the Christian surfing projects in South Africa is on (black) male youth, as is the case for skateboarding projects. This represents a concern with combating male delinquency, continuing the common aims of sports-based youth development discussed in that chapter. In the case of South African hip hop, Charry (2012: 305–7) observes that female rappers are a minority throughout African hip hop, having to “fight against strong odds” to acquire an audience. The particular concerns—both pragmatic and Pentecostal—that Evangelical churches have about hip hop, discussed in Chapter 6, further code the genre as male—a space where women are strongly sexualized and objectified, but where it is the role of Christian men to lyrically combat such backwardness. Although Christian punk maintains punk’s general “veneer of egalitarianism” (Leblanc 1999: 115), it marginalizes female creativity just as secular punk does. As in secular punk, young women constitute a significant minority of audience members at Christian performances, between one-quarter and one-third in my observation, but only a tiny fraction of musicians. Women rarely move from being consumers to producers of punk, Christian or secular, which is striking given that the free movement from fan to musician is foundational to punk’s “do-it-yourself ” ethic. My research participants critiqued what Nathan, from a

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London emo band, referred to as the “unwritten law” that women are fans and not musicians. Mitch, a punk and ska musician from Melbourne, Australia, similarly critiqued the gendering of church worship bands in that women rarely adopt the instruments (or vocal styles) found in rock bands. The key critical difference within Christian punk, however, is the absence of the Riot Grrrl movement that accelerated female involvement in secular punk, partly by mobilizing against the American Christian Right (Gottlieb and Wald 1994). Another noteworthy feature of the sample is that the music-based sample is primarily made up of musicians, who are the most prominent members of the population (Moberg 2009: 11–12). As indicated, though, it is in the nature of punk—and hip hop—to encourage individuals to take on various roles, such that a thorough understanding of the music cultures in this book is obtained. In contrast to some of the author’s earlier journal articles, elements of which are incorporated in this book, the demands of academic book publishing required that everyone interviewed in these projects be identified by a pseudonym, even though this was only rarely requested by research participants. Although the use of pseudonyms is standard practice in the social sciences, studies of music are a common exception, since creative artists adopt public personas and there is an understandable desire to be connected with their work (ibid.: 13–14). Research participants are usually capable of understanding their own interests, and in fields such as this one, can conceive of interviews as creating a new audience (Bielo 2009:  23), so I  am disappointed with the restrictions placed upon this book. Musicians engaged in church-based worship rarely adopt public personas in the same way, of course, and as discussed in Chapter 5, some radically distinguish between their role in worship music and their involvement with other musical practices. This is even more the case for sports missionaries and sportsbased youth development facilitators, all of whom have been identified via pseudonyms as well. One unusual feature of this book is that, unlike typical scholars of youth subcultures (Hodkinson 2005), I have never been a member of the subcultures I study. Like some research participants, my interest in punk developed with its second wave of popularity in the early 1990s, and hip hop soon after, but I cannot recall receiving any spiritual revelations from these sources as a teenager. I similarly recall receiving a skateboard and bodyboard as gifts at some point, but can report no significant achievements or injuries. Although I have remained a fan of punk and hip hop, I am not a “fan-researcher” (Bennett 2003: 186). My interest in the relationship between religion and youth subcultures developed through chapters written with Roland Boer in 2005 (Boer and Abraham

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2006, 2009), examining contemporary religious tropes in subversive art and popular culture. This pathway shaped how I approached contemporary Christian music, such that I was struck by its almost exclusively conservative Evangelical nature (Powell 2002:  17). I  was raised in liberal congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia—where I first became conscious of South Africa, through the anti-apartheid stickers offered as rewards to Sunday school children—later attending “broad” Methodist and Anglican churches, all of which differ from the Evangelicalism analyzed in this book, such that much of my data was familiar only through prior academic study. In contrast to common experiences of researchers in this field (e.g., Bielo 2009:  29–45), my beliefs were rarely questioned by participants. Given the limited time I  spent with many, and the “friendship evangelism” (Bramadat 2000: 25) employed in these subcultures, this is not surprising, but even those I came to know well showed no desire to argue, in keeping with Magolda and Gross’s (2009) findings, discussed in the next chapter. I am reticent about any regime of reflexivity that goes beyond this awareness of the histories we bring to our research and the limits of our disciplines. Research shouldn’t pivot on the moment when the researcher tells their informant, “Enough about you, let’s talk about me” (Hage 2009:  61–2). Here lies work such as Malott and Peña’s (2004: 1–12) study of punk politics, which introduces its authors via a chapterlong self-criticism, confessing all conceivable sources of counterrevolutionary thought in the family tree. The perils of too politicized or personalized a study of subcultures will become apparent in the next chapter, which analyzes relevant theorizations of subcultures, post-subcultures, and countercultures. Chapter  2 focuses on a particular issue in subcultural studies, authenticity, in the context of Christian punk, analyzing the competing regimes of authenticity demanded in secular punk scenes and by Evangelical churches and Christian music scenes. Chapter  3 continues the analysis of Christian punk, analyzing the negotiated inclusion of Evangelicals into secular punk scenes, suggesting this as a particular example of the “postsecular” condition relocated to alternative youth culture. Noting the affinity between punk, skateboarding, and surfing, Chapter  4 examines Evangelical engagements with these extreme sports– based youth cultures, as well as the use of extreme sports by Evangelicals in youth development projects in South Africa. Chapter  5 reconceptualizes alternative music and extreme sports–based youth subcultures as forms of “serious leisure,” focusing on the spiritual anxieties some Evangelicals experience because of what they conceive as an idolatrous commitment to these

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forms. Chapter 6 analyzes Evangelical opposition to youth subcultures, with a particular focus on hip hop, noting both nominally secular criticisms of the role of popular and youth culture in the moral formation of youth as well as supernatural concerns about the power of music in young people’s lives. The conclusion reviews the book’s key findings and notes three persistent challenges in Evangelical engagements with the four youth subcultures studied in this book.

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Evangelical Christianity and Youth Subculture Theory

Introduction This chapter will summarize and analyze theories of youth subcultures and cognate concepts such as countercultures, showing how they might contribute to understanding Evangelical youth culture. The analysis will cover concepts emerging from within cultural studies and the sociology of popular and youth culture, familiar to anyone who has studied secular popular music-based subcultures such as punk, heavy metal, or to a lesser extent hip hop (in which race is often the key analytical category). It will also cover concepts emerging from within the sociology of religion, including the neglected work of J. Milton Yinger, as well as the more contemporary analysis of Evangelical subcultures by Christian Smith, and several ethnographies of Evangelical university students. With few exceptions, such as Hebdige’s interest in reggae and Rastafari (1976, 1979, 1987), which he viewed as quickly secularized into an expression of oppositional racial identity in Britain, theorizations and empirical investigations of secular subcultures and religious subcultures have existed in separate scholarly universes. Scholars of the performance of cultural difference and moral superiority within religious youth subcultures, such as Evangelical university student groups, have paid little attention to the analysis of the performance of cultural difference and moral superiority within secular youth subcultures, such as Straight Edge punks. Similarly, scholars of nominally irreligious youth, emphasizing the playfulness of identity and the lightness of cultural convictions, have paid little attention to the religious youth comingling with and critiquing their irreligious peers, for whom the embodiment of strong convictions includes the creative expression of identity through music and fashion. This chapter will leave aside the many studies of Evangelicalism that employ the term “subculture” in an offhand manner, assuming their readers will

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understand the vague social form they are hinting at without worrying about the genealogy of the concept or the quarrels over its use in the study of secular youth. The chapter will, however, engage with some of the less fashionable notions that have emerged in this field, such as the idea of youth subcultures as a form of “resistance,” as theorized in the Marxist semiotics of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), also known as the Birmingham School in subcultural studies, and the admittedly obscure idea of the “counter-counterculture.” While these concepts may well be of limited use for analyzing many forms of youth culture, for the study of religious youth culture—specifically Evangelical youth culture—these concepts do have some value. As this chapter works through its discussion and analysis, I will identify key constitutive elements of different approaches, attempting the “household chore” of cleaning up subcultural and countercultural terminology, suggested by Bash (1982: 27) at a time when the field was far less convoluted and contested. Today, theories of countercultures and subcultures appear within sociology, cultural studies, and youth studies as a vast collection of different labels for identical phenomena and identical labels for different phenomena. Beyond their most familiar labels, variations of subcultures and countercultures appear (alphabetically) as:  brand communities, club cultures, contracultures, cults, dance nations, delinquents, deviants, fan cultures, fields, lifestyles, microcultures, neo-tribes, parallel cultures, protest cultures, scenes, sects, styles, substream networks, technotribes, and probably more. Connected to these labels are social theories that attempt to make sense of relationships between culture and society, and individual and collective agency in the lives of (usually) young people. Sometimes these different theories reflect different theoretical perspectives (Marxian, Foucauldian, or unapologetically liberal individualist), and sometimes different methodologies (semiotic, ethnographic, critical analytical, or even quantitative survey-based). The differences between these theories are probably less profound than their theorists insist (Hesmondhalgh 2005: 25), and I suspect some of the divergence within this field flows from the academic dream of owning one’s own theory, which parallels Gusatvo Gutiérrez’s (1983: 91) joke about theologians dreaming of owning their own theology the way the lower middle class dream of owning their own house. This chapter will begin with the analysis of countercultures, the subcultural form most directly applicable to religion, as authors have been wont to make contemporary analogies with early Christianity. Included in this section is an analysis of the Jesus Movement, theorized as a counter-counterculture, an important source of Evangelical popular music and youth ministry. The chapter

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continues with an analysis of studies of secular youth subcultures, focusing on the work of the University of Birmingham’s CCCS and its class-based analysis of subcultural resistance. Rejection of this approach lead to the notion of a postsubcultural turn, which includes a variety of more flexible concepts, such as neotribes and music scenes, which some scholars of Evangelicalism have made use of. Finally, the chapter turns to specific studies of Evangelical subcultures, notably Christian Smith’s (1998) “subcultural identity theory of religious strength” as well as several ethnographic studies of Evangelical student subcultures. The chapter concludes with considerations of the usefulness of various ideas from subcultural studies, notably a reorientation of the idea of subcultural resistance.

Christianity as counterculture and counter-counterculture The understanding of “counterculture” in this chapter is influenced by the American sociologist J. Milton Yinger, not least because he is concerned with countercultures as religious phenomena (Yinger 1977: 846). He revealingly subtitled his book on countercultures The World Turned Upside Down, in reference to Acts 17: 6–7 (Yinger 1982), and describes institutional churches as domesticated descendants of once radical movements, which is not too far removed from the perennial challenge for music-based youth subcultures of incorporation into the pop culture mainstream. Roszak’s (1970: 34) sociology of the hippie counterculture makes a similar analogy with “the quest of third-century Christians (a similarly scruffy, uncouth, and often half-mad lot) for escape from the corruptions of Hellenistic society.” The hippie milieu was the context for Yinger’s study of countercultures, and for many in the Anglophone world, the word counterculture remains associated with the hippie movement and aesthetic. The hippie milieu remains important for understanding Evangelical subcultures, too, because the Evangelical—typically Pentecostal—fraction of the hippie counterculture called the Jesus Movement (or the Jesus Freaks) pioneered the youth subculture-focused evangelism analyzed in this book. Yinger (1982: 39–40) defines countercultures as “all those situationally created designs for living formed in contexts of high anomie and intrasocietal conflict, the designs being inversions of, in sharp opposition to, the historically created designs.” Therefore, understanding countercultures means understanding the dissatisfying dominant culture they wish to invert. For Fred Davies (cited in Yinger 1977: 835–6), the hippies presented a “studied inversion of certain key middle class American values and practices,” including the natural against the

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artificial, the spontaneous against the structured, and so on. It is the “studied” nature of these countercultural “designs for living” that are particularly important for understanding countercultures, as they are thorough attempts at reimagining and then recreating society through new institutions. Countercultures emerge from the development of the belief among some that “the social order is unable to bring them the accustomed or the hoped for satisfactions” (ibid.:  843), with the Weberian notion of status inconsistency particularly relevant in youthful societies (Yinger 1982: 52–66). Roszak’s (1970: 19) characterization of the hippie counterculture as “a revolt of the unoppressed” pointed to its middle-class origins, but middle-class youth have very high expectations for self-actualization. The foundational statement of the CCCS approach to youth subcultures suggests no such elevated expectations for working-class youth (Clark et al. 1976: 18–21). Yinger (1982: 51–113) analyzes a number of additional factors influencing the rise of countercultures, especially periods of social reorganization such as the postindustrial turn in Western societies in the 1960s and 1970s, which tend to result in the weakening of traditional social networks, and the questioning of dominant values. A good example is the interest in indigenous and Asian religions in the hippie counterculture, demonstrating a desire for “uncorrupted” belief systems (Glock and Bellah 1976; Yinger 1977: 848). Even more so than in contested theories of subcultures, “resistance” to what is perceived as culturally dominant, if not domineering, is foundational to countercultures. For countercultures, this is done through alternative institutions intended to replace the foundational structures of society like family and work. For Yinger (1982: 40), countercultures embody a coherent set of beliefs and actions; the positions they assume and the alternative institutions they build are anchored in their vision of a new society. To understand what this means in practice, we can briefly look at several examples of what have been labeled religious countercultures, as well as the Jesus Movement, which has been understood as a counter-counterculture. Radically different from the Evangelical youth subcultures this book is concerned with, the most heavily studied contemporary Christian counterculture is the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in New  York during the Great Depression. It is a network of “hospitality houses” wherein otherwise homeless people live alongside communards, in an alternative family, connected to farms that employ alternative economic practices focused on self-sufficiency (Farrell 1997:  21–50; Shires 2006:  7–16). The Catholic Worker movement, and some conservative religious movements,

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embody aspects of Sample’s (1996:  120)  notion of “populist traditionalism”— notwithstanding the myth circulating in radical Christian circles that Dorothy Day modeled for Marcel Duchamp’s modern masterpiece Nude Descending a Staircase. Rejecting the state as a source of moral authority and assistance, but also hostile toward classical liberalism, populist traditionalism seeks to build freer lives that nevertheless emphasize “living right” through regulation by family and faith, and underpinning this for the Catholic Worker movement is its commitment to the radical margins of Church history and Catholic theology. The Catholic Worker movement embodies the three common aspects of countercultural Christian communities theorized by Angrosino (2003: 940–1): solidarity with the poor and marginalized, an experience of the everyday sacred, and an emphasis on community. This emphasis on community often leads to alternatives to conventional families, such as in the L’Arche (Ark) network of communities of people with and without developmental disabilities (ibid.), and the “New Monasticism” movement of largely youthful and urban Evangelical (or “post-Evangelical”) communities that focus on social justice, community service, and spiritual development (Bielo 2011). Like the Catholic Worker movement, members of L’Arche and the New Monastics emphasize people over possessions and, in keeping with Sample’s idea of populist traditionalism, regulate themselves through interpersonal relationships and shared religious values. A similar attitude was found within the Hare Krishna networks that emerged within the hippie counterculture, rejecting liberal capitalist imperatives to work and consume as an “illusion” (Ketola 2004: 304–7). Urban ashrams became alternative families, later having a role in the development of Krishnacore punk (Peterson 2009: 109–53), depicted in the film Ten Thousand Saints (2015). As these religious movements show, countercultures are not radical in the same way, and “[t]hose who oppose the established ways to truth may be quite conservative in their definitions of the good life” (Yinger 1982: 114). The term counter-counterculture can be used to describe some of these movements, taking the underdeveloped concept from Yinger’s (ibid.: 246) overview of the Jesus Movement, and Luhr’s (2009: 75) description of it as “the counter to the counterculture.” A basic definition of a counter-counterculture would be a movement maintaining continuity with countercultures in relation to what are considered dominant social values and practices, seeking lived alternatives to hegemonic patterns of work, leisure, and family, but grounding alternative visions and institutions in values such as fundamentalism or authoritarianism. The best way to understand the idea of a counter-counterculture is to examine the Jesus Movement in detail. As Shires (2006) argues in his analysis of the movement and

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its legacy, the network of churches and communes shared the hippie counterculture’s rejection of Western modernity as thoroughly alienating, but the Jesus Movement differed in its diagnosis of this dead-end culture, rejecting individual experimentation with sex, drugs, and spiritualty, preaching the apocalypse instead. Although the Jesus Movement was clearly fundamentalist, it was highly extroverted when engaging with a society it believed to be doomed. This exemplifies the tension between evangelism and evasion that characterizes Evangelical attitudes toward secular culture, described by Bramadat (2000) in his ethnography of Canadian Evangelical youth through the metaphor of “bridges” and “fortresses,” probably adapted from George Simmel’s metaphor of “bridges” and “doors,” employed in Strhan’s (2015) study of Evangelicals. The Jesus Movement’s evangelism was embedded in youth culture and popular music, and Stowe (2011:  215–37) uses the example of contemporary Christian music (CCM) pioneer Keith Green to illustrate the different social spaces the Jesus Movement simultaneously inhabited. Green drifted between a rural commune called “The Last Days Community”—not to be confused with an award-winning South African Christian hip hop crew called the Last Days Fam—suburban Evangelical churches, and California’s secular music scene, combining his piano-driven pop-rock with apocalyptic preaching, and building sincere friendships with non-Christian musicians. The Jesus Movement adopted the aesthetics of hippie movement that, as we will see, raises methodological concerns within broader subcultural studies about analyzing the “authenticity” of young people whose beliefs, appearances, and behavior do not conventionally correspond. In his study of one of the important factions of the Jesus Movement, Jews for Jesus, Ariel (1999: 243– 4) argues that part of its appeal to young suburban Jews was a chance to rebel against their peers and parents but in a very safe way; they could engage in “daring activity,” such as evangelism among the hip and radical, but limited risks by shunning alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex. As such, he argues that Jews for Jesus was countercultural “only as far as dress, haircuts, and music were concerned” (ibid.). Billy Graham also saw through the Jesus Movement’s countercultural fashion, it seems, “tolerat[ing] the movement’s hippie eccentricities” because he believed it represented a return—prodigal son–style—to the values of earlier generations (Eskridge 1998: 84–5). Yinger (1982: 246) rejects the idea of the Jesus Movement as a mere “parody,” however, arguing for the sincerity and genuinely counter-hegemonic nature of its beliefs. Earlier generations of Americans were actually not, by and large,

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apocalyptically minded commune-dwellers eagerly anticipating the end of the world. There were definite radical aspects to the Jesus Movement, and for the most part it was rather ambiguous, as contemporary accounts illustrate (Glock and Bellah 1976). The Jesus Movement rejected hegemonic consumerist values of work and leisure, and sought radical alternatives to the middle-class families most of its members left behind. Their new homes could exaggerate aspects of their old ones, however, such as the abandoned Chicago hotel inhabited by the Jesus People USA, who ran the alternative Christian music festival Cornerstone (Mall 2015a), discussed in the next chapter, that strictly regulates personal relationships (Stowe 2011: 133–6). This emphasis on music is one of the reasons why the Jesus Movement (counter-)counterculture is relevant to a study of contemporary Evangelical youth culture focused on alternative music and extreme sports; it was integral to the birth of contemporary Christian music and Evangelical youth subculture ministry. Calvary Chapel, a Pentecostal church in affluent Orange County, California, was “ground zero” of the Jesus Movement (Powell 2002:  165), pioneering ministry with the youth subcultures that emerged in California at the time, and fostering many CCM artists through its label Maranatha, initially in the folk-rock and pop-rock genres but later also some punk or proto-punk bands. The “father” of CCM was Larry Norman, who quit the secular music industry in 1968 after suggesting the album title We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Whole Lot Less Rock and Roll to Capitol Records, and pursued unapologetically Christian projects embodying values common to the Jesus Movement (Howard and Streck 1999:  30). Seeking to communicate Evangelical orthodoxy “in unorthodox ways” (ibid.), Norman was socially conscious but highly traditional, raising awareness of poverty whilst preaching apocalyptic warnings to repent (Alfonso 2002:  208–12; Powell 2002: 632–41). Whatever their (counter-)countercultural commitments, as Schwendener (2001: 104–5) argues, and Shires (2006) and Luhr (2009) illustrate, many members of the Jesus Movement moved “without much psychic shifting of gears” from the apocalyptic margins of the hippie milieu to the conventional suburban world of the Religious Right. Much of the broader content of the hippie milieu also migrated to middle-class suburbia, becoming staples of New Age and holistic spirituality and therapy (Heelas and Woodhead 2005). The studies of Christian (counter-)countercultures I have cited here show the problematic nature of analysis that assumes too much rigidity and ideological coherence in cultural articulations. Cultural forms may well live on, but the commitments

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and practices of the individuals constituting them are subject to change. This “shifting of gears” into conventional Evangelicalism mirrors the assessment of both Christianity and punk by Ty, an American-born musician and pastor, formerly involved in a number of punk projects in the United States and United Kingdom, who described Christianity and punk “in their original and purer forms” as “counterculture” and their “watered-down versions” as “subculture.” He described the latter as lacking “a subversive element. It’s kind of like taking something that could be counterculture and finding a place for it within the greater culture.” We will see that something similar has been theorized by social scientists studying Evangelicalism in contemporary North America, but it is first necessary to examine how secular youth subcultures have been theorized in the past.

Secular youth subcultures The move from analyzing countercultures to analyzing subcultures is somewhat arbitrary, since there is no uniform division because there are no uniform definitions. Many considerations of the differences do exist—most basically, Hebdige’s (1988: 35) argument that subcultural resistance is not about “general revolt” as one expects from a counterculture reordering society and redeeming humanity, but about “insubordination.” Gelder (2007: 22) makes a clear contrast between countercultures and subcultures on the matter of building the kinds of alternative institutions already analyzed, noting that few subcultures “have widespread social change on their agenda,” and among scholars of the CCCS, Clarke et al. (1976: 61) argue that countercultures are concerned with political articulations of dissent and subcultures with social articulations. In the American context, we have the basic notion from Dowd and Dowd (2003: 23) that countercultures challenge dominant culture, whilst subcultures, to varying degrees, are merely set apart from dominant culture. Typical accounts of subcultural theory begin with the “Chicago School” of ethnographic sociology in the 1920s, studying gangsters, homeless drifters, and other subterranean lives. Summarizing this approach, Gelder (2007: 39) emphasizes the importance of “the modern urban problem of alienation” for these researchers; early-twentieth-century cities are sites of anomie, full of new arrivals, establishing the foundational question in American subcultural studies of integration in a diverse society (Dowd and Dowd 2003). The ongoing use of ethnography to study generic subcultures might be traced back to the Chicago

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School, also the generalized notion in American social science of the subculture as a somehow problematic subgroup. The term “deviance” is rarely used in Anglophone sociology outside the United States anymore, and other theories employed by the Chicago School have fallen out of use. However, a recent study of affluent London Evangelicals (Strhan 2015) makes productive use of George Simmel’s work on the early-twentieth-century city, influential on the Chicago School. Significant theoretical debates were opened up in the 1970s through the work of the CCCS, particularly the collection Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson 1976) and Hebdige’s (1979) punk-focused Subculture:  The Meaning of Style, which achieved a certain status, not least for the volume of criticism directed against their Marxist semiotic approach, decoding social symbols and class systems, over subsequent decades. Attempts to make a clean break with the CCCS approach are short-circuited by constant reference to this work within, in particular, British youth studies and cultural studies. Bennett and Kahn-Harris (2004: 1) are right that positive use of the CCCS is rare in the twenty-first century, and this book is not aimed at defending the CCCS against forty years of criticism. Certain notions are pertinent for understanding Evangelical youth culture, though, in particular the idea of subcultural resistance; the articulation through popular music and youth culture of a refusal and alternative, which emerges from a sense of contradiction with what are conceived of as society’s dominant values. Most contemporary studies of youth subcultures set aside the key focus of the CCCS analysis of subculture: class. Influenced by the Marxist cultural theory in vogue at the time, and the pervasive poverty and inequality of post–World War II Britain, the CCCS moved against the “classless” feel to youth studies of the time—as if youth somehow stand outside such divisions (Muggleton 2005: 206– 8)—not least in studies of countercultures. For the CCCS, subcultures are “subsets” of larger class-based cultures (Clarke et al. 1976: 13), and although its key statement acknowledges the idea of middle-class subcultures, and that subcultures can be more or less intensely experienced, the CCCS approach focused on tightly knitted, working-class subcultures. This approach led to a particular idea of popular culture among working-class youth as critical political expression in a time of socioeconomic transition. This predetermined focus on class inequality has been so thoroughly rejected that Shildrick and MacDonald (2006) criticize the absence of questions of class in more contemporary (post-)subculture studies, suggesting the CCCS left a stigma around the topic, and that since so much literature in (post-)subcultural studies consists of doctoral research by past or

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current subcultural insiders, there is now a strong middle-class bias. They are probably correct, but unlike the CCCS who, with some exceptions (e.g., Willis 1977), had little interaction with the subcultures they analyzed, contemporary researchers are more driven by the emic concerns of research participants who may, rightly or wrongly, disavow class as a determining concern. The mediating influence of Evangelicalism, within which personal faith is more important than any material measurement, deemphasizes class in Evangelical youth cultures, even in deeply unequal societies like South Africa. The emphasis on the sinful nature of individuals and the importance of individual conversion and conviction trumps the normative categories of social science (Baillie 2002: 42–4). This is a move beyond the critical notion within the foundational essays of the CCCS that subcultures seek “magical” solutions to social problems. Cohen (1972) argues, after Claude Lévi-Strauss, that this “magical” approach offers cultural solutions with no causal link to the socioeconomic issues they are seeking to address. This is a criticism of the efficacy of youth subcultures by the CCCS, but within Evangelical youth subcultures there are normative assumptions about causality and agency that have no parallel in the social sciences, to say nothing of the actual magical thinking we will encounter in Chapters 5 and 6. Being subsets of their parent cultures, subculturalists experience the “same basic problematic,” which for the CCCS was class inequality (Clarke et  al. 1976: 15), but as we will see in the next chapter, the more pertinent parent cultures for Evangelical youth subcultures are Evangelical churches and the nominally secular form they are engaging with, be it punk, surfing, or something else. Working-class subcultures are testament to the notion that young people experience the problems of their parent culture in a different way, however (ibid.: 48), and there is a tension between, on the one hand, rejecting the notion of a “generation gap” emphasized in counterculture studies and the sheer novelty of post– World War II working-class subcultures and identities (Clarke et al. 1976: 50–1). The solution is the idea of subcultures as a “double articulation” of discontent— against their parent working-class cultures, and with their parent working-class cultures against the “dominant” culture. Variations on this can be clearly seen in the music-based youth subcultures examined in this book, and elsewhere, such as in Gault (2015) and Mall’s (2015a, 2015b) studies of music-based subcultural identities and resistance against Evangelical parent cultures. At the core of the idea of subcultural “resistance” is the idea of style; for the CCCS, subcultures articulate themselves through aesthetics as “a gesture of defiance or contempt” (Hebdige 1979: 3). Early punks, for example, mocked serious

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fashion with symbols like safety-pin jewelry (ibid.:  115), and in this way, the subcultures of interest to the CCCS are described as “spectacular”—they express their displeasure through creative bricolage “at the profoundly superficial level of appearances” (ibid.: 16). Yet Clarke et al. (1976: 67) argue that even a move against “superstructural” or cultural values can be radical, since the production of ideologies, like consumerism, is a precondition for producing anything else. So while fashion and cultural practices are part of subcultural resistance for the CCCS, they are nevertheless linked to experiences of contradictions with the dominant ideologies of society; without the sense that society is based on falsehoods, subcultural style loses its (problematic) claim to authenticity in this model. Underpinning this idea of subcultural style is the notion of “homology,” connecting belief and behavior in an authentically honest and thorough way, but within the aesthetic field of popular culture. Clarke et  al. (1976:  54)  explain homologous style as “the active organization of objects with activities and outlooks, which produce an organized group-identity in the form and shape of a coherent and distinctive way of ‘being in the world.’ ” There is a problem with making claims about coherence and authenticity, however, when interpretations of subcultural style and identity can be subjective (Hesmondhalgh 2005: 31–2). For example, hippie style has been cited as an example of homology, with men’s long hair undermining gender differences and showing commitment to natural living (Willis 1978: 96–9), but the Jesus Movement adopted hippie style too, and they held conservative attitudes about gender. The broader problem with the CCCS approach to subcultural style and authenticity, Muggleton (2000: 20–2) and Hodkinson (2002: 61) argue, is that the CCCS had limited information from subcultural insiders, imposing its Marxist semiotics on superficial observations.

The post-subcultural turn Quite different approaches to subcultural style and structures developed simultaneously, later coalescing into what came to be called the “post-subculture” approach. Bennett (2011) offers a good overview of the ideas circulating under the label, and Wheaton (2007) offers an even better one, applying some postsubcultural notions to the study of extreme sports. Early rejections of the CCCS’s focus on subcultural incorporation into the mainstream and the loss of authenticity came from studies by Clarke (1990) and Cohen (2002)—in material originally published in the 1980s—arguing for the limits of semiotic analysis, and

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recognizing the problem of assessing authenticity given the speed with which subcultural style disseminates away from core participants. Donnelly (2006) makes similar arguments about extreme sports subcultures, noting the importance of understanding the motivations of “peripheral” participants in skateboarding or snowboarding subcultures, which may differ from the anticompetitive anticapitalist motivations of early, “core” participants, as well as understanding how particular consumer practices are important for making these distinctions. Thornton’s (1995) study of dance music culture has been especially important in highlighting the importance of commercialism and consumerism in subcultural studies, arguing that commercial media plays such a role in constructing subcultural identities that there is no authentic original. Returning to extreme sports subcultures, Wheaton and Beal (2003) make similar arguments, noting that commercial media and consumerism has been foundational to self-consciously “alternative” sports like skateboarding, even if resistance to consumerism has also been a part of skate culture (Beal 1995). The problematic nature of the CCCS’s theory, but also its undeniably appealing ability to find weighty political meaning in youth culture, led some scholars to reject the term “subculture” altogether in the 1990s and 2000s. This partly explains the roll call of different concepts in the introduction to this chapter, which proliferated as possible replacement terms. Other studies retained but reformed the idea of subculture, such as Hodkinson’s (2002:  29–33) ethnographic work on British goths that redefines “subculture” as a “set of ideals and tastes,” practiced by people with a sense of cultural solidarity and control. Since goths tend to be rather upwardly mobile, putting their nerdish subcultural virtues to good use, he rejects the CCCS’s focus on class and “resistance.” In quite different ways, however, Haenfler’s (2006) study of Straight Edge punk, Zine’s (2000) work on Muslim youth in Canadian schools, and Bottrell’s (2007) work on Australian Indigenous students, maintains the importance of “resistance” in subcultural studies, while similarly doing away with a focus on class. With the belief that the CCCS approach to subcultures “is irrelevant for the twenty-first century” (Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003:  6), the broad desire in post-subculture studies has been to develop consciously postmodern approaches to subcultures, now more generically understood, differing not only in methodology and politics, but also in subjects of interest. The most striking difference in British subcultural studies in the 1990s and 2000s is that the groups modeled within the post-subculture framework rarely experience any contradiction with the values of liberal capitalism that the CCCS assumed its subculturalists did. Post-subculture studies does not ascribe “ ‘intrinsically’ subversive quality

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to subcultures” (ibid.: 4–5), and particularly rejects the idea of style as inherently subversive. These changes are at least partly because of a shift in cultural and geographic focus toward, in particular, electronic dance music (Thornton 1995; Redhead 1997; Bennett 1999), and away from, in particular, the bleakness of Britain; youth subcultures present a different set of sociological issues when viewed from Australia’s Gold Coast rather than the English Midlands (Bennett 2011). The basically postmodern post-subcultural approach argues that cultural formations have become disconnected from structural determinants, particularly class, and constituted through “elective consumption strategies” (St. John 2003: 65). This reflects shifts in theory and methodology, a return to ethnography reminiscent of the Chicago School, but also the importance of individualism as ideology as well as methodology (Sweetman 2004:  80–1; Muggleton 2005: 214). Thornton’s (1995) study was influential in this regard by focusing on individual accumulation of “subcultural capital,” rather than on the collective meaning of a subculture in relation to the rest of society. Gordon’s (2014) study of punk authenticity, and Wheaton’s (2000, 2003) analysis of “beach cred” in the windsurfing subculture apply Thornton’s approach. Post-subcultural approaches tend to downplay oppositional motivations among young people, arguing that youth cultures “are mainly hedonistic, individualistic and politically disengaged, or are concerned only to assert their authenticity via the accumulation of subcultural capital” (Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003:  14), but as Gordon’s (2014) analysis of subcultural capital in the British punk scene shows, one must be careful about predetermining the content of contemporary subcultural value. This association of subcultures with hedonism is a common trait of post-subcultural studies (Blackman 2005: 9–10), which seemingly limits its strict applicability to understanding most religious youth cultures, other than to provide a sense of what is being resisted. Post-subcultural approaches also present a departure from the CCCS model by reducing the importance of subcultural homology, as ethnographic methods bring researchers into contact with individuals with different understandings of how aesthetics relate to belief and behavior. Muggleton (2000: 46–7) offers an extreme illustration of this, the “post-subculturalist,” who need not worry about falling into “contradiction” because there is no expectation of “ideological commitment, merely a stylistic game to be played.” Making the case for loosening subcultural aesthetics and beliefs, he cites an ethnographic encounter with a 1970s-styled punk who is “a Southern Baptist metal head!” (ibid.). We are never told how this individual understands the relationship, if any, between aesthetics

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and belief, since Muggleton’s exclamation point is supposed to drive home the implication; how could anyone insist upon the continuity of aesthetics, belief, and behavior in the face of such a contradictory subject? He rejects “the full implications of the postmodern,” however (ibid.), noting that taking subcultural playfulness too far, changing subcultural identities too fast “would be seen as evidence of one’s superficiality and inauthenticity, for style is viewed as an expression of one’s inner self ” (ibid.: 103). As we will see in the following chapters, inauthenticity is something Evangelical youth are often suspected of, they are sometimes viewed as comical or contradictory figures, like that “Southern Baptist metal head!” (ibid.: 46–7). In the 1980s, hardcore did away with early punk’s spectacular style, embracing the mundane T-shirts, basketball singlets, and baseball caps I encountered at many Christian hardcore shows, which might be more associated with hip hop or sports-focused jock culture (Willis 1993), and Haenfler’s (2006: 12–17, 162–6) empirical study shows that style has become less important for punk’s insiders than ethical values. However, punk’s “spectacular” style continues among the “scene kids” embracing the crossover subgenre metalcore, and adopting a recognizable style combining skinny jeans, facial piercings, tattooing, and high-maintenance hairstyles (Rowe 2012). Described by one fan as “the metrosexuals of metal,” the emphasis scene kids place upon their style is interpreted by some of their subcultural peers as having an inverse relationship to their appreciation of metalcore music (ibid.: 10). For many of the scene kids themselves, their spectacular fashion symbolizes their intense commitment to music, with scars evidence of the “injurious removal” of piercings from the crashing together of bodies at live shows (ibid.: 13). One female scene kid described having her ankle piercings “ripped out” during the performance of the commercially successful Christian metalcore band Underoath; “They saw my ankle and thought it was brutal, there’s like this little child at our show getting torn up—but after that I couldn’t get enough, I was like yes! I love this!” (ibid.) A strong influence on the post-subculture approach has been the idea of the “neo-tribe,” closely associated with electronic dance music, and adapted from the work of Michel Maffesoli (1996), who rather likes religious metaphors. Neo-tribes share spontaneous emotional connections rather than structural ones, emerging from the basic social desire for connectivity in increasingly individualized societies. de Kock, Roeland, and Vos (2011:  333)  find some affinity between Maffesoli’s neo-tribes and Evangelical youth festivals, where young people “form temporary communities in which their faith is shared, celebrated and expressed,” but these events are part of a broader web of

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religious belonging grounded in churches. The neo-tribal formation is predicated on shifting identities performed in different social spaces (Bennett 1999: 605–8), and has been quite useful in studying music festivals and other loose, music-based affinities. Another term that has superseded “subculture” in some studies of musicbased youth cultures is “scene.” In keeping with other post-subcultural developments, the utility of the “scenes perspective” is its flexibility for analyzing social relations without requiring that participants share common class origins, beliefs, or even geographical connections (Bennett 2004; Straw 2005). This latter point is important because it allows for movement between local and global cultural expressions; “trans-local” scenes can connect “kindred spirits many miles away” (Peterson and Bennett 2004: 8–9), which is precisely how Moberg (2015: 85– 119) understands the organization of Christian heavy metal. In a broader consideration of the relevance of the scenes perspective in the study of popular music and religion, Moberg (2011: 414–15) recognizes that while the concept is a useful mapping tool, it lacks “theoretical weight” so that describing something as a “scene” doesn’t tell us very much. In this book, I  will use the term “scene” in this quite generic way, to refer to either a local genre-bound network of music production and consumption, such as the Cape Town hip hop scene, for example, or a global network such as the Christian hip hop scene.

Evangelical subcultures Previous sections have outlined various approaches to countercultures, secular youth subcultures, and broad ideas circulating under the label post-subcultural studies. As has been apparent, with the exception of studies of countercultures, there has been little interest in religion, either by subculture scholars themselves or by scholars of religious youth culture engaging with subcultural theories. Nevertheless, ideas about an Evangelical subculture in general, and Evangelical youth subcultures in particular, have been developed. Most prominent is Christian Smith’s (1998: 89–119) “subcultural identity theory of religious strength,” although it is interesting that Smith’s work on religion and American youth (Smith and Denton 2005; Smith and Snell 2009) has little to say about subcultures. Further, three ethnographies of North American Evangelical university students (Bramadat 2000; Wilkins 2008; Magolda and Gross 2009) are deserving of analysis, each of which engages in various ways with subcultural themes and theories.

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As a leading mixed-methods scholar of American religion, Smith’s (1998) work on the “subcultural identity” theory of Evangelical resilience has been influential. Instead of subcultural studies, though, Smith relies upon rational action theory, a paradigm applying classical liberal economic theory to seemingly noneconomic social spheres, assuming utility-maximizing calculations govern all aspects of our lives. Seeking to answer the persistent problem for sociologists of religion—why conventional religious decline is more pronounced in Western Europe than North America—what has come to be called the “market model” of religion reverses, to varying degrees, key features of the secularization model, to argue that religious competition creates religious vitality. The market model argues that religious institutions act like corporations, so rather than undermining the plausibility of religious truth claims and influence, competition fuels innovation in response to individual needs, which in turn leads to greater commitment from congregations. Hence the relatively open religious market in the United States has held up better than the relatively closed markets of Europe with its single official or dominant national churches. Summarizing the “hard” market model position, Finke and Stark (1998: 762) argue that “effort is rewarded [and] competition results in more efficient and energetic firms . . . [t]o the degree that religious economies are unregulated and competitive, overall levels of religious commitment will be higher.” This model has met strong opposition, with critics arguing that it fails to show any positive relationship between religious competition and commitment, especially in Western Europe where greater religious choice has accompanied religious decline (Bruce 1999; Voas, Olson, and Crocket 2002). However, the forms of Evangelicalism discussed in this book seem like ideal examples of the vitality of contemporary religion and response to niche interests; who could doubt Christianity’s ability to reinvent itself when even skateboarders and surfers have their own Bibles and global missionary organizations (Bible Society Australia 2007, 2008)? On this reading of contemporary religion, Evangelicalism’s emergence within subcultures such as skateboarding or surfing, and as a subculture itself, is not unexpected; these are predictable developments in otherwise secularizing societies in which religion is obliged to meet people on their own cultural terrain. As Smith (1998: 89) argues, following this logic, Evangelicalism “thrives on distinction, engagement, tension, conflict and threat.” Martin (2005: 5–6) similarly argues that Evangelicalism has a competitive advantage over more liberal mainline churches, because it has “retained its boundaries and survived better than movements lacking firm boundaries.” The root of Evangelical subculture,

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Martin argues, is asserting universal religious truths and subsequently failing to convince most others to accept these truths. Consequently, “being Christian comes to refer to a subcultural lifestyle not a whole society” (ibid.). According to Smith (1998:  75–88), America’s Evangelical subculture combines creative dynamism in religious expression with a distinctive subjectivity that dissolves divides like race and class while distinguishing itself from many modern values and practices. American-orientated Evangelical churches in South Africa I have visited attempt to do precisely the same thing (Ganiel 2008), often modestly succeeding despite obstacles and tensions. In this way, Evangelicalism provides people with a distinctive social identity by drawing “symbolic boundaries” between themselves and the world (Smith 1998:  91), through cultural refusals and positive cultural alternatives such as the Evangelical subcultural forms examined in this book. The fact Evangelicalism contradicts social norms without, in the countries this book is concerned with, leading to unbearable stigma or actual persecution, creates the opportunity to display one’s special identity and cultural difference, often understood as an embodied form of “witnessing” Evangelical truths. As such, living as a religious minority in America, or similar societies, could strengthen religious commitment rather than erode it (ibid:  105). This theory assumes basic underlying liberal tolerance of difference, and a culture of expressive individualism, discussed later in this book, and leads to a persistent productive tension between renegotiating religious expression for changing cultural contexts, and “resistance towards accommodation with secular modernity” (ibid.). Recalling Bramadat’s (2000) metaphor of “bridges” and “fortresses,” this tension is exemplified for Smith (1998: 98–9) in Pentecostal churches like Calvary Chapel, integral to the Jesus Movement as we saw, and its more charismatic breakaway church Vineyard, catering to the “culturally hip” by combining conservative theology with contemporary popular and youth culture, something also associated with the controversial “New Calvinist,” Mark Driscoll (Haynes 2014). Building “bridges” to the non-Evangelical world requires compromise over various issues discussed in later chapters, such as appropriate contexts for evangelization, and whether to contest aspects of contemporary youth culture, such as support for same-sex equality. One can retreat into the “fortress” of an Evangelical youth subculture consisting of churches, youth groups, and contemporary Christian music, but Bramadat’s metaphor of the fortress also signals confrontation with secular modernity, rather than simply its evasion, because the Evangelical subculture’s metaphorical fortress is present in

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society as one optional belief system and lifestyle. The marginal or embattled status of Evangelicalism within campus culture is even conceived of by one of the Evangelical students as “a good sort of alienation” (Bramadat 2000:  23). Alienation from mainstream campus culture compels internal solidarity, and is also the basis for “witnessing” Evangelical otherness, an “implicit critique of prevailing and relatively permissive norms,” not least the pluralism and moral relativism that makes evangelism possible but often ineffectual (ibid.:  71, 86). Further, even when crossing a bridge to the secular world to evangelize, the fortress comes as well, as building bridges with non-Evangelicals is “partly an act of self-creation,” for it is in the act of evangelizing that Evangelical subjective differences are most obvious (ibid.: 137). In their ethnographic study of an Evangelical “oppositional collegiate subculture,” Magolda and Gross (2009: 287–94) use the term “progressive fundamentalism” to describe this interplay of resistance and compromise, bridges and fortresses. Their study is one of the few that engages with relevant concepts from earlier studies of secular subcultures, and is laudable in combining this with the empirical grounding found among “post-subcultural” scholars. As such Magolda and Gross analyze the “subcultural style” of their Evangelical students, arguing that a homologous “bricolage” is created by repositioning facets of university life to “create a distinct style that is pregnant with complex meaning and structures that challenge dominant groups” (ibid.: 266–7). These youth do not wholly abandon consumption, but—like the subcultures theorized by the CCCS—make critical consumer choices to demonstrate their belief and identity, including rubber bracelets with Christian slogans as alternatives to secular bling, and scheduling rock/pop church services on Friday nights as “a sacred alternative to the dominant culture’s profane Friday night activities” (ibid.). Interviews revealed genuine belief within the group that their “Christ-centered values” contradict the “materialism, hedonism, and individualism” that constitutes the dominant values of their society (ibid.: 104–8). However, the ethnographic nature of Magolda and Gross’s research contrasts the “internal coherence” of the subculture’s symbolic life with the “paradoxes and contradictions” emerging in everyday interactions (ibid.: 279). For all their Evangelical enthusiasm, group members are reluctant evangelists since—unlike Smith’s (1998) theoretical model, but much like Strhan’s (2014, 2015) English Evangelicals—they try to avoid conflict. Nevertheless, very much in keeping with Smith’s (1998) “subcultural identity” theory, these American Evangelical youth feel a sense of cultural marginalization, despite their primarily privileged white and middle-class backgrounds, and the group drifts between

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traditional and deliberately contemporary religious practices (Magolda and Gross 2009: 279–95). In her subcultural ethnography Wannabes, Goths and Christians, Wilkins (2008:  88–149) studies a similar American Evangelical university group, and while avoiding thorough use of existing subcultural theories other than Smith’s work, it is also comparable to earlier, CCCS-style studies. Like the CCCS, Wilkins interprets Evangelical subculture as a problem-solving activity that fails to address underlying socioeconomic inequalities. Wilkins argues that for her participants “Christianity provides a path through the pain and complexity of youth status hierarchies” (ibid.: 90), resolving problems with relationships and body image while papering-over ethnic and class differences. A distinct identity is maintained in a similar manner to Magolda and Gross’s (2009) students “by avoiding the activities that they perceive as central to many of their peers— partying, goofing off, gossiping, complaining, sex” (Wilkins 2008: 96). However, drifting toward too “functionalist” a reading of Evangelical youth like this, reducing professed religious beliefs to instrumentalized problem-solving, is problematic. It risks assuming beliefs are held in an insincere manner, and in doing so, risks denying the actual diversity of young people’s beliefs and subjectivities, such that at best, religious difference is simply folded into some broader cultural or ethnic category, or contemporary youth becomes one spiritually or ideologically undifferentiated cohort. Such an approach risks repeating the methodological failings of the CCCS’s analysis of youth subcultures by neglecting young peoples’ accounts of their own lives in favor of political “decoding” by scholars (Muggleton 2000: 20–2).

Conclusion A basic tension is apparent in the theorizations of Evangelical subcultures above. On the one hand, there is a desire to resist the dominant practices of contemporary secular culture to strengthen marginal religious beliefs and identities but on the other hand, there is a need to negotiate the expression of religious beliefs and identities in secular cultures to make them understood. In discussions with Evangelical punks, I observed a common concern that however comfortable the Evangelical subculture as they understand it is, it is deeply problematic because of the inability to evangelize effectively from within it, as well as a recognition that the Evangelical subculture can be an embarrassingly easy market for Evangelical musicians. We will see in the rest of this book that the forms

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of subcultural identity and resistance Evangelical punks, surfers, skateboarders, and hip hoppers seek to perform are radically different from the class-based antagonisms theorized by the CCCS, but present issues of identity and subjectivity that sit uneasily within post-subcultural representations that assume an absence of meaningful ideological disagreement in subcultural spaces. At the same time, there is no serious desire for the kind of countercultural institutions the Jesus Movement established, and what apocalypticism one might now encounter is typically a moral injunction not to get too comfortable in the world, rather than count down the days until it ends. As the religious forms we will explore in this book reveal, youth subcultures are ways to embody and perform profound differences, and can demonstrate precisely how young people embody belief, through the simultaneous movements of cultural refusal and cultural alternative that frame Evangelical subcultures. We can conceive of this as a form of resistance, albeit articulated differently from the class-based resistance theorized by the CCCS. The resistance of Evangelical youth in secularizing cultures becomes the creative exploration of different ways to embody their beliefs. One will not find explicit concerns with upward or downward mobility, therefore, but concerns that whatever success and pleasure comes one’s way does not compromise one’s relationship with God and with other people. The political approach, such that there is one, can be broadly framed within the notion of “populist traditionalism” I take from Tex Sample’s (1996: 120) class-focused study of Christianity and country music; it is less a policy platform than a subversive relational individualism evincing strong distrust of the normative social institutions and practices of secular modernity. Rather than radical social demands, then, Evangelical youth subcultures ask questions about religious subjectivity. How does one be Christian in the context of contemporary liberal secularism? In the dual movements of refusal and alternative—not unlike Bramadat’s (2000) “fortress” and “bridge”—which constitute Evangelical youth subcultural resistance, to “be” a Christian is itself conceived of as the foundation of resistance; it is to “witness” an alternative way of being in this world and the next. Such an emphasis on a continuity of personal (and collective) integrity combines Evangelical commitment to individual conviction and doctrinal correctness, with something approaching an older theorization of subcultural concern with authenticity. As a form of cultural resistance grounded in Evangelical affect, aware of its own otherness, Evangelical youth subcultures can be appreciated as forms of “identity work” as developed in studies of youth subcultural resistance looking

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beyond class, such as Zine’s (2000) studies of Muslim youth, or Bottrell’s (2007) study of Australian Indigenous youth. We will see in the next chapter, in particular, that the idea of identity work fits well with Thompson’s (2004) notions of punk as a space or template for exploring alternative subjectivities. We will also see the link with Charles Taylor’s (2007: 473–504) work on contemporary religious affect framed within the boundaries of what he calls the “age of authenticity” wherein the desire for individual identities based on individual experience is at the forefront of culture and ethics. The problem with resistance as “identity work” is that it allows religious particularities to reverberate in such a way that they can reinforce a sense of embattled identity and alienation that need not necessarily be so pronounced. This is Smith’s (1998) theory of Evangelical “subcultural resilience” based in Evangelicalism’s belief in its own marginal and threatened state, combined with a sense of its own novelty and privileged truth. A key question for these Evangelical youth subcultures is how to authentically articulate Evangelicalism as an embodied minority belief in a popular cultural form, communicating a comprehensible alternative subjectivity within a broader subculture and society, the basic problematic which is the focus of this book.

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Christian Punk in an Age of Authenticity

Introduction When Evangelical Christians engage with secular youth culture, they carry with them a burden of authenticity. Christianity’s acceptability and compatibility with a given youth culture cannot be assumed, especially the forms of youth culture this book is concerned with, which in various ways conceive of themselves as quite different to the public perception of Christianity. As we saw in the previous chapter, concerns about authenticity have been fundamental to debates around youth subcultures. In the case of music-based youth subcultures, including secular punk and contemporary Christian music (CCM), authenticity is constituted by a sometimes contradictory commitment to individual self-expression and reproduction of received ideas. Christian punk musicians and fans therefore find themselves negotiating complex and contradictory demands and desires to demonstrate the authenticity of their musical practices and affiliations. This chapter draws on the work of Charles Taylor in particular, to examine competing regimes of authenticity operating within the Christian punk subculture, and within its parent cultures of secular punk, Evangelical youth culture, and the CCM scene. The basic problematic explored in this chapter is articulated by Kyle, formerly of a Californian Christian emo/indie rock band, who no longer identifies as a Christian but has experienced the difficulties arising from existing within and between different cultures: When you’re playing in a music scene that has a political and historical culture to it, and you come from a religious background that has its own cultural identity, there’s always this weird personal conflict going on. You have to hold these two separate identities at the same time, and they don’t necessarily meetup with each other. It can be really hard to be authentic overall. In some ways your Christianity invalidates your punk views, and then, at the same point, a lot of people would feel the punk views can invalidate your Christian upbringing and what that subculture has to say.

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This chapter will argue that within the contexts of secular punk scenes, Evangelical churches, and the CCM scene, Christian punk relies upon rhetoric of authenticity as honest self-expression to legitimize its cultural practices. Problematically, as Kyle’s quote illustrates, authenticity is constituted in different ways based on the different underlying values of the secular punk scene on the one hand, and Evangelical youth culture and the CCM scene on the other. The first section of this chapter will offer a brief, historical overview of Christian punk as it has developed over the past thirty years. The second section will analyze various theories of authenticity in modern cultural production in general, and within popular music in particular, noting differences with traditional and religious notions of authenticity in artistic expression. We will see that in contemporary secular culture, an authentic individual is held to be someone whose outward behavior is a truthful reflection of their inner beliefs and desires; authentic music can be thought of by its audience as traveling a short distance from the artist’s mind (or heart, or soul) to the listener’s ear (Moore 2002:  209). This is not just pertinent for religious individuals who might be called upon—as Christians in the punk scene often are—to justify their beliefs as sincere and self-examined ones, but also for artists seeking acceptance within a particular genre that has recognizable rules (Fabri 1980; Frith 1996). These “genre rules” often serve as standards by which the authenticity of a genre artist can be assessed, to see whether outward adherence to the rules of their particular genre is a truthful reflection of inner belief and commitment to the values of the genre. After critically analyzing various notions of authenticity, this chapter will then turn to an analysis of the ways in which the norms of secular punk, Evangelical youth culture, and CCM are negotiated by Christian punk musicians and fans to gain acceptance for their musical and religious practices.

A brief history of Christian punk Christian punk can be traced back to developments within the remnants of the Jesus Movement, the Evangelical fraction of the hippie counterculture discussed in the previous chapter, which engaged with youth subcultures and used various forms of popular music to express their beliefs. The first Christian punk bands to gain any significant audience emerged out of this Evangelical milieu in California in the early 1980s. Sponsored by the Calvary Chapel church in suburban Orange County, which combined popular music and youth culture–friendly

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ministry with Evangelical apocalypticism, the pop punk bands Undercover and The Lifesavors—sometimes presented as “new wave” to avoid punk’s stigma— were criticized for adopting punk’s aesthetics without its “attitude” (Thompson 1999:  89–90; Powell 2002:  974–5). Christian punk existed on the margins of even the Christian music industry throughout the 1980s, and the few bands that achieved some prominence, such as One Bad Pig and The Crucified, remained unknown beyond Anglophone Evangelical churches. The 1990s signaled a radical shift in Christian punk, through the emergence in the United States of the “Spirit-filled hardcore” movement of teenage Pentecostals growing up with one foot in their local church and, unlike earlier bands, the other foot in their local secular hardcore punk scene. As Tomas, a vocalist involved with the Spirit-filled movement, said: Mostly we were playing local shows [but] I did some small tours with the band. We did what I would classify as secular shows and they were in basements and warehouses—fear-for-your-life kind of places—and half were Christian venues. Our original intent was not to play Christian venues, but the Christian venues afforded us the opportunity to tour. Not to make money, but to pay our bills.

These bands also frequented Christian music festivals, most importantly the Cornerstone festival, organized between 1984 and 2012 by a remnant of the Jesus Movement, the Jesus People USA. Tomas described Cornerstone as “a Christian Woodstock,” and his former bandmate, Max, likened it to a religious revival: I’d been in ninety-two and we went back in ninety-four with our demo. There was an influx of other hardcore bands:  Focused, Unashamed, Six Feet Deep, there were all these different bands and it was like this one summer there was an awakening that coined the term “Spirit-Filled Hardcore.” After that, all the bands were really on fire and there were a lot of people—kids—who were into it, and they were giving records to their friends who weren’t Christians but were in the hardcore scene.

As Mall (2015a) argues, framing the Cornerstone festival within youth subculture theory, the festival was intended by its founders to be an explicit form of “resistance” against standardized contemporary Christian music, encouraging the articulation of “resistant identities” that overlapped Evangelical and alternative music subcultures. Cornerstone might have been the best example of what Young (2012:  335)  describes as Evangelical youth culture’s “ongoing dalliance with

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pluralism,” at least insofar as it accepted that diverse cultural expressions can emerge from common beliefs. When Cornerstone ended in 2012, Mall (2015a) suggests this precise pluralization of Evangelical youth culture had made it redundant; punk and metal became more acceptable within Evangelicalism, and Evangelicalism became more acceptable within punk and metal scenes. The rise and fall of Cornerstone is also linked to another significant development—the creation of Tooth & Nail Records in 1993. Modeled on independent secular labels, and bearing some similarity to the defunct Broken Records label from the Calvary Chapel’s Maranatha label, Tooth & Nail is a Christian label focusing on punk and alternative rock, which provided a focal point for musicians and fans (Thompson 1999: 175–6). A hardcore and metal-focused subsidiary, Solid State, was established in 1997, and the Christian subsidiary of transnational major label EMI purchased a 50 percent stake in Tooth & Nail in 2000, providing greater access to the secular market. By the turn of the millennium, a thriving Christian punk subculture had developed in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. In the mold of Spirit-filled hardcore, Christian pop punk, ska, hardcore, and metalcore bands were embedded in local secular scenes, but touring with the support of churches. Mitch, a ska and punk musician from Australia, explained that a typical tour in the 2000s would involve playing half of the shows in secular venues, and half of them in churches, sometimes standing in as the worship band in church service, with better pay from the church shows covering the tour’s costs. The proliferation of these bands is an example of the globalization of contemporary Evangelicalism, similar to the globalization of contemporary charismatic worship music outward from certain hubs in the United States or Australia, carrying ambiguous traces of national or local parent cultures (Miller and Yamamori 2007: 140–1). In the case of Christian punk, the Californian (or West Coast) aura is certainly acknowledged by foreign fans; South Africans imagine Californian Evangelicalism has overcome provincial anxieties about style and propriety, offering a good example of a “trans-local” scene, which retains local specificities within its global vision (Peterson and Bennett 2004; Moberg 2011). By the mid-2000s, Christian punk bands—especially Tooth & Nail’s roster—could easily be found alongside secular peers in the “normal” section of major music retailers (Beaujon, 2006:  57–62), and Christian bands would feature in secular magazines such as Alternative Press in the United States and Kerrang in the United Kingdom. As is the case for secular punk, the overwhelming majority of Christian punk bands are commercial failures

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or nonstarters, but Christian punk has produced a significant number of commercially successful artists: MxPx’s (1998) pop punk album Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo was certified gold, indicating 500,000 sales, as was Underoath’s (2006) metalcore album Define the Great Line, which debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 album chart. More recently, the metalcore band August Burns Red (2013, 2015) released two albums that reached the top ten of the Billboard 200 album chart, Rescue and Restore and Found in Faraway Places. A number of other bands released albums that also charted on Billboard’s main (secular) album chart, including Anberlin, Blessthefall, The Chariot, The Devil Wears Prada, Emery, Five Iron Frenzy, Haste the Day, Hawk Nelson, mewithoutYou, and Norma Jean. Indeed, Christian punk, especially its heavy metal–influenced crossover subgenres, is significant in having achieved a place within many secular local punk scenes and having attracted a significant non-Christian fan base. This is quite different from most other forms of CCM, and contrasts with scholarly assessments of CCM, including in its alternative forms, that position it as “confined to the very margins” of its parent genres (Moberg 2015: 115–16).

Authenticity between the sacred and the secular Christian punk musicians and fans often use the term “authenticity” when describing aspects of their involvement with secular punk scenes, CCM, and Evangelical youth culture. Although the appropriateness of the concept of authenticity has been much debated in popular music studies, as this chapter will show, authenticity is a vital keyword within the vocabulary of punk, and within CCM and Evangelicalism more broadly. Insofar as Christian punk struggles to achieve authenticity within two quite differently organized meta-genres, its struggle for recognition constitutes a novel study in the negotiation of identity and ethics in popular music and youth culture. For Taylor (1989:  377–9, 1992:  25–9), the key distinction between notions of authenticity in secular and religious cultures is between the secular modern notion of the artist as the key creative agent, making something new and unique, as opposed to the traditional religious idea of God as the key creative agent, with the artist reproducing God’s creation in some form, and God remaining the nominal authority for claims about morality and truth. So within both secular modernity and religious tradition—or at least the Christian tradition Taylor is concerned with—the creative artist is a seeker of deeper truths, but in secular

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modernity, creativity is a subjective process, with one’s personal relationships and creative life taking precedent over ritual and religious life as the means for finding fulfilment and expression. Lewin and Williams (2009: 71–9) explicitly connect punk’s ethics with this secular “quest for authenticity” in which the individual breaks with conventional institutions and ideas, using their own subjective judgement as the measure of truth. What punk criticizes most of all is the uncritical reproduction of established ideologies—especially the uncritical reproduction of punk’s established ideologies—by people whose inner lives do not match their outward selves. For creative artists from the Romantic era onward, notions of authenticity are based in personal revelation rather than in a shared religious system or language, such that creative self-expression itself becomes fundamental to notions of individual authenticity and “[a]rtistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in which people can come to self-definition” (Taylor 1992: 61–2). Because modern authenticity is a process and experience unique to the individual, it becomes closely connected to the notion of originality such that one is not supposed to find self-fulfillment by reproducing received truths. Realizing and expressing one’s authentic self is a personal struggle (ibid.: 29, 63). As such, the contemporary notion of authenticity becomes fused with the related ideology of “expressive individualism” for Taylor (2002:  80–107, 2007:  473–504), a concept that Bellah et al. (1985) also make productive use of, and which underpins Heelas and Woodhead’s (2005) theory of religious “subjectivization.” The basic ethos of this form of individualism is that everyone has a right to develop their own form of life, grounded on their own sense of what is really important or of value. People are called upon to be true to themselves and to seek their own self-fulfilment. What this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content. (Taylor 1992: 14)

Such moral autonomy is a morality all its own, Taylor argues, and it can make acceptable individual indifference to matters deemed by others (not least Taylor himself) to be of the utmost importance. Although locating the emergence of expressive individualism within Romanticism, and concerned with its manifestations in nonconformist secular and religious cultures, including early Evangelicalism, Taylor recognizes the significance of the notion of authentic living filtering down from the artistic elite to become a standard demand in the contemporary West. So while we may look to artists to offer us a glimpse of the “inner world of an exceptional

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subject” (Weisethaunet and Lindberg 2010: 471), the consumers of popular music have as much right to a rich inner life as its producers. As such, Taylor’s (2002, 2007) later work engages with contemporary consumerism, including popular music, as a vital resource for this realization of one’s authentic being. So at the same time as becoming the building blocks for the expression of an individual’s understanding of who they are, popular culture, music, and fashion has become a way to be connected to “thousands, even millions of others” (Taylor 2007: 475). One could think of this as a basic way of understanding the development of subcultural identities, but as we saw in the previous chapter, more spontaneous forms of affective connections are also conceivable, such as neo-tribes. The broader tension here is that although creative artists are paradigmatic self-creators or self-definers of authenticity, through introspection and selfexpression we seek out artists whose personal visions correspond with our own. Since no one can engage with consumer capitalism in a unique manner, Taylor’s analysis of the broad sweep of Western culture over the past three centuries raises similar issues as the debates we looked at in the previous chapter about the problem of distinguishing between what is “authentic” and “inauthentic” in rapidly commercializing and fragmenting youth subcultures. As we will see, authenticity within a music-based subculture relies upon replicating recognized elements. A punk band that boldly refused to follow any of punk’s identifiable genre rules might earn respect for its creative boldness, but it would not land many gigs. It makes more sense, therefore, to argue that within the consumer culture of late modernity, we are “co-determiners” of the meanings of our actions and identities; the personal truths we consider authentic are achieved through dialogical interactions and relationships with often thoroughly commercialized social and cultural systems (ibid.: 481–2). In the case of Christian punk, and in CCM, both of Taylor’s interpretations of authenticity are present. The authentic Christian punk seeks to sincerely perform a subjective understanding of their own true identity, but this true identity conforms to orthodox Evangelical beliefs and practices. There is a tension here familiar within Evangelical Christianity more broadly. Individual Christian punks can articulate their beliefs within the same subjective form normative within (secular) punk, emphasizing individual affect, but Christians—more so than punks—remain subjective adherents of an institutionally determined identity. This basic situation that Taylor has identified within the modern ideology of expressive individualism in consumer societies is replicated within debates about authenticity within secular popular music.

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Authenticity in secular popular music Scholarly debates over authenticity in popular music have analyzed the extent to which popular music is a mediated process of interpellation into a commodified identity. We saw earlier associations of authenticity with noncommercial or anticommercial cultural innovation in the previous chapter, epitomized by Hebdige’s (1979) early writing on music-based youth subcultures, which lost its appeal after a succession of studies presented individualized and consumeroriented analyses of youth subcultures, with Thornton (1995) and Muggleton (2000) the most influential. In a similar vein, some scholars of popular music, notably Grossberg (1992), have argued that a shared sense of authenticity is impossible given the lack of a common value system in postmodernity. And yet, the alternative notion of authenticity as an open ethic of expressive individualism, as in Taylor’s writing, is unviable in subcultures and scenes that seek continuity and coherence. However, just because authenticity is problematic for scholars does not mean it is problematic for participants in music-based subcultures themselves. Despite the problem of defining and analyzing authenticity, music discourse is “saturated” with the concept (Fairchild 2003: 302). With a few exceptions, contemporary popular music scholars are concerned with examining how authenticity is constituted within a particular genre, scene, or subculture. This “collective assessment” depends on specific, changeable circumstances, meaning that authenticity is a value that can degrade over time or be lost altogether (ibid.: 304–5). A typical example is the accusation that an artist has “sold out” by changing their values to chase commercial success. They can then be accused of creating “inauthentic” music that has no higher purpose than popularity (Frith 2007: 263); this is predicated on a common moral judgment that “if something is created to sell, it is less worthy than if created for some other reason, say, for the love of the thing itself ” (Jensen 1998: 165). As Peterson (1997: 206) argues, “co-option, commercialism, and commodification” are the typical crimes “sellouts” are accused of, which returns us to debates from the previous chapter about music-based subcultures and the fear of incorporation into the cultural “mainstream.” This concern with commerciality as inauthenticity is particularly acute within punk, which developed in the 1970s through a relationship with the commercial music industry that was soon dissolved, but revived in the 1990s (Tschmuck 2006: 143–5). Thompson (2004: 144) notes a certain discourse circulating within punk that argues “the moment that a punk band succeeds commercially, which for punks means working with a major label, it ceases to be punk.” While this

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attitude is not uniformly held, resistance to commercialization is, but this is primarily about creative autonomy and not a total rejection of commerce. This opposition to commercialization is one of the three constitutive “desires” that Thompson (ibid.: 4–79) identifies within punk, framing its discourses of authenticity. The other two being constant critique of the norms of popular music and the subsequent desire to explore alternative subjectivities, and the creation of communities where this exploration and self-expression can take place. Recognizing punks’ belief in their own authenticity, and the inauthenticity of others, has been a mainstay of academic studies on punk (Hannerz 2013: 51–3). The precise location of the boundary between the authentic and inauthentic differs, however, not least because “subcultural schisms” (Wood 2006) continue to complicate punk’s ethical practices, such that scholarly and journalistic studies show that Pentecostalism, punk pornography, and the secular puritanism of the Straight Edge movement coexist within the subculture (Thompson 2004; Diehl 2007). Nevertheless, Gordon (2014) identifies several broad criteria that, as in Thornton’s (1995) analysis of subcultural capital, individuals within a punk scene can use to claim and contest authenticity, including the celebration of obscure bands and professed hatred of successful ones. Hannerz (2013) bluntly applies Durkheimian distinctions between the sacred and the profane in understanding punk’s differentiation from what it construes as the cultural mainstream, through the maintenance of symbolic boundaries and prohibitions on certain relationships. For Moore (2004), this insistence upon maintaining authenticity serves as a subcultural diagnostic to prevent the loss of creative control, recalling Thompson’s (2004) emphasis on resisting commercialization for the same reason. Arola (2007: 297–300), however, identifies the negative aspects of this constant policing of authenticity, which can create an “exclusionary community whose primary means of self-constitution lies in defining oneself negatively against that which we wish to smash.” This is an internal process as well as an external one, for just as punk constantly renews its sources of external inauthenticity and potential corruption, so too are internal sources of inauthenticity identified (Hannerz 2013). One might assume that Christian punk would be among the internal deviations to “smash” in the war on inauthenticity, but as we will see in the next chapter, despite a small number of exceptions, this has not been the case. I believe this is because authenticity in punk is primarily understood as procedural rather than substantive. As Thompson’s (2004) discussion of punk’s constitutive “desires” demonstrates, there is no single way punk must be realized. Punk is, as Garnett (1999: 22) claims, the most inclusive genre in popular culture, incorporating “mutually exclusive tendencies [and] styles.” Lewin and Williams (2009)

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find that claiming and debating authenticity is a vital punk preoccupation, but this is an individualized ethical discourse that is not necessarily commensurate with the music-based subculture theories from the previous chapter. Rather, a commitment to uniformity of individual belief and action is the hallmark of authenticity in punk; artists accused of the instrumentalization of punk, seeking commercial success for example, can be rejected as inauthentic for abandoning the beliefs underpinning their behavior (ibid.: 73–5). An interesting example of this fusion of personal belief and public performance can be found in the case of Brandon, lead singer and guitarist in an American ska-influenced hardcore band. Initially a Christian band, its members no longer identify as such, and although Brandon describes himself as “a subscriber to the Hippie Jesus philosophy,” a change in belief led to a change in performance. When I asked Brandon how he handles the Evangelical messages in some of the band’s earlier songs, he explained: I just don’t play them anymore; I can’t. I gotta be honest. Being a musician, the point of it is to play your music and present yourself as honestly as you can to people. For example, I can’t play “Choose.” I didn’t even write the lyrics, it was our old singer. Even if people ask for it, we can’t do it. The only one thing that’s been consistent is passion. Whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it one hundred percent. Now we’re one hundred percent an agnostic, morally conscious, politically-infused band.

Authenticity in contemporary Christian music Much the same can be said for notions of authenticity in CCM as in secular punk; what matters is a uniformity of belief and action rather than any specific aesthetic outcome. Emerging in the United States in the late 1960s, as musicians in the Jesus Movement explored various forms of popular music to express their beliefs and experiences, CCM has two broad tasks:  to provide Christian analogues of secular culture, and to evangelize non-Christians (Romanowski 2000). CCM is primarily the domain of Evangelicals (Howard and Streck 1999: 6; Powell 2002: 17), for whom the desire for subcultural distinctiveness, and unease with secular culture, is stronger than for many other kinds of Christians. Like punk, there was early (secular) major label interest in CCM, although Evangelicals have distrusted the secular culture industry, and CCM artists largely went their own way until major labels rediscovered CCM in the 1980s and 1990s (Howard and Streck 1999; Thompson 1999). Even now, CCM artists are largely signed

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to Christian subsidiary labels, or independent Christian labels. Reminiscent of the subcultural positioning of American Evangelicalism, the persistence of Christian labels and subsidiaries reinforces the meta-genre’s self-belief that the secular culture industry is no place for Christians. Such a view is not found elsewhere, however, and Christians have found a happy home in the secular culture industry in South Africa, for example, including countless gospel superstars, as well as celebrated indie bands like Gangs of Ballet, and Desmond and the Tutus. Every substantial study of CCM refers to artists who have defied Evangelical orthodoxy and been ostracized accordingly. Most dramatically, the “mother” of CCM, Marsha Stevens, was disowned by the industry—and all but erased from its memory—when she came out as a lesbian (Powell 2002: 870–5; Beaujon 2006: 22–3). Thirty years later, successful CCM pop artist Jennifer Knapp left the industry and also came out as a lesbian. Discussing an album she released that reflected her religious beliefs but was not marketed as CCM, she said she was now able to “write without feeling like I’ve got to manufacture something that’s not entirely genuine, to take a song and feel like I have to make an obvious biblical reference” (Moring 2010). This quote neatly encapsulates the tension between the notion of authenticity as autonomous self-expression, and the notion of authenticity as expressing received religious truths. However, insofar as CCM also focuses on personal experiences, there is a connection with broader aspects of modern creative expression. Taylor (1989: 368–410, 495–9) and Martin (2005: 5–6) cite Evangelical correlations and cross-fertilizations in the Romantic milieu, without losing sight of the substantial differences. CCM has had difficulty mediating between these Romantic and secular modern notions of creativity, and the demands of Evangelical orthodoxy. Pattison (1987: 186) argues that rock’s Romanticism undermines Christianity, “firstly, by shifting the locus of faith from God to self, and secondly, by depriving sects and churches of their claim to exclusive revelation.” Being framed within the cultural practices of popular music as well as Christianity has meant that the tension between celebrating the message and the messenger has been a constant controversy in CCM. Successful CCM singer Rebecca St James describes a “contradiction” within CCM between pressure for female artists to appear attractive without being “sensual,” and to achieve commercial success without appearing to want it (Alfonso 2002: 90–2). A different way of understanding the demands of authenticity in CCM is to argue, with Moore (2002), that authenticity can be about artists reproducing the hegemonic truths of their community, as well as the truths of their personal experiences. For a musician to be accepted as an authentic part of the world of CCM,

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they must reproduce the cultural norms of the Evangelicals who dominate the CCM scene, through narrating personal experiences. This will, of course, create conflicts and contradictions, but as Moore (2002: 216–19) observes in the context of secular popular music, questions are also asked about the authenticity of an artist who breaks with the audience with whom they form a subculture or community. Partridge (2013: 124) offers the famous example of a fan declaring Bob Dylan “Judas” for switching from acoustic to electric guitar, breaking the connection the folk scene had with generations of acoustic musicians. Similarly, CCM pioneer Larry Norman recalls a performance by Bob Dylan after his Evangelical conversion, in which Christians abused him for playing pre-conversion songs, and non-Christians abused him for not playing his most hedonistic hits; “[H]e just couldn’t get any breathing room” (Stowe 2011: 230). This returns us to the basic tensions in the notion of authenticity in secular culture; the artist creates and communicates their unique self, in part by reusing recognizable tropes, and we celebrate the supposedly unique figures we find relatable. This combination of conviction and creativity, reproducing community beliefs, is close to Howard and Streck’s (1999:  205)  analysis of authenticity in CCM existing somewhere within and between the traditional religious and modern secular values of creative expression: Incorporating threads drawn from both evangelical Christianity and the culture of mainstream pop music, authenticity in Christian music has become a function of religious motivations, aesthetic judgments, sales figures, airplay, and audience demographics. However, there is no one equation explaining how these elements come together to produce “authentic Christian music.”

Within this imprecise formula, one key measure of artistic authenticity is gaining a large non-Christian audience (ibid.:  200–2). This is difficult enough for a secular musician, let  alone one signed to a Christian label, principally sold through Christian retailers, and performing at Christian venues. Secular success validates not only the individual artist, but the entire genre of CCM that remains haunted by the idea that it is only catering to like-minded Evangelicals, and having no impact on the lives of anyone else.

Evangelical authenticity in secular punk culture Existing within and between secular punk scenes and CCM, Christian punk is located at the meeting point of these competing cultural forms with competing

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ideas of what authentic music is. Although few Christian punks doubt the legitimacy of what they are doing, they sometimes struggle to be accepted as authentic by irreligious punks and Evangelicals alike. As its commercial success began to peak in the mid-2000s, a series of interviews with Christian punk’s protagonists in the glossy secular music magazine Alternative Press essentially asked the subgenre to justify itself (Heisel 2005). The arguments offered for the authenticity of Evangelical Christianity within secular punk, by those interviewed in Alternative Press and by the musicians and fans I subsequently interviewed, rests upon adherence to elements of expressive individualism, as well as demonstrating values of honesty and creative autonomy, accepting free expression of all of punk’s participants, and at least attempting to conceive of Christianity as an anti-mainstream ideology. It is significant, however, that many Christian punk musicians encounter no specific suspicion of the authenticity of their music in secular spaces. Mitch speculated that the garbled vocals and distorted guitars of his punk rendered their lyrics incomprehensible, lessening their religious difference such that they even received airplay on secular youth radio. A similar point was made by Kyle, who found that the most “preachy” Christians in the punk meta-genre gravitated to the metalcore subgenre, with its usually unintelligible vocal style. Even when Christian punk vocals are understandable, the often personal nature of the lyrics, coupled with reduced religious literacy and the unlearning of “the great languages of transcendence” (Taylor 2007: 727), means that lyrics may be inconceivable as anything other than individual expression. Jordan’s London-based “funkcore” pop punk band began explaining the spiritual significance of its songs to secular audiences when they realized that the messages in their lyrics were otherwise not understood. As Taylor (1992: 84) argues, “where formerly poetic language could rely on certain publicly available orders of meaning, it now has to consist in a language of articulated sensibility.” In the absence of shared religious beliefs and doctrine, spirituality is part of an individual “personal vision” (Taylor 1989: 425–9). Although arguably undermining the desire to evangelize, except perhaps insofar as it bolsters the process of subcultural “friendship evangelism” (Bramadat 2000:  25), the personal and experiential nature of most Christian punk lyrics allows Christian punk musicians to act authentically according to the contemporary standards of secular punk, in which lyrics more often address angst than anarchism (Azerrad 2007). Concern about the motivation of Christians in the punk scene is fundamental to the acceptance of their authenticity in secular scenes. This will be the particular focus of the next chapter, but the prevalence of the rhetoric of honesty is

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worth mentioning here. An authentic artist is an honest artist whose beliefs and behavior cohere, whose creative acts express sincerely held ideas, as illustrated above in the discussion of Brandon’s musical and spiritual journey. Whereas religiously inspired songs are seen by Christian punks as authentic expression of personal beliefs and experiences, nonreligious or antireligious punks can interpret the same songs as inauthentic, because they cannot conceive of the possibility of sharing these beliefs or experiences themselves. As such, Christian bands can be viewed as cynically infiltrating punk scenes to evangelize, under the direction of local churches, which can be presented as a scenario in which older, religious leaders are effectively curtailing the freedom of irreligious youth (Malott 2009; Peterson 2009: 129–30). Even without such suspicions, the presence of Christians in punk scenes can still be considered inauthentic insofar as they are viewed as evidence of punk’s entry into the cultural mainstream and loss of oppositional status. In this way, the presence of Christians serves, for some, as analogous to the presence of women; for some punks, both are litmus tests for how far punk has shifted from what they view as authentic punk culture that should repel all but the most disenfranchised and dysfunctional young men. Accordingly, one of the most important tasks that Christian punk’s protagonists must undertake to establish their authenticity in secular punk scenes is to disprove suspicions of dishonesty and outside control. Tomas, a participant in the Spirit-filled hardcore movement, said that Christians became accepted in the 1990s Florida hardcore scene in which he was active as “simply people of faith; they’re not trying to work for the man.” This notion of Christian punks as individual believers, rather than agents of religious institutions, returns us to earlier arguments about authenticity in secular modernity as a question of personal sincerity and struggle. The difficulty for Christian punks is that by adhering to Evangelical orthodoxy (correct belief) and orthopraxy (correct behavior), skeptical secular peers can question their individuality. This tension around voluntarily following a conservative religious creed goes back to the early days of CCM when musicians sought to maintain Evangelical practices, without appearing to do so unthinkingly. As Shires (2006: 96) explains, they insisted to their hippie peers that whatever they were doing, or not doing, was driven by internal desire, not external control. Brown (2012: 129) observes the same implicit approach more recently; a Christian musician can follow “his or her creative spirit rather than worrying about producing a product with an overt message,” trusting that their subjective convictions will result in religiously appropriate output. As Tim, from a melodic hardcore band in the British Midlands, said of appreciating Straight Edge prohibitions from within a

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Christian subjective position, “It’s not about a bunch of rules and regulations; it’s a relationship, isn’t it? So it’s sort of saying, ‘I’m giving up this because I’m devoting myself to what God created me to be.’ ” Individual Christians in the punk scene such as Tim can argue the authenticity of their beliefs within the same subjective form that Lewin and Williams (2009: 79) argue is normative within secular punk, individual emotion and experience as the ultimate arbiter of truth in a continuation of Romanticism in modern cultures of creative self-expression; it is nevertheless the case that Christian punks ground their emotion and experience within their religious beliefs. The general acceptance of arguments that Christians in local punk scenes are individual actors rather than agents of religious institutions goes some way to achieving authenticity in secular punk scenes. But recalling how authenticity in popular music and culture is not merely a question of individual autonomy but also a question of reproducing genre norms, the articulation of shared values is also an important criterion of authenticity in punk. These shared values are rarely wholly substantive; even the prohibitions in punk’s Straight Edge subculture are followed for different reasons, from within different worldviews (Abraham and Stewart 2014). Rather, the authentic values that Christian punks can claim they share with the secular punk scene are the constitutive punk “desires” Thompson (2004) outlines. Most basically these are values of autonomous self-expression and the notion that the form of Christianity they adhere to is, in fact, an alternative subjectivity running counter to the norms of their society. My concern is not whether the latter argument is true, although this sense of otherness is in keeping both with Smith’s (1998) theory of Evangelical subcultural resilience, and Gelder’s (2007:  2, 67)  observations of more generic (secular) subcultural subjectivity. What matters is the self-belief of Christian punks that they hold a counter-mainstream identity, because it is from this self-belief that support for the maintenance of punk as autonomous space for creative self-expression emerges. As we will see in the next chapter, in arguing for shared values of selfexpression, Christian punks recognize that they must allow the free expression of contrary views. As Zach, the US-born vocalist from a Sydney-based hardcore band said: A lot of times when we meet atheists, they’ve voiced that they like what we do because they see that it’s in the heart of their tradition, hardcore, to voice an opinion, to be bold and to—in their words—“have balls.” I have had some hardcore guys that are atheist and involved heavily in hardcore say to me, “at least there’s still someone passionate about something.”

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Similarly, Suvi, the vocalist of a Brisbane-based metalcore band, argued that hardcore was an “easy” genre for Christians to adapt to, since “it’s about expressing your views whether they’re bad or good,” in contrast to pop music in which “you don’t write music to express your point of view; it’s a feel good, make money kind of scene.” Suvi’s criticism of pop music also illustrates the shared value of opposition to the cultural “mainstream.” It is important for Christians in punk scenes to insist that their beliefs also differ from the “mainstream political, vocational, and moral imperatives” that secular punks seek to subvert (Leblanc 1999: 62–3), even if this opposition emerges from a quite different set of concerns. Jordan, from a London-based “funkcore” pop punk band, whose members originate from the Philippines and South Africa, argued that “secularism is pretty dominant nowadays in the West; if you’re a born-again Christian, you’re quite radical and rebellious in the current culture.” Even if one insists that Evangelicalism embodies mainstream values in the societies this book is concerned with, something I consider incorrect, as Barr (1977) argues, Evangelicalism holds its values to be inherently scandalous within sinful societies. Tim was not the only musician I interviewed to make use of the secular Straight Edge anthem “Out of Step” by Minor Threat (1981) to explain his position as an Evangelical Christian in contemporary culture. When Evangelical punks make further direct comparisons between Christian and punk values, both are presented as committed to passion, outspokenness, community, activism and the search for meaning—all positioned in opposition to a mainstream culture. Jesus can be recontextualized within a punk framework, as Jono, a hardcore musician, promoter, and zine editor, said: Jesus as a person was so anti-establishment and so angry at the society and the way it was. People think of Jesus as a bit of a hippie, but to me he’s a complete punk—albeit bearded and long haired. Yeah, Jesus is a punk to me. When you read closer into the scriptures it makes complete sense that this music must exist and definitely has an audience to appreciate it.

Accordingly, Christian punks argue that Christianity and punk emerge from dissatisfaction with the dominant values of society, even if the way these dissatisfactions are mediated and resolved are different. That few secular punks would be interested in Jono’s views about the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s life and teaching is not, I suspect, the primary issue for Christian punk’s claims of authenticity. Christian punk’s collective self-belief that it is a form of decidedly unpopular music is more significant insofar as it compels the kind of enthusiastic

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and egalitarian engagement with secular punk spaces that will be discussed in the next chapter.

Punk authenticity in Evangelical youth culture This chapter has been arguing that one of the novelties of Christian punk is that it seeks authenticity in two differently organized and orientated cultures: secular punk on the one hand and Evangelical youth culture and CCM on the other. In secular scenes, we saw the importance of Christian punks proving their openness to creative self-expression, demonstrating that not only do they express their own sincere beliefs but that they are also willing to accept the beliefs of others. When it comes to proving the authenticity of Christian punk in Evangelical youth culture and the CCM scene, the situation is somewhat different. It is still necessary to prove the individual sincerity of one’s beliefs, but stricter limitations are placed upon creative self-expression, and much of the suspicion of the authenticity of Christian punk in Evangelical spaces is concerned with its religious bona fides, such that personal religious commitment and experience can be used to authenticate Christian punk in Evangelical culture. This is most apparent in the emphasis on evangelism in Christian punk. Whereas Christian punk musicians and fans are committed to the maintenance of punk’s secular spaces, there is still a desire to share Evangelical belief in these spaces, which theoretically offer better prospects for evangelism precisely because of their secularity. This desire to evangelize forms half of the basis of the acceptance of Christian punk’s authenticity in Evangelical youth culture and CCM; the other key element is the notion of Christian punk music as a form of music that draws listeners closer to God—punk music as, most obviously, a form of worship. The Evangelical authenticity of Christian punk is also predicated on the same anticommercialism of secular punk. This is also not a total rejection of commerce, but an insistence that the music and its spiritual sentiments supersede the profit motive. Until the mid-1990s, Christian punk’s isolation on the margins of the North American CCM scene protected it from possible commercial corruption. Discussing Christian punk in South Africa, a few years later, Francois said, “Being punk it was all anti-commercial; we were trying very hard not to get signed—not that anyone would even want to. We were worried about selling out, but we couldn’t sell out.” In such a situation, merely being in a Christian punk band would be evidence enough of one’s religious authenticity.

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Jeff, a former grunge musician, characterized secular musicians’ attitudes in the 1990s: The only response to Christian music was that it was artistically not very good. It was cheesy, and the Christian musicians can’t drink, or smoke, so it’s not fitting that model of what it means to be a band. We willingly did that for the sake of ministry; feeling that sense of rejection from the world. They’d look at you as being totally out there to do that.

These bands could claim a religious form of indie credibility, a “celebration of obscurity and failure” by the measures of the culture industry (Hesmondhalgh 1997: 55), and a sacralized form of the punk authenticity in Fox’s (1987) study, measured by the status and comforts one gives up. At the same time, however, the religious authenticity gained through the “stigma” attached to playing Christian music in secular scenes (Hendershot 2004: 59) undermined Christian punk’s claims to musical authenticity because of the idea of bands as evangelismfocused musical imitators (Powell 2002: 16). My older, American research participants located a change in their youth, around the turn of the millennium, particularly when the Christian division of EMI purchased a 50 percent stake in Tooth & Nail. As Jeff said, “in the early 2000s it became acceptable to be Christians in a band; people didn’t look down on you as much.” The possibility of commercial success first manifested with Christian pop punk and ska punk bands in these years, particularly the pop punk band MxPx who were accused by some fans of “selling out” by signing with A&M Records, a subsidiary of secular major label Universal. Steve, the former curator of a Christian punk website, summarized these criticisms, and offered his view on the question of Christian punks “selling out”: Look at MxPx, at their first few non-successful albums, they were very overtly Christian; their last couple of albums haven’t mentioned Jesus or God at all. They have positive lyrics and, ultimately, that’s the approach they’ve decided to take, to get a positive approach out there, rather than potentially being too overtly Christian—so censoring what they’re saying. I’ve done an interview with those guys before, [drummer] Yuri [Ruley] and I  had a good chat about the Christian connotations—what happened to their message and why. You’ve got two things, the watering down of the Christian message, and the watering down of the punk-ness. I’m not hugely against “selling out,” as such; the only thing that frustrates me would be if someone did change their message and their music in order to be more successful, but just changing who’s signing your paycheck isn’t necessarily selling out, I don’t think.

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Christian bands certainly do attract criticism when they sign with secular labels, similar to Moore’s (2002) notion of authenticity as maintaining fidelity to one’s community, especially given the historical sense of “us and them” that characterized Evangelical attitudes toward the secular culture industry (Howard and Streck 1999:  90–1). Tanner, from a small, independent Christian record label, noted the commonality of statements from successful bands such as “Yeah, we’re in the Christian world, but that’s just where we got our start.” Christian record labels are not immune from accusations of inauthentic commercialism either. Tanner was extremely critical of the Christian music industry, based on his experience as an artist and repertoire manager: My definition of the Christian music industry, from experience, is really: industry, music, Christian. At the top it’s about the P[rofit] and L[oss] sheets; they speak louder than what sort of disciples of Christ we’re making—in any given situation. Then the music comes second to the industry because we’ve got to have songs that can connect with radio, or we’ve got to have the right video, or whatever it may be, so let’s tweak this or that. Then faith is important, still, but it’s the lowest caste in that system.

Even bands that explicitly reject the larger, commercial side of the Christian industry can be accused of greed. Derek, from another small, independent Christian record label, noted that some bands embedded solely within the Christian scene “want to make the most money and so stay in it to play to sheltered church kids.” Jeff observed that the Christian scene does a better job of filling the gap between being a DIY band, and being signed and successful; the Christian scene makes it easier, he observed, “for a band to stay on the road without being totally poor or being millionaires either.” As such, Tanner admitted that for artists with moderate talent, the Christian industry does offer “an easier ride, and you can coast it a little further.” The commercial success of Christian punk undermined its religious authenticity in general. Suspicion crept in that bands were driven by money, not ministry, and that religious identity was just a matter of public image. At the turn of the millennium, Jeff argued, “you could no longer tell whether a band was Christian or not by what label they were on, by who booked them, by who they toured with, or by where they played.” I encountered significant skepticism about whether members of more successful Christian punk bands adhere to Evangelical orthopraxy, especially when almost constant touring places these groups of popular young men beyond the purview of their families and churches. Tanner explained that spiritual crises are not uncommon in the Christian music industry, precisely

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because of the demands placed on successful artists, and show business is hardly known for strengthening people’s faith. Away from the (relatively) bright lights of Nashville or Seattle, the popularity of Christian punk and other alternative forms of alternative music in Evangelical youth culture also allows smaller bands to experience local success, exacerbating the problem of identity and authenticity. As Quinton from an Australian metalcore band said: Christians have money, you know? They’ll buy merch[andise]. They’ll come out to your show—their parent’s will let them come out to your show if you’re Christians. Churches have all the stuff that you need to put on a really good show; they’ve got a hall, they’ve got a really good PA, they’re already allowed by the council to make noise. There’s all these things. I know a few bands that I kind of have a problem with because it seems they’re Christians when it’s convenient, and they’re not a Christian band when it’s not convenient.

In contrast to the 1990s, when identifying as a Christian band was detrimental to one’s career, the opposite is sometimes suspected today. In the crisis of authenticity that emerged from their unexpected commercial success, Christian punk bands that seek greater religious authenticity typically orientate their musical activities around the idea of “mission.” In this sense, they are emphasizing the second self-justification of CCM, to evangelize as well as provide a Christian cultural alternative. Insofar as a band identifies as being ministry-focused, effectively seeking the kind of authenticity that Jeff experienced in the 1990s, claims of commercial opportunism that haunt CCM can be negated (Romanowski 2000: 112–13). Moberg’s (2015: 137, 148–9) analysis of Christian metal holds for Christian punk in this regard; the music is not seen as purely a means to evangelize such that it could be accused of exploiting music for religious ends (and so lose authenticity in secular scenes), but presenting a Christian message within a music-based subculture remains an integral part of the genre’s self-identity. While some bands do emphasize religious messages in their lyrics, the general focus is on relationship-driven “friendship Evangelism” (Bramadat 2000:  25)  or “witnessing,” an imprecise label for situational approaches to performing Christian belief as an alternative subjectivity. One of the reasons why many Christian punks are frustrated with the suspicion of the authenticity of their music in Evangelical youth culture, is their experience of punk as an instigator of intense religious experiences. This is the individual experiential aspect of religious authenticity, in keeping with the particular embodiment of belief within Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on

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personal conviction and emotional reassurance—or quite simply “feeling right” (Flory and Miller 2008: 131–2)—which ought to confirm the truth of received religious doctrines to the individual. Nick and Adam, from a Sydney-based hardcore band, discussed at some length the experience of feeling as if they were worshipping God during their live sets in secular venues. As Nick said, “Live shows give me a real sense of the presence of God. At a lot of places we’ve been it’s given me a chance to feel and understand what I believe.” As Lynch (2006: 486) argues, the emotional impact of music allows young people to learn to “feel” about the world in certain ways, as well as to “think” about the world in certain ways. Rory, who has played in various Scottish punk bands, recounted the following experience during a performance that served to authenticate his music: I had this bizarre charismatic experience when I  was playing. I  just became aware of God in the room, just really aware of his presence, particularly aware of his presence in the mosh pit. I was just like, “this is amazing; I think God really likes this,” you know?

Rory also discussed a similar experience of sensing God’s approving presence while watching a performance of the secular “hardcore anarchist conspiracy band” called Global Parasite. Another supernatural experience was described by Dave, curator of a Christian music website. His description of his experience while watching a set by the hardcore band Sleeping Giant at the Cornerstone festival in 2010 is worth quoting at length: That Sleeping Giant show, it was a great set; I really enjoyed myself. I was dancing, dancing, and at the end of the show the guy up on stage was singing, I don’t know what song it was; “Holy, Holy, Holy.” He’s singing it over and over and I felt compelled to pray. I just started praying as hard as I’ve ever prayed in my life. So I’m praying and this girl who was behind me, I hear her screaming; screaming about Jesus. “Aaaargh!” She’s on the ground, screaming and crying. There’s a couple of people around her, laying hands on her, and I’m praying. So I go over and lay hands on her and I’m praying, too, and when she was praying and everyone was praying around her, and laying hands on her, that’s when I had my run in with the Holy Spirit. It was incredible and terrifying at the same time. I was praying out loud. As I was praying I started to lose control of my body. It was shaking, violently shaking; extreme shivers. It was just terrifying. I was on my knees and I almost fell over, I was not in control of myself. I managed

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Evangelical Youth Culture to stand up and thought, “this isn’t happening to me. This can’t be happening.” I stumbled back and walked out of the tent and walked back to my tent and a couple of the guys from [the Christian hardcore band] Debtor were there. Here I come, and I must have looked like I was high as a kite. They were like, “what’s wrong with you?” I said, “man, you will not believe what’s happened.” I told that whole story and I was praying over people as they walked by. They must have thought I was crazy. I would have thought the same thing; here comes a crazy guy who wants to pray over me. I was explaining to them what was happening, that the Holy Spirit was moving me. It was wild. For hours I was on cloud nine, I was really happy. No problem in the world could have brought me down. The next day it was funny, I  saw Tom Green, the lead singer [of Sleeping Giant]. He laughed and said, “yeah, pretty cool, huh? The Holy Spirit will mess you up like that, man.” I told my wife and some friends about it and I think they thought I was kind of crazy, but it was an experience, you know? I felt it.

Originally a Victorian-era hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy” has been rerecorded by a number of contemporary worship artists. As Jennings (2014: 25) explains, worship music is intended to “catalyze the divine-human encounter” and facilitate this kind of intense ecstatic experience foundational in Evangelicalism. This is a standardized feature of Pentecostal worship (Miller and Yamamori 2007: 157), but certainly not a standardized feature of Christian punk performance. As Moberg (2015:  72)  argues, a distinctive feature of CCM is the ambiguous boundary between concert and worship, and Dave’s experience demonstrates the continuum and compatibility between Christian punk and more normative Evangelical (especially Pentecostal) worship experiences. In keeping with Evangelicalism’s individual subjectivity, worship can be a matter of what the individual experiences as religiously edifying and spiritually catalyzing, but this will not necessarily hold within a congregation. Despite Alexander’s (2009:  25–32) claim that Pentecostal worship in particular has a proletarian rowdiness to it, many of my research participants were critical of the standardization of contemporary worship music, and hence what they viewed as its inauthenticity. There is a general recognition of the need to, as Rory said, “make worship bland sometimes” to serve a diverse congregation, but musicians discussed using various Christian punk subgenres, from ska to metalcore, as worship in informal services. As Ethan said, “I find a lot of punk and hardcore stuff really worshipful. If it touches your soul and it makes you want to get in touch with God and praise him, then it’s worship.” He was critical

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of the role of worship music in Evangelical subcultural homology, similar to the analysis offered by Magolda and Gross (2009: 266–9) about a unified Evangelical youth style. “I just can’t understand why mainstream Christianity accepts one particular style of music as ‘worship,’ ” Ethan said. “It really pushes people into a box; we all look the same, we all listen to the same thing.” In contrast, the comparative idiosyncrasies and unpredictability of Christian punk—including the option of finishing a performance with a reimagined Victorian hymn, as Sleeping Giant did in Dave’s anecdote—is offered as evidence of its authenticity as a form of worship.

Conclusion This chapter identified authenticity as a key site of contestation for Evangelical youth seeking to engage with secular youth culture, in this case punk. As we saw in the previous chapter, the notion of authenticity as the continuity of belief and behavior has been fundamental to debates around youth subcultures. This emphasis on continuity can be found in criteria for authenticity in both secular punk scenes and church-regulated Evangelical youth culture, but with generally less emphasis on questions of aesthetic continuity or homology than in some theorizations of youth subcultures we encountered in the previous chapter. We saw that the challenge for Christian punks is negotiating and simultaneously fulfilling the demands of both secular and Christian authenticity. Following Taylor, it was recognized that whereas in contemporary secular creative practice it is the individual who is the key creative agent and the key ethical authority, in the contemporary Evangelical continuation of traditional religious notions of authenticity, it is God who is the key creative agent and the key ethical authority. As such, authentic creative selfexpression in a secular cultural milieu, such as a normatively secular punk scene, grounds itself in personal experience and sincerely held and reflected upon individual beliefs. Authentic creative self-expression in the religious context of Evangelical youth culture, on the other hand, grounds itself in recognized religious truths, reproducing Evangelical orthodoxy (correct belief) and orthopraxy (correct behavior). Without seeking to collapse these two regimes of authenticity, we saw that the key creative practices of Christian punk allow it to achieve the general recognition of its authenticity within both secular punk scenes and Evangelical youth culture. In contrast to some of the more aggressively doctrinal bands of

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the 1980s (Luhr 2009, 2010), contemporary Christian punk lyrics are generally poetically personal reflections of Christian belief, delivered—in sometimes unintelligible vocal styles—to audiences of decreasing religious literacy, who will not necessarily recognize the lyrics as anything other than typically subjective sentiments. We also saw the importance of the self-belief that the form of Christianity Christian punks adhere to is, in fact, a counter-mainstream subjectivity that creates affective links with the punk subculture. As does the general anticommercialism of Christian punk, which is not understood as repudiation of all commercial activities, but a constant policing of subcultural activity in the attempt to maintain creative autonomy and subordinate commercial interests to cultural (or spiritual) ones. Nevertheless, this chapter noted the crisis of religious authenticity that emerged from the unexpected commercial success of Christian punk since the turn of the millennium, underlining the importance of a sense of “mission” from Christian bands, as well as a sense that Christian punk music can be an effective form of worship. In analyzing the suspicions directed at Christians within secular punk scenes in this chapter, it was recognized that fear of the manipulation of individuals, and the scene itself, by outside religious organizations is central. The suspicion, in short, is that naïve or fanatical religious youth are being manipulated by older religious leaders to infiltrate and disrupt the secular punk scene, robbing non-Christian youth of a space of freedom. In the next chapter we will see that Christians involved in secular punk culture have generally successfully negotiated their inclusion in secular scenes, which, along with the unexpected commercial success of Christian punk discussed in this chapter, can be understood within the broader notion of the “postsecular,” and increasing recognition within the social sciences, social policy, and social theory, that religious forms such as Evangelicalism maintain internal vibrancy, not least because of their engagement with secular youth culture.

3

Postsecular Punk: Christianity’s Contested Inclusion in Alternative Music Scenes

Introduction Continuing the discussion of Evangelicalism and the punk subculture developed in previous chapters, this chapter brings punk and Evangelical youth cultures into dialogue with contemporary debates in social theory and political philosophy over the inclusion of religious actors and religious expression in the public life of communities that have considered themselves, if not thoroughly secularized already, at least well on the way. As we have seen, punk scenes typically seek cultural distinctiveness from their parent societies, if not outright contradiction. Nevertheless, similar debates and dilemmas can occur simultaneously within both, albeit mediated in different ways. This is the case for what can broadly be labeled our present “postsecular” moment wherein increasing perceptions of the public prominence of religion has led to a reconsideration of the regulation of religion within contemporary society. Although many discussions of the postsecular have focused on questions of Islam in Europe, Evangelicalism is also a prominent postsecular actor since, in its often youthful guises, it utilizes various forms of popular culture to conspicuously communicate and celebrate religious beliefs. As our paradigmatic case of Christian punk demonstrates, religion can be found in some unlikely places today. As discussed in previous chapters, despite the circulation of religious ideas and subjectivities, punk scenes remain “secular” insofar as they are not regulated according to religious beliefs or values. The enthusiastic presence of religious punks—as well as outspoken atheists—can compel debate, however, as individuals and groups with contradictory worldviews find themselves sharing the stage, and the broader infrastructure, of music scenes across the world. To analyze the processes through which the specifically Evangelical Christian presence in punk has been negotiated, and sometimes opposed, this article will draw

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upon key concepts from the work of North American political philosopher John Rawls, applying the theories he developed for studying political life among the diverse social actors of the United States, to the punk scene. Rawls’s ideas will be complimented with insights from some of the more recent writings of Jürgen Habermas who has approached a similar problem but from within the European context, where the postsecular phenomenon is more appreciable. After introducing and analyzing concepts of the postsecular, this chapter will examine the underlying, shared subcultural values that allow for the coexistence of radically contradictory belief systems in punk space, by applying Rawl’s notion of an “overlapping consensus”—agreeing to agree whilst disagreeing about the grounds for agreement. The chapter will then look at instances in which this “overlapping consensus” has been undermined, offering examples of behavior from religious and secular(ist) actors in punk scenes that have undermined the diversity. Finally, the chapter will look at processes of avoiding conflict over religion within the context of punk’s radical diversity, focusing on notions of compromise and tension in the public presentation of Evangelical punk.

Theorizing punk’s postsecular turn In contemporary social science and social theory, the postsecular—or the postsecular turn—typically refers to a new or renewed recognition of the internal vitality and public resilience of religion within Western societies that had been considered secularized to the point that religion had ceased to be a significant aspect of public life. A postsecular perspective seeks to move beyond the view of religion in modern society as simply what Taylor (2007:  22)  labels a “subtraction story,” and of the secular as simply the morally neutral absence, or the negation, of the religious. A postsecular society need not experience any overall increase in religiosity, therefore, and certainly not a (re)imposition of religious regulation. No serious study would suggest that organized religion is experiencing an overall increase in the West according to any conventional social scientific measure. Nevertheless, a corollary of religion’s internal vitality and public resilience—vital to understanding the emergence of Evangelical youth culture— is that religious expressions can also erupt in unexpected public spaces as well as stubbornly remain in those spaces from where society had hitherto assumed it had departed. Despite some earlier sightings of the term (Beckford 2012), the notion of the postsecular emerged in a meaningful way in social science and social

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policy in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For Habermas (2008a: 61–2), three emergent elements create postsecular belief in supposedly secular societies: increasing religiosity in the developing world, increasing visibility of “fundamentalist” forms of religion, and high-profile acts of religiously inspired or justified violence. The most pressing and public debate concerning the postsecular concerned the impact upon the West of globalized Islamic radicalism. That globalization is the sine qua non of the postsecular in this formation hardly needs stating, and it can be glimpsed in the influx of Pentecostals from Africa into Europe, and Latin America into the United States, as much as in global jihadi networks. The 9/11 attacks led to an intensification of existing debates about integrating Muslim minorities—who had largely been reinterpellated as such in the 1980s and 1990s—into nominally Christian but largely secular and nonreligious Western societies. These debates were initially brought to prominence in the 1980s by incidents such as the Salman Rushdie affair in Britain and l’affaire du foulard—the debate over headscarves in schools—in France. Even before the current wave of political populism and the associated fake news phenomenon, Habermas (2008b) recognized that the increasing fragmentation of democratic politics in the West, and the increasingly pluralistic ethical discourses circulating in society, also gives greater prominence—if not actual power—to conservative Christian voices. In the public and political sphere, then, the last two decades have seen religion increase its public profile, often being viewed as a social problem needing a solution. The concept of the postsecular could therefore be approached in a phenomenological way. We live in a postsecular age if enough people feel that we do: [I]n industrialized societies, there is a widespread perception of the increased public role of religion. Debates such as the one on the reference to Christian origins in the draft European Constitution, on the threat to excommunicate Kerry supporters in the [2008] American presidential elections or the role of Islamic fundamentalism in the post-9/11 September world are signs that something has changed, if not in the substance of individual religious beliefs, at least in the perception of religion’s public role. (Bottici 2009: 986)

In short, what the postsecular turn engenders is the experience of events that encourage secular-minded social actors to come to a recognition, whether they like it or not, of religion’s internal vitality and its probable public resilience. What we might theorize as punk’s postsecular moment is somewhat different from the violence and global migrations that have ushered in our political postsecular age. The instant of punk’s subcultural realization that religion retains a

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certain vitality such that it is likely to retain a certain public presence has three sources situated within the broader reality of the almost inexhaustible plurality of contemporary punk forms. First and primarily, from the commercial and critical success enjoyed by Evangelical punks in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Second, from the subcultural controversy surrounding the disproportionate attention paid to a small number of North American Muslim punks in the mainstream media. And third, from the short-lived “Krishnacore” subculture of the mid-1990s, which saw a handful of relatively prominent American hardcore bands (the Cro-Mags, Shelter) embrace the Hare Krishna movement (Abraham and Stewart 2017: 245–8). Perceptive punk (and metal) fans would have had an inkling about religion’s public resilience at some point in the last decade, upon seeing Evangelical artists fêted in magazines such as Alternative Press in the United States, or Kerrang in Britain. In Australia, perceptive punks would likely have come across the name of the Adelaide hardcore band God So Loved the World in local zines and the street press, or heard very good things from the band’s nonreligious peers. In his journalistic study of contemporary Christian rock, Beaujon (2006: 72) recounts the surprise of a school teacher upon being informed that Underoath is a Christian band—“I see their shirts every day!” As discussed in the previous chapter, the commercial success of some of these bands is significant, but even punk’s most vehemently anti-consumerist consumers, who reject anything with a barcode on it and hardly respect chart success, will probably have encountered Evangelical bands sharing the stage with atheistic and apatheistic peers on occasion. A  Christian metalcore band—shamefully mislabeled “speed metal”—even features in the American drama series Friday Night Lights; named “Crucifictorious,” they are the precise kind of generic, after-school project that proliferated throughout small-town America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In contrast to earlier attempts by some Evangelical artists to evangelize through disruptive spectacles in secular scenes (Luhr 2009:  111–43), punk’s crisis of subcultural secularism was not produced by Evangelical Christianity’s mere presence, or disruptive activities, but by the exceptional technical abilities and creative innovations by Christian punk musicians. Christian punk became a talking point in the global punk scene in the twenty-first century because a number of bands—especially in the metalcore crossover subgenre—were critically lauded in the secular music press and online forums, and established a significant non-Christian fan base. This is very different from earlier waves of CCM in the 1970s and 1980s that could be characterized as derivative with a reasonable amount of critical objectivity, given the focus on the message in the lyrics,

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rather than the quality of the music. Even in the early 1990s this was arguably the case. As the Australian musician Mitch explained, “Christian music, in general, at the time, was probably a couple of years behind the mainstream; it would follow a phase but come out later.” Jeff, who played in a grunge band, similarly argued that among secular musicians “in the nineties it was really looked down upon to be Christians in a band” partly because of the perception of poor quality, derivative music. However, the view among secular metal fans that Christian bands are “mere copycats and mimickers” (Moberg 2015: 50) has not been prominent since the mid-2000s in the case of metalcore and several other crossover subgenres. Will, an Australian metalcore and contemporary worship musician, explained that the critical and commercial success of Christian hardcore, post-hardcore and metalcore crossover bands in the mid-2000s radically changed the perception of Christian music: All my friends started getting into bands like Beloved, and mewithoutYou, and Emery, Project 86, and Underoath. With bands like Underoath, all of a sudden in the hardcore and metal genres, Christian bands started leading the way. Guys like Norma Jean, As I  Lay Dying, August Burns Red. With all these bands it wasn’t quite cool to be a Christian, but we didn’t have dudes out there making us look bad. Guys like Underoath were just owning everything.

When I  interviewed South African hardcore musicians in 2014, I  observed a genuine sense of vicarious pride when they spoke of Underoath receiving perfect scores in reviews from secular music magazines, vindicating alternative music produced by Evangelical Christians. As in metal and its crossover (sub)genres, Luhr’s (2010: 448) assessment that Christian punk “achieved notoriety more for its novelty than its innovation” is not an accurate appraisal of the situation since the turn of the millennium, and quite possibly not since the mid-1990s, in the case of the Spirit-filled hardcore acts. This is not to say that nonreligious audiences would not have found “novelty” in realizing, after hearing a brief religious message during a live show, that they had been rocking out to a metalcore band that may have formed at a Sunday school picnic. However, the global punk scene did not start thinking about religion in the 1990s and 2000s because Christians could be identified within innumerable interchangeable pop punk bands. Punk musicians and fans were obliged to (re) consider the position of religion within the scene precisely because talented and original Christian artists started appearing on their musical radar, and found a place in their record collections and on their mp3 players.

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What this sudden recognition of religion’s presence has required in punk scenes, as in punk’s parent societies, is a postsecular “adjustment” by nonreligious social actors. As Habermas (2008a: 63) argues, since religious individuals and institutions have been adjusting to increasingly secular societies for quite some time, a certain reflexivity and flexibility is not unreasonable. So rather than what Habermas (2006: 4) labels the “condescending benevolence” of the nonreligious toward the religious, which rests on the assumption that religion will eventually evaporate, something more inclusive is required. This adjustment requires moving beyond a certain limit Habermas (2008b: 115–16) identifies in progressive thought, which cannot regard religion as anything other than traditionalism, and cannot comprehend the “vitality” and “dynamism” of contemporary conservative religion—including the precise variety that energizes Evangelical youth cultures. The attitudes that Habermas is concerned with are certainly replicated within punk scenes, too. There was, for example, genuine confusion around the presence of Muslim punks in North American scenes in the late 2000s; in the context of the ongoing “War on Terror,” punk scenes and zines found themselves unsure about where to draw to line between legitimate criticism of religion and the illegitimate defamation of marginalized ethnic minorities (Abraham and Stewart 2017: 248). As Tomas observed of his time in the American hardcore scene in the 1990s, more marginal spiritual subjectivities were acceptable, but Christianity was suspect: The sense was that you weren’t really supposed to be in a hardcore band or punk band and be Christian. You could be militant Straight Edge, you could be an anarchist, you could be a Marxist, you could be Buddhist, Krishnacore—bands like Shelter and 108 who we played with—but you couldn’t be Christian; that wasn’t anti-establishment.

I would suggest that Christianity is thus viewed by a section of the punk subculture through a subcultural lens of Jacobin neurosis, a periodic theme throughout Charles Taylor’s writings on religion and modernity. It is as if suburban Christianity is a rival center of power that must be constrained for punk’s new order to flourish. In Malott’s (2009) view, the circulation of anti-Christian attitudes within even commercial pop punk is evidence that punk’s rebel heart keeps beating. In examining empirical data from various local punk scenes, however, it is clear that more inclusive, negotiated, approaches to religion’s public presence in punk are being enacted. It is to the broadest conception of this negotiated inclusiveness, punk’s “overlapping consensus,” that we will now turn.

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Theorizing punk’s overlapping consensus The notion of an “overlapping consensus” emerges from Rawls’s basic concern about how a community consisting of large numbers of subgroups and individuals with contradictory worldviews (which he labels “comprehensive doctrines”) can achieve a “stable” agreement about the foundational values upon which it will operate. Rawls did not work within the framework of the postsecular, but within a much older, almost foundational, American problematic of negotiating the presence of diverse religious sentiments and public cultures within a secular legal and political framework. That concerns over achieving a shared social framework in the context of diverse and contradictory worldviews is pertinent within youth subcultures such as punk scenes, especially in the postsecular context of increasing religious visibility, should be immediately apparent. For Rawls (2001: 35) the foundational values of society should be acceptable to people with different worldviews so long as they are “reasonable” in accepting the inevitable plurality of society and willing to fairly cooperate with people holding different worldviews. In the punk context, one could imagine punks seeking to impose their comprehensive doctrine upon a local scene to the point that dissenting expressions are prohibited. Historically, we can point to the exclusion and withdrawal of racist groups and Marxist–Leninist political parties from British punk as an example of the legitimate noninclusion of worldviews Rawls would label unreasonable; the participation of these groups was predicated upon their desire to ideologically control or restrict the punk scene (Savage 2002: 481–5; Worley 2012). The expectation is that commitment to society’s foundational values will reproduce itself across generations from within the discrete worldviews that populate that society. In the punk context, the relevant analogue would be new fans and musicians entering the scene and then swiftly agreeing to abide by its foundational principles, from within whatever worldviews they come into the scene holding. The ability of individuals and groups to agree to foundational principles governing a society—or a music scene—from within different comprehensive doctrines, is the basis of the overlapping consensus. An illustration is Charles Taylor’s (1999) discussion of a theoretical global agreement on human rights. State actors adhering to different political systems and cultural histories would articulate different justifications for standardized international human rights norms. “We would agree on the norms, while disagreeing on why they were the right norms. And we would be content to live in this consensus, undisturbed by the differences of profound underlying belief ” (ibid.: 101). The greatest difficulty,

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Taylor supposes, would be mutual agreement upon the meaning of particular rights and the number of rights. The desired point of mutual agreement in the postsecular punk scene is not shared musicological, ideological, and historical definition of “punk.” In Taylor’s example, this would be equivalent to establishing a consensus on the nature of the human condition in order to achieve a consensus on respecting human rights. Even if we were to reach an agreement on the precise meaning of punk, we would eliminate one of the great pleasures of being a punk fan, which is this exact, endless argument. The only practical issue to seek consensus on is the conditions under which a particular punk scene, or creative self-expression in general, can best flourish. An objection to the application of these theories to punk is that they are concerned with parliamentary deliberation or judicial reasoning. Isn’t punk a “wild public sphere” (Gardiner 2004) compared with the spaces of particular concern to political philosophers, and aren’t we imposing too formal a theoretical model on punk’s celebrated informality? Perhaps, but as Rawls (1996: liii), argues, interactions that require mutual comprehensibility between people and communities with different belief systems are not only the reserve of political debate, but occur on a daily basis, since the “office of citizen” carries with it a “duty of civility” to be exercised when “matters of basic justice are at stake.” So the legitimacy of applying these theories to punk rests on two foundations. First, the punk scene—globally and locally situated—has an important role to play in the formation of citizens and moral subjects. Although it is absurd to essentialize punk as a primarily political form—not least because punk mediates the political and pseudo-political debates carried on in punk spaces—it certainly is a space within which political ideas circulate and political subjectivities are explored and enacted, radiating well beyond punk itself. Were it not the case that punk carries with it a certain moral seriousness— even in its least serious moments—Evangelicals would find punk a much less interesting form of creative self-expression to engage in and with. As we saw in the previous chapter, Thompson (2004) theorizes the exploration of alternative subjectivities as one of the constitutive desires of punk, one of the key reasons that it is attracting Evangelical youth. Second, as a discrete public space seeking its own inclusive stability, punk is subject to the same questions about diversity as its parent societies: of free expression, the relation of individuals to collectivities, and the presence of contradictory doctrines. My research with Christian punks revealed a strong commitment to seeking mutual understanding and to communicating their beliefs in a way that is comprehensible to their nonChristian peers. This is one aspect of the productive tension within the cultural

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practices of Christian punk, as explored in the previous chapter, between creative self-expression allowing a song to contain opaque personal reflections on an obscure Bible verse, spontaneously allowing a performance to become an act of religious worship, and attempting to ensure artistic expression is actually comprehensible to its audience. The idea of the overlapping consensus relates to Rawls’s (1999b:  118–23) famous political thought experiment, the “original position,” also commonly known as the “veil of ignorance,” which imagines a political system designed by its subjects without knowledge of what position they will occupy within it. So, “if a group were to decide to band together to the disadvantage of the others,” they might end up occupying this very position of disadvantage themselves (ibid.: 121). In the specific case of religious actors, Rawls (1999a: 149) asks whether it is possible “for those of faith, as well as the nonreligious (secular), to endorse a constitutional regime even when their comprehensive doctrines may not prosper under it, and indeed may decline?” In our context, the question is whether Christians will be part of a punk scene that facilitates the challenging or ridiculing of Christianity and the possibility that, through their involvement in such a scene, some Christian punks may reject Christianity. Conversely, will nonreligious punks be part of a punk scene that facilitates the communication of religious ideas such that religion’s presence in punk—in one or more guises—may increase? The general answer from contemporary Christian and non-Christian punk musicians and fans is an enthusiastic “yes.”

Enacting punk’s overlapping consensus What, then, is the basis for Christian punks’ commitment to the maintenance of the punk scene as an open space for creative self-expression and the exploration of alternative ideas and subjectivities? First, as we saw in the previous chapter, since the vast majority of Christian punk musicians, from the time of the Spirit-filled hardcore movement in the early 1990s onward, have grown up as participants within secular punk scenes, or have at least grown up as fans of secular punk music, there is a commitment to the flourishing of punk as a genre of music indistinguishable from that held by non-Christian punks. Second, from within the Evangelical comprehensive doctrine shared by the overwhelming majority of Christian punk musicians and fans, there is a desire for punk to flourish as an open space for creative self-expression and the exploration of alternative ideas and subjectivities. This maintenance of punk as an open space

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for creative self-expression will allow the realization of the two elements present in all forms of contemporary Christian music (Howard and Streck 1999:  98– 103):  creative self-expression reflecting and celebrating Christian beliefs and creative self-expression presenting Christian belief to non-believers. Because they have made the choice to embed themselves wholly or partially in secular music scenes, in contrast to the option of existing solely within Christian cultural spaces exercised by the first generation of Christian punks in the 1980s, there is a recognition that to allow the free expression of Christianity in the punk scene and to provide an audience of non-Christians to engage with, Christians in the punk scene must allow the free expression of contradictory beliefs. Significantly, several American Christian punk musicians I interviewed speculated that their bands could be more commercially successful were they to wholly commit to remain within what pastor and former grunge musician Jeff referred to as America’s Christian music “circuit.” Cory, active in the American Midwest hardcore scene explained that church shows compare favorably with secular venues insofar as “more often than not it’s better organized and you know that you’re going to get looked after; you know that you’ll get paid.” This is a sentiment generally shared—especially when churches are compared with secular venues that like to pay musicians in beer—although the situation will differ for the more commercially successful bands signed to the Tooth & Nail stable or secular major labels. Even in the far more modest commercial context of Australia’s music scenes, Christian punk bands were similarly aware that shows at Evangelical churches were generally better organized and paid than shows in nightclubs or pubs. A commitment has been made, then, by the vast majority of Christian punk bands, to primarily or exclusively embed themselves within secular scenes—accepting all that comes with that. As part of their commitment to the maintenance of secular punk scenes as open spaces for creative self-expression, Christian punks accept the “contestability” of their beliefs in the punk scene, to use the language of William Connolly (1999:  9). They understand that Christianity will inevitably be challenged and will not dominate discourse. There is a recognition that just as Christianity can be given a voice by punk’s constitutive commitment to explore different ways of living and thinking contra what Leblanc (1999: 62– 3) refers to as “mainstream political, vocational, and moral imperatives,” punk also gives voice to many other beliefs. This gives rise to a necessarily self-reflexive approach to Evangelical culture and belief among the Christian punks I have researched. Cognizant of the circulation of conservative beliefs concerning, in particular, sexuality within Evangelicalism, there has been a

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general consensus on keeping such attitudes out of public utterances. This is part of the process of building respectful relationships and avoiding religious conflict, which I shall detail below. As will be demonstrated in the next section, punk’s overlapping consensus on the maintenance of scenes as open spaces for creative self-expression and the exploration of alternative ideas and subjectivities is not always adhered to. In certain contexts it has been undermined by both religious and secular(ist) protagonists. In general, however, the overlapping consensus usually holds and punk scenes are generally more inclusive and tolerant toward religious discourse than we might initially assume. For an example of the usual operation of punk’s overlapping consensus, creating an open cultural field that allows the articulation of religious beliefs, as well as critical or openly hostile antireligious beliefs, we can begin in Scotland, where Ty and Rory discussed a particular performance in which they were heckled by the audience. “During our set people started chanting ‘Dawkins! Dawkins! Dawkins!’ ” Rory said, referring the author of the popular book The God Delusion (Dawkins 2006). “When the song finished [Ty] was like, ‘right, who here has read The God Delusion?’ And only him and our bass player had.” The band used the disruption as an opportunity to explain their beliefs. As Ty explained, “We talked about cosmology and God being the best explanation for the cosmos. There were some interruptions, there was some back and forth.” This “back and forth” was described by Zach as “butting heads,” which periodically occurred with the nonreligious bands he shared a stage with: I feel that we’ve handled it pretty well in the sense that we’ll love anyone and everyone and we’ll let them voice their opinions, because that’s what hardcore is all about; someone standing on a stage, passionate about a subject and voicing that opinion. So we have open arms to their opinions.

A similar attitude was articulated by Ryan, from a Welsh metalcore band: We were playing with a band, there’s no need to name them, and they decorated their amps with upside down crosses in tape. We didn’t make a big deal out of it, we didn’t mind. We just played with those amps because we feel what we believe is more important than symbols. We’d rather be friends than enemies of those bands. They have their right to say what they want, as we do. We’ve had deep discussions with bands with these views; there can be a barrier, but with friendship there is no barrier.

Zach’s bandmate, Lachie, argued that since the hardcore punk scene is “respectdriven,” accepting disagreements over what Rawls refers to as comprehensive

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doctrines is vital if a scene is to avoid fragmenting along personal or ideological lines, which will occasionally happen. Another way in which punk’s overlapping consensus is enacted is through forms of “translation” between religious and secular belief systems. In this way, religious and nonreligious punks can acknowledge the legitimacy of each other’s opinions from within their own comprehensive doctrines, but without falling into a situation where one has to hold one’s own beliefs too lightly or ironically (Redhead 2006:  658–60). Following the particular concerns of Habermas and Rawls, translation is necessary because since punk is a place where weighty ideas are debated and enacted, mutual comprehensibility between participants is important. In diverse, secular spaces like punk, opinions grounded solely upon religious authority have limited force and, as religious socialization weakens and societies lose common understandings of the historical “languages of transcendence” (Charles Taylor 2007:  727), they have limited comprehensibility. Ethan, a South Africa–based pastor and punk, illustrated this clearly, saying, “A lot of punks are opposed to any kind of authority and if you tell them ‘the Bible says this,’ they’re gonna say, ‘I don’t care what the Bible says! The Bible’s not relevant to me!’ ” Yet there are areas in which religious and secular values overlap, even though they emerge from quite different comprehensive doctrines. One area is punk’s anti-drug, anti-alcohol Straight Edge subculture wherein Evangelical subjectivities, “holistic spirituality” (or “new age” belief), and secular subjectivities, can lead to agreement on avoiding similar vices (Abraham and Stewart 2014). Suvi, a vocalist with an Australian metalcore band, demonstrated this notion of sharing values in arguing: There [are] a lot of positive hardcore bands out there that speak truth without even realizing it. The only difference is that it doesn’t have the same power and authority as our truth does, because they’re not speaking it out of their relationship with God; they’re just speaking it out of their philosophy.

One can of course imagine an inverted statement from a nonreligious musician about Christian hardcore bands, lamenting the lack of authority in their truths that are only spoken out of their religion, rather than our philosophy. Given the increasingly limited comprehension of religious beliefs and doctrines in many (post)secular societies, Harrington (2007:  551–3) sees more possibility for translation between religious and secular discourses through a focus on religious aesthetics: “[R]itualized action and gesture, music, song, visual representation, and the sensuous space and event of worship.” In Christian

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punk, this form of translation works to a limited extent insofar as Evangelical and nonreligious punks can attend the same performance but experience and interpret it differently. As we saw in the previous chapter, live shows can spontaneously become acts of religious worship for Christians. Nick, a Sydney-based hardcore vocalist said, “Live shows give me a real sense of the presence of God. At a lot of places we’ve been it’s given me a chance to feel and understand what I believe.” Rory similarly said he became aware of God’s approving presence— “Particularly aware of his presence in the mosh pit”—during a performance of his band, as well as during the performance of the secular “hardcore anarchist conspiracy band” Global Parasite. We can take this example of the experience of spiritual affirmation at punk shows a step further, noting the common analogies made between religious services and experiences of secular popular music. Expressive forms of artistic practice such as punk intrinsically inhabit a “border zone” halfway to transcendence (of some kind) in Charles Taylor’s (2007:  545)  poetic imagination. I will confess to being skeptical about many of the analogies drawn between religion and popular culture, or at least the analogies drawn by scholars of religion, and McCloud (2003) and Moberg’s (2012) critical assessments of these studies reveal often subjective or spurious associations, using limited and highly selective empirical data. Jennings (2014), on the other hand, offers the most theoretically wide-ranging analysis of analogies between religious and secular music, and Partridge (2013:  119)  approvingly cites secular punk musician Iggy Pop’s claim that it is “obvious that rock ‘n’ roll is a religion; it’s formatted exactly as a religion . . . I’ve had spiritual experiences at rock concerts.” For the religion scholar Partridge (ibid.), popular music can be such an extraordinarily effervescent experience that “only” religious language can convey the division between musical experience and the banality of everyday life. Taking our analysis a step further once again from the descriptions of religious experience at secular punk performances, it must be acknowledged that wholly secular experiences of nominally religious performances are possible as well. Since punk vocals are usually difficult to understand without access to the lyrics as text, especially experienced live, and because the instrumentation and basic musical practices of Christian punk bands do not differ from their secular peers, it is not always apparent when a performance is a “Christian” one. Moreover, Christian bands usually limit the length of any specifically religious messages they deliver from the stage between songs, and sometimes appreciable religious statements are wholly absent from a performance. In this way, independent of any specific religious outcomes or motivations, and not reliant upon a shared

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religious subjectivity, these live performances by Christian bands contribute to a local scene and reflect constitutive punk values of creative self-expression and the exploration of alternative subjectivity, without alienating audiences who do not share a band’s beliefs.

Undermining punk’s overlapping consensus Musicians and fans are not the only actors of influence in Christian punk, however. In spite of its DIY ethic, punk and proximate subcultures are not always as self-sustaining as they would like to be, and they often benefit from the support of external institutions—including churches. On the one hand, the Evangelical churches that many Christian punks are raised in are responsible for fostering many talented musicians. Will, an Australian metalcore and contemporary worship musician, explained that the musical training and mentorship churches provide, coupled with the experience of playing in a rock/pop-influenced Evangelical church band on a Sunday, gives punk musicians raised in Evangelical churches “a real head start.” Pat, a South African hardcore musician, described the “average skill level of kids” in his Evangelical mega-church’s worship band as “beyond what you can imagine” and akin to the skill level of “some old dude who’s thirty or forty years old” in previous generations. On the other hand, churches can impose conditions upon musicians performing in their spaces that heavily restrict creative self-expression. Churches usually make it quite clear whether they are willing to be part of the infrastructure of a local punk scene and the conditions under which they will be involved. A Methodist church hall I visited in the English city of Boston, for example, periodically hosted secular and Christian bands as part of the Punk 4 the Homeless charity project, but disallowed alcohol in the church (it was consumed in the car park). Other churches and church-owned venues restrict themselves to Christian artists, such that local nonreligious punks may well be entirely ignorant of local a church’s role as a music venue. Chapter six will explore comparatively rare contexts in which churches actively oppose punk and proximate forms of alternative music and youth culture altogether. But a more common scenario is for the position of a church to be ambivalent or unpredictable. Thommo, active in the hardcore scene on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, explained that Evangelical churches—especially Pentecostal churches—contrast their desire to be “out there” engaging with contemporary youth culture, with the fact that they “don’t want to rock the boat” by

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encouraging profane forms of youth culture. “It’s a fine line,” he explained, and one difficult to predetermine; “You can lose people quite quickly.” Punk musicians from the United States in particular had experience with church venues imposing conditions upon the performances of bands in their venues—typically discouraging profanity. While this undermined the overlapping consensus predicated upon creative self-expression, it could often be negotiated so long as the conditions were advertised ahead of time. On occasions when bands were informed of the conditions placed upon their self-expression only upon arrival at sometimes rather isolated venues in small Midwestern towns, conflict predictably ensued. Finally, recalling one of the values underpinning Christian punk, promoting Christian beliefs, churches can sometimes be encouraged to host punk bands in the expectation of attendance carrying over from the shows on Saturday night to the services on Sunday morning. A Midwestern hardcore musician, Cory, observed some churches ending their support for the local punk scene if the increase in membership they hoped for does not materialize. Some of these churches could therefore be considered “freeriders” in Rawls’s (1999b: 340) language; they are taking advantage of punk’s culture of autonomous creative self-expression without reciprocating. One dramatic example of the overlapping consensus breaking down, with permanent repercussions, comes from Cape Town in the early 2000s. Niz, a veteran of the local scene, said that before conflict arose there was a lot of interaction between Christian and non-Christian bands in a flourishing scene. “On any given day there’d be about a thousand kids at a show and it was a really good scene; people loved each other and we’d openly speak about Jesus and about God and everything because we were all just there together.” There were also a noticeable number of conversions among musicians within the scene. But as the South African–born, London-based guitarist Francois explained: What happened in the punk scene is that the Christian bands started doing shows in schools—because they were Christians. Even though they were playing hardcore music, they were let in because they were Christian. They made a good living from that, so some of the secular bands wanted to play as well, but the rule was, of course, that you can’t drink and can’t swear on stage. So bands started swearing on stage and the Christian bands kicked them off because they broke the deal. So conflict started happening between these two sides in the scene.

As Adriaan, who was also involved in the Cape Town scene, said “the more ambitious bands who wanted as many shows as possible, they were offended by it.” The Christian bands performing in schools did not establish the rules that excluded

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many secular bands, and the schools were not seeking to impose their regulations upon the whole Cape Town punk scene. However, the fact that some Christian bands did willingly enforce the schools’ regulations broke the relationship of reciprocity that had hitherto existed in Cape Town, undermining the overlapping consensus that had contributed to the creation of a briefly thriving scene. The desire to share religious beliefs from the stage can also undermine the inclusive atmosphere of punk shows, if only momentarily, by displacing the shared love of music and dividing the audience along religious lines. Religious messages shared between songs are usually brief; Tim, a hardcore musician from the British Midlands emphasized “leaving that seed of hope” in his band’s performance, and inviting offstage conversations. However, Zach and Lachie’s Sydney-based hardcore band would sacrifice part of their set to present a four- or five-minute message; this may not sound very long but, in hardcore, five minutes can be an eternity. This led to screams of abuse from members of the overage audience at a Brisbane nightclub, and from members of the underage audience at a Sydney youth club. One of the cries—“no youth group!”—summed up the concern that the band was ruining the experience of attending a punk show. If a band appears unappreciative of the secular space it finds itself in, it will have difficulty being accepted as a positive presence in the scene. It is not just Christians who have undermined punk’s overlapping consensus on occasion, however. The amorphous, energetically secularist “God Free Youth” movement, periodically active within some hardcore scenes, has also sought to undermine inclusivity and creative self-expression. Jay, involved in the Welsh hardcore scene, noted its rise in Britain around 2010, but it has been around in one form or another since at least the mid-1990s when Max experienced members of the movement target Spirit-filled hardcore bands and “come by shows and throw stuff at people.” Connor observed a “huge God Free movement” in the hardcore scene in the Midwest of the United States in which he is active, noting that being “God Free,” like being an atheist in general, became a more concrete and claimable identity; “You can even get t-shirts!” As Ciminio and Smith (2007) argue, atheism mimicked American Evangelicalism’s development of a particular “subcultural” form. The God Free Youth clothing referred to by Connor mimics the band-related merchandise many young people wear to punk performances, which has also been mimicked by Evangelical clothing companies (Moberg 2015: 62). In the Sunshine Coast, Australia, Thommo witnessed the movement attempt various antireligious stunts intended “to get a rise out of the Christians and piss a few people off.” The desire, he argued, was to prompt a violent response from Christians that would reveal them to be a destructive element

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in the scene, undermining the idea that radically different comprehensive doctrines can coexist within it. With conflict failing to eventuate, “we’ve seen the movement burn out here,” Thommo said. Connor suggested that the God Free Youth movement understands itself as “self-defense” against the religious presence in punk, recalling my earlier point about a certain parodic Jacobin mentality aimed squarely at suburban churches. The role of these suburban churches as incubators and supporters of Christian punk, as well as the importance of churches as venues for varieties of punk music in places and situations in which many young people have difficulty accessing live music, has exacerbated these secularist suspicions. As Malott’s (2009) analysis of, and contribution to, secular punk opposition to Christianity in the United States illustrates, antireligious suspicion within the punk subculture is based upon the fear of religious control over cultural expression. In his fan history of North American hardcore punk, Peterson (2009: 129–30) notes the fear of some secularist punks that suburban churches are engaged in well-planned and wellfinanced subcultural infiltrations; that religious fundamentalists are seeking a cultural hegemony that would eradicate autonomous cultural spaces for the youth and everyone else. There is a certain historical basis for this fear insofar as punk—like most popular music genres and youth subcultures—has endured periodic moral panics, including a self-described “crusade” by Christian conservatives to “clean up America” during the “culture wars” of the 1980s, focusing on punk, hip hop, and heavy metal (Shuker 2001:  217–26; Malott 2009), discussed further in Chapter  6. In the European context, punks can point to violent police action against anarcho-punk activists occupying Copenhagen’s Youth House (Ungdomshuset), to uphold an eviction order by a conservative Christian group, the Father’s House (Faderhuset), apparently leading to the largest civil disturbance in Denmark since World War II (Profane Existence 2007). Such fears underline the internal importance placed upon maintaining punk as a global and local space for young people’s cultural autonomy, free from coercive institutional oversight.

Respectful relationships and religious conflict in alternative music scenes This theory of religious infiltration and undermining of secular punk spaces was not supported by my research. Evangelical churches certainly do bring together spiritually and musically like-minded young people and provide them

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with a space to socialize and often to practice and perform. It is also true that Evangelical churches can create like-minded youth; Jamie, involved with a London-based emo band, explained how the band members attend the same Evangelical Anglican church in south London, whose youth pastor introduced them to the obscure skramz sub-subgenre of hardcore that influences their sound. However, I have found no indication that any Christian punk bands operate in any sense under the direction of churches. Indeed, as we have seen, the support of churches—even one’s own church—is often contingent or ambivalent. Nevertheless, given the secularist suspicions that exist within punk toward Christian involvement, it is perhaps surprising that the punk subculture is a generally cohesive cultural space within which religion is respected. The following section will continue to explore the strategies used to build respect for Evangelical Christianity within this youth subculture, as well as examples of conflicts that have erupted around Evangelicalism and what we might call subcultural conflict-avoidance strategies. What has proven crucial is the ability of religious and nonreligious actors to justify their behavior within the normative cultural values of the youth subculture itself, and to make a material contribution to their local music scene. In the case of punk, the subculture’s key desires must be referenced and adhered to, but these desires, as theorized by Thompson (2004), are procedural rather than substantive and there is no single way that they must be enacted. There are multiple ways that one may resist commercialization or explore new musical styles and subjectivities, and one can do so from within a spiritual subjectivity. A culture of mutual respect among religious and nonreligious subcultural actors is one that allows for individual difference and acknowledges the legitimacy—and probably inevitability—of individual religious and spiritual journeys. In this sense, the normative values of punk youth culture reflect the normative values of contemporary youth culture in the societies in question. A large-scale study of youth spirituality in Australia found most young people hold spirituality to be “the responsibility of each individual” (Hughes 2007: 144). This means that not only is it illegitimate to impose one’s beliefs on others, but also that one’s own beliefs must be shown to be sincerely and freely decided upon. Insofar as Evangelicalism inevitably emphasizes the religious journey and choice of the individual spiritual subject, this has proved to be unproblematic, and comes quite naturally. This point is particularly important insofar as suspicion of religion within the punk subculture is concerned less with the belief of individuals and more with the power—or the supposed power—of religious institutions. This is not

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least because allowing religious institutions power over popular culture means giving older generations power over a vital aspect of the lives of young people. Among punks themselves, I was told on multiple occasions by Evangelical musicians and fans variations on the statement from Rory, who worked as a kind of chaplain in the local music scene: “A lot of folk that I know hate Christians, but they don’t hate me.” A number of diverse individualized spiritualties have emerged within punk in recent years, therefore, and encountered little serious resistance (Abraham and Stewart 2017). Identification with established religious identities has proved more problematic, however, placing an onus on individual believers to demonstrate their individuality and disprove suspicions of unreflexive adherence to dogma. Discussing his years in the American hardcore scene, Tomas explained that Christianity became acceptable when secular punks recognized Christian peers as “simply people of faith; they’re not trying to work for the man.” In a broader sense, the acceptance of Christianity within punk has been predicated upon its demonstrated commitment to punk as a secular and autonomous cultural form, just as theorists of postsecular societies have noted that most religious institutions and individuals have abandoned the expectation, or even the desire, to religiously regulate public life in general. So although religious and spiritual ideas and individuals will circulate within punk, nonreligious ideas and individuals will not be judged according to religious standards of belief or behavior, even though we have seen that this must be negotiated when punk bands play in religious venues, just as negotiating respect for religious ritual life in society at large is an ongoing postsecular process. Related to this acceptance of punk as a secular subculture is the individual and collective acknowledgment that Christianity is one of many truths circulating within punk and within youth culture generally. In fact, it is not religious disagreement or argumentative atheism that troubles Christians in the punk subculture as much as the sense that an increasing proportion of subcultural youth are entirely apatheistic. This growing number of young people, to paraphrase Bruce (2002: 42), simply don’t care enough about religion to identify as irreligious, let  alone as explicitly antireligious; they cannot comprehend religious language, or engage with religious ideas. In addition to a demonstrated commitment to maintaining punk as a secular space for young people’s creative self-expression, a process of subcultural dialogue is necessary to develop respectful relationships between religious and nonreligious actors within punk and proximate youth subcultures. This mirrors the process of dialogue that Habermas (2006) hopes will take place in

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the context of postsecular Europe. His dialogue with the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—the future Pope Benedict XVI—was an example of the sort of dialogue Habermas hopes can take place on a much larger, inclusive social scale (Habermas and Ratzinger 2007). It is significant in this context, returning to the question of the God Free Youth movement, that Evangelical punks’ presence is most commonly opposed by those in the subculture holding strongly atheistic beliefs that are increasingly influenced by the “new atheist” movement associated with scholars such as Richard Dawkins. Dialogue is made possible by the foundational desires of punk already discussed, notably the commitment to exploring alternative subjectivities and passionate self-expression. Punk provides what the theologian Jürgen Moltmann (2001) calls a “third language” external to the parties in dialogue, and capable of mediating between spiritual and thoroughly atheistic viewpoints so long as each party can accept the legitimacy of both religious and nonreligious viewpoints within the logic of punk culture. As a mediator of dialogue, the third language of punk can allow atheist punks to accept the presence of religious beliefs they may otherwise find unacceptable, and vice versa, and this acceptance may well remain beyond the boundaries of the subculture itself. Dialogue in this punk context is primarily informal, taking place at punk shows where musicians and fans naturally gather, but dialogue can also be more formal when it is carried out online. Gault’s (2015: 97) understated assessment of religious debates involving Christian rappers on Facebook is that they “rarely have winners,” but having an opportunity to even discuss religion is considered worthwhile, and in the 1990s and the early 2000s this was often done on internet message boards, then drifted to MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter, as well as the comments section of YouTube videos. This dialogue, of varying formality, tends to focus, if not deliberately then at least predictably, on refuting what individuals believe to be erroneous views about their religious or nonreligious peers. Steve, a former website curator, explained that some in the subculture view Christians as intrinsically “angry and irrational” individuals who are especially prejudiced against gay and lesbian people. Dialogue between Christians and non-Christians in a variety of subcultural spaces can disabuse people of this view, or seem to confirm it, or perhaps point to the diversity of Evangelical opinion and ongoing debate. Attitudes among Evangelical youth toward sexuality are shifting, even if there is no ultimate accord on questions of sexuality, an issue we will return to. Dialogue can also disabuse many Christians of prejudices toward secular tendencies within punk such as the usually strongly secular humanist Straight Edge movement, which in promoting a drug-free and often vegan lifestyle developed

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a reputation for being judgmental and violent (Haenfler 2006). Dialogue then allows religious and nonreligious actors to recognize commonalities in their ethical systems without giving up belief in the specificity of their own worldview. The Evangelicals in the punk subculture I have interviewed also place a premium on maintaining relationships with non-Christian punk peers, for both religious reasons, facilitating what Bramadat (2000: 25) calls “friendship evangelism,” and for the purely secular good that comes from subcultural camaraderie. Cary, from a music-focused ministry project in Missouri that has hosted many Christian and non-Christian bands, explained that often “the friendships and the relationships are more important than getting someone to say a salvation prayer.” In a similar vein, respectful relationships between religious and nonreligious youth in the punk subculture are developed through acts of creative self-expression that can be readily appreciable across religious divides. Religious punks produce music and organize performances that nonreligious punks participate in, and vice versa. I have already discussed the phenomenon of Evangelical churches hosting non-Christian bands, especially in the United States where churches are often the only venues capable of hosting live music in small towns. Many of these performances—as well as those in larger secular commercial venues—have Christian and secular bands performing together, with bands judged for the quality of the music rather than the religious specificities of their lyrics, which are usually incomprehensible. Those who wish to engage the band’s spiritual message are typically invited to speak with them after their performance or contact them online, meaning that the shared musical experience does not rely upon a shared spirituality. So although it is important that Evangelicals do not only articulate themselves in or through religious language, a spiritual seriousness tends to always be present—especially when engaging with young audiences. As Sydney musician Quinton explained, even if their audience is not inspired along a Christian spiritual path, there is a desire to simply influence “the way people are towards people; there’s a need in this generation to stop the downward spiral.” This moral pragmatism and focus on service to the youth subculture was uniform among the Christians involved in the punk subculture I spoke to. Tim, from a hardcore band in the British Midlands, explained that his band’s engagement with the audience is “not always about the whole Christian thing; just telling kids [to] follow your dreams, do what you enjoy, I think that can be as encouraging sometimes.” This desire to make a positive impact within the broader youth subculture in an inclusive manner across religious boundaries, encouraging individual reflection and expression, is the key ingredient in building respectful

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relationships among individuals that, in turn, creates respect for religion within the secular youth subculture. I have argued that by adhering to the key desires of punk, including a commitment to maintaining punk as an open space welcoming of young people’s creative self-expression, Evangelicals have generally become a cohesive component of the punk youth subculture through the respectful relationships they have built with nonreligious and antireligious peers. Religious difference can create conflict, of course. The key ingredient for building respectful relationships and respect for religion is respect for individual autonomy and different expressions of spirituality within punk’s secular spaces. As such, the seed of religion-related conflict within punk is limiting individuals’ participation and self-expression and seeming to undermine punk as a secular cultural form. Two types of religious conflict are identifiable within punk, as we have generally seen; curtailing creative autonomy by censoring self-expression, and alienating or excluding an audience on the basis of religious belief. In each scenario, Evangelicals in the punk subculture have reflexively developed conflict avoidance and resolution strategies. In the first category of conflict—curtailing participation—Evangelical punks are concerned with the occasional attempts to prevent Christian involvement in punk, which, as we saw in the previous section on the undermining of the overlapping consensus of punk as an inclusive secular space for creative self-expression, usually involves intimidation from the God Free Youth movement. Christians involved in punk have also sought, at times, to curtail participation and self-expression themselves by imposing behavioral codes in order to maintain the support of the church community, which is committed to providing events for young people where they will be safe from physical dangers as well as what are perceived as moral dangers. As discussed above, the general approach has been to discourage profanity outside of song lyrics, but such limitations are not always acceptable, or effectively communicated, to touring bands. The second source of religious conflict within punk is the alienation or exclusion of an audience on the basis of religious belief. This occurs most commonly when a band, in their evangelistic enthusiasm, makes a religious statement between songs that is too long or too doctrinal for the audience’s toleration. Most Christians involved in punk are very sensitive to their audience; as Suvi said, “you have to be wise about how you approach things otherwise people can turn away from offence.” Youth pastors and Christian promoters of live punk performances are necessarily highly reflexive also, constantly balancing

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demands for creative self-expression with the need to regulating punk space to ensure it remains inclusive and viable. Sensitivity has not always been the utmost concern of Evangelical artists, though. Rory criticized the “very heavy handed” approach of high-profile Evangelical rock bands in the 1980s and the 1990s, who, unlike most Christian punk bands from the time of Spirit-filled hardcore onward, had no interest in acceptance from secular music scenes and viewed causing deliberate offense to secular bands and fans as a bold strike against cultural enemies (Luhr 2009: 111– 43). The contemporary desire for respectful and relationship-driven evangelism includes an awareness that certain beliefs that can be encountered within Evangelicalism should be kept out of the punk subculture. In particular, there is a broad recognition that insofar as conservative Evangelical attitudes toward sexuality are discriminatory toward gay and lesbian people, they are largely unacceptable within contemporary youth culture. As the scholar of American religion and politics E.  J. Dionne Jr. (2016:  7)  rightly observes, a broad commitment to gay, lesbian, and transgender rights is “nearly hegemonic” among American youth. This does not mean such views are universal but that they have achieved the status of common sense. Orthodox Evangelical approaches to sexuality (and gender) are recognized as increasingly inexplicable outside of specific conservative religious frameworks, and hardly uniformly adhered to within those. The Evangelical youth in ethnographic studies by Magolda and Gross (2009) and Strhan (2014) are reluctant to discuss homosexuality with non-Christians, considering conflict inevitable. It is therefore not surprising that Olsen (2005: 314–17) and Jennings (2016) suggest that being “open” to non-heterosexual individuals but not “affirming” of non-heterosexual relationships has become the new Evangelical norm. So by recognizing potential incompatibilities between aspects of Evangelicalism and the normative values of youth culture and the punk subculture, conflict can be avoided before it develops, and engagement with religion in punk does not necessarily occur on its most controversial terrain.

Conclusion This chapter has continued the discussion of Evangelicalism and the punk subculture, drawing upon ideas of the postsecular from contemporary social theory, and theorizations of the inclusion of diverse religious actors into secular societies

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and institutions. It was argued that the emergence of religion—primarily, but not exclusively, Evangelical Christianity—with the secular spaces of punk constitutes a postsecular turn for the subculture, a realization that religion retains sufficient internal vitality and meaning to enough people that it is likely to maintain a certain, albeit circumscribed, public presence. The chapter argued that Evangelical and secular(ist) punks have developed an informal subcultural version of Rawls’s notion of the “overlapping consensus” that punk should remain a secular space for autonomous creative self-expression and the exploration of alternative ideas and subjectivities. In keeping with the nature of the overlapping consensus, it is not problematic for Evangelical punks to conceive of reasons for maintaining punk’s openness and secularity, such as opportunities for evangelism, that are different from the reasons nonreligious punks might offer. The chapter noted that, at times, the overlapping consensus has been undermined—by both the aggressively secularist God Free Youth movement, and by Evangelicals alienating, censoring, or offending non-Evangelicals. Nevertheless, it was argued that respectful relationships between Evangelical and non-Evangelical punks have developed, and have proven capable of withstanding the contradictions contained within the diverse comprehensive doctrines. The basis for the development of a culture of mutual respect among religious and nonreligious subcultural actors is the acceptance of the individual spiritual autonomy, something that Evangelicalism emphasizes in its own particular way. Where conflict and suspicion has emerged, the concern has primarily been the institutional power of religion—real or imagined—to undermine punk’s secularity. A  shared commitment to an ethic of reciprocity that allows for mutual flourishing has proven to be a more common approach than the attempt to doctrinally dominate a particular punk scene, however. We will return to punk in Chapters  5 and 6, and touch upon certain already established aspects of the subculture in the next chapter. Our primary focus will now shift, however, from a music-based youth subculture to two sports-based youth subcultures: skateboarding and surfing. In examining Evangelical engagements with extreme sports we will see similar processes of the negotiation of the secular norms of subcultural activity, and the negotiation of certain skepticisms or wariness toward secular subcultural activity from within Evangelical culture and belief. We will also see a similar desire to find places and positions in which to articulate religious sensibilities within an overall secular space, and the quest for rhetorical and lived expressions of religious belief that are capable of making Evangelicalism explicable and attractive to subcultural youth.

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Evangelical Extreme Sports Subcultures and Youth Development Ministry

Introduction As we saw in the preceding chapters, punk culture is constituted by “more than noise” (O’Hara 1999). The deeper ethical, philosophical, and spiritual debates circulating within local and global punk scenes have proved both attractive and problematic to Evangelicals engaging with the subculture. In this chapter, we will take a sideways step beyond punk’s music-based subcultural space and into the sports-based subcultural spaces of skateboarding and surfing. We will encounter a similar dynamic here; skateboarding, surfing, and the broader milieu of “extreme” sports embody and signify ethical, philosophical, and spiritual values that Evangelical youth must negotiate as they participate in subcultural life. The affinity between punk and skateboarding is apparent; several of the punk musicians I have interviewed discussed the intertwined nature of the two subcultures. Ethan, a South Africa–based youth pastor and punk musician, discussed his adolescent excitement upon seeing the spikey-haired cartoon skateboarder on the cover of MxPx’s (1998) compilation album Let It Happen. “I instantly knew that I had found my first Christian punk CD,” he said. Indeed, histories of skateboarding typically link its popularization with punk itself; both subcultures came to be viewed as “antiestablishment and outside the pale of mainstream society” (Turner 2013: 1249), and both experienced crises over authenticity and commercialization, which will continue in light of surfing and skateboarding becoming Olympic sports in 2020. Asking “What is so punk about snowboarding?” Heino (2000) charts a similar dynamic within that particular extreme sport, as Honea (2013) does with BMX biking. Punk is often the soundtrack to the lives of surfers, too. Thommo, an Australian hardcore musician and promoter, discussed growing up on the Sunshine Coast in the 1990s when “the whole surfing

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scene was about punk music and stuff like that. I  remember watching bodyboarding DVDs with bands like Bodyjar and Frenzal Rhomb.” In moving away from the previous chapters’ focus on punk, this chapter will also constitute a shift away from the earlier focus on Britain and its wealthiest settler colonies, the United States and Australia, to focus specifically on South Africa. Although South Africa has been discussed in previous chapters, focusing the analysis of Evangelical extreme sports–based youth culture and youth ministry in the context of a developing and deeply unequal economy and society wrestling with the lasting impacts of European colonialism and enforced racial segregation under apartheid, highlights certain features of Evangelical youth culture. First, the contested utility of sports as tools for moral pedagogy, through the rapidly developing sphere of sports-based youth “development.” Second, the possibility of sports-based youth culture as tools for social integration and cohesion. Third, the ongoing globalization, in a generally but not entirely Americanized form, of Evangelical youth culture. Focusing on Evangelical engagements with two interrelated forms of extreme sport, surfing and skateboarding, this chapter relies largely upon ethnographic data obtained in South Africa in 2014 and 2015 with facilitators of Evangelical extreme sports–based youth ministries and extreme sports–based youth development projects. This research primarily took place in the province of the Western Cape, centered upon the city of Cape Town and its hinterland region referred to as the Cape Winelands. Some interviews and observations were also conducted in the neighboring Eastern Cape province, home to surfing pilgrim beaches around the town of Jeffreys Bay—famous since the iconic 1966 surf film The Endless Summer—where the thriving tourist industry and laid-back local vibe belies the reality that the hinterland contains some of Africa’s least economically developed regions. Drawing upon this data, this chapter will analyze specific subculture-focused attempts at evangelism within skateboarding and surfing youth cultures, including a discussion of the spirituality of surfing. The chapter will then examine specific conflicts that have emerged between the normative cultures of extreme sports and Evangelicalism, focused in particular on symbolic aspects of skateboarding. Finally, the chapter will analyze Evangelical approaches to youth development in South Africa, which use extreme sports as forms of moral pedagogy.

Extreme sports spirituality and culture It is first necessary to unpack the term “extreme sports,” for various labels are used in academic and insider discourses to describe a similar set of activities. As

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Rinehart (2010: 312–13) notes, different labels emphasize different features of the sports, such that surfing and skateboarding can described as “action sports,” “lifestyle sports,” or “alternative sports” to emphasize excitement and speed, or the importance the sports play in individual lives and identities, or to make a critical comparison with popular “mainstream” sports such as the various football codes. The predominance of the term “extreme sports” owes its popularity to the sports channel ESPN, and the X Games it established in 1995, and is therefore condemned by those who—similar to some of the punks discussed in previous chapters—wish to maintain a strong separation from the commercialization and competition associated with “mainstream” sporting practices (Beal and Weidman 2003). Despite “extreme sports” being the dominant etic term, “action sports” seems to be the preferred emic term among Evangelical youth ministries in South Africa, perhaps because, as Rinehart (2010: 313) suggests, it is the “least offensive” term one might choose. As we will see throughout this chapter, for these Evangelical youth ministries in South Africa and elsewhere, the utility of extreme sports rests upon two foundations. First, the popularity of these sports among male youth alienated by dominant sporting cultures. Second, the pedagogical and fundamentally liminal nature of these sporting activities. In regard to the popularity of extreme sports among alienated male youth—in their guise as “alternative sports” here—it is worth noting that although Evangelical extreme sports is not an exclusively male phenomenon, and the global Evangelical surfing subculture has a significant female minority contingent, the focus in South Africa is strongly on young males—and typically young black males. Evangelical surfing youth development ministries are focused neither on the consumer angle of the sports, within which “the figure of the surfer-girl has been a central commodity,” nor upon the idea of extreme sport as a transgressive space within which gender norms are resisted or recast (Roy and Caudwell 2014: 237). The concern is more conservative or conventional, focusing on addressing antisocial attitudes and behavior among boys and young men. In South Africa, the concern is especially with boys and young men in impoverished black communities, which carries with it a recognition of the greater demand in those communities for organized recreational activities and education-focused development projects, and to some extent a discursively depoliticized recognition of the need to address unequal economic development and spatial dislocation in a country shaped by colonialism and apartheid. It could be argued, however, that there has been a significant failure to acknowledge the even greater lack of organized recreational activities for girls and young women in countries like South Africa (Hayhurst, MacNeill, and Frisby 2011).

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Among the young men in South Africa, the dominant sporting cultures that extreme sports offer an explicit alternative to are association football (“soccer”) in most black communities, and rugby in white communities nationwide as well as in many black communities in the western half of the country. In some of these areas, such as the wealthier communities of the Western Cape, it is reasonable to argue that rugby culture is a significant part of the “dominant” culture, rather than being merely “mainstream” (Wheaton 2007:  295). This is partly a result of the sense of embattlement pervading Afrikaans-speaking white communities of the past “in which enthusiasm for rugby as an Afrikaner male activity, was equated with robust patriotism” (Grundlingh 1994: 409). In the wealthy, largely white southern suburbs of Cape Town, Liam, a Pentecostal youth pastor explained to me that young men who make it into their school’s first-tier rugby team are granted “honor” and “influence” among their peers, and no doubt the rest of the patriarchal “rewards system” attached to dominant sporting cultures (Lesko 2012: 154–5). Mari, an assistant youth pastor from the rugby-obsessed Cape Winelands region was somewhat blunter, explaining that if, as a teenage boy, you are not in your school’s first-tier rugby team, “you’re nothing; that’s how the boys see it.” If you can make it into the second-tier rugby team then you are deemed “acceptable, but a slightly lesser human being.” Such comments may exaggerate the matter, but Watson (2011: 187) suggests it is far from uncommon for sport to be stripped of its playfulness, and function as a test of the legitimacy of a young man’s “very existence.” Numerous South African rugby professionals interviewed by Liz McGregor make similar comments, lamenting the intense competitiveness of rugby in secondary schools and universities, and the pressure commonly placed upon young players by their fathers to excel. She quotes University of Cape Town coach Paul Dobson, who admits: In my first year at senior rugby [at the private school] Bishops, I didn’t make the first team, and I felt a deep sense of shame about that. Once you’ve made the first team, however, everything changes. Everyone knows who you are. Everyone likes and respects you. (McGregor 2011: 16)

The personal, collective, and vicarious prestige that accompanies success in South African school rugby is best illustrated by a joke I was told in a Winelands church: “How can you tell if a man went to Bishops? He’ll tell you.” It is therefore understandable that, as Ethan, a youth pastor and punk musician in an Evangelical church in the Cape Winelands region said, his skateboarding ministry immediately appealed to teenagers alienated from the “jock

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culture” of their schools, famous for producing internationally successful rugby players. Unlike team sports within which one must keep up with teammates and opponents or suffer the physical consequences, or competitive individual sports such as athletics, extreme sports theoretically allow individual progress according to one’s own criteria (Beal and Weidman 2003: 339–44). There also remains a sense of subcultural egalitarianism. Former professional skateboarder Tas Pappas—subject of the documentary All This Mayhem (2014) charting his rise, fall into drug addiction and prison, and ultimate recovery and conversion to Christianity—finds the notion of skateboarding as an Olympic sport “cheesy,” explaining that “this country versus that country is not the unified skate culture . . . when you meet a bunch of skaters you don’t feel like it’s us versus them, it’s just a bunch of guys getting together and want[ing] to have a skate” (Cox 2016). Nevertheless, Pappas was involved in an intense personal contest with American skater Tony Hawk to be the first to execute a 900 degree spin and, as we will see, noncompetitive aspects of extreme sports are modified within Evangelical youth development projects in order to emphasize the pedagogical aspects of sport. This tension between the playfulness of sport and its pedagogical potentials is in keeping with critical analysis of earlier Protestant engagement with sport that emphasized regulated and outcome-orientated activities over more ludic leisure (Overman 2011). Weber (1992: 111–12) argues that Puritan objections to sport as ludic leisure were grounded in opposition to “the spontaneous enjoyment of life,” contra “the ordered life of the saint,” such that sport was only acceptable for the “rational purpose” of increasing “physical efficiency.” This notion of sport as a pedagogical tool is the second of the three key reasons why sports are attractive for Evangelical youth ministry, following on from the specific appeal of extreme sports as alternatives to the sporting “mainstream.” The third particular point of appeal for extreme sports among Evangelicals rests on the point that these sports are liminal forms. For Turner (1969: 95), the liminal stage is the middle point of a ritual of transformation; one is “betwixt and between” social position and identity when in a liminal space. The emphasis on liminality is especially striking within surfing, as Bron Taylor’s (2007) foundational article on surfing and spirituality argues. Surfing takes place in a liminal physical space, between “the existing codes and controls of civilized land life on one hand, and the wild and untamed spaces of the open sea on the other” (Anderson 2013: 956). As Andre, an Evangelical surfing youth development facilitator, said of the young surfers he trains from impoverished townships, “the kids break away from their space once they’re in the water.”

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It is the hope of Evangelical surfing ministries that surfers will not only return to civilized land—which cannot be taken for granted—but that they will return as changed individuals. Conceiving of sports as liminal forms emphasizes the fact that one can be changed through participating in sport; a surfing session might be an event in-between who one was, and who one becomes. This potentiality is a recognized aspect of the liminal, likened in a “mainstream” sporting metaphor to “the moment when the trembling quarterback with all the ‘options’ sees the very solid future moving menacingly towards him!” (Turner 1974: 75). This notion is present in Evangelical extreme sports initiatives entirely focused on converting participants to Evangelical Christianity, and in semi-secularized youth development projects that are also concerned with creating effective students and citizens. The basis of these projects remains, however, the pleasure of involvement in the sports themselves, including the physical acts of riding a wave or attempting a skateboarding trick, as well as the pleasure that comes from being part of a sporting subculture. Social scientists have attempted to understand the pleasure of surfing through the concept of “flow,” more commonly and simply referred to as “being in the zone” (Turner 2012:  43), with the term most often attributed to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), a former student of anthropologist Victor Turner. Bron Taylor (2007: 941–2) invokes “flow” to help explain surfing’s “religious aura.” He understands flow as a point of intense psychological concentration in which there is a unity of mind and body, and of the body with some deeper reality; the body obeys the mind and moves ideally through physical space, and yet one is not consciously deciding to “flow,” which creates something trance-like about the experience. Turner (1974:  87–9) outlines further aspects of the notion; flow eliminates fear, even during dangerous sporting activities such as rock climbing; and flow is its own end—it might be triggered by surfing, but it seems that it does not work if consciously utilized as a technique or technology. Edith Turner (2012:  48)  emphasizes the religious nature of “flow” most explicitly, writing about both music and sport as sites of flow, as both forms are given to the “spillover effect” experienced as a mystical union or “revelation.” While Stebbins (1996:  66–8, 2005:  40–2) also identifies flow as an important part of both music and sport, he does so in purely secular terms. Turner works through a variety of cross-cultural musical and sporting examples of flow, from the music of Inuit shamans, to the Grateful Dead, and Jean Sibelius, as well as a famous Manchester United victory; her argument is that flow taps into a spiritual undercurrent that neither the social sciences nor institutional religion can comprehensively account for. As such, she presents an understanding of the

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phenomenon that resists doctrinal classification; flow may come from God, Turner infers, but “not a god of judgment for sin or a god of authority or of any particular culture” (ibid. 47). As such, each “shining moment” of flow may be considered “a bit of the beatific vision [but] it cannot be claimed exclusively in the holy words of any one language or religion” (ibid. 49). Something similar was true for Edith Turner’s partner, Victor Turner (1974: 89); “[T]o flow is to be as happy as a human can be—the particular rules or stimuli that triggered the flow, whether chess or a prayer meeting, do not matter.” As we will see in this chapter, and in the following chapter, this sense of an innate spirituality in surfing—and music, too—is deeply attractive to Evangelicals, but also deeply problematic. The same cross-cultural ecumenicalism in the Turners’ analysis of flow is present in many surfers’ accounts, too, and their “craving,” as Bron Taylor (2007: 942) calls it, for these experiences is not something that can be easily absorbed within Evangelical belief and practice.

Extreme sports evangelism This desire for religious transformation through sport is dramatized in the South African–produced Evangelical surf film, The Perfect Wave (2012). Advertised with the line “a surfer’s glimpse into eternity,” the film depicts the experiences of Ian McCormack, a young New Zealand surfer who embarks upon a conventional surfing pilgrimage around the world, eventually arriving in Mauritius where a jellyfish sting leads to a near death experience and conversion. Seeking to effect these individual changes in less life-threating ways, Evangelical extreme sports culture has developed various approaches to evangelism. The most obvious evangelizing strategy used by Evangelical extreme sports missionaries and youth pastors is the articulation of Christian doctrine in the language and imagery of their chosen sport. A veteran South African surfing missionary described surfing evangelism to his subcultural peers as being “about sharing the stoke we found when we found Jesus,” utilizing a ubiquitous surfing phrase. A good example of this “sharing” through translation comes from the South African–produced DVD series On the Rocks (2010), which presents the doctrine of the Incarnation as God taking “the ultimate drop” (falling off a surfboard) and becoming human. The analogy is later extended; “You know that feeling when a pro, someone like [Kelly] Slater rocks up on your home beach? It’s just amazing! Well, two thousand years ago, God rocked up on the beach in the form of Jesus.”

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One former surf missionary and current conservative Evangelical church pastor, Philip, explained the analogies he used in proselytizing to surfers on the beaches of Cape Town: Like a missionary, you have to know the local language. We’d draw a lot of analogies from surfing. Your leg rope is your security in Christ. The fins are your direction like the Holy Spirit. We had a lot of these. When we were doing beach carnivals and sharing the gospel on the beach we’d use those kind of analogies.

Similarly, in an Evangelical skateboarding session, sin was presented to the teenage skaters as “like a grease stain on your favorite pair of shorts.” A grease stain is easily acquired from a skateboard’s bearings, and just like sin in Evangelical doctrine—setting aside the trick of using dishwashing liquid—it cannot be removed by human hands. Publicly praying with or for one’s extreme sports peers is another way that Evangelical surf missionaries seek to create or enhance a culture receptive to their message. As an informal surf missionary from Cape Town, Chris, said: It’s a challenge to have a bunch of teenagers paddling out and saying, “hey, guys, let’s just pray quickly.” For that split second I worry I’ll sound weird, but I will just say, “thank God for this awesome day and these incredible waves; we pray for protection and to keep us safe from the sharks.”

In South Africa, several Evangelical surfers expressed concern at the increasing presence of sharks as a result of the practice of “chumming”—dumping fish parts in the water— by adventure tourism operators offering shark-spotting tours and “cage diving” into shark-infested waters. Although, as Booth (2007: 318) argues, surfing is usually no more dangerous than fishing, the most famous Evangelical surfer, Bethany Hamilton, had her arm bitten off by a shark in Hawaii when she was thirteen. She returned to the sport and achieved great success and fame; her autobiography (Hamilton 2004) was adapted for film as Soul Surfer (2011), and she also wrote a series of devotional books and young adult novels about surfing and Christianity. In contrast to Britain and Australia, and even parts of the United States, public prayer is common in South African sports culture. McGregor (2011) observed the ubiquity of prayer in rugby clubs, especially traditionally Afrikaans clubs, understood in the plurality of ways that prayers in sport can be understood in, including as traditional cultural ritual, seeking protection, as a teambuilding strategy, and as public evangelism (Robinson 2014: 257). Public prayer is also ubiquitous in South African football culture, which often combines

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Christian prayers with traditional African religious practices (Alegi 2010: 49– 51, 174–5). Public prayer is therefore less abrasive in South Africa than in some other countries; a visiting Swiss surfer, Helen, observed that European surfers are simply “not open to it.” In the United States, each sport will have one or more Evangelical ministries embedded somewhere within it, and prayer is ubiquitous in some regional sporting cultures, such as NASCAR racing. Baker (2010: 225) explains this by pointing to its combination of danger and cultural rootedness in America’s Bible Belt, giving the example of Dale Earnhardt who “drove with a devil-may-care swagger, but carefully taped Biblical verses on his dashboard—until his instant demise in 2001 when he crashed head-on into the wall on the final lap of the Daytona 500.” In the American football-focused drama series Friday Night Lights, prayer is ubiquitous in the Texan high school sporting culture, but it is used and understood in different ways, including deeply ironic prayers for victory and success as well as for physical healing and protection. Evangelical extreme sports participants do not only seek divine protection from risks inherent in extreme sports, they also utilize religious resources to surmount risks and excel at their chosen sport. A surfing development facilitator, Andre, cited the example of a visiting big wave surfer who told “grommets” (novice surfers) that he summoned up the courage to confront the largest wave of his career when he recognized that “God was speaking to him, saying, ‘I’m with you, you can do this.’ ” A  similar example comes from the skateboarder Ben, who explains in a glossy insert in the Skaters Bible that “God says he’s given his angels charge over me to protect me wherever I go. So I try new tricks with confidence. That’s why I don’t get skidmarks in my underpants” (Bible Society Australia 2007: Insert 1). The euphemism here refers to soiling yourself in fear, and it is quite remarkable that an Evangelical publisher—even an Australian Evangelical publisher—would consider this appropriate to insert into a Bible, halfway through the Gospel of Matthew. Analogous but less scatological comments are to be found in the similar Surfers Bible (Bible Society Australia 2008). Both these publications are aimed at offering Evangelical youth religious encouragement by appealing to particular subcultural identities, similar to the Metal Bible for that music-based youth subculture (Moberg 2015:  114–15), showing how Evangelical orthopraxis can be adhered to within the rhythms of extreme sports. Underpinning the specific sporting references is an expectation, similar to that found in proximate youth-focused Bibles, that Evangelical youth will be engaged in secular leisure activities, negotiating the moral and spiritual hurdles of popular and youth culture (Kaell 2010). As in the youth Bibles Kaell analyzes, the Skaters Bible and

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the Surfers Bible present sacred and secular culture side-by-side, as one expects contemporary Evangelical youth will experience it in their everyday lives; turning a page juxtaposes Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, for example, with an Australian surfer discussing his favorite beaches and favorite verses. In this way, the excitement—the stoke—of belief is presented as something existing alongside, but ultimately above, the excitement of the sport itself. In the case of surfing, this very excitement of the sport itself is also a key point of entry for evangelism, as is the broader environment in which it takes place, both of which lead to the common notion that the sport of surfing is a deeply spiritual act. In his survey of Welsh surfers, Anderson (2013:  957–9) reports feelings of “awe” among surfers as well as a common sense of the spiritual significance of the sport. Relatedly, Bron Taylor (2007: 934) notes common attempts within surf art to inspire feelings of the “sublime,” in addition to the idea of “flow” discussed above. Schmidt (2006: 187) lists surfing as among the nature-based sports that can serve as spiritual resources because within these sports “individuals found spiritual awareness that located them in a wider world beyond the everyday. They found a sense of connection and/or realized some sense of meaning about their inner, outer or spiritual selves.” When I asked Andre, the surfing youth development facilitator, whether he viewed surfing as a spiritual activity, he replied: No one can say there is no god when you see the beauty of something that’s alive—and the ocean is alive! It’s constantly moving; no wave is the same. Of course it’s a spiritual thing. When you’re in the ocean you’re just in awe of the beauty of God. The thing is that creation was created for us to enjoy.

Chris, an amateur surfer engaged informally in surfing ministry, said: I never have a better opportunity to share with youngsters than when a guy is full on in the elements and has just experienced an incredible surf. I just claim it unashamedly; everything we experience and everything we’ve been immersed in has been created by God.

These two quotes illustrate the standard rhetorical move for surfing evangelists who seek to frame or explain the spiritual nature of surfing within Evangelical beliefs; they position an exciting experience of surfing within an Evangelical cosmology that the individual surfer is then interpellated within. It is not necessarily easy for Evangelical surf missionaries to explain Evangelical doctrine to young people with more individualized or unorthodox beliefs, even when they share sporting experiences and subcultural affiliations.

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As Liam, a youth pastor involved with ministering to surfers in Cape Town, explained: I think for a lot of surfers it’s hard to be that intimate with nature and creation and not have a sense that there is some higher power behind it; some design behind it. A lot of surfers that I know would admit this—just because they appreciate creation and they enjoy it—that there’s something behind it, but they’re not sure who or what that is, and they wouldn’t call it the Christian god, necessarily.

This is a good illustration of Heelas and Woodhead’s (2005) argument that topdown religious subjectivities, such as one encounters in the attempted interpellation of an individual into Evangelical cosmology and soteriology, are giving way to bottom-up individualized religious subjectivities in certain contexts, as well as Charles Taylor’s (1989, 2007) arguments about modern spirituality being articulated in individualized registers instead of through a shared religious framework. It also reflects Turner’s (2012: 49) discussion of the spirituality of “flow” that “cannot be claimed exclusively in the holy words of any one language or religion.” Liam backed away from his initial assessment of surfer spirituality as polarized between those who “love Jesus and God” and those who “love drugs and alcohol and the party lifestyle,” with an excluded middle. There is a theoretical attractiveness to this notion of a homologous worldview, and Liam inadvertently stumbled into the longstanding debate within youth studies, familiar to us from Chapter 1, about the extent of ideological uniformity in youth subcultures. But the notion that surfers “live in a world of extremes, their surfing is extreme, if they apply themselves to something, they give it everything,” which limits a surfer’s spiritual options to Evangelicalism or apatheistic hedonism, belies the reality of South African surfers, and the reality of surfers from elsewhere attested to in literature that suggests a strong, implicit spirituality in surfing (Schmidt 2006; Bron Taylor 2007; Anderson 2013). As Liam went on to say, reflecting on his experiences as a youth pastor: I suppose if you position South Africa relative to the rest of the world, we are a more Christian culture, definitely. Especially compared to Europe which is more secular. But, while people might acknowledge a God, or some kind of power, in terms of understanding the significance of who Jesus is, his death, and the authority of scripture, those things are more and more falling away.

The broader field of Evangelical surf ministry is aware of this fundamental divide among young people, very well documented in the National Study of Youth

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and Religion (Smith and Denton 2005; Smith and Snell 2009) and similar largescale studies (Mason, Singleton, and Webber 2007). There is, on the one hand, a minority of religiously committed youth for whom religious doctrine of one kind or another is instructive or foundational and, on the other hand, the vast majority of youth—including self-identified religious youth—for whom religious doctrine is of minor importance, no importance, or simply irrelevant and incomprehensible. Illustrating a general awareness of this divide, the booklet accompanying the DVD On the Rocks suggests that pastors who show the films take steps to avoid alienating non-Evangelicals—such as, keeping prayers short and “in normal language.” A review of the aforementioned Evangelical surf film The Perfect Wave in The Hollywood Reporter also illustrates this division between Evangelical doctrine and the dominant worldviews of contemporary Western youth. While respectful of the religious intent of the film, and acknowledging the increasing popularity of well-produced Evangelical films, the reviewer criticizes the absence of “any sort of significant conflict” in the film prior to the near death experience (Lowe 2014). The activities of the film’s protagonist—“[C]atching waves at gorgeous surf spots, picking up girls on pristine beaches and living the surfers’ vagabond life” (ibid.)—hardly creates high drama, but to an Evangelical audience the protagonist’s “unsaved” status is enough to signify where the conflict lies. Trying to bridge this divide, the early episodes of On the Rocks work through Evangelical doctrine on sin, just like the Evangelical skateboarding lesson likening sin to “a grease stain on your favorite pair of shorts” did. The foundational concept these ministries seek to convey to non-Evangelicals is their own damnability. This is an idea increasingly alien to the societies in question, even the United States, illustrated by Christian Smith’s notion of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” as the default belief of America’s religious youth; subjective, egalitarian, and devoid of any specific doctrinal referents (Smith and Denton 2005: 162–70; Smith 2010). Some Evangelical surfers are unimpressed with the idea of the intrinsic spirituality of surfing, however. They certainly recognize the allure, and the personal significance of surfing to surfers, but they see surfing in a much more negative light. A former surfing missionary, Philip, exemplified this more skeptical approach to the sport, delivered with a rather contemptuous tone in his voice: Outsiders see the fun-loving, ocean-loving, nature-loving, environmentallyconscious image of the surfer, but when you look at it from the inside you just see guys who are addicted, and selfish, and self-consumed. It’s just a drug. This is why surfers need to be saved, just like anyone else. It’s our fallen nature. What

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attracted Eve? What made her sin? That desire for the fruit became stronger than the voice of God in her life and following God’s will. Was it really worth it for a piece of fruit? That became everything; there was nothing else that could satisfy her apart from that fruit. That’s what surfing is like. The wave, the ocean, you just want to give yourself entirely to that.

Anderson (2013: 961–2) notes that for some surfers, rather than the surf being a liminal space, it becomes the center of their life and they become “a liminoid citizen of the surf zone,” permanently existing part way between the surf and conventional life. These “liminoid citizens” are one embodiment of the “people lost in the ocean” that a surf missionary tasked his peers with going out to save at a gathering in Jeffreys Bay in 2014. They are also a visible minority or stereotype of surfers that undermines the respect accorded to the subculture in some churches.

Negotiating Evangelical ecclesial norms As these attitudes to surfing suggest, simply because extreme sports are potential sites for missionary activity and tools for youth development does not mean they meet with Evangelical acceptance. Critiques of surfing are quite complicated, as we have seen, but skateboarding is often viewed as childish and so continuing skating after adolescence can be a sign of a lack of moral seriousness. The broader lifestyle of youthful rebelliousness that skateboarding seeks to symbolize (Gems and Pfister 2009: 59; Rinehart 2010: 298–300) is the key source of Evangelical unease, however, particularly assumed connections with drug and alcohol misuse. As Beal and Weidman (2003: 347–8) observe, images of rebelliousness are used in skateboarding advertising to authenticate commercial products, which can scandalize Evangelicals who engage with this “surface level” of the subculture, according to Ethan, a youth pastor involved in skateboarding ministry. I will discuss some of these Evangelical critiques of alternative youth cultures in greater detail in the following chapters, but it is worth mentioning now the similarity between contemporary Evangelical critiques of extreme sports and Evangelical critiques of rock music between the 1950s and the 1980s. While various theological and pseudoscientific theories circulated about the harmful nature of rock music as music (Howard and Streck 1999: 31–6), authorities such as the influential scholar of church music Erik Routley (1969: 117–20) critiqued

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the notion that music genres are ethically neutral, since sound sometimes stands in for subcultural values. As Alex, a sports-based youth development facilitator engaged with several extreme sports noted: The skating culture, a lot of the time, gets mixed up with the music culture because there’s a lot of overlapping similarities. At some of our events that we’ve had, we’ve included some hardcore bands—hardcore Christian bands—and I think a lot of people at that point couldn’t really understand how, for instance, you could worship God in that way; how that could be worship music, you know?

As will be discussed in Chapter  6, along with supernatural fears that certain forms of music emanate from a genuine source of evil, there is also deep concern with what the subcultures symbolize and what sorts of behavior and values the subculture connects with or opens youth up to. Nevertheless, some more specific theological critiques of extreme sports circulate within Evangelicalism. Harker’s (2004: 78–81) critique of the integration of extreme sports into youth ministry is representative of broader ideas circulating in the most conservative Evangelical churches. He argues that, first, for Christians to “needlessly expose themselves to injury or death” is an inappropriate abuse of divine protection and, second, that the ideologies underlaboring extreme sports are at best humanist and, at worst, amount to New Age paganism focusing on awakening the inner potential and self-esteem of youth. Selfimprovement rhetoric is common in contemporary Protestantism, from Norman Vincent Peale’s (1952) The Power of Positive Thinking to the focus on consumeristic material rewards by Evangelical preachers of the “Prosperity Gospel,” but as Watson (2011: 188–91) shows, there is an equally common Evangelical caution against dwelling too much on “self ” and worldly success. From a scholarly Evangelical perspective, Watson (2009:  108–12) subtly endorses a more modest version of these general critiques of sports-based youth development, demonstrating the broad Evangelical concern about how one ought to understand spiritual experiences that are not contained within an Evangelical doctrinal framework. However, he also notes the utility of extreme sports from an Evangelical perspective because of the potential link to orthodox Evangelical understandings of masculinity; “ ‘Men’ in the truest sense of the word,” Watson writes, confront God and mortality in the wilderness (ibid.). Although this question of Evangelical masculinity is beyond the scope of this book, it is worth mentioning in the context of a discussion of extreme or alternative sports, the significant popularity of mixed martial arts (MMA)—notably the Ultimate Fighting Championship—among Evangelical male youth since

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the mid-2000s. Described as “human cockfighting” by Senator John McCain (Masucci 2007: 329), someone not known for his squeamishness, it has nevertheless been promoted as an expression of traditional masculinity and a form of “muscular Christianity.” The popularity of MMA emerged within the context of status anxiety among some men in postindustrial economies with increasing gender and sexual equality, without, of course, being reducible to these anxieties. The popularity of MMA among Evangelical male youth may be attributed to the controversial American “New Calvinist” pastor and author Mark Driscoll, whose promotion of traditional patriarchal gender roles has proved appealing to some members of Generations X and Y, and who even made reference to an aggressively patriarchal model of Christ he labelled “Ultimate Fighting Jesus” (O’Brien 2008; Watson and Parker 2014: 82). However, from my observations of Evangelical youth culture over the last decade, this interest in contemporary American blood sports seems separate or autonomous from Driscoll’s specific ministry, and is appreciated among some Evangelical male youth as a spectacle that seems to possess some vague subcultural imprimatur. In addition to explaining Evangelical Christianity to extreme sports participants, Evangelical extreme sports ministry and youth development is tasked with explaining extreme sports to Evangelical Christians. Ethan, the punk musician and youth pastor in the Cape Winelands involved in skateboarding ministry, offered his view of normative negative Evangelical attitudes toward extreme sports and proximate forms of youth subculture and serious leisure: The Christian norm has this tendency to look at things like punk or things like skate and view them as inherently bad, or immature. You lay those things aside as foolish, and childlike, and of the world, and you lay them aside because you’re saved now. I  think when I  see inherently good things in the subculture like skateboarding I get excited.

He articulated his insider experience of skateboarding culture, as a young skater himself and now as a youth pastor ministering to young skaters: From a Christian perspective, there are things within subcultures that we can redeem—we can say, look, that’s inherently good. Within skate culture there’s a great sense of community; they enjoy spending time together, they value one another, and get excited when they see each other. Those things within the subculture are the things pointing to the fact that the subculture can be redeemed.

At this point in the interview he became audibly emotional, saying that “it shows that there’s a value to that subculture; it shouldn’t just be dismissed, you know?”

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Yet he recognized an inherent tension in the desire to “redeem” skateboarding culture in Evangelical eyes. On one hand, skateboarders seek sufficient secular legitimacy to allow them to practice their sport relatively unmolested. An ongoing campaign to legitimize skateboarding in Cape Town has been successful in having it accepted as a means of personal transport like cycling (Mackay 2013). On the other hand, skateboarding culture relishes its alternative status, such that observations of skate culture by Evangelical Christians have created a collective perception of a subculture dedicated to values Evangelical Christians reject. In Ethan’s experience, and that of other Evangelicals actually involved in skateboarding ministry, the reality is rather different. “These are not crazy, rebellious, anarchist kids,” Ethan said. There are other aspects of the culture of extreme sports that complicate their relationship with Evangelical churches. The autonomy of skateboarding and surfing differentiates them from many mainstream sports. Skateboarding, in particular, is a self-organizing activity; it does not require a sports field, coaching, or adjudication (Beal and Weidman 2003: 338–9). Specialized skate parks are nice, but hardly necessary, since skateboarding simply imposes itself on any appropriate aspect of the built environment. In Cape Town, the portico in front of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament building is a ubiquitous location for skateboarding outside of business hours because it offers a smooth concourse the length of a city block with stairs for skaters to jump off. This autonomy and adaptability makes skateboarding an easy youth activity for churches to adopt; any church near a car park has the physical infrastructure to facilitate a skateboarding ministry. Autonomy and adaptability makes skateboarding a difficult proselytizing instrument for Evangelical youth ministries, however. Unless the ministry is willing to invest in a skate park, and maintain a church presence in a religiously neutral space, there are no obvious material benefits a church can offer local skateboarders. As one Evangelical punk musician and lifelong skateboarder from Cape Town explained to me, if authorities restrict skateboarding in one area, skaters relish the challenge of finding an equally good location elsewhere. This is different from the proximate musicbased youth subcultures analyzed in this book that, as discussed in the previous chapter, benefit from churches providing spaces to rehearse and perform. The same issues surrounding the self-sufficiency of extreme sports apply to surfing ministries. As Ruben, a youth pastor involved with surf ministries in the Eastern Cape explained to me, whereas youth ministries typically grow through providing safe entertainment and other leisure opportunities for young people, surfers have their own source of entertainment and excitement, and have no

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need for a church to provide it for them. Where Evangelical churches do engage with the surfing subculture, the particular rhythms of the lives of surfers can be a source of tension. Surfers may well be absent from regular scheduled worship services if surfing conditions are optimal. Ruben and several other Evangelical surfers told me that this can exacerbate a church’s distrust of individual surfers and the broader surfing subculture to self-manage surfing ministries. Extreme sports are, in short, ambivalent tools for churches to use to engage with youth.

Evangelical extreme sports–based youth development One way in which South African Evangelicals have found some success in utilizing extreme sports to engage with young people is in youth development projects. As Hartmann and Kwauk (2011: 287) outline the “dominant” view of youth sports development, sport teaches necessary life and social skills, and it does so organically through “competition, respect for the rules, and dedication to a physical craft.” I heard variations upon this theme, articulated in varying degrees of formality, throughout the interviews I conducted. Andre, an Evangelical surfing development facilitator said that “surfing produces commitment, focus, and determination. It’s the same in life; if a wave knocks you down you’ve got to get back on your board and stand up. You can relate surfing to a lot of life experiences.” Another Evangelical extreme sports development facilitator, Alex, made similar comments about skateboarding, “You’re never going to progress in your sport if you don’t choose to get up and go practice for three hours, you know? There’s a lot from the sport itself that can be carried over into life skills.” These contemporary projects can be traced back to the use of sport as a form of moral pedagogy in elite British schools in the Victorian era, which was itself a newer form of existing Evangelical attempts to insert moral instruction into the leisure time of the youth of the new urban working class—the “home heathens” (Reid 2000). This was not sport as “play,” but as a character building exercise becoming fused with the ideology of “Muscular Christianity” that saw the body not as something to be denied but as something to be trained and put to service for God and Empire (Rees and Miracle 2000: 277–8; Meyer 2011). Underpinning this, Overman (2011) argues, is the Christianity of Weber’s (1992) famous Protestant ethic thesis, which rationalizes sport by stripping it of its ludic elements, creating a tension that we will see persisting in religious sporting cultures to this day. In South Africa, beginning at this time, rugby played a similar role for Afrikaans-speaking white males, forming part of the “theological

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armory” of Dutch Reformed clergy, educated in rugby-obsessed universities such as Stellenbosch (Grundlingh 1994: 409–11). Despite this early, close connection between sport as a tool of youth development and institutional religion, Morgan (2006: 134–5) argues that secularization was integral in providing sport with its moral legitimacy. When religion could no longer be relied upon to morally regulate society, sport became a way to build character and community. There has been rapid growth in sports development organizations in the last twenty-five years, including in South Africa (Burnett 2009:  1192–3; Sanders, Phillips, and Vanreusel 2014: 791–2), accompanied by a growing body of practical, theoretical, and critical literature (e.g., Houlihan and Green 2011). Today, many nonreligious sports-based youth development initiatives offer secularized analogues of the programs that religious organizations have been offering for over a century, so it is not surprising that critiques of sports-based youth development pick up on these religious connections or analogues. In Giulianotti’s (2004: 356) critical view, these secular “sports evangelists” perpetuate a puritan sporting pedagogy by utilizing “sporting activities to dissipate the lower orders’ dangerous energies and to divert them from ‘licentious’ social practices.” There are many similar political critiques of sports-based youth development, especially as practiced in developing countries such as South Africa (e.g., Coakley 2011; Hartmann and Kwauk 2011; Thorpe and Rinehart 2012). These political critiques stand quite apart from the fact that involvement in youth sport has been shown to have an ambivalent impact on the “licentious” behavior these so-called sports evangelists are seeking to dissipate (Rees and Miracle 2000:  283–4; Coalter 2007:  92–132). In the documentary All This Mayhem (2014), Australian skateboarder Tas Pappas explains that he used skateboarding to escape from a dysfunctional home life in the workingclass Melbourne suburb of St Albans, but that through skateboarding he and his brother became heavily involved with drugs, such that they “got sucked back into the life we would have had in St Albans anyhow.” The general pedagogical criticism is that since the sports field, broadly conceived, is itself a location of moral contestation in which one may make dishonest or selfish choices and be rewarded for them, it cannot be certain that involvement in sports will promote positive moral choices in other fields. The American high school football-focused drama series Friday Night Lights offers an excellent illustration of this ambiguity; there are no consistent consequences to either moral or immoral behavior, undermining “the moral myth that hard work, sacrifice, and high character in sports are rewarded” (Phillips 2014: 997). This secular critique is separate from the explicitly religious concerns about sport discussed in this book and, absent

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Evangelicalism’s pervasive anthropological pessimism, the critique can be an unwelcome acknowledgment of the moral ambiguity of a social field often considered unambiguously beneficial to youth (Coalter 2007: 8–9). The general political criticism of sports-based youth development, on the other hand, is that such programs fail to confront the dominant socioeconomic order on global or local scales, maintaining hierarchies of the young over the old, the Global North over the Global South, and capital over everyone and everything. Sports development projects are commonly criticized, therefore, for promoting “neoliberal” notions of individual self-accountability over collective political engagement, and the social responsibility of the state. The term “neoliberalism” must be differentiated, however, between its reality in economically developed countries—such as the United Kingdom or Australia, where it describes a decades-long process of privatization, deregulation, and competition, essentially the state taking a step back and handing off the responsibilities it had previously assumed—and the way in which “neoliberalism” manifests rhetorically in South Africa, where the term is ubiquitous in academic and activist discourse. Despite this ubiquity, South Africa’s expanding welfare system, highly regulated labor market, large public sector, and influential trade unions, make talk of “neoliberalism” misleading in a global context. The matter is not helped by the fact that postapartheid South Africa is wrongly cited as an example of neoliberalism on the third page of Harvey’s (2005) popular study. Like the legitimately neoliberal states of Australia and the United Kingdom, religious groups certainly play a role in the provision of social services, which is even more the case in the United States, but in South Africa these religious groups are addressing social needs that the government lacks the financial and human resources to address. Successive South African governments, of the colonial, apartheid, and democratic eras, have simply never had a substantial reach in much of the country, especially in the townships and impoverished rural areas that welcome religious and secular youth development projects. It should be obvious that Evangelical extreme sports development projects are unlikely to find favor with proponents of these progressive political critiques, as they are simply addressing a wholly different conception of personal development and social need. On a more modest and practical scale, however, there certainly is a productive critique to be made that sports development programs are often overly ambitious in utilizing sport to solve mismatched social and economic problems (Burnett 2009:  1195; Sanders, Phillips, and Vanreusel 2014: 790–1). Both secular and Evangelical youth sports development projects approach questions of personal and community development

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in a rather diagonal manner. The shared belief is not that increasing youths’ surfing skills will automatically boost GDP, of course, but that lessons learned from sport, and lessons communicated by peers and mentors during sporting activities, can provide young people with the social, cultural, and moral capital to allow them to better negotiate the difficulties they will encounter in life, including inculcating attitudes and providing generic skills that will benefit them within the conventional educational system and employment market. But the way in which a sports development project understands the problems in the society it is seeking to improve will determine its particular approach to remedying them (Hylton and Totten 2008), and Evangelical sports projects obviously differ from secular ones insofar as they believe that, ultimately, the solution to individual and collective ills is conversion to Evangelical Christianity. Two identifiable, but not always distinguishable, sports development models exist along a continuum, according to Coalter (2007:  70–1), and one can locate both forms within South African Evangelical extreme sports projects. Coalter labels the first model “sport plus,” in which involvement in sport is foregrounded, but within which sport is utilized to address social problems. He labels the second model “plus sport” in which nonsporting concerns are paramount, but sport is used to attract young people into these programs. It is not easy to apply a single label to most of the projects I have encountered in South Africa. It is unlikely that the instigators of these projects would pursue their work with such devotion were they precluded from expressing their beliefs as part of their coaching and mentoring tasks, but the love of one’s chosen extreme sport(s) is also essential to the projects, particularly given the concern with subcultural authenticity among skateboarders and surfers. For example, Ethan decided to suspend the religious aspects of the skateboarding ministry he developed in the Cape Winelands when he departed the area, and simply maintained the skateboarding-based friendship network, rather than be replaced in his ministry role by someone who is not a skater. Before they can engage with young people through extreme sports, these Evangelical development projects must negotiate the inequalities of South African society. As Davis (2012: 232–3) explains, in his history of the Christian Surfers organization that he cofounded, exposure to the reality of South African poverty made the organization rethink its priorities: In South Africa, Christian Surfers explored how our mission—traditionally so focused on personal salvation—needed to develop a social justice edge. The black

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community traditionally did not enter the water, yet scores of black kids lived right at the beach and only felt they had drugs, sex, and alcohol to occupy them.

It is hard to think of a more obvious example of the moralism of the “sports evangelists” that scholars such as Giulianotti (2004) condemn. Nevertheless, the quote illustrates the institutional thinking of the Christian Surfers organization and the complexities of religious sports development projects. The quote also illustrates a basic irony in youth sport: although sport is about achieving status through one’s own efforts, one’s ability to participate in sport is often dependent on one’s ascribed status (Overman 2011: 264). In South Africa, one’s ascribed status broadly correlates with the racial group one is born into such that extreme sports’ tendency to “delineate by class and economics” (Rinehart 2010: 301) is especially evident. As Ethan said in 2014, “you can buy a cheap skateboard for 150 rand [11 USD] and you can skate that thing for a year if you don’t do anything stupid.” On the other hand, according to Andre in 2015, the cost of an entry-level surfboard and youth-sized wetsuit was approximately 3,000 rand (220 USD). By way of comparison, in 2016 the Child Support Grant, received by approximately 12  million South African children, was worth 350 rand (25 USD) per month. Noting the de facto continuation of what Thompson (2011) labels “beach apartheid,” Gordon, a veteran, informal surfing missionary in Cape Town told me, “A lot of the time guys from disadvantaged areas don’t have a board, don’t have transport, don’t have a wetsuit. On the Atlantic side [beaches], you can have a board, but with no wetsuit you ain’t getting in that water!” In meeting the needs of impoverished South Africans interested in surfing, surf development projects run by Evangelicals—which are not necessarily identified or conceived of as primarily evangelistic—link access to equipment, coaching, and transport with adherence to various educational and behavioral obligations. It is not merely participation in sport that is of pedagogical use, therefore, but the very possibility of participation as well. This can be understood as an example of teaching “leisure literacy,” a way of conceiving of leisure within a holistic framework, understanding the relationship between personal leisure and other aspects of individual and community life (Elkington and Stebbins 2014: 181). In linking sports participation to moral instructions and to requirements such as staying in school, these extreme sports development projects downplay the playful aspects of extreme sports, which returns us to the analysis of earlier religious interventions into sport (Overman 2011). As Daniel Turner’s (2013:  1257–9) study of secular skateboarding sports development

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programs in Britain argues, skateboarding programs can attempt to “civilize” wayward youth, deliberately or otherwise, by discouraging the “punk-styled participatory behaviors” traditionally associated with the sport, such as swearing and indifference to safety. Similarly, Watson (2009: 97–8) notes that much of the appeal for nature-based extreme sports is escaping the restrictions and paternalism of bureaucratic modernity. Through their desire to emphasize pedagogical rather than ludic aspects of extreme sports, such development projects run the risk of inadvertently replicating the codified nature of “mainstream” sports that extreme sports deliberately seek to repudiate, and perhaps even the highly regulated environment of conventional education and employment. By becoming less recognizably a part of a young person’s leisure time, and more a part of the “imposed regime of well-meaning adults” (Overman 2011: 239), the pedagogical emphasis can undermine the very appeal of a sports development program. Certain tendencies within extreme sports are clearly deemphasized within some South African Evangelical extreme sports projects in order to enhance their effectiveness as tools of moral pedagogy, and arguably in order for them to gain greater acceptance from Evangelical churches. Most obviously, individual autonomy is deemphasized in order to prioritize the role of mentorship. This is the primary way in which religious beliefs are communicated to young people in these programs; unlike the notion of organic moral pedagogy in sport, no one anticipates youth making a commitment to Jesus simply by making a commitment to skateboarding. Mentoring happens didactically, such as in the conversations that occur while waiting for a wave, and through mimesis in which mentors model (or “witness”) religious orthopraxy. As Andre, a full-time surfing youth development worker said, “We don’t necessarily preach to the kids but we live life before them. They see me as I am, how I am with my wife, with my family, there’s a constant flow.” When I asked if this constant scrutiny—a panopticon of grommet surfers—was burdensome, he replied, “No, because so many positive results come from it.” Within youth development projects aimed at impoverished youth, this mentorship is considered necessary to compensate for the common absence of parental guidance and supervision, a problem Burnett (2014: 727–8) noted in her assessment of a secular sports development project in Cape Town, and that Swartz (2009) noted in her important study of the “moral ecology” of township youth on the outskirts of the city. Another way in which values of individual autonomy are deemphasized within Evangelical extreme sports–based youth development programs is through organizing competitions. Although these are a regular part of the

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commercialized sphere of surfing and skateboarding, and surfing contests in South Africa are major events on the global surfing calendar, competitions are organized for all skill and age levels. This departs from a tendency existing within extreme sports–based youth culture to deemphasize interpersonal competition, which has been particularly strong within surfing culture and its derivatives in the notion of the “soul surfer” who rejects competition and embodies “a form of ‘fraternal’ individualism” (Booth 2003: 319). What is notable here is that extreme sports ministries are bringing to nonprofessional and recreational surfing the values and practices of commercialized competitive surfing, for ultimately noncommercial, noncompetitive, religious ends. For example, in the early days of the “Jesus Surf Classic” contest in Australia in the 1980s, the organizers made a virtue of reasserting the very “rituals of bourgeois order” that surfing culture had sought to disrupt (Bourdieu 1984: 220). The absence of swearing, and the presence of coffee and chocolate cake served undercover on the beach, drew the praise of parents and sponsors alike and altered negative images of surfing culture (Davis 2012: 71–7). Competitions attract interest from those outside of the projects, making them visible to potential church sponsors. They are also visible to the wider sporting subculture, which allows for direct evangelism through the short sermons and the personal narratives (“testimonies”) of Evangelical extreme sports participants that are an integral part of these events. Competitions are another way in which tendencies evident in earlier Protestant sporting cultures to moralize sport through regulation are reasserted. Competitions can be used as diagnostic tools to monitor and publicize individual and collective skills development, as well as cultivate cultures of self-discipline and goal-setting among participants, since surfing in anticipation of a future competition mirrors studying in anticipation of a future examination. Sporting success is not the primary concern, therefore. As Andre said in describing his approach to surfing-based youth development, “Growth has to be holistic. As they evolve here they must evolve there; they have to go in parallel.” He was more excited about the fact that the group’s best surfer was turning into a bookworm than his prospects at upcoming competitions.

Conclusion This chapter moved beyond the previous focus on Evangelical youth in punk culture, to focus on the related sports-based subcultures of skateboarding and

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surfing. Various similarities to Evangelical engagements with punk were shown to inform Evangelical engagements with these forms of extreme sports, including concerns with subcultural symbolism and the hedonistic lifestyles of secular subcultural peers. There were also shown to be abiding connections in the desire to engage with the underlying values of the subcultures from a position of likeminded enthusiasm, while seeking to negotiate the differences with Evangelical orthopraxy. It was argued that two key beliefs underpin Evangelical extreme sports engagements, in addition to the enthusiasm the Evangelical extreme sports practitioners hold for the sports themselves. First, the belief that extreme sports can be used to engage with, in particular, young men who are disengaged from “mainstream” sporting youth cultures. In South Africa, it was shown that this this means rugby and association football. We can reasonably transpose these findings to much of Europe and the Americas, substituting hockey in Canada or American football in much of the United States. The fears repeatedly expressed by rugby youth coaches to McGregor (2011), that South African rugby is becoming like the ultracompetitive junior culture of American football, is evidence of the similarities. The big business that is American high school football, with its local celebrity coaches, stigmatized underperformers, and persistent suspicion of cheating, is similar to the culture of South African youth rugby (Gems and Pfister 2009: 183–9), even if it never reaches the dramatic heights portrayed in Friday Night Lights, in which the high school football team’s success is a Texan town’s key civic project. Second, it was argued that the liminal nature of sports, notably surfing, underpins Evangelical extreme sports engagement. The topic of surfing and spirituality has been the subject of serious theorizing, notably by Bron Taylor (2007), and this chapter has made use of fieldwork with Evangelical surfers to demonstrate that the implicit sense of spirituality in surfing certainly carries over to Christian surfers, but that they are wary of spiritual experiences that are untethered from Evangelical doctrine. As understudied topics within the field of youth culture, sports culture, and religious culture, the topics touched upon in this chapter require further analysis. In the following chapter I will re-theorize Evangelical engagement with extreme sports, as well as Evangelical engagement with alternative music-based youth subcultures, through the prism of the concept of “serious leisure.” Developed by the sociologist Robert Stebbins, the term has become ubiquitous in sports and leisure studies, but unutilized by scholars of religion. Somewhat analogous to the concept of the subculture, thoroughly interrogated in Chapter 1, we will see that

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serious leisure focuses attention on the commitment demanded of participants by certain leisure activities. In analyzing three key elements of South African Evangelical extreme sports, it was first argued in this chapter that in addition to the translation of doctrine into subcultural argot, the precise experiences of participating in the sport itself become points of reference. We will see in the following chapter, however, that—as was illustrated in several quotes in this chapter— participation in sports activities is not necessarily a religiously neutral or unproblematic activity for Evangelicals. Second, certain tensions between the culture of extreme sports and the culture of Evangelical churches were analyzed in this chapter. The focus was on institutional culture, but the next chapter will examine individual negotiations of values and identities with a focus on the question of “salvation anxiety,” expanding and moving beyond the analysis of the concept by Max Weber (1992). Finally, and in a quite particularly South African context, the role of Evangelicals in facilitating extreme sports–based youth development projects was analyzed in this chapter. In the next chapter, we will see how the transformation of subcultural leisure activities into pedagogical—or evangelistic—activities can be a way of reconciling religious and subcultural commitments, effectively sacralizing a profane pastime.

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Serious Leisure and Salvation Anxiety in Evangelical Youth Culture

Introduction Previous chapters have revealed Evangelicalism’s ambivalent relationship with alternative music and extreme sports–based youth subcultures. While Evangelical individuals and institutions have been able to acknowledge the good within these cultural forms, as well as recognized them as spaces for evangelism, spiritual unease has destabilized these engagements. This chapter utilizes the concept of “serious leisure” to understand the tensions experienced by committed Evangelical participants involved with nominally secular leisure pursuits, which they fear are functioning as rivals of God in their lives. In the particular Evangelical context this book is concerned with, this tension can lead, in turn, to profound anxieties about one’s status in the overall scheme of salvation. As developed by the Canadian sociologist Robert A.  Stebbins, the “serious leisure perspective” has been applied to a variety of leisure activities, in a variety of contexts, usefully indexed by Elkington and Stebbins (2014). Pertinent applications of the concept include a consideration of “professional amateur” creators and “disruptive innovators” like rappers (Leadbeater and Miller 2004), and the analysis of youth sport as serious leisure (Siegenthaler and Gonzalez 1997), which examines the problem of serious leisure becoming serious competition, as discussed in the previous chapter. Crucially, serious leisure has been studied within a largely irreligious framework; only an analysis of the lives of American dog sports enthusiasts seems to take seriously the impact of serious leisure on adherents’ religious lives (Gillespie, Leffler, and Lerner 2002). As we will see, serious leisure is typically conceived of as a form of meaning-making in secularized societies in which religion no longer makes substantial claims on individual lives.

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Further to this normative secular approach, the serious leisure perspective is presented as a form of “positive social science,” not in the sense of positivism, but in the sense that social scientists have a tendency to neglect “the positive, rewarding side of life” (Elkington and Stebbins 2014: 198). To some extent, the authors acknowledge, this is a provincial problem of understanding the lives of certain segments of the population in wealthy societies in which a “basic tranquility” has been achieved. But for Evangelicals, “basic tranquility” cannot be considered a question of material comfort and stability. Serious leisure has typically been treated as “inherently positive” in the social sciences (Gallant, Arai, and Smale 2013: 95), and as we will see, Stebbins (1992: 7) identifies eight particular “durable benefits” from serious leisure that accrue to the individual and community. But for Evangelicals, the fact that the features and benefits of serious leisure allow it to fulfill many of the worldly functions of religion (moral education, socialization, emotional satisfaction, etc.), and the fact that serious leisure is complex and fulfilling enough to be an end in and of itself, is problematic. Insofar as its importance in one’s life can be considered spiritually distracting, and socially and emotionally demanding, serious leisure is often conceived of by Evangelicals as a form of “idolatry.” We will see that there are two interrelated concerns that Evangelical youth culture has around serious leisure activities. First, there is concern with the simple fact that many religiously committed youth struggle to find time to engage in religious activities. Second, there is concern with the fact that it is increasingly common for young people to derive their sense of identity from their leisure pursuits, including music and sports subcultures, rather than grounding their identity within a religious subjectivity. In some cases, the anxiety this produces leads to a spiritual crisis, requiring a radical rupture with one’s chosen form of serious leisure, and then a fundamental repositioning and reconceptualization of the role of serious leisure in an individual’s life. This chapter will begin by outlining key aspects of the serious leisure perspective, drawing in particular on Stebbins’s (1992) foundational presentation of the theory. The chapter will then contextualize issues of serious leisure within the broader sweep of Evangelical youth culture, noting particular religious concerns and socioeconomic divergences in the specific context of South Africa. The chapter will then analyze several representative experiences of “salvation anxiety” within Evangelical youth culture, which in turn lead to “rituals of rupture” that culminate in the reconceptualization of the role of serious leisure in an individual’s life. In the latter sections of this chapter, important theories developed

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by anthropologists of Pentecostal communities will be redeployed to understand the anxieties in the lives of Evangelical individuals.

The serious leisure perspective The basic definition of serious leisure is “the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that is sufficiently substantial and interesting for the participant to find a career there in the acquisition and expression of its special skills and knowledge” (Stebbins 1992: 3). “Serious” leisure is contrasted along a continuum to “casual” leisure that differs in its spontaneity and simplicity. Stebbins (ibid.) offers examples of casual leisure such as taking a nap or watching television, but recognizing that serious and casual leisure exist on a continuum, means acknowledging that, for example, watching television can evolve from a form of “casual” leisure to become a form of “serious” leisure, in the context of television fandom (Lawrence 2006). Various aspects of serious leisure serve to set it apart from both casual leisure and non-leisure activities (Stebbins 1992: 5–8). Most importantly, serious leisure is not “work,” for unlike work, serious leisure is not relied on as a source of income; there may be compensation, but that is not why it is done. Similarly, while serious leisure is an activity that one is committed to, that commitment is different from one’s regular obligations at work. Further, serious leisure is a “career” in the particular sociological sense of a role with the possibility of advancement and increasing expertise, based on the investment of time and effort; athletes and musicians improve their performance, increasing their status along the way. Serious leisure also differs from casual leisure insofar as it confers at least some of the eight “durable benefits” to participants that Stebbins has observed:  “[S]elf-actualization, self-enrichment, self-expression, recreation or renewal of self, feelings of accomplishment, enhancement of selfimage, social interaction and belongingness, and lasting physical products of the activity” (ibid.: 7). Identifying qualities such as self-actualization, self-expression, and selfimage as aspects of serious leisure pushes the understanding of the concept closer to earlier discussions about subcultures and their observable values-based nature. In fact, Stebbins (ibid.) uses the term “subculture” to refer to the “special beliefs, norms, events, values, traditions, moral principles, and performance standards” associated with various forms of serious leisure, all of which amount to a “unique ethos” shared by participants. Similarly, participants in serious leisure “tend to identify strongly with their chosen pursuits,” Stebbins argues (ibid.),

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observing a tendency to talk a lot about their serious leisure—sometimes to excess—and to “present themselves in terms of these pursuits when conversing with new acquaintances.” In her study of windsurfing as a form of serious leisure, Wheaton (2003: 93–4) notes that for the most committed, “subcultural status and identity are central to their sense of self.” Stebbins (1992:  8–17) breaks down serious leisure into three particular forms:  amateurism, hobby pursuits, and career volunteerism. Amateurism, such as amateur musicianship, which covers the overwhelming majority of the Christian musicians interviewed for this book, or amateur surfing, refers to activities that are undertaken for the love of the activity and not as a significant source of income. Although some musicians I have interviewed were able to play professionally for a brief period, albeit earning a low income, and some harbor hopes of signing with one of the larger Christian labels, most willingly accept amateur status. Amateurs are specifically differentiated from “professionals” because of this fundamentally different economic arrangement, but amateurs ironically exist on the “margin of leisure” because they commonly pursue their activity with the seriousness of professionals, and so in this sense amateurs are much more than (mere) fans (ibid: 55–6). Second, Stebbins (ibid.) cites hobby pursuits as a form of serious leisure, with hobbyists pursuing their chosen activities in fields in which there is no substantially developed commercial sector, such that the distinction with professionals is not relevant. In the episode “Upping the Ante” of the drama series Friday Night Lights, an injured American high school football star–turned–wheelchair rugby player’s passion for his sport is dismissed by the very use of the word “hobby,” and the insistence that since one cannot make a living from a sporting hobby, it is of little value compared to the wealthy world of American football. And yet the emotional commitment of wheelchair rugby players, and its role in helping a disabled athlete recover his personal, social, and athletic “self-assurance” (Ellis 2012), demonstrates its status as a serious leisure hobby pursuit quite different from the common devaluing use of the word. In his study of hobbyist barbershop quartets, admittedly rather different from the punk that has been the main musical focus of this book, Stebbins (1996: 63) found that “self-enrichment” was the most popular reason for these singers to do what they do, followed by “selfactualization,” with “financial reward” at the very bottom. Third, Stebbins refers to career volunteering, with the term “career” in this case having the particular sociological meaning of a role with the possibility of advancement and increasing expertise over time. This career volunteering is differentiated from mere donations or charitable acts, as it implies the same sense of

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increasing expertise as for amateurs. Volunteers assisting with the youth development projects in the previous chapter are good examples of this; their ability to deal with complex issues in the fields in which they are working increases over time. Crucially, Stebbins (1992: 16–18) observes, volunteering is never wholly altruistic. This does not mean there is anything illicit going on, but simply that career volunteers benefit from their involvement by increasing their social and cultural capital or perhaps their possibility of supernatural reward.

Serious leisure and Evangelical youth culture Each of these three forms of serious leisure can be located within the field of Evangelical youth culture, but Evangelical youth are also likely to engage in wholly secular serious (and casual) leisure activities, just as their non-Evangelical peers are. The generally increasing significance of leisure in the societies this book is concerned with affects Evangelicals in quite particular ways, however, as we shall see. Stebbins (ibid.: 1) argues that an increasing number of people have assumed a “serious orientation toward leisure,” and that in the context of increasingly normalized long-term unemployment in many societies, extended periods of retirement—and, I would add, adolescence—and the waning of the early modern, so-called Protestant work ethic, this is likely to continue (Stebbins 1998: 13–15). Along with the increasingly important question of how to meaningfully occupy your time when a smartphone app makes your job redundant, the role of leisure in the construction and performance of individual identity is increasingly important as well. Leisure can replace work as the most significant aspect of one’s identity, and might be the dominant activity in one’s life, similar to the “soul surfer” who disengages from the rat race of careers and corporations and focuses on a life of self-exploration and self-expression on a beach somewhere (Booth 2003). Recognizing the increasing importance of leisure in individual meaningmaking and identity construction, Stebbins (1998: 111–14) makes use of Robert Dublin’s (1992) concept of the “central life interest,” the aspect of life that one invests the most positive energy in. In Wheaton’s (2003: 86) study of windsurfing as serious leisure, she describes the sport as the “organizing principle” in the lives of its core devotees, whose “commitment to windsurfing affects their whole lifestyle.” She gives the example of constantly monitoring weather reports— something Liam praised as a valuable and transferable soft skill for young surfers to learn—as well as choosing to live near the beach, as examples of windsurfers’

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“attempt to organize their whole lives around this leisure activity” (ibid.: 87). As Dublin (1992: 114–19) argues, the affluence, individualism, and secularism of the modern West has granted individuals increasing opportunities “for emotional commitment well beyond work and religion,” which were theoretically once fused together in the Protestant work ethic. Such a notion is backed up by Norris and Inglehart’s (2004: 164) analysis of data from the World Values Survey that shows wealthy, traditionally Protestant countries “place the greatest importance on the values of leisure, relaxation, and self-fulfillment outside of employment,” and subsequently have the weakest traditional Protestant work ethic. In Chapter 2 we looked at Charles Taylor’s theories of the “Age of Authenticity” and the foundational concern with the right of each individual “to develop their own form of life, grounded on their own sense of what is really important . . . to be true to themselves and to seek their own self-fulfillment” (Taylor 1992: 14). Returning to the question of the Protestant ethic, to the extent that one still needs “moral justification” for worldly activities (Weber 1992: 41), one’s “calling” might be thought of, not as devotion to one’s salaried work, but as the personal articulation of the “expressive individualism” Taylor is concerned with here. We saw that Taylor is particularly interested in creative artists, from the Romantic era onward, as paradigmatic figures exploring and performing their individual identities based upon personal experience rather than in the preconceived systems that once regulated central life interests. Heelas and Woodhead (2005) have developed a compatible thesis on changing patterns of religious conceptualization and practice in contemporary Western societies, examining subjective experiences and engagements with a great variety of religious, therapeutic, and leisure activities. Charles Taylor (2007: 473–86) is particularly concerned with issues of contemporary consumerism, which briefly includes popular music, as a vital resource for the realization and performance of one’s authentic being, and while consumerism should not be considered coterminous with leisure (Stebbins 2009), it is nevertheless the case that individuals in wealthy Western societies have been increasingly drawing upon irreligious resources as the building blocks of meaning and morality for some time. In the classic sociological study of religious and cultural change in the United States, Habits of the Heart, Bellah et  al. (1985:  71–5) explicitly refer to the increasing importance of leisure in lifestyle-based “expressive individualism.” Noting that this first emerged in post–World War II youth culture, in which the consumption of popular culture proved to be more important for identity and community in some cases than ascribed characteristics, they also identify the importance of leisure for older people, too, who hardly regret giving up work to

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focus on golf. Taking this back to questions of youth subculture, we can think of the Mods’ “attempt to live in leisure time, not just to consume but to create themselves,” with an explicit overturning of the conventional work ethic (Cohen 2002:  214). Underpinning this is the recognition that we are increasingly free to decide the foundations upon which individual identity and social engagement will be established. A relevant illustration is offered in McCloud’s (2003) consideration of literature supposing the implicitly religious nature of much popular culture fandom, recognized by Lawrence (2006) as one form of serious leisure. Rather than arguing that devotion to the utopian values of Star Trek, or a personal relationship with a dead celebrity, is ultimately religious in nature, McCloud (2003: 199) views such serious leisure as “late modern projects of the self, elective affiliations that establish self-identity and community during a time when these things are not ascribed, but reflexively made and remade.” Religion, in short, is one possible basis for identity, and one possible resource for a meaningful life, but it is hardly the only basis or even the most common one. If forms of serious leisure like surfing or Star Trek fandom seem like religions, it is because they are expansive and comprehensive enough to serve a structurally analogous function. Analyzing data from the National Study of Youth and Religion in the United States, Smith and Denton (2005: 28) observe that (conventional) religion is in a “weak and often losing position” in the lives of many American youth, squeezed out by competing educational, work, and leisure activities. This radically differs from traditional societies in which, as Bruce (2011: 92–7) illustrates with the case of a now-secularized Scottish village, churches once established the framework for social engagement and could restrict competing secular leisure. In keeping with studies such as Bellah et al.’s (1985) and Putnam’s (2000) reconsiderations of individual and collective belonging in the United States, data from the National Study of Youth and Religion suggests that the minority of young Americans who actually are religiously committed are also significantly more likely to be committed to serious leisure activities (Smith and Denton 2005: 106). Within such busy and increasingly individualized lives, commitment to formal religious activities—church on Sunday morning or a prayer group on a weekday evening—can be an unwelcome imposition. Meanwhile, the vast majority of activities that young people actually do engage in, either for leisure or out of necessity, have no intrinsic spiritual aspect to them (Smith and Snell 2009:  77–8). A  moralistic Evangelical perspective might position this as a case of personal salvation being edged out by the lure of one’s PlayStation, as the Christian pop punk band Grand Incredible do on their track “Be Thou My

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Television.” A sociologist with a reputation for bluntness might point out that “young people are more likely to find ecstasy in a dance hall than a church or invest more of their energy and wealth in following a football team than worshipping God,” as Bruce (2011:  81)  does. In the context of such increasingly secular lifestyles, as we will see, fusing nominally secular leisure activities with religious activities has obvious appeal to those engaging with overstimulated and under-committed contemporary youth. The tensions discussed in the preceding paragraphs are far from universal, however. In the South African context that I have studied closely, Evangelical youth pastors recognize a broad divide between overstimulated and understimulated youth. The majority of white South African youth, and a segment of the growing black middle-class youth, lead overstimulated lives filled with serious leisure activities, including sports practice and music lessons, as well as structured out-of-school learning. Casual leisure, including social media and the latest videogames, occupy much of the remaining time. In the wealthiest households, stay-at-home mothers are able to manage their children’s nascent sports or music careers, although much serious leisure is organized by elite schools themselves. To the frustration of Evangelical youth ministries, there is little room for religious activities in these overstimulated lives. Youth pastors are aware of the after-school and weekend activities a church’s youth are engaged in, struggling with overlapping schedules to find times for social evenings, and wrestling with the idea of Sunday morning as a time for recuperating from the week’s activities. In contrast, the vast majority of black South African youth are comparatively under-stimulated. Leisure is typically casual, school days are unpredictable, and schools are under-resourced. Most young black South Africans grow up without their father present, and many grow up without their mother as well, in households headed by a grandparent or sibling (Meintjes, Hall, and Sambu 2015: 102). The consequence is a comparative lack of adult oversight, as the sole breadwinner is often away from home, as well as a comparative lack of income. As Bray et al.’s (2010) study of the lives of Cape Town youth shows, poorer black schools lack the extracurricular activities that wealthier, traditionally all-white schools offer. The serious leisure activities of black youth are typically organized by NGOs, similar to the activities discussed in the previous chapter. Absent these activities, leisure is located “on the streets,” a catchall phrase encompassing all the casual (often illicit) leisure activities that under-stimulated and impoverished youth engage in (Swartz 2009: 40–3). The desire to keep youth “off the streets,” figuratively and literally, also motivates religious NGOs offering serious leisure

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activities. Whether engaging with overstimulated youth or under-stimulated youth, there is a nagging concern among Evangelicals that a young person’s identity and central life interest might be formed within their secular leisure activity, whether it is in an Olympic regulation swimming pool or in an unregulated township shebeen.

Salvation anxiety in Evangelical youth culture For some Evangelicals, this concern that their leisure pursuit is, or is becoming, their central life interest can lead to a profound experience of salvation anxiety, as the questioning of the centrality of God in their life leads to a questioning of whether they are truly living the life of a born-again Christian. The classic example of salvation anxiety comes from Max Weber’s (1992) famous thesis The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, focusing in particular on the state of “inner loneliness” produced by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The “quite incomprehensible decrees” of the Calvinist god in Weber’s account leaves believers uncertain whether they are one of the “elect,” since although Calvin could feel assured of his own salvation in his own theology, everyone else is left guessing, since even the most righteous and pious may have been predestined for damnation all along (ibid.:  60–6). What Weber calls “a duty to attain certainty of one’s own election” became paramount in Calvinism, through seeking signs of election in rational, ascetic, but worldly actions (ibid.: 65–80). Although Calvinism is Weber’s key concern, he is also interested in how assurance of salvation was sought in early Methodism, a foundational component of contemporary Evangelicalism. For early Methodists, it was in “emotional certainty of salvation as the immediate result of faith” that one could theoretically find assurance (ibid.:  91), as in John Wesley’s 1738 Aldersgate experience of feeing his heart “strangely warmed.” The specifics of Weber’s thesis are not pertinent here, but the phenomenon of salvation anxiety that he popularized for social scientists is. While I have no ethnographic data on contemporary Calvinism, in everyday Evangelicalism I would suggest that individual questions about assurance are somewhat taboo. Holifield’s (2005: 163) example of a model response suggested by the head of an Evangelical Bible college to the salvation anxiety of parishioners, to point them to the Bible and ask, “Are you going to believe God or your feelings?” seems an accurate account of the responses I have observed. In a congregational context, I  have watched the way in which the salvation anxiety of one individual can

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impact others; it is unlikely to be very specific concerns that trouble people in this regard, but generally applicable questions about how scripture, sermons, emotions, and everyday life are supposed to meet. It is much safer, therefore, to discuss salvation anxiety after it has been resolved, just as the research participants I quote in this chapter do. A personal conversion experience, the foundational born-again moment, is essential in Evangelicalism (Chung 2007). Bramadat (2000: 65) found that the overwhelming majority of the Evangelical university students he interviewed could name at least the month and year of their conversion, even though most were children when it happened. Being born again or “saved” carries with it the implication of personal change, of growth in holiness through one’s relationship with God and, to a lesser extent, the church (Chung 2007). The precise theological understandings of salvation among my research participants are beyond the scope of this book, but it is worth mentioning the influence of “New Calvinism” within Evangelical alternative youth cultures, largely under the influence of Mark Driscoll. As Haynes’s (2014) analysis of the music at his now-defunct Mars Hill church shows, the practical distinctions with orthodox Evangelicalism are subtler than they appear in systematic theological or church history, but some Calvinist language did appear in interviews. Looking at a representative example of how one person discusses his conversion demonstrates the underlying issues in Evangelical salvation anxiety. Dave, a hardcore fan and the curator of a Christian music website, said: I wasn’t technically a Christian until 2005. I grew up in a Christian household, but just growing up in a Christian household doesn’t make you a Christian. Being born again and committing my life to Christ, surrendering to Christ, that’s what brings you to Christ. I was born again in 2005 and I had a lot of anger in my life; a lot of hurt feelings and a lot of things that were part of my life that, when I became saved, I didn’t have any more. I was free of all that. Part of it was a lot of praying and a lot of asking, “Lord, what do I do now? What do I do now?” I think a lot of new Christians aren’t really sure what to do. I immersed myself in the Bible and went to church a lot and learned quite a bit.

This is a good illustration of the desire for change and the anxiety about what precisely that change should look like. The individual nature of Evangelicalism makes this liminal stage of conversion an ambiguous one. While there are recognized rituals—altar calls at punk shows and salvation prayers in the surf—as well as certain ideas about how the “gifts of the spirit” ought to be realized (Chung 2007), and more particular standards that individual churches and communities

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will hold up, the Evangelical emphasis on the individual subject means that adhering to these will not necessarily feel fully spiritually satisfying. For Dave, as we will see below, the absence of “anger” and “hurt feelings” did not feel like sufficient change. In some other cases, anxiety develops around involvement with serious leisure quite some time after an intense conversion experience. In these cases, there is a growing fear of estrangement from God as a result of serious leisure commitments that raises questions of the sufficiency of one’s faith. In interviews with musicians and extreme sports enthusiasts I often heard of music or sport being referred to as an “idol.” This concern that serious leisure is taking the place of religion in one’s life leads to anxiety around whether one is living a truly Christian life and, in fact, whether one is truly Christian at all. This kind of Evangelical salvation anxiety comes very close to the analysis of serious leisure pursuits undermining intimate relationships. While Stebbins’s (1992:  108–11) early research found that serious leisure only negatively impacts relationship in a minority of cases, typically when partners and family cannot share in the activity, relationships damaged by perceived “selfishness” are a feature of his later work (Stebbins 2014: 166–7). The “selfishness” of amateur and hobbyist serious leisure participants is a charge made by someone who feels cheated; the time, or money, or the emotional commitment invested in serious leisure should have been invested in a way that benefits the exploited partner, not merely the serious leisure participant (ibid.). It is easy to conceive of this in the context of an intimate relationship; too little time spent with one’s partner and too much time spent with one’s surfing buddies. Evangelicals experience this same problem in a powerful way, with the difference that in place of, or in addition to, exploiting one’s intimate partner or family, a serious leisure participant may be exploiting her or his relationship with God. As Bramadat (2000: 10) argues, in searching for the key differences in the lives of contemporary Evangelical youth, “the definitive element of contemporary evangelicalism” is the emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Rhetorically, it is not uncommon for Evangelicals to deny that Christianity is a religion at all, and express its entire personal and social significance through the lens of this relationship. Examples of this relationship-based salvation anxiety occur across a range of serious leisure pursuits, but surfing seems particularly susceptible, perhaps because, as Stebbins (2005: 42) argues, the experience of flow is so intense in nature-based extreme sports. For example, Wheaton (2003:  87–8) found that committed windsurfers “willingly ‘sacrificed’ ” other commitments in order to

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be prepared for good windsurfing weather. She cites a “not atypical” woman— who nevertheless refers to herself as “obsessive”—who refused to commit to Christmas with her family because of the possibility of good windsurfing weather on that day. Similarly, Philip, a former surfing missionary in South Africa, described his past unwillingness to travel too far from the coastline and away from the surf. “I never travelled to Johannesburg, not for family. There would be this 30 kilometer line that I would never pass; I just could not bear to be away from the ocean.” The most committed male windsurfers Wheaton interviewed were quite upfront about the fact that they “put their windsurfing before their families and partners” (ibid.: 89). The experience narrated by Philip offers a good illustration of how this relationship-based salvation anxiety manifests for Evangelicals who feel themselves over-involved and overcommitted to serious leisure. Just as Wheaton (2003) described windsurfers “sacrificing” relationships with family out of commitment to their sport, Philip felt he was sacrificing his relationship with God for his sport. His ritual of rupture, which we will analyze in the next section, felt necessitated by his sense: Surfing was dominating so much of my life and it was a very self-fulfilling, selfish thing. It was only serving me; it wasn’t beneficial to anyone else in the world—just myself. Everything I’m doing between Monday and Sunday, how much am I doing for me and how much am I doing for God? The scripture is clear that God created us for his glory and to serve him; to take up your cross, deny yourself, and follow me.

The Calvinists in Weber’s (1992) analysis of salvation anxiety, rejecting taking part in sport for purely personal and pleasurable reasons, would be clear that this sort of activity demonstrates Philip is not among the elect. For Evangelicals it is rather different, though; there is a more general questioning of the meaning of being “saved” and the personal changes and social distinctions that are supposed to be brought about when one is born again.

Rituals of rupture in Evangelical youth culture The particular kind of salvation anxiety experienced by Evangelical serious leisure devotees reflects concern with ambivalent or insufficient individual differentiation from one’s subcultural peers, exemplified by the fact that “saved” and “unsaved” appear to share a similar central life commitment. Individual

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transformation is considered necessary to be convinced of one’s set-apartness and salvation, recalling the importance of collective set-apartness in Smith’s (1998) “subcultural identity theory” of Evangelical resilience. Contemporary social scientific studies of Pentecostalism emphasize the rhetorical importance of personal change and transformation; as Robbins (2004: 127) observes, Pentecostal language is “littered with images of rupture and discontinuity.” This is understandable given the foundational importance of the born-again experience in the lives of charismatic and noncharismatic Evangelicals alike. Anthropological studies of African Pentecostalism have been the driving force in this new subfield in the study of Christianity, and these studies have been asking about the extent to which the growth of Pentecostalism in Africa can be attributed to its ability to transform existing beliefs in ways that allow them to continue under a Christian framework. Taking a certain liberty in applying theories and ethnographic observations from these studies to Evangelical youth culture in much more affluent contexts, we will see that what Robbins (2003: 224) refers to as “rituals of rupture” can also be observed in the lives of individuals experiencing salvation anxiety as a result of their serious leisure pursuits. As Casanova (2001:  437)  argues, Pentecostalism is both global and local, but wherever it is localized it engages “in spiritual warfare with its own roots.” Or, as Robbins (2003:  223)  restates this argument, “Pentecostalism is at once extremely open to localization and utterly opposed to local culture.” In contrast to the “disenchanting” earlier approaches of Protestants who dismissed non-Christian supernatural beliefs, and Catholics who offered “condescending toleration,” Pentecostalism takes these beliefs seriously (Casanova 2001:  437– 8). As Sanders (2001:  170)  describes this Pentecostal approach, the Christian God “overpowers rather than replaces other occult forces” that are incorporated within what Gifford (2009) refers to as Pentecostalism’s “primal religious imagination” that perceives the presence of the supernatural in all facets of life. Robbins (2004: 127) describes this process as “ontological preservation,” arguing that by taking local, non-Christian spiritual claims seriously, Pentecostalism both transforms and continues aspects of existing local religious belief and cultural practice. Foundational to this process are “rituals of rupture” that attempt to publicly set Pentecostals apart from not only their “unsaved” peers, but also from their past life and the past culture of their community that contradicts or confuses Christian claims about individual salvation (Robbins 2003: 224–7, 2004: 127– 30). In his research on the circulation of competing belief systems in South Africa, Ashforth (1998, 2005) refers to “spiritual anxiety” as a generalized

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condition that emerges from uncertainty about precisely how the spiritual realm operates, a condition Pentecostal rituals of rupture seek to resolve by foreclosing or containing contradictory concepts. Ellis and ter Haar (2007: 388) argue that Evangelical claims of making a “complete break with the past” are emic ones that are not necessarily sustainable from an etic social scientific perspective, and Engelke (2010: 184) agrees that Pentecostal claims of total rupture are rhetorical rather than “fully realized,” but insists that they are still significant “boundary drawing” practices that define orthodoxy and orthopraxy for a particular community, or at least for an individual. Evangelical serious leisure participants also have particular ways of ritualizing rupture with their personal past, and with what they view as sinful (sub)cultural practices. We will see that these rituals involve temporarily repudiating and refraining from serious leisure, but conceiving of this repudiation as potentially permanent. It is much more serious than simply giving up chocolate for Lent. In the next section of this chapter we will see that while some people actually do appear to permanently break with their serious leisure activities, rituals of rupture usually precede a return to serious leisure pursuits after a different “moral evaluation” of that activity has been made (Sanders 2001:  170), in what can be described as the “sacralization” of serious leisure. Paradigmatic examples of subcultural rituals of rupture concern surfing. Philip, a former surfing missionary, and currently the pastor of a conservative Evangelical church in Cape Town, told me the story of another South African surfer who also became a missionary. He summarized the “big cost” in the other missionary’s “testimony” as spending two years on a mission project in central South Africa, away from the surf. This in itself is significant as Stebbins’s (1992: 112) research revealed that serious leisure participants “try to avoid jobs that seriously interfere with their leisure.” I heard this story repeated in almost awe-filled tones by several other South African surfing missionaries, with slightly different and exaggerated details. As Gordon told the story, “At one stage, as he would say, his god was surfing, so God had to bring him down to Earth. He got led away from the coast and couldn’t surf for three years.” A visiting Swiss Christian surfer, Mari, was visibly shocked by the story and the prospect of going three years without surfing; “You see the power of that decision to really want to follow God,” she said. Philip contextualized the other missionary’s story, quoting Matthew 16:24: If you’re going to follow the Lord, if you’re going to do this year or two of ministry, it’s going to mean putting your surfboard away and following after the Lord.

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That’s where the scripture becomes real; “if anyone wants to come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” It’s that thing when you take stock and look at your whole life, and you put it before you; how much am I doing for me and how much am I doing for God?

He went on to say that “it’s not like the Lord wants to deprive anyone of sport or music or anything else,” but for Philip, serious leisure became a source of deep anxiety because of the foundational role it played his life and identity, at the expense of his religious commitments. Philp explained his particular ritual of rupture, which followed his conviction discussed in the previous section that his surfing was “a very self-fulfilling, selfish thing:” When the Lord told me to quit surfing he didn’t give me a date; he didn’t say three weeks or six weeks. It was just like, “I want you to lay down your surfing.” That was, for me at that point, the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my life. At that point I’d been surfing ten or twelve years, all through my teenage years. That’s who you are, and the Lord says, “well, is your identity going to be in surfing or is it going to be in me?” The Lord did a lot of hard work in changing me. It was a period of wanting to follow the Lord wherever he will lead, if he says “I don’t want you to surf again, ever,” it’s in his hands. It wasn’t actually a long time that I didn’t surf for, but it was long enough to dethrone surfing and put the Lord in its place.

As we will see in the next section, this notion of “dethroning” serious leisure as one’s central life interest is common in rituals of rupture; serious leisure must be publicly subordinated and reintegrated into a lifestyle that explicitly places religious commitment at its center. Another example of a ritual of rupture concerns popular music. Dave, the Christian music website curator, discussed his rupture with secular hardcore and other forms of punk music, symbolically selling off his record collection. This is an activity that, in different variations, a number of Evangelical musicians discussed with me. For example, Andy, a South African bass player formerly in a black metal band, told me he recently “purged the CD rack. I got rid of a lot of stuff because I just wasn’t listening to it. I think that’s God working in my life; it was a bit of an idol to me.” George, a London-based musician, explained a similar process of purging a music collection by emphasizing the importance of surrounding yourself with music that “you’d be happy to chuck in the CD player with Jesus sitting next to you on the couch.” Reconciled, a South African rapper, felt that because of the content of the secular rap he was listening to, his total

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involvement with hip hop would have to cease; “When I became a Christian, I thought I’ll have to stop rapping. I thought if I’m going to get serious with God that will have to go, that music.” As Dave explains, he was not only seeking a rupture with the negative emotions and experiences that hardcore addressed for him at one point in time, but also a repudiation of hardcore as a moral resource and source of identity: The Holy Spirit moved me to get rid of all the hardcore that I listened to previously. I had hundreds and thousands of CDs, and vinyl, and lots of really hard to find stuff. I just sold it; I got rid of it. I was really convicted to get rid of the hardcore that I had listened to because it represented a time in my life that didn’t mean anything to me anymore; I was set free from that. I went from completely listening to stuff that was secular, everything from classic punk, to metal, to hardcore, to dropping all that in like a week, and saying I’m gonna only listen to Christian hardcore. For me, hardcore music was like my moral compass; I used it to gauge my activities. That’s what’s good about hardcore. Hardcore helped me through a lot of tough times. I look at hardcore like an old pal. It was my moral compass and something I could lean on. It was taking the place of Christ for me. I found Christ so I don’t need that crutch anymore.

Relationships are a prominent theme once again, albeit in a less directly accusatory way compared with Philip, who felt directly challenged by God. In Dave’s narrative, he no longer wants or needs his “old pal” secular hardcore, and certainly not as a potential distraction from his relationship with God. At the risk of slipping into “parallelomania” (McCloud 2003), Dave’s rupture with his “old pal” secular hardcore seems analogous to the common concern in African Pentecostalism to break with the ancestors (Meyer 1998; Engelke 2004, 2010); there may well be some continual overlap, but there is a rhetorical emphasis on looking forward and seeking a new modality for dealing with life’s complexities and challenges.

Sacralizing serious leisure in Evangelical youth culture Rituals of rupture in Pentecostal communities do not entirely erase the past; preexisting beliefs are often retained, but redefined and subordinated within a Christian framework. Where it is most successful, Pentecostalism will “overpower” but not “replace” the preexisting worldview of converts (Sanders 2001: 170); the term Robbins (2004: 127) uses for this is “ontological

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preservation.” In her important study of Ghanaian Pentecostal rituals of rupture, Meyer (1998: 339) argues that because of the ritual focus on the foundational conflict between Christian and non-Christian practices, Pentecostal churches offer “an intermediary space for members to move back and forth between ways of life they (wish to) leave behind and the one to which they aspire.” Meyer’s study is concerned with profound issues—not just religious beliefs, but radical changes in African societies, and foundational social scientific debates about “tradition” and “modernity.” Although these latter topics are not present in a study of surfing or punk rock, the basic principle remains that within Pentecostal practice—and Evangelicalism more broadly—subcultural practices and serious leisure can be sacralized such that, like spiritual powers in African Pentecostal cosmologies, the affective desires of surfing or playing music are “managed” and a different “moral evaluation” is made (Sanders 2001: 170). The end result is the possible continuation—if one so chooses—of aspects of the meaningful worldview and activities that existed before one’s conversion, or before the onset of anxiety. The best examples of this process of coming to a different moral evaluation come from Evangelical surfers. We saw in the previous chapter the way in which Andre and Chris sought to reconceptualize the pleasures and implicit spirituality of surfing within an Evangelical framework. “Nature” becomes God’s “creation” and “creation was created for us to enjoy,” as Andre said. Chris said something similar, that after someone “has just experienced an incredible surf,” he will “claim it unashamedly; everything we experience and everything we’ve been immersed in has been created by God.” In this way, the pleasures of surfing are subordinated, both in a conceptual sense for Evangelical surfers who are reminded of their position within Christian cosmology, and in a practical sense for Evangelical surfers whose presence in the surf is an opportunity to save souls, not simply to seek personal pleasure. Earlier in this chapter it was suggested that pleasure-seeking “selfishness,” conceived of within the framework of an unequal or exploitative relationship, is at the core of Evangelical experiences of salvation anxiety around serious leisure; sport or music is believed to be playing an “idolatrous” role in one’s life and undermining one’s relationship with God. We saw an example of this, in particular, from Philip who felt that his surfing was “only serving me” and that he was being called upon to serve God. The solution Stebbins (2014: 167) suggests for this secular problem is to “include where possible those who would be adversely affected by an overstrong commitment to a particular activity.” He gives the example of getting one’s partner “hooked on travelling, collecting,

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hiking, bridge, or whatever is one’s passion.” This does not necessarily remedy the tendency in serious leisure to veer toward “uncontrollability” as passion exceeds practicality (Stebbins 1992: 56), but it does strike a balance in a different part of an individual’s life. This process of inclusion as a way to remedy relationships damaged by perceived overcommitment to serious leisure is similar, once again, for Evangelicals. The point is to include God in one’s serious leisure activities by sacralizing the serious leisure as a form of religious service, either as worship or as a form of ministry. In some cases this has the added advantage of legitimizing the serious leisure activity as part of the life of one’s local church even if, as we have explored in other chapters, support for punk or surfing ministries is not always forthcoming. Recognizing the foundational problem of religion being squeezed out of the lives of youth in contemporary secular societies, previous studies of Christian youth culture offer examples of attempts at the sacralization of “casual” leisure by integrating conventional social activities into the life of a church or youth ministry. The Evangelical fusion of religious activities and secular “causal leisure” is intended to be socially symbolic, with casual leisure activities designed to “parallel and yet differ from their secular analogues” (Bramadat 2000: 86). In their ethnographic study of an American university–based Evangelical group, Magolda and Gross (2009: 278) explore the deliberate ways in which the group makes its religious activities the “epicenter” of its members’ lives, including their casual leisure. They give the example of a typical member who commits as much time to religious activities as classes, about fourteen hours per week, but explain that many of his religious activities are simultaneously leisure activities. This parallels the unstructured daily activity of “just hanging out” with friends foundational to the lives of most American youth, but differs from the secularized manner in which religion is “compartmentalized” out of conventional casual leisure (Smith and Denton 2005:  130–1). In his similar study of a Canadian university–based Evangelical group, Bramadat (2000: 85– 6) notes the variety of “almost daily” casual leisure events that members of the group can partake in, including barbecues in the afternoon and parties in the evening. A similar process of sacralizing serious leisure can be observed among Evangelicals, with the added importance of reevaluating the centrality of leisure in one’s life. Philip describes his return to the beach and his return to the surfing subculture after an unspecified period of abstinence from surfing, as an explicitly sacralized process; he describes feeling specifically called by God to minister to “lost” surfers:

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In that period when the Lord told me to lay down my surfing, it was really a time of discipleship for me where I’m reading my Bible more and the Lord’s Spirit is working within me. When I  was alone and praying in my bedroom, I felt the Holy Spirit come upon me and I felt like God is right in this room with me. I felt like every word I’m reading was God speaking to me, showing me the power of the cross and how he came to redeem us and just to give us the hope of eternal life. I started thinking about my friends who I  knew through surfing or other things, and these guys were lost. It started burdening me more and more. These guys don’t have Christ; if they die, they die in their sins and they perish. I need to go back; I need to go back into this and share the gospel and help people get saved and know the Lord. So it was really just through having a strong burden for the unsaved; there are all these really cool guys that I love, but they’re not saved. I was feeling how I was, at one time, chained in life and not pursing the Lord. That’s what drove me back there. It was a real call of God; like Moses had the burning bush. I was reading my Bible and saw God leading me: “this is what I want you to do. Just like my son opened blind eyes, so I want you to open blind eyes and free captives from prison.” That became my life call. It was the Lord saying: “this is what I want you to do.”

When Philip returned to the surfing subculture, he returned with a radically changed understanding of the role that surfing would play in his life. Surfing is not only an instrument for evangelism for him; just as Stebbins (1992: 6) suggests he would, Philip often speaks “proudly, excitedly, and frequently” about surfing, including in his sermons. But he was obliged to reflect upon and reform the previous role that surfing played in his life: If I had to analyze my passion for surfing, what it boils down to is just waves and wanting to get to the next level; just exploits, just satisfying that. The Lord had to bring in a new love. That love is still there, but not in a domineering way. It’s something new from God, versus something from within.

This reprioritization of religion, subordinating surfing under a religious framework, creates an opportunity for evangelization, as well as being the outcome of an individual experience of salvation anxiety. For Chris, reorientating priorities within the serious leisure framework is an opportunity to “witness” Christian difference within the surfing subculture: If you look at any surfer, and what they do, and any Christian surfer, and what they do, then that finding of a balance is the quest of life. It’s very, very difficult.

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The biggest ministry opportunity comes from teaching guys how to make God your god, and move away from having surfing as your god.

Gordon gives the example of consciously witnessing a rebalanced life with higher religious priorities by considering, “When people are hot under the collar because the waves aren’t there, how do I conduct myself? It’s important; people are going to judge by what they see and hear.” When Evangelical surfers return to the subculture to focus on evangelization, as Philip did, it suggests a recategorization of their serious leisure pursuits, from amateur to career volunteer. Recalling the three types of serious leisure, it is significant that Stebbins (ibid.:  16–18) makes a distinction in this broad area between amateur and hobbyist pursuits on the one hand, and career volunteering on the other. Amateurs and hobbyists are primarily motivated by a desire for “self-actualization” that can lead to what might be considered to be an unbalanced self-interestedness. While it is entirely possible that a career volunteer might neglect other relationships, Stebbins sees a balance between altruism and self-actualization. As such, I  never encountered any concerns among my research participants that their religious volunteering, such as youth ministry, was in any sense disruptive to their relationships with friends, family, and partners, or to their relationship with God. Surfing is not the only serious leisure activity that can be sacralized after the experience of salvation anxiety. Andy and Reconciled offer two different examples of the sacralization of music performance. Andy has entirely rejected even listening to secular popular music, which he has replaced with worship music, including instrumental music in which “you can feel the worship without words.” While Parascandalo (2013) argues that contemporary Christian music can be used as a religious technology to maintain a high religious awareness, this is even more the case for those listening to worship music in their everyday lives. “It’s like walking to work in the morning singing his praises; it’s like constantly having a heart for worship,” Andy said. He now plays bass in a church worship band, but radically differentiates “worshipping” from making music. “There’s such a distinct separation,” he told me, rejecting the underlying assumption of my question about his “musical journey,” insisting that “there’s no connection; the closest connection is the fact that my fingers are touching the strings.” Above all, Andy wishes to separate his current serious leisure activities from his past involvement with secular heavy metal music: Through grace, this desire to play—to worship—has been placed in my heart. It’s sanctification; it’s being washed clean of what that was. I think about the times

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I was absolutely facedown drunk at the Purple Turtle [nightclub] after finishing a gig, and now I’m facedown with praise at church on Sunday. What stands out to me is the way the Lord takes something that was used for the flesh and perverted by the world and turns it to something to his glory.

In differentiating his experience of “worshipping” from playing bass in a secular band, Andy organically describes a process of “flow,” discussed in the previous chapter, as something present in his “worshiping” that was not present in his playing before: In that black metal band I was in, we practiced two times a week for eight hours each session—each practice session was eight hours. Now, going to worship Christ, we practice once a week for an hour. We come together to worship him in the practice session and then we come together Sunday morning. That’s completely in service of God and it’s the grace of God that I’m now making far fewer mistakes than I would in my previous bands. My personal view is that it’s not relying on self, but relying on God—that’s the main distinction. There’s no desire to stand up front as a personal presence; you forget that you are there—you really do. You’re just another person worshipping.

An emphasis on the ability to perform with little practice is also a feature of Jennings’s (2014: 55–6) interviews with Pentecostal worship musicians, one of whom discusses “flow” in an emic way, which Jennings discusses as a form of “trance.” Similar to the examples in Chapter 2 of the rhetoric religious authenticity in Christian punk, grounded in ecstatic experiences during performances, the experience of flow promotes feelings of religious legitimization and selflessness integral to the sacralization of serious leisure, because flow shuts out questions of reward. As Turner (2012: 50) describes the process, “[w]hen in flow, we are without the expectation of some future benefit but act simply because the doing itself is the reward. . . . When in the flow and zone, people say the self is surpassed.” No one could claim that religious worship is value neutral, but neither is the notion of flow, in its pure form; Stebbins (2009: 22) associates it with self-enrichment and other durable benefits of serious leisure. Neither is worship autotelic—the point is to offer praise to a higher power of course, but eliminating the values attached to music-making in one’s past secular activities is vital to the notion of sacralization and resolution of salvation anxiety, which pushes toward this proximate flow-like experience. A quite different approach to the sacralization of serious leisure after a ritual of rupture is described by the rapper Reconciled. He is a member of a North American–orientated Evangelical church in Cape Town, nominally open to

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North American Evangelical popular culture and contemporary Christian music. Nevertheless, these churches can instill a sense of anxiety in born-again hip hoppers who feel that such a momentous change in their lives must be accompanied by an equally dramatic change in their musical practices. The conflict for rappers seems particularly severe as it is not just a subcultural identity that comes from secular hip hop, but arguably a more elaborate and encompassing way of being in the world, and we will see some of the critiques of this aspect of hip hop culture in the following chapter. Hip hop and its various ideological subgenres can be “a way of life, a means by which to view the world and act in accordance with that vision” (Pinn 2009: 106); scholars of religion in secular rap note the heterodox and idiosyncratic religious concepts circulating within the subculture (Miller and Pinn 2013), and of course hip hoppers learn their “swag” through secular hip hop’s “body pedagogy” (Abraham 2015). In some cases the ritual of rupture is resolved by abandoning hip hop, in other cases by articulating exclusively Christian messages in one’s lyrics and using rap to evangelize within the local scene. Reconciled, however, found a different way of sacralizing his serious leisure; working through his anxiety, and coming to a realization that enjoying and participating in hip hop in what he considers to be an authentic manner could further, rather than contradict, his religious identity: Because of that fight about becoming a Christian and having to stop rapping, I decided on being conscious. I only got saved, got serious with God four or five years ago. I said, “Lord, I’m going to leave this rap thing; I’m going to leave it for you.” That was the last fight I remember. The music was—no!—if you get serious with God the music has to go.

Significantly, Reconciled wanted nothing to do with Christian hip hop; for many of the reasons discussed in Chapter  2 around authenticity in creative self-expression, he did not feel comfortable forcing evangelistic content into his music, or associating with a subgenre that allowed rappers to be “slack in the art” of rap, since “no Christian will tell you, ‘you suck.’ ” He has since come to appreciate some Christian rappers, notably Lecrae, whose 2014 album Anomoly debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart. Initially, though, Reconciled’s dilemma was whether his love of conscious hip hop was acceptable: When I did get serious with God I continued the social commentary. I felt God was saying, “you can do this for me. I gave you that writing talent and that passion to write.” If he gave it, what am I supposed to do? God kept working, and I  kept writing; I  would write social commentary, but in the end, God would

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come in. Even now, I don’t try to do Christian hip hop, I do music. God worked in a way so I didn’t know why I was fighting all along.

As we saw in Chapter 2, rather than focusing on building a track around a key religious message, some Christian musicians will follow their “creative spirit rather than worrying about producing a product with an overt message,” trusting that their subjective convictions will result in religiously appropriate output (Brown 2012: 129).

Conclusion This chapter has reconceptualized Evangelical engagements with alternative music and extreme sports subcultures through the lens of the serious leisure perspective that, it was shown, is useful in helping to understand the experience of salvation anxiety experienced by some Evangelicals because of what they conceive of as their overstrong commitment to a form of serious leisure. Evangelicals’ understanding of Christianity as fundamentally relationship-based was shown to lead to charges of “selfishness” and “idolatry” if there is a sense that serious leisure is taking the place of God in one’s life, which in turn can undermine notions of the assurance of salvation. It was further shown that Evangelical youth ministry is generally strongly aware of the increasing significance of nominally secular leisure in the lives of the majority of young people in the countries this book is concerned with, and even if these ministries conceptualize the nature of contemporary leisure quite differently from scholars like Stebbins, or even Taylor, there is a profound recognition of the increasing compartmentalization of religion out of the lives of many young people as a result of their commitment to secular leisure activities. It is worth stating at this point, though, that it is by no means every Evangelical who goes through this process of salvation anxiety as a result of their serious leisure activities. Although the Evangelical experience of being born again is foundational, and it is expected to manifest in changes in attitude and behavior, it does not always radically disrupt cultural or leisure pursuits, especially for Evangelicals narrating very early born-again experiences. As Chris, a surfing missionary, explained, “I grew up in a Christian home, I was a dedicated guy and made a commitment to Christ at an early age,” such that he experienced the “struggle” of balancing his religious and surfing commitments in a low key manner in his teenage years, not in an

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abrupt or disruptive way. On the other hand, it is no doubt the case that some Evangelicals experience rituals of rupture even more radical than that of Andy, who abandoned secular music entirely and did not conceive of his bass guitar-playing in a church worship band as music-making at all, but such individuals would presumably self-select out of research studies on the very activities they have repudiated. In understanding the nature of the rituals of rupture that, it was argued, can be used to resolve experiences of serious leisure-based salvation anxiety, this chapter made use of a number of contemporary anthropological studies of African Pentecostalism, drawing upon ideas of the ontological preservation of existing beliefs to help understand the reconsideration of serious leisure and subcultural involvement. The next chapter, which will focus on particular Evangelical—typically Pentecostal—objections to engagement with popular music and youth culture, will make further use of these contemporary anthropological studies of African Pentecostalism. It will be argued that concerns with remoralizing questions about contemporary popular and youth culture, with a particularly primal Pentecostal focus on the quotidian presence of the supernatural, is not unique to African Christianity, but is a feature of Pentecostal and charismatic Christian thought in Europe, North America, and elsewhere.

6

Fear of a Black Magic: Evangelical Opposition to Alternative Youth Culture

Introduction In the previous chapter, thinking of Evangelical youth subcultures as forms of “serious leisure,” we saw that in spite of the numerous positive aspects of the experience of participating in alternative music and extreme sports recognized by Evangelical youth and their churches, there was nevertheless an anxiety about music or sport becoming a negative influence by taking the place of religion as what Dublin (1992) calls the “central life interest.” Surfing was seen to have a particularly addictive aspect to it, perhaps because the experience of “flow” is so intense in nature-based extreme sports (Stebbins 2005: 42). Punk was seen to offer a “moral compass” such that it might take the place of God. Hip hop was seen, in the case of Reconciled, to be a negative influence that he felt he had to abandon if he got “serious with God.” Indeed, Reconciled wrestled with hip hop’s mimetic consumerism since he was a boy. “When I was ten years old, these guys were making it cool to have a gun and be in a gang,” he said, talking about American gangsta rap. “Do you know the Bloods gang in America? The people I was listening to were glamourizing that, and I started carrying around a red bandanna,” the symbol of that gang. This final substantive chapter will continue to focus on negative aspects of the relationship between Evangelicalism and alternative youth subcultures, hip hop in particular. The focus will be on individuals’ experiences of hostility and opposition, building on discussions in previous chapters about authenticity, the autonomy of youth culture, and the everyday spiritual sensibilities of Evangelicals—especially Pentecostals. Broader contemporary discourses circulating within local and global Evangelical culture will also be analyzed in this chapter, as Evangelical discourse, typically directed by older people through

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churches, books, and increasingly online, helps define the boundaries of acceptable Evangelical youth culture. This chapter will also build upon many of the ideas from the previous chapter about the globalization of Pentecostalism as it is being experienced in Africa, because particularly supernatural critiques of hip hop seem to have found a receptive audience in South African churches, where concerns about supernatural bargains and illegitimate strategies for material success are relatively common. This chapter begins, however, by focusing on nominally or appreciably secular critiques of popular and youth culture from Evangelical churches, from both progressive and conservative positions, recalling Gushee’s (2008) recognition of the existence of an Evangelical “Left,” “Right,” and “Center.” This chapter will also deal, in part, with African American churches, which have not been present in the book thus far. As Butler (2016: 61) notes, African American Evangelicals are typically left out of the usual social scientific and journalist understanding of American Evangelicals, but she rightly observes that many African American Evangelicals share the socially conservative beliefs of their coreligionists, without necessarily opposing the social justice initiatives that some white American Evangelicals find so frightening. In general, a particular sense of anxiety about youth comes through engagements with Evangelical discourse on popular music and culture, and Evangelical youth culture sometimes relieves this anxiety but sometimes amplifies it.

Authority in popular and youth culture Popular music and youth culture have been subject to a variety of Evangelical criticisms over past decades. Focusing on hip hop in this chapter, it is significant that these criticisms have ranged from secular, policy-orientated critiques by many African American clergy and laypeople, to wholly supernatural critiques, claiming that certain artists, or the entire genre, are endangering the souls of the youth. Many Evangelicals will recognize this distinction between secular and supernatural criticism for what it is, an artificial etic division, yet Gifford’s (2009: 48–50) argument, that Pentecostal concepts of causality and agency resist secular policy analysis, should be relatively uncontroversial. Some churchbased criticism furthers secular progressive critiques of hip hop, focusing on the impact on young listeners of lyrics about violence, drug and alcohol use, and strongly sexualized depictions of women. There is an underlying recognition that hip hop is a significant form of public pedagogy, operating in formal

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and informal ways, producing a variety of outcomes (Abraham 2015). Hip hop’s embodied aesthetics—fashion, speech, body language—have become globally ubiquitous youth styles, usually distanciated from anything resembling a hip hop subculture, creating sometimes startling cultural disjunctures in locations like suburban Australia, in perhaps the best example of subcultural diffusion and mainstream incorporation. In the case of hip hop in particular, some criticism from churches has not significantly departed from progressive critiques of commercial, mainstream hip hop, especially gangsta rap and especially focusing on casual misogyny. Michael Eric Dyson (1996, 2007) is probably the leading voice in this regard. So although Tricia Rose’s overview of the “hip hop wars” ignores religion almost entirely, she makes space to mention the protest of Rev. Delman Coates outside the Black Entertainment Network’s award show ceremony, because of its support for music that “stereotype[s] black and Latino men as pimps, gangsters, and thugs” (Rose 2008: 121–2). In her important early study Black Noise, Rose (1994) outlines a foundational tension between hip hop grounded in the everyday challenges and concerns of specific groups, and commercially focused hip hop that offers fantasies of sex and violence—it can be a thin line between the two, but I have often heard identical iterations of this criticism from Evangelical hip hoppers. Conservative political critiques from Evangelicals have also circulated, distinct from secular progressive critiques, but not too far removed from secular conservative critiques. As Shuker (2001:  217)  notes, conservative American Christians were important protagonists in the “culture wars” of the 1980s that engaged in a “contestation of cultural hegemony” with secular popular culture. Luhr (2009) offers excellent analysis of this contest, especially the pervasive anxiety of conservative Evangelical parents over the increasing power of secular popular culture as an agent of socialization, at the expense of parents and churches. In the midst of all this, Dyson (1996: 176–86) testified before the US Senate’s juvenile justice subcommittee about gangsta rap, and while he does not shy away from criticizing it, he notes the absurdity of conservative politicians blaming rappers and Hollywood directors for the dysfunction of families living in poverty. Sometimes pervasive political and religious fears fuse for Evangelicals; in the Cold War context, Satan, socialism, and secular popular culture were conceivable as a single threat. Even more so than in America, these fears were especially virulent among conservative white Evangelicals in South Africa (Crapanzano 1985). Racism was not far from the surface, of course, and theories of African rhythms being used in popular music to corrupt the youth circulated in forms

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barely updated since the 1930s (Partridge 2013: 204–5). Less openly fascist theories developed a form of religious Zhdanovism, dividing music into legitimate forms traceable through Western church history, and those seen to originate in the demonic realm of everywhere else (Howard and Streck 1999:  34–6; Luhr 2009: 45–6). All this, Luhr notes, was before middle-class white kids even discovered gangsta rap. That secular popular culture won the “culture war,” every American Evangelical surely knows, and many feel that they have been humiliated, not merely defeated. Thinking back to earlier chapters, this helps us to understand what is “alternative” about certain forms of Evangelical popular and youth culture, and how subcultural resistance works. Following Gault’s (2015) study of Christian rappers here, we can recognize their discomfort with both the victor and the vanquished in the “culture war,” both their parent cultures, secular hip hop and conservative churches. As has been shown, conservative Christian criticism of popular music has been particularly concerned with its impact on youth. Luhr (2009: 46) is struck by the fantastic powers that youth culture is seen to have over individual lives in the eyes of its Evangelical critics, just as Bergler (2012: 45) is puzzled by the social power that youth, as a relatively newly discovered category, are believed to have in the eyes of many churches. Popular music is seen by its most conservative critics as a “profanation of childhood and adolescence” that further undermines the sacred status of the family by displacing the moral authority of parents (Partridge 2013: 201). Even relatively prosaic concerns about Christian music, such as those of Routley (1980: 134–7) about popular music in churches splitting congregations along generational lines, can also be understood as a question of parental authority. Further, Howard and Streck (1999) note ongoing concerns about what kind of de facto pastoral authority Christian musicians might have over church youth. Jeff, a former grunge musician and now a church pastor, described conflict over conflicting messages from touring Christian musicians, the church, and parents, as extremely common: “That right there is basic church drama 101.” We will see that the question of the role of secular popular culture as an agent of socialization for young people is a particular concern of the anti–hip hop crusader, Rev. G.  Craige Lewis, with the twist that in the case of the African American youth he is primarily concerned with, and the black South African youth whose churches have taken to Lewis quite strongly, parental authority is already partially absent because fathers often are. Although this chapter focuses on music, something similar can be seen in the conservative Christian critique of extreme sports; these activities take young people into profane spaces—the

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beach, the skate park, the empty car park—governed by profane values. There is also an additional criticism that, in the case of skateboarding in particular, becoming overly involved with extreme sports leads not just to the profanation of youth, but to the unnatural extension of youth as well, returning us to the foundational problem from the introductory chapter of defining “youth” in anything other than emic ways. Two alternative views have circulated within Evangelicalism, however, offering positive approaches to secular music and youth culture. The more culturally progressive view advocates deep engagement with secular music and youth culture, to discern the spiritual values already circulating within these subcultures, building on those existing ideas and reorientating them toward Christian norms. This particular approach is common within studies of contemporary hip hop written by academics from within, and for, African American churches, with Price’s (2012) collection offering a good overview, building on the aforementioned religiously engaged cultural history and criticism of Dyson (1996, 2007). Daniel White Hodge (2010, 2014) has been a leading voice for this approach; carefully combing through a selective back catalogue—dismissing what he considers inauthentic commercialized rap— he seeks to understand the spirituality circulating within secular hip hop. For Hodge (2013: 104), the correct approach to evangelizing the hip hop subculture is to treat it “as if it were a foreign far-off island in the Pacific Ocean and realize that God has been doing something within that culture long before we set foot on its shores.” While this statement throws up a century or more of missiological and anthropological debate, especially for those of us who happen to come from far-off islands in the Pacific, the basic idea is to abandon or suspend theological privilege in order to engage hip hop culture on its own material and cultural terms. Such an approach has not been the norm for Evangelical engagement with popular music and youth culture, however. As we saw in preceding chapters, there is a common recognition of secular good produced within alternative music and extreme sports subcultures, from punk’s celebration of creative self-expression to the camaraderie of the skateboarding subculture. However, non-Evangelical spirituality circulating within these subcultures has tended to be differentiated from the cultural form itself, to be critiqued on religious grounds. Instead, the approach that has come to predominate among Evangelicals in the Anglophone world is to insist upon genres of popular music (and sports) as spiritually neutral, but even this is not always agreed upon.

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Subcultural style and spiritual stigma In addition to these broad critiques of secular popular and youth culture, conservative Evangelicals have also been concerned with the legitimacy of contemporary Christian music (CCM). While some theologians have criticized CCM for its spiritual shallowness—a theological debate beyond the scope of this book—other Evangelical theologians and clergy have argued against making any distinction between CCM and secular popular music. The argument has effectively been that music is not in fact neutral and cannot be distinguished by ideological genre rules, because musicological genre rules contain cultural and spiritual values. If, as some Evangelicals insist, musical structure can be a technology of supernatural harm, even the most well-meaning Christian musicians are leading their audience astray (Howard and Streck 1999:  33–6). One conservative Evangelical view has therefore been that some genres of popular music are simply irredeemable, remaining inherently inappropriate as vehicles for Christian expression (Moberg 2015: 49). Nyaniso, a South African rapper and visual artist from the Eastern Cape province, now living in Cape Town, stated the case for the religious neutrality of hip hop, probably drawing on an argument from the United States: If I have two shoeboxes, and I use one box to store baseball cards, and the other to store pornographic magazines, what’s evil? The container or my heart? The problem we have is not the container, but the people within the culture using the container—their hearts are evil—but it’s not the container itself.

The consequence of this view is that so long as the lyrics and broader aesthetics of the music are in accordance with Evangelical orthodoxy, and the onstage and offstage behavior of the musicians is in accordance with Evangelical orthopraxy, any genre of music is an acceptable “container” for Christian content. The neutrality of musical genres is not uniformly accepted, however. Although the renowned ecclesial musicologist Erik Routley (1969:  117–20) indulged pseudoscientific ideas about rock music as music being physically damaging to human health, he had a more sophisticated point—that one should not assume that musicological genres of popular music are neutral, since music is often an integral part of, or metonymically symbolizes, broader subcultural forms and values. What Sorett (2012: 108) refers to as “the politics of respectability” at work in some contemporary African American churches, which view hip hop as axiomatically profane and inappropriate for good Christians, is one example of this, which will be analyzed below.

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Another argument against the neutrality of music genres, coming from popular music scholars, is that if “music and sonic environments do convey meaning,” then there are limits to the concepts one can sensibly communicate through a particular musical genre (Partridge 2013: 214). A good example is the debate between the Christian rapper Shai Linne and the conservative Evangelical theologian Scott Aniol, familiar to a number of Christian hip hoppers I met in South Africa. Aniol insists that since music is a form of “moral human performance,” and the Bible offers guidelines about the values and emotions one ought to convey in any such performance, then certain forms of music are “inherently sinful” because of their “natural meaning” and “specific contexts,” including hip hop and heavy metal (Aniol and Linne 2014). In response, Shai Linne (ibid.) gestures toward Aniol’s particular personal values, but he never explicitly challenges him on what seems to be quite obvious cultural bias, coming so close to the earlier racially coded fundamentalist divisions of music. Clearly looking to avoid the notion that Evangelical brotherhood might be undermined by racial disharmony, Linne simply explains that Aniol’s analysis is subjective, and wonders how one discerns the “natural meaning” of an instrumental rap track, and who is privileged to do so (ibid.). Nevertheless, it would be wrong to claim that musical aesthetics does not have some influence over genre norms. In the case of Christian metal, Moberg (2015: 55–6) notes that broader metal aesthetics are reflected in the style and content of Christian metal’s choice of lyrics; “metal rhetoric” is invoked by Christian artists making use of shared biblical and secular metal subject matter, including violence and personal suffering. Jousmäki (2013: 280) finds that although spiritual quest narratives, including some form of a final conversion, are paradigmatic in Christian heavy metal lyrics, songs work through a litany of negative material before reaching the final stage of the narrative. The metalcore album They’re Only Chasing Safety by Underoath (2004) is a good example of this—ten tracks of misery before a final, slower song offering Christian spirituality as the solution. A Christian metal band that flouted these genre norms would, Partridge (2013: 215) argues, risk losing their identity as a metal band. Arnett (1995:  47)  suggests a more basic homology at work in secular metal, arguing that the core instrumentation in metal music makes it “exceptionally effective in portraying chaos, death, war, destruction, and other violent themes,” and a failure at portraying pleasant themes. Precisely how one articulates this musical homology, and the amount of flexibility (or neutrality) that one might grant genres is not clear, however, and whether one examines the more controversial subgenres of heavy metal, or a

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broader meta-genre such as hip hop, will make a significant difference. Lee Marshall (2011) argues that musical semiotics is often resisted in social scientific studies of popular music, both because of a lack of musical training, and because of the suspicion that we cannot engage with the language of music in this manner without falling into either subjective idealism or neuropsychological claims of a fixed relationship between sound and meaning. On the one hand, Partridge (2013: 214) is no doubt correct that replacing the usual music accompanying the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” with the famous fragment of the score from Psycho “would be more disturbing than uplifting.” On the other hand, Kennett (2003: 198–204) rejects strong musical semiotics on the grounds that he has found no meaningful patterns to interpretations offered in response to an instrumental fragment, reminding us of Shai Linne’s point above (Aniol and Linne 2014). Similar findings are related by Lyons (2009) in his analysis of the uses that YouTube’s consumer-producers have found for Johnny Cash’s apocalyptic “The Man Comes Around” that provides a soundtrack to footage of amateur sport and the 9/11 attacks. Where Evangelical opposition to youth subcultures and alternative forms of music exists, it can oppose specific sounds, but a more usual concern is the extra-musical values and practices a music-based subculture incorporates. “It’s the ‘Highway to Hell’ idea,” explained Nick, a Sydney-based hardcore vocalist, in reference to the song by the Australian rock band AC/DC, whose original lead singer, Bon Scott, drank himself to death but has a statue in Perth and a laneway named after his band in Melbourne. Invoking the song, Nick suggests it represents a certain conservative Evangelical view of rock music leading down a path of hedonistic self-destruction. In relation to punk and its heavy metal–influenced crossover subgenres, the sound itself is also often attacked on account of its sheer otherness, disrupting the idea integral to CCM that popular music genres are neutral forms. In discussing churches’ opposition to punk, Chase, a Californian hardcore musician, said that he would “definitely agree with the rock lifestyle clashing with the churches’ ethos,” but he added that the sound of punk invites opposition itself. “Punk is not supposed to be accessible at all; it’s meant to be a form of protest against mainstream society and something that most people will think sounds hideous.” This is analogous to Sample’s (2006: 33) example of the “everyday resistance” of a smoke-filled country music honky-tonk bar; they don’t want anybody there uptight enough to complain. Fashion, of course, was a key feature of early punk subcultural affiliation, and as discussed in Chapter 1, was important in semiotic studies such as Hebdige’s (1979), but has been fundamentally less important more recently, with a few

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sub-subcultural exceptions, such as metalcore “scene kids” (Rowe 2012). I observed only a few older Christian punks displaying spectacular visible commitments; the majority dress in the mundane style documented by Willis (1993) and Haenfler (2006). Facial piercings and tattoos are relatively common within contemporary punk scenes, but they are relatively common elsewhere, too. Band T-shirts are often too obscure to offer any particular meaning, or too commonplace, since stores like Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters sell many band T-shirts online, whereas earlier generations were forced to physically visit places like London’s Camden market to buy T-shirts of bands they had never listened to. Style remains an issue within Evangelical churches, however, such as tattoos and piercing in the punk subculture, and the baggy clothing of hip hop. In some cases, this is concerned with symbols of criminality, especially in the context of South Africa where violent crime is particularly prevalent. A heavily tattooed American pastor had difficulties in some communities where tattoos are closely associated with prison gangs. But in other cases the interrogation of personal style has echoes of Tawney’s (1984: 115) assessment of Calvin’s “Godly Republic” of Geneva, where spiritual corruption “might be revealed by pointed shoes or gold ear-rings.” As Dave, curator of a Christian music website, explained, “church folk get bent around the axels” on matters such as tattooing; “[P]eople say they can’t be Christians if they have tattoos. Really? Did Jesus say that?” Ethan, a youth pastor and punk musician, discussed his comparatively banal fashion choices creating difficulty in the Pentecostal churches he grew up in; “Black tees or skull and crossbones are often frowned upon.” The pop punk style of worship leader Brian creates difficulties in his South African church, particularly in relation to his position as a de facto religious authority as the leader of the church worship band. He was brought before the leaders of his church to discuss his style, which includes facial piercings and sometimes black nail polish and colored hair if he has played a gig on Saturday night. He told me he was once rebuked by a worshipper who could not concentrate “because the light was reflecting off my nose-ring,” but maintains that his style is a matter of spiritual sincerity, in spite of the stigma attached to it. He could not lead worship in a spirit of honesty, he said, if he could not be himself. Stigma also surrounds hip hop style in many churches, especially in South Africa where it seemed that only a minority of Evangelical churches, in particular “megachurches” orientated toward North American Evangelical theology and popular culture, are open to Christian rap. Other churches refuse hip hop a part of the cultural life of the church in any form. Ulwazi, a successful rapper from the Johannesburg area, said:

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I was once kicked out of a church because of how I dressed and obviously my dress code is hip hop. The church was really hostile to rappers specifically because they believed we were gangsters and they didn’t want us to come into the church. I didn’t go to church after a while because hip hop—secular hip hop—that culture gave me a platform to be who I wanted to be, and the church was really not interested in me when I came in; they weren’t accepting at all.

In the African American church context, Sorett (2012: 108) blames this on “the politics of respectability” in churches that view hip hop as axiomatically profane and wish to be set apart from controversial aspects of contemporary culture. Although this specific African American context falls beyond the purvey of this book, it appears that the generational divide is particularly strong, and warnings against the sort of alienation that Ulwazi experienced are common in literature addressing rap in African American churches (e.g., Price 2012); indeed when Christian rap developed in the 1980s, its foundational task was bridging the generational divide (Zanfanga 2011: 149–50). Among South African research participants, the consensus was that the strongly negative view of hip hop in many churches is informed by public visibility being confined to secular commercial rap. Tsebo, a rapper from the Johannesburg area, explained the attitude of many churches when confronted with the idea of hosting Christian rappers, “We all know what hip hop—secular hip hop—is associated with, so when you mention hip hop what comes into their head is, ‘oh, that ain’t happening; we can’t have that in the church.’ ” Whereas the rap featured on South African television used to simply be American commercial rap, in recent years the local commercial scene, centered in Johannesburg, began mirroring aspects of American rap. As Nyaniso said of the Johannesburg scene, “When you look at it, you would swear you’re in America. Woah! I thought MTV was only on TV, but they’re living it! Having tattoos, wearing chains, having that swagger and talking that way.” Some Christian rappers have spoken at Evangelical churches, describing hip hop’s commercially successful forms as false innovations, and Christian and secular conscious rap as authentic forms deliberately marginalized by the culture industry. Possessing a not dissimilar “swag,” it can nevertheless be difficult for these rappers to disabuse church leaders of the attitudes they have developed toward hip hop. If we return to some of the fundamental ideas of subcultural studies discussed in Chapter 1, we can see from the above analysis of the stigma attached to subcultural style that, in contrast to post-subcultural ideas about the free-floating or neutral nature of subcultural aesthetics, in church contexts aesthetics can

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still be read to reveal deeper meanings. Even among individuals who never personally experienced opposition to their style or subcultural affiliations, isolated incidents would reverberate, such as Ethan hearing about young skateboarders being chased away from the steps of a church because they were assumed to be antisocial vandals, or variations on stories I  heard about young people with Mohawk haircuts—strongly associated with punk despite very few punk musicians every having one—being turned away from American churches. The impact of these incidents galvanizes Christian subcultural identities in a manner similar to Smith’s (1998) notion of the overall Evangelical subculture being “embattled and thriving” with a unique identity and vocation out of step with social norms—in this case, of churches as well as mainstream society.

Fear of a black magic Evangelical opposition to popular and youth culture is not simply a question of wanting to disassociate from music-based subcultures associated, rightly or wrongly, with hedonism or delinquency. While conservative churches certainly do have concerns about the broader subcultures that punk, hip hop, or heavy metal music symbolizes, theories circulate within global Evangelicalism about the spiritual and even physical dangers of the sound of certain forms of music. As such, the most serious criticism that Christian punks and hip hoppers have received from within Evangelical culture is the accusation that their music is “satanic,” that it emanates from a genuine source of evil, and is capable of seducing people away from God (Howard and Streck 1999: 33–6). This is the case for punk, in particular for its heavy metal–influenced crossover metalcore subgenre, replicating many of the allegations made about heavy metal in the 1980s, analyzed by Luhr (2009) and Moberg (2015). To a lesser extent this is also the case for hip hop, but one Evangelical pastor, G. Craige Lewis, has attracted attention for his claims about hip hop’s intrinsic evil, which have found a receptive audience in South Africa. In the case of punk, it is the deliberately abrasive and aggressive sounds of many songs that seem to be disconcerting, reminding us of Chase’s observation that punk is “meant to be a form of protest against mainstream society and something that most people will think sounds hideous.” For some people in Evangelical churches, “hideous” means “demonic,” and this is intimately related to the sorts of imprecise behavioral norms associated with Evangelical

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orthopraxy discussed in the previous chapter. Further, as discussed in Chapter 2, churches have certain expectations around authentic Christian musical performance, but so do secular music genres, such that an authentically passionate or frivolous punk performance may be considered an inauthentic Christian performance. For example, Ty, who played in American and British Christian punk bands, recalled being removed from an Evangelical music festival in Ireland after his band’s performance was cut short. “I was eating grass and wrapping duct tape around my neck. Just silly madness to me; I was having fun. They thought something evil was happening and they turned the power out on us and kicked us out the next morning.” Similarly, Jason Berggren, former lead singer in the influential Spirit-filled hardcore band Strongarm, recalls having, then losing, the support of the Christian Jewish temple where his band practiced. His book recounts the Rabbi reluctantly stopping the band practicing there after a parishioner “had a vivid dream that a doorway to hell had opened in her living room floor and pulled her children into it [as] a result of our practicing our music in the church” (Berggren 2009: 201). Berggren adds amusingly that while he would admit that his band, which would become influential in the Spirit-filled hardcore movement, “was not very good yet,” he felt the criticism that their music was opening a doorway to hell was “a little extreme” (ibid.). Nevertheless, he also explains that the band felt like “outcasts” when they were told to surrender the keys to the building they were no longer permitted to practice in (ibid.). Belief in the active influence of Satan is especially prominent in Pentecostal churches (Olsen 2005: 265–7); what Gifford (2009) labels Pentecostalism’s “primal religious imagination,” perceiving the presence of the supernatural in all facets of life, was discussed in the previous chapter and will be a particular concern in the rest of this chapter. Raised in a Californian Pentecostal church, Zach, vocalist in an Australia-based hardcore band at the time of his interview, “suffered some heartbreak” because of the views many in the church had about hardcore music. “A lot of people called it demon-possessed; a lot of people called it ‘Satan’s music.’ ” The unpredictability of church support some interviewees experienced can be particularly acute in this Pentecostal context. Thommo, a hardcore musician and promoter from Australia’s Sunshine Coast contrasted Pentecostal churches’ desire “to be ‘out there’ ” and appealing to youth, with the fact they “don’t want to rock the boat. It’s a fine line, you can lose people quite quickly.” For example, Thommo was called to account for his music after “someone who is affiliated with a local church heard us practicing and thinks I’m possessed

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because she’s heard me singing.” He gave the example of “a complete turnaround” from a once-supportive church that is very similar to the experience of Jason Berggren (2009), discussed above: They were saying God gave them a word and told them that hardcore is of the devil; it’s demonic, and its roots are in Nazi Germany, and it’s all about violence and rebellion. They made everyone in that church circle renounce any connection to hardcore and give up any involvement they had with hardcore bands. A couple of members of my actual band had to step down; if they wanted to continue their ministry they had to stop being part of the band. That doesn’t make any sense, but it happened. It’s the same group of people who welcomed you, and then turned around. It’s got nothing to do with God, that’s got nothing to do with church, that’s just people’s fallibility.

Within Pentecostalism, the “word” Thommo refers to is a divine message that “manifests itself as an inaudible voice in the mind, interrupting and sometimes contradicting the regular thought process” (Fraser 2003: 149). There are no set boundaries around the notion of receiving a “word,” so more positive examples are possible. Suvi, the female vocalist of an Australian metalcore band, discussed receiving a “word” to reach out to an unknown woman in the audience of one of her shows, and Fraser (ibid.) explains that “words” are often used in a similar way by Pentecostal women to support each other beyond the strictures of Pentecostal ministry. The Pentecostal paradox on display here is grounded in its churches’ normative charismatic authority structures; this allows individuals to claim being called by God to support some form of youth activity, but also allows individuals—the same or different ones—to claim they are called by God to oppose it as well. Needless to say, such claims, based in dreams and other personal revelations, would be incomprehensible to the non-Christian youth—or even more specifically the non-charismatic Christian youth—that most Christian artists want to attract to their performances. Research participants who discussed these problems sought to resolve them by insisting that opposition is due to human fallibility, as in Thommo’s example. A systematic ecclesiological or theological critique is evidently not on the agenda and would, in any case, risk undermining the cultural mechanisms of support that rely upon the dynamism that charismatic authority creates. The only consistency Thommo experienced, after negotiating with a variety of churches, was the importance of personal relationships and trust; “[I]t all comes back to a relationship, and knowing people’s hearts, and knowing what their hearts are for the ministry.”

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It is not only punk and heavy metal that have been accused of being demonic; several Christian rappers and hip hop fans in South Africa made reference to the influence of the American Evangelical pastor, author, and public speaker G. Craige Lewis, who makes similar claims about hip hop. In the opening chapter of his self-published book, The Truth behind Hip-Hop, Lewis (2009: 9–19) narrates an encounter with the musician Kevin Thornton, who was at that time a member of the secular hip hop/r&b crossover group Color Me Badd, known for their 1991 hit single “I Wanna Sex You Up.” Lewis tells us that his sermon convinced Thornton to leave the group, but that he continued to write secular popular music, which resulted in possession by numerous demons that Lewis exorcised through prayers and by playing his own gospel music, which the demons found intolerable. Lewis’s (ibid.:  9)  basic claim is that hip hop is intrinsically spiritually corrupt and destructive, warning listeners of Christian and secular hip hop alike that they are encountering a “supernatural influence that is beyond their natural control.” Lewis advances these ideas at various public speaking events, which have been recorded and released as the film series The Truth behind Hip Hop (2009–16), which has currently reached volume eleven. Lewis’s focus is broad, looking at rap music itself, not just lyrics, as well as the industry, all of which he considers corrupted by Satan. Like many Pentecostals, Lewis (2009: 50) views music as powerful, claiming that God told him to emphasize the power of music to “subconsciously” impact people’s moods regardless of lyrical content. Musicological genre, or subcultural aesthetic, is the narrowest category Lewis wants to recognize; Christian hip hop is condemned as well, therefore, since Christian rappers are still introducing young people to a corrupt cultural form “birthed through poverty, idolatry, and ignorance” (ibid.:  155). Here Lewis is in total accord with earlier fundamentalist critics of popular music, invoking some pseudoscientific research to support claims made available to him by divine revelation. Indeed, his book reproduces many themes from earlier Evangelical critiques that find Satan behind most popular music forms, aiming to sow moral corruption and snatch souls. Nevertheless, Lewis’s ministry is thoroughly contemporary, and his Truth behind Hip Hop series constantly addresses new music, and new developments within African American life, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, which he opposes. Lewis claims that the music industry routinely employs witchcraft, and his presentations position hip hop within an increasingly complex web of occult politics and demonic power, borrowing from various secular conspiracy theories and fundamentalist theologies. In his book, Lewis (ibid.: 85–6) claims to have insider accounts of the use of occult practices by the hip hop industry:

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Many hip-hop artists use witchcraft, voodoo, and spiritualism to gain epidemic popularity. Do you know that witches have actually been hired to “pray” over recording artists and their recording sessions in order to captivate people? . . . [M]any of them seek influence from shamans and witches that have favor with dark powers to release influence.

In his book (ibid.: 75–6), and in the first volume of the Truth behind Hip Hop film series, Lewis claims that secular rapper Snoop Dogg died and was resurrected after doing a deal with the devil. This was, in fact, the plot of Snoop Dogg’s (1994) fictional short film and soundtrack album Murder was the Case, but since it fits with Lewis’s (2009: 76) notion of satanic influence over rap, and that “[m]any [rappers] confess to exchanging fame and fortune for damnation in the afterlife,” he can treat fantasy as true confession. The hip hoppers I interviewed in South Africa are dismissive of Lewis’s claims and frustrated by the attention his views receive in local churches; sometimes a rapper will contact a church, seeking an opportunity to perform, only to find that Lewis’s teachings reached the church first and rap is unwelcome. They have probably not been helped by the fact that, as was the case in Christian metal, some Christian rappers have also sought to “demonize their secular counterparts” (Moberg 2015: 48) to justify their own musical practices, such as Lecrae (XXL Magazine 2012). The South African hip hoppers I have interviewed are not totally dismissive of belief in the supernatural power of music, however, resembling the American Evangelical hip hop promoter and writer Cassandra Thornton (2012) who believes in the possibility of demonic powers influencing people’s lives, without believing hip hop is intrinsically demonic. Some rappers suggest that Lewis’s legitimacy in South African churches is enhanced because he is American, and this is significant and rather ironic, because although his ideas have found an audience in African American churches (Gault 2015: 96), his ministry addresses ideas that are far more prevalent in Africa than the United States. The idea of Snoop Dogg’s success coming through a supernatural bargain would find a receptive audience in southern African churches, especially in African Pentecostal churches, wherein an epistemology emphasizing the everyday presence of the supernatural is common (Gifford 2009). For a great many people in contemporary Africa—and elsewhere, of course—individual success is not just a moral matter, but also a religious matter, and the question of success and the supernatural has become ubiquitous in the study of African religion, neatly summarized and critiqued by Sanders (2008). The basic idea is that in societies in which supernatural bargains are frequently used to explain material

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success, it is because material success is inexplicable on secular capitalist terms, which are radically different from the established rules that traditionally governed wealth and status. In much of contemporary Africa, markets are murky, institutions are unreliable, and life is sufficiently and generally unpredictable, such that the “structures of plausibility” (Ashforth 2005: 19) that explain success in banal, secular capitalist terms are simply unconvincing. Although anthropological studies of supernatural explanations for success have focused on contemporary Africa’s radical social and economic changes, such views are not restricted to periods of social anomie. Further, although key studies in this area have focused on “African epistemologies” (Ellis and ter Haar 2007), the “idea that prosperity flows from a good relationship with the invisible world, which may require nurturing like any relationship, is common among believers all over the world” (Ellis and ter Haar 2004:  125). Many Christians believe, as Lewis does, that if a wealthy and successful individual is not demonstrating Christian piety, it is conceivable that some sort of occult bargain has been struck. Although many music fans will be aware of the modern myth of blues guitarist Robert Johnson’s Faustian deal with the devil at a Mississippi crossroads—which is also commemorated by a statue—this is an exceptional idea within North American Christianity, but a relatively mainstream one in African Christianity. For an “extraordinary” enterprise—global hip hop stardom, for example—a supernatural contract of some kind is commonly considered necessary, with the same kind of reciprocity found in a conventional contract (ibid.: 122–5). The changing role of young people in Africa has led to conflicts and accusations of occult dealing as well, as the lives of young people are increasingly less regulated by traditional bonds of reciprocity (ibid.). In South Africa, where fear of witchcraft and malevolent supernatural beings are “real and frequent problems” from the perspective of many Christians (Anderson 2005: 83), Niehaus (2001) notes the particular upsurge in witchcraft accusations during the dismantling of apartheid, which substantially freed up the economy and offered new forms of upward mobility for a minority of black South Africans, creating significant inequality within black communities. From the rather reductive Marxist anthropological perspective of Comaroff and Comaroff (1999, 2000:  316), African Pentecostalism, traditional fears of witchcraft, and global financial capitalism are all analogous forms of seeking material reward through finessing “forms of power/knowledge that transgress the conventional.” One does not need to follow all the tangents and tangles of the Comaroffs’s analysis to recognize how a society changing so rapidly might experience what Ashforth

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(1998, 2005) calls “spiritual anxiety,” emerging from uncertainty about precisely how the spiritual realm is operating. Even if we had not worked our way through proximate examples from North America and Australia, these common African beliefs should not be viewed as exotic. Jenkins (2006: 127) observes that since most churches in the Global North no longer offer spiritual explanations for all of life’s problems, some go to the spiritual margins of society to find answers, and the increasing popularity of traditional African beliefs among affluent white South Africans, typically Afrikaans speakers, is relatively well known. In an effort to “level the epistemological playing field” (Sanders 2008:  111), Ellis and ter Haar (2004:  35)  argue that African witchcraft accusations serve a similar function to Western conspiracy theories. Rather than blaming witches for life’s deep disappointments, Westerners may blame foreigners, minorities, cultural elites, secret societies, or extraterrestrials. This is not merely true of Donald Trump supporters; conspiracy theories have long been a staple of American hip hop lyrics (Jackson 2015), and some hip hop scholars advance ideas about the culture industry’s deliberate marginalization of conscious rap that are scarcely better evidenced than Lewis’s supernatural conspiracy claims. Significantly, however, Lewis’s ministry blends occult beliefs familiar from both the Global North and the Global South; witchcraft accusations that could come straight from a South African tin shack township church are combined with characteristically European and North American far-right political conspiracies about the Illuminati, pseudoscience, and theories about the deliberate undermining of morality through popular culture. Lewis’s ministry points to the fact that epistemologies that blend concern with malevolent supernatural forces and more recognizable political and cultural criticism are hardly unique to Africa or developing economies. Rather, the epistemological refusal to divide ideas into distinct secular categories such as “religion,” “politics,” and “economics,” is part of the global phenomena of contemporary Pentecostalism, with its “primal religious imagination” (Gifford 2009). It should therefore be possible, to some extent, to translate Lewis’s particular concerns into a secular register, or at least recognize the material concerns in his ministry, for no significant division is recognized between spiritual and material power by Lewis. Although Niehaus (2001: 200) warns against getting too far away from empirical data and into theoretical speculation, he observes that contemporary allegations about supernatural success only make sense “within the frame of contemporary social and political concerns.” To reorientate Sanders’s (2008: 108) overview of these arguments, what Lewis is advancing with his ideas about the satanic control of hip hop, critique of New Age spirituality,

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condemnation of liberal and progressive African American Christianity, and so on, is his own “indigenously-inflected critique of the diabolical workings of capitalism.” When we look at the sort of issues that Lewis’s (2009) book discusses, we do not see a significant departure from the basic concerns that inspired the “culture wars” of the 1980s, nor do we see a significant departure from the conservative disavowal of secular policy-based questions around inequality and injustice. There is, at the heart of Lewis’s ministry, a fundamental fear of the power of secular youth culture as an agent of socialization, especially prevalent, in his view, within African American families in which the kind of stern male patriarch that Lewis believes should be heading households is often not present. Underneath all of this, though, there is a basic and crucial political concern left unreasoned with; “If you throw a million men in prison, what happens to their sons?” (ibid.: 123).

Conclusion This final substantive chapter has focused on negative aspects of the relationship between Evangelicalism and, in particular, two of the youth subcultures this book is concerned with, punk and hip hop. The chapter has ended with a sustained discussion of the ideas of G.  Craige Lewis concerning the satanic nature of hip hop, including Christian hip hop. It was shown that despite being concerned with many contemporary developments in African American music and political life, his basic concerns reflect ideas prevalent in earlier fundamentalist Evangelical critiques of popular music and youth culture, as well as the approach of conservative Evangelicals during the “culture wars” of the 1980s. These concerns about popular culture, especially music, have been disproportionately concerned with its role as an agent of socialization; it was recognized that hip hop, in particular, functions as a form of public pedagogy offering young people embodied examples of ways of being in the world and orientating themselves toward urban life and material challenges. For many Evangelicals, this is intensely concerning because the increasing power of secular popular culture over the moral and religious formation of youth can only lead to the decreasing power of traditional agents of socialization, in particular parents and churches. Evangelical youth subcultures are one way to combat this increasing power of secular popular culture over young people, but this chapter has shown that the initiatives of Christian rappers and punks, in particular, are not always welcomed. Two basic forms of opposition have been recognized and discussed, what

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I have referred to as secular, policy-orientated critiques, and critiques grounded in supernatural concerns. However, the extended discussion of Lewis’s ministry, contextualized within both (South) African Christianity and culture, and within global Evangelicalism, reminds us that such divisions are etic distinctions that are not necessarily recognized within Evangelical culture and theology. Nevertheless we saw that churches’ policy-orientated critiques of hip hop do not significantly depart from either secular progressive or conservative critiques of hip hop circulating in the 1980s and the 1990s, and that there are, moreover, concerns common to the “Left” and “Right,” such as misogynistic attitudes in rap lyrics. Criticisms of punk and hip hop youth subcultures grounded in specific supernatural concerns were shown to focus on ideas of music, including vocal style, rather than simply lyrics. In the case of Christian punk, it was the unpredictable nature of churches’ support or opposition that often proved frustrating. In keeping with the analysis of competing demands of Christian and secular scenes in Chapter  2, what were considered authentic punk performances might be considered as inauthentic, even demonic, performances from Evangelical Christian perspectives. Focusing on the ministry of G. Craige Lewis in relation to hip hop offered a picture of absolute opposition to a genre of music and a youth subculture. Lewis has not been included in this book as an object of ridicule, although many readers will find his ideas laughable. Rather, he is arguably the best contemporary example of a particular kind of Evangelical opposition to popular and youth culture that flourished within global Evangelicalism in past decades. Further, Evangelicalism of a typically charismatic form continues to grow in the Global South. In countries like South Africa, where the idea of a relationship between religious morality and material success, mediated through the everyday supernatural, is plausible from within people’s experiences of life’s inequity and unpredictability, questions of why contemporary capitalism appears to do “bad things to good people” (Sanders 2008: 108)—and good things to bad people—will continue to require religious answers.

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As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the various expressions of Evangelicalism encountered in this book, embedded in punk, hip hop, surfing, and skateboarding youth subcultures, are not the alternative institutions of the apocalyptic Jesus Movement (counter-)counterculture analyzed in Chapter  1. Evangelical punks, rappers, surfers, and skateboarders build Facebook groups, hold music festivals, and organize seaside camping retreats; they do not establish communes and rarely even churches. Rather, they function as supplements or correctives to conventional Evangelical institutions, offering sometimes radically different experiences of worship, resisting the drift toward what was implicitly theorized by some research participants as a restrictive Evangelical subcultural homology. Similar to the analysis offered by Magolda and Gross (2009: 266–9), Ethan, a punk musician and youth pastor, criticized the Evangelical tendency to offer a contemporary, pop culture–friendly identity that “pushes people into a box; we all look the same, we all listen to the same thing.” The forms of Evangelical youth subculture analyzed in this book also offer, most significantly, opportunities to embody Evangelical belief and practice in everyday life in secularizing societies, “witnessing” a different way of being in the world. Not dissimilar to the idea of the “resistant” Evangelical identities theorized by Mall (2015a, 2015b), or similarly by Gault (2015), the four Evangelical youth subcultures analyzed in this book experience contradictions with both their parent church cultures and the nominally secular subcultures they engage with, not to mention the prevailing values of the societies they have emerged within. In this way, the utility of certain ideas of subcultural resistance discussed in Chapter 1 remain pertinent, albeit stripped of the privileging of class as the key criteria for experiencing sociocultural contradiction. Unlike the more open models of abidingly youthful culture assembled under the label “post-subculture,” we saw that coherence of belief and behavior remains fundamental to these forms, and that style remains an issue within Evangelical churches; tattoos, body piercings,

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and hip hop fashion may be almost ubiquitous among the youth in the four societies studied in this book, but they can still raise concerns in conservative churches about the deeper morality they may signify. Despite broad recognition that cultivating Evangelical youth culture generally, and in specific subcultural forms, can help churches militate against religion being squeezed out of the lives of young people, unresolved questions and challenges remain around Evangelical engagements with youth subcultures. Drawing on examples from previous chapters, this conclusion will suggest three particularly pertinent challenges: the challenge of subcultural strength, the challenge of secular translation, and the challenge of globalization.

The challenge of subcultural strength The first recurrent challenge to the Evangelical youth cultures studied in this book is the strength of the nominally secular subcultures that Evangelical youth engage with. The previous chapter analyzed ongoing debates with Evangelicalism, and secular studies of popular music and culture, over the moral and spiritual neutrality of music genres. We saw that the dominant approach, while far from being uncontested, approves of the maintenance of most aesthetic elements of popular music and youth cultural forms, replacing values and practices considered immoral or amoral with Evangelical norms. Nevertheless, a consistent concern has been the persistence, in some form, of values and practices inimical to Christianity. The most extreme positions argue that there are strong supernatural forces within popular culture, but even pragmatic approaches to popular and youth culture can identify prevailing practices that undermine religious commitments rather than strengthen them. This tension was most clearly articulated by Kyle, formerly of a Californian Christian emo/indie rock band, who explained in Chapter 2 that Christians in the punk scene have to hold these two separate identities at the same time, and they don’t necessarily meet-up with each other. It can be really hard to be authentic overall. In some ways your Christianity invalidates your punk views, and then, at the same point, a lot of people would feel the punk views can invalidate your Christian upbringing and what that subculture has to say.

We saw that in the case of punk it is usually possible to negotiate the inclusion of Evangelicals by showing commitment to foundational punk values or “desires”

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(Thompson 2004). Further, an overlapping consensus can be articulated, as discussed in Chapter 3, predicated on an agreement emerging from quite different underlying beliefs. One example of opposition to this is the God Free Youth movement, opposed to what it sees as the religious undermining of punk’s autonomy. However, tensions with subcultural forms have generally been more ambiguous experiences of Evangelicals feeling uneasy about their own presence in subcultural spaces, rather than concrete secularist restrictions on Christian involvement. Making use of the notion of serious leisure (Stebbins 1992) as a central life interest (Dublin 1992), foundational to personal identity in secularizing societies, Chapter 5 analyzed experiences of salvation anxiety among Evangelicals involved with music and sports-based subcultures. It was these examples that demonstrated the underlying strength of nominally secular subcultural forms that can compel such commitment from their participants that some Evangelicals feel they are committing a form of idolatry. This was most obvious in the case of surfing, and the foundational experience of “flow,” which Bron Taylor (2007: 941–2) invokes to explain the sport’s “religious aura.” In Chapter 4, the former surfing missionary and Evangelical pastor Philip was most critical of this, discussing the addictive nature of surfing; “The wave, the ocean, you just want to give yourself entirely to that.” The pedagogical aspects of hip hop, influencing choices in language, fashion, and other embodied practices that constitute someone’s “swag,” was seen to have a similar strength such that some Evangelicals felt they had to abandon their involvement with it if, like the rapper Reconciled, they got “serious with God.” It is not just the existence of strong values within youth subcultures that create challenges for Evangelicals, it is also the broader social ethos of expressive individualism, discussed in Chapters 2 and 5, that makes nominally secular subcultures a socially acceptable foundation to build an identity upon. The basic ethos of this form of expressive individualism is that “everyone has a right to develop their own form of life, grounded on their own sense of what is really important or of value” (Taylor 1992: 14). This ethos allows Evangelicalism to be one value system circulating within youth culture, articulated through passionate performance and relational evangelism, but it also limits its ability to influence the spaces it moves within, and to communicate its specific truths to young people. Liam, a South African youth pastor, offered a good assessment of the spirituality circulating within the surfing subculture, explaining that “for a lot of surfers it’s hard to be that intimate with nature and creation and not have a sense that there is some higher power

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behind it . . . but they’re not sure who or what that is, and they wouldn’t call it the Christian god, necessarily.” The personal experiential nature of surfing is foundational here such that there is no particular reason why it would correspond to Evangelical truth claims, or be immediately explicable within this logic.

The challenge of secular translation Within this secularizing culture of expressive individualism, Evangelicals seeking to not only find a cohesive home within nominally secular youth subcultures, but also evangelize within them, are faced with the challenge of precisely how their beliefs are to be translated into forms comprehensible to subcultural peers. According to Smith’s (1998: 75–88) “subcultural identity theory of religious strength,” Evangelicals combine creative dynamism in religious expression with a distinctive subjectivity that dissolves divides like race and class while distinguishing itself from many modern values and practices. Recalling Bramadat’s (2000) metaphor of “bridges” and “fortresses” used throughout this book, this tension is exemplified for Smith (1998: 98–9) in churches that cater to the “culturally hip” by combining conservative theology with contemporary popular and youth culture. But conservative theology is not always comprehensible to contemporary youth, let  alone convincing, and building “bridges” to nonEvangelicals requires compromise over various issues, such as attitudes toward gender and sexuality, as well as compromises over when to evangelize and how to evangelize. Smith (1998: 89) argues that Evangelicalism “thrives on distinction, engagement, tension, conflict and threat,” but ethnographic studies such as Magolda and Gross’s (2009) and Strhan’s (2014, 2015) reveal Evangelicals trying to avoid personal conflict—something I found as well. The Evangelicals interviewed in this book reject the kinds of antagonistic strategies displayed by Christian bands in the 1980s and 1990s (Luhr 2009: 111– 43). As Suvi, an Australian metalcore vocalist said, “you have to be wise about how you approach things otherwise people can turn away from offence.” Unlike earlier bands, focused on the spectacle of their own religious difference, there is no sense that offending audiences and rubbing their noses in their own damnation is a sensible missionary activity. As discussed in Chapter 3 in particular, there is a much greater focus on “friendship evangelism” (Bramadat 2000: 25), evident from at least the time of the Spirit-filled hardcore movement of the mid1990s. Evangelical musicians from that time onward are far more likely to have

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grown up with one foot in their local secular music scene, and the other in an Evangelical church, demonstrating broader changes within Evangelical culture over recent decades. For Bruce (2002:  140–50), this is modern religion’s “regression to the mean,” the gradual process of cultural accommodation such that all but the most cultish Christian communities increasingly resemble their neighbors in all but essential religious and moral matters. For example, none of my research participants who grew up Evangelical in the 2000s, or even the 1990s, experienced a comprehensive prohibition on secular music, since most Evangelicals had become critical consumers of secular popular culture by then, rather than abstainers. Specific artists are still set aside for their lyrics or behavior, and secular music might be replaced in an individual’s life for reasons discussed in Chapter 5, but Evangelicalism in general is no longer conspicuously marked by total belligerence toward secular culture. At the other end of Evangelical experience are attempts to translate Evangelical belief into relatable forms that speak to subcultural insiders, emphasizing the sharing of subjective experiences over doctrine, which may also nevertheless fail. The acceptance or embrace of Evangelicals by secular subcultural peers does not mean embracing their beliefs, which can remain literally or figuratively incomprehensible, unpersuasive, or undesirable. Kyle witnessed the ability of metalcore bands to be “preachy,” because the subgenre’s musicological rules emphasize passionate but inarticulate growls and shrieks, such that “no-one has a clue what you’re saying.” Influenced by the broader subjective and poetic turn in punk lyrics (Azerrad 2007), the often personal nature of the lyrics, combined with generally decreasing religious literacy, may make meditations on the gospels appear as mere individual expressions. As Chapter 2 argued, this is normative for modern secular creative self-expression, but not for traditional religious expression that focuses on repeating received ideas; although these Christian lyrics usually do both, only the personal aspect may be appreciable by nonChristian audiences. Remaining with the book’s key focus, Evangelical engagements with punk, it was shown to be significant that in spite of its DIY ethic, punk and proximate music-based subcultures are not always as self-sustaining as they would like to be, and they often benefit from the support of external institutions, including churches. This is different from the extreme sports subcultures analyzed in this book, for although the Christian Surfers organization had success in organizing the “Jesus Surf Classic,” changing some opinions about the respectability of the surfing subculture (Davis 2012: 71–7), and Evangelical youth development projects have been able to provide surfing equipment and lessons to impoverished

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youth, skateboarding and surfing are largely self-sustaining. When music-based subcultures engage the infrastructure of churches, which they are wont to do in small towns especially, some restrictions inevitably apply. As discussed in Chapter  3, some are relatively uncontroversial like alcohol bans in churches, which are not much different from restrictions at secular youth centers. Other restrictions are objectionable but negotiable, such as discouraging profanity, which undermines the notion of autonomy in creative self-expression, but might only be imposed on banter between songs, and not on probably unintelligible song lyrics. When restrictions are imposed, the rules and restrictions are usually comprehensible and even conceivably reasonable for non-Christians; they may not agree with them, but they can at least understand why parents would not want their children exposed to profanity in a church. However, some restrictions are based on purely religious grounds, emerging from particularly Pentecostal concerns about the everyday supernatural, as explored in Chapters 3 and 6. As Thommo, from Australia’s Sunshine Coast, explained, Pentecostal churches want to be “out there” and engage with contemporary youth culture, but they don’t want to “rock the boat” by being too innovative. Most importantly, he explained that Pentecostal support can be unpredictable as well as conditional. Chapter  6 analyzed the Pentecostal paradox grounded in normative charismatic authority structures allowing individuals to claim being called by God to support some youth activity, but alternatively or subsequently claim to be called by God to oppose it. It is here that any translation of Evangelical beliefs and values into terms comprehensible to non-Christians—or sometimes noncharismatic Christians—simply fails. To explain that a particular form of music that was once welcomed by a church’s youth program no longer is, because of bad dreams, reveals the limits of relatability between Evangelical and modern secular worldviews.

The challenge of globalization The final persistent challenge to Evangelicalism in its engagement with nominally secular music and sports-based youth subcultures relates to the process of globalization; specifically the point at which theoretically global forms meet with local cultural concerns and material conditions. In Chapter 5, it was argued that Evangelicalism is thoroughly capable of adapting to a great variety of cultural contexts, and that when it does so it engages in a complicated process of

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synthesis with local cultural forms, which it both combats and combines with (Casanova 2001; Robbins 2003, 2004). This was argued to be the case not only for national or regional cultures, but for youth subcultures as well. Some examples of this process working quite seamlessly are the global spread, outward from the United States in general and California in particular, of Evangelical punk and surfing subcultures into culturally and climactically proximate contexts, such as surfers and punks in suburban Australia. A different example is the positive reception of the ideas of American Pentecostal pastor G. Craige Lewis about the satanic control of hip hop in southern African churches, where life’s unpredictability makes the “structures of plausibility” (Ashforth 2005:  19)  that explain wealth and success in secular terms less convincing than Lewis’s claims about supernatural bargains and occult powers. The term “glocalization” is often used in the social sciences to examine specific intersections of the global and the local, such as the example in Chapter 5 of the Christian Surfers organization deciding that it “needed to develop a social justice edge” in the South African context rather than simply focus on “personal salvation” (Davis 2012: 232–3). Indeed, the material reality of South African life has altered a variety of globalized Evangelical youth ministries and subcultures that localized relatively unchanged in other contexts, or quickly acknowledged their own limitations—such as skateboarding ministry in Britain, where it rains one day in every three. It is revealing that it has not been the pervasive poverty that has been most challenging for globalizing Evangelical youth culture and ministry in South Africa, so much as the country’s hyper-diversity and extreme inequality. This inequality creates bad consciences within ministries focused on pleasurable activities, like surfing, that are off-limits for a great deal of the population for reasons of affordability and access. This is one reason why skateboarding ministries have proven successful in South Africa. Ethan, a punk musician and youth pastor facilitating a skateboarding group, explained that the popularity of the sport seems to transcend the country’s racial and class divides. In some impoverished black townships the roads are too uneven for skating, but in other townships brand new roads have been laid that even attract skateboarders from affluent areas. Further, although skateboarding can connect with a culture of white suburban ease and pop punk pizza parties, Mackay (2013) shows how it also fits seamlessly into relentlessly urban life for black South Africans; white suburban skaters might complain about being chased away from a church, but skateboarding can be a part of a strategy of reclaiming a whole city designed to alienate and exclude black South Africans.

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Concern with racial inclusion in South African youth ministries also focused on music, particularly reflexive considerations by Evangelical punks that their otherwise counter-hegemonic subculture might operate in unexpectedly exclusive ways. As Basson (2007: 79–81) argues, South African punks are overwhelmingly affluent white males, and while many are more aware of social injustice than “ignorant first world punks,” as one South African punk said, their subcultural identity has already taught them to accept or value life on the cultural margins, which is potentially problematic in postapartheid society. As Francois said of his punk scene in the early 2000s in which Christian bands thrived: The problem with the punk thing was that we were all a bunch of white kids hanging out in Cape Town. We were all anti-racism but there were no black people at the shows, unless they were working at the bar. It was really exclusive and the main place for getting our music was from the States. So there was a sense of being anti-racist, but there was no way to practice that—or there was, but we didn’t do it. Punk was just inadequate for addressing the issues that needed to be addressed. With the hip hop scene, I  remember going to those [club] nights and there was a big mix of kids, black and white, altogether. When it comes to crossing racial lines, rock music and punk music doesn’t really do that; hip hop changes that.

He argued this was also the case in churches, where having worship bands that “all sound like [American contemporary worship musician] Chris Tomlin is something quite strange to black kids that come along.” The emergence of Christian hip hop, he explained, “was quite a blessing.” Evangelicals are not yet sure how to integrate hip hop into worship services, even setting aside the debates over its religious legitimacy from the previous chapter, but there is a growing recognition of its importance as a globalized youth culture that they must, in some way, claim. As they globalize out from their contemporary point of origin in the United States, the forms of Evangelical youth culture studied in this book will increasingly find themselves wrestling with these local concerns. This is not to say that Evangelical youth culture remains somehow untroubled within the United States, for quite apart from how particular churches and broader Evangelical culture engage with increasing inequality and persistent racial injustice in the United States, Evangelicals themselves are aware of the reality of secularization. As has been argued throughout this book, Evangelical youth subcultures such as surfing, skateboarding, punk, and hip hop, offer ways of addressing the

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compartmentalizing of religion in the lives of young people as well as providing opportunities for creative embodiments of belief that may well run counter to prevailing Evangelical norms. Evangelicals are nevertheless challenged by the persistent values of the nominally secular subcultural forms they engage with and adopt, which are themselves increasingly acceptable foundations for fulfilling lives.

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Glossary Slang has been important in subcultural studies, such as Willis’s (1977) analysis of the language of working-class English delinquents as part of his thick description of their worldview. Insider terminology is also important in Evangelicalism, with terms like “blessed” used as both everyday euphemisms and religious doctrines. Jason Berggren (2009: 196–9), an Evangelical pastor and former hardcore vocalist, refers to this language as “Christianese,” an example of Evangelicals being “sincere without being authentic.” The religious terminology below reflects actual beliefs, but can be used in an unreflexive manner, or in a way that alienates non-Evangelicals. Similarly alienating jargon emerges from the diversity and fragmentation of music genres. This glossary avoids hipster minutiae, but the insider distinction between, for example, conscious rap and gangsta rap is relevant. Extreme sports slang can be even more impenetrable, with several of the terms below relating to foundational experiences or the organization of these subcultures, but terms relating to the mechanics of the sports are best left to online dictionaries. Blessed A generic religious term expressing gratitude. One can be blessed by God, or by other people. A Christian band might be “blessed” by a church providing rehearsal space. Born again A term used by Evangelicals to refer to a personal conversion and commitment to Evangelicalism, in emic terms accepting Jesus Christ as one’s savior. Charismatic A form of Christianity emphasizing ecstatic experience and the ongoing possibility of miracles, often called “gifts of the (Holy) Spirit.” Pentecostalism is the most common form of charismatic Christianity, but some non-Pentecostal churches are also charismatic. Conscious hip hop A subgenre of hip hop emphasizing self-knowledge and social critique. Conscious rap differentiates itself from commercial rap, considered inauthentic. Evangelical rappers are uneasy about being included in this subgenre for fear of undermining their specific and exclusive truth claims. Contemporary Christian music A meta-genre of popular music with no strict musicological limits, primarily produced by and for Evangelicals, pioneered by the Jesus Movement in the late 1960s.

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Counterculture Movements seeking social reorganization through radically different values, via alternatives to institutions like family and work. The Jesus Movement has been called a “counter-counterculture” because of its desire to reorganize society along fundamentalist lines. Crossover A term referring either to the blending of genres (i.e., metalcore), or artists from one genre achieving success in another, (i.e., contemporary Christian music performers achieving secular success.) Emo Short for “emotional hardcore,” a punk subgenre that emerged in the mid1980s, solidified in the 1990s, and achieved success in the 2000s. Emo features introspective lyrics and became associated with different fashion trends across the decades. Evangelicalism Varieties of Protestant Christianity emphasizing individual conviction and conversion, evangelism, biblical authority, and the importance of a personal relationship with God. Extreme Sports A term used to describe a set of individual, often nature-based and youth-focused sports, notably surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, and BMX biking. The terms “alternative sports,” “action sports,” or “lifestyle sports” are also used. Flow A term used across the social sciences to describe an intense feeling of excelling at a physical activity, also called “being in the zone,” associated with individual sports and music. Gangsta rap A hip hop subgenre emerging in the USA in the late 1980s, focusing on impoverished urban youth struggling for survival and status in often illegal ways. To its critics, gangsta rap promotes violence, misogyny, and greed, but to its defenders it provides critical commentary on the lived experiences of the poor. Genre A way of distinguishing cultural forms. The idea of “genre rules,” developed by Franco Fabri, has been influential. Genres can be distinguished ideologically (i.e., contemporary Christian music), musicologically (i.e., ska), semiotically (through style), and so on. God Free Youth A loose tendency within the global hardcore scene advancing secularist values and opposing Christian hardcore bands, viewed as a threat to the autonomy of the scene. Grommet A young surfer expected to assume a subordinate position in the subculture and learn from more experienced surfers, acquiring subcultural status with age and expertise. Grunge A subgenre of heavy metal influenced by hardcore, prominent in the United States in the 1990s.

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Hardcore A subgenre of punk that developed in the 1980s, particularly in the United States. Deemphasizing melody, hardcore songs are short and fast, with often screamed lyrics. Hardcore spawned subgenres in the 1990s and 2000s, including post-hardcore and metalcore, with Christian hardcore thriving in the same period including the Spirit-filled hardcore movement. Heart Evangelicals refer to the “heart” of an individual in relation to their beliefs, commitments, or calling. One can “have a heart” for something, often a social group, such as a youth subculture. Heavy metal A form of rock music emerging in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, which became known for its style, including leather jackets and long hair, and use of occult imagery. Christian metal developed in the 1980s. The heavy metal–influenced punk crossover genre, hardcore, developed in the 1980s and spawned its own subgenres such as metalcore. Hip hop A meta-genre that emerged in New York in the late 1970s, often used interchangeably with “rap” and typically viewed as having four elements: rapping/emceeing (rhymed speech over music), DJing (music created with turntables), breakdancing (acrobatic dance), and graffiti (calligraphy and comic art). A fifth element, knowledge, is important in conscious hip hop, and some add fashion. Christian hip hop emerged in the United States in the late 1980s. Idol In Evangelical youth culture, an idol is an activity that someone commits too strongly to, such that it undermines religious commitments and identity. Music and sports are typical examples. Jesus Movement, The An Evangelical tendency in the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, sharing hippie aesthetics and desire for social reorganization, but preaching often apocalyptic Pentecostal theology. Associated with contemporary Christian music and youth subculture ministry. Meta-genre A diverse genre that incorporates very different styles and ideologies, e.g., punk, or hip hop. Metalcore A subgenre of hardcore emerging in the 1990s, incorporating elements of heavy metal. Several very successful Christian metalcore bands emerged in the mid-2000s. Pentecostalism A charismatic form of Evangelicalism typically emphasizing ecstatic individual experience and the ongoing possibility of miracles. Emerging in North America in the early twentieth century, with various precedents, contemporary Pentecostal churches differ in worship style and theology. Pop punk A subgenre of punk emphasizing melody and often youthful pleasure-seeking. Christian pop punk thrived in the 1990s and 2000s.

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Post-hardcore A subgenre of hardcore punk emphasizing musical innovation and experimentation, influenced by indie rock and heavy metal. Punk A meta-genre of popular music and culture emerging in the United Kingdom and United States in the 1970s, emphasizing spontaneity and selfexpression, rejecting highly produced pop and rock styles. Punk diversified into many subgenres, including hardcore and pop punk, and had renewed commercial success beginning in the early 1990s. Saved A term used by Evangelicals to refer to those who are born-again Christians and therefore “saved” from damnation. Scene A generic term used to describe a network of music production and consumption, bound by geography and/or genre. Ska Jamaican music related to reggae, “third wave” ska is a punk crossover genre with a melodic, upbeat feel, popular in the 1990s. Many Christian ska bands were formed in the late 1990s. Spirit-filled hardcore A name given to some Evangelical hardcore bands emerging in the United States in the mid-1990s. In contrast to earlier Christian bands, they were comfortable in secular scenes. The term “spirit-filled” is a reference to the Pentecostal orientation of the bands. Straight Edge A primarily secular subculture emerging in US hardcore scenes, rejecting alcohol, drugs, and “promiscuous” sex, often promoting veganism. A small minority of adherents have tried to violently impose these prohibitions in their local scene. Stoke(d) A surfing term common in related extreme sports, referring to excitement and pleasure. There is something unstable or excessive about being “stoked,” like jouissance in its less arcane usage. Subculture A generic term used in different ways to describe groups connected by shared interests, beliefs, and practices, often associated with youth culture and opposition to dominant mainstream culture, but not usually considered as radical as a counterculture. Swag Short for “swagger,” meaning style. A common term in hip hop and youth culture in the 2010s. Witnessing Traditionally understood as religious testimony, witnessing has the broader meaning of evangelization through embodying and modeling Christian values in everyday life. Worship Broadly the act of praising God, specifically religious services, and music used in church services; pop-rock “worship music” has become common in contemporary Evangelical services, replacing contemporary Christian music in everyday life for some.

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Zine Short for “fanzine,” fan-produced magazines that have been part of music culture, especially punk , since the 1970s. Evangelical zines emerged in the 1980s, but have been superseded by social media, blogs, and secular media covering Christian crossover artists.

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Discography August Burns Red, Rescue and Restore. Solid State, 2013. August Burns Red, Found in Far Away Places. Fearless, 2015. Lecrae, Anomaly. Reach Records, 2014. Minor Threat, Complete Discography. Dischord, 1981. MxPx, Slowing Going the Way of the Buffalo. Tooth & Nail / A&M, 1998. MxPx, Let It Happen. Tooth & Nail, 1998. Snoop Dogg, Murder was the Case. Death Row Records, 1994. Underoath, They’re Only Chasing Safety. Solid State, 2004. Underoath, Define the Great Line. Solid State, 2006.

Filmography All This Mayhem (2014). Directed by Eddie Martin. Australia: Screen Australia / Vice Films. The Endless Summer (1966). Directed by Bruce Brown. USA: Bruce Brown Films. Friday Night Lights (2006–11). Directed by Peter Berg, et al. USA: Imagine Television / NBC / UMS. On the Rocks (2010). Directed by Jonty Bougas. South Africa: Christian Surfers Media / Light Years Media. The Perfect Wave (2012). Directed by Bruce Macdonald. South Africa: Divine Inspiration. Soul Surfer (2011). Directed by Sean McNamara. USA: Enticing Entertainment / Island Film Group. Ten Thousand Saints (2015). Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. USA: Archer Gray / Screen Media Films. The Truth behind Hip Hop (2009–16). No director credited. USA: Ex-Ministries.

Interviews (all names are pseudonyms) Adam (hardcore musician), Sydney, Australia, October 2010. Adriaan (former punk and current contemporary worship musician), Cape Town, South Africa, February 2014. Alex (extreme sports youth development professional), Cape Town, South Africa, February 2014. Andre (surfing youth development professional), Cape Town, South Africa, March 2015.

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189

Andy (former heavy metal and current contemporary worship musician), Cape Town, South Africa, March 2014. Brandon (hardcore and ska musician), Seattle, USA, December 2010. Brian (punk and contemporary worship musician), Cape Town, South Africa, March 2014. Carey (punk promotor and youth ministry volunteer), Missouri, USA, October 2010. Chase (hardcore musician), Los Angeles, USA, September 2010. Chris (informal surf missionary and youth pastor), Cape Town, South Africa, February 2015. Connor (hardcore musician and website curator), Cincinnati, USA, June 2010. Cory (hardcore musician), Indianapolis, USA, October 2010. Dave (hardcore fan and website curator), Raleigh, USA, August 2010. Derek (small Christian record label owner), Portland, OR, USA, December 2010. Ethan (punk musician and extreme sports-focused youth pastor), Cape Winelands, South Africa, 2010, 2014, and 2015. Francois (former punk and current contemporary worship musician), London, UK, January 2014. Franz (hardcore and contemporary worship musician), Cape Town, South Africa, February 2014. George (pop punk and contemporary worship musician), London, UK, April 2010. Gordon (informal surf missionary), Cape Town, South Africa, February 2015. Helen (informal surf missionary), Cape Town, South Africa, February 2015. Jamie (emo/hardcore musician), London, UK, August 2010. Jeff (former grunge musician and current pastor), Nashville, USA, December 2010. Jono (hardcore musician, promoter, and zine editor), Coventry, UK, March, April, and November 2010. Jordan (pop punk and contemporary worship musician), London, UK, August 2010. Kyle (former emo/indie rock musician), Seattle, USA, December 2010. Lachie (hardcore musician), Sydney, Australia, December 2010. Liam (youth pastor involved with surfing ministry), Cape Town, South Africa, March 2015. Mari (assistant youth pastor), Cape Winelands, South Africa, March 2014. Max (emo/hardcore musician), Tallahassee, USA, July 2010. Mitch (ska and punk musician), Melbourne, Australia, June 2010. Nathan (emo/hardcore musician), London, UK, August 2010. Nick (hardcore musician), Sydney, Australia, October 2010. Niz (hardcore and contemporary worship musician), Cape Town, South Africa, February 2014. Nyaniso (rapper and visual artist), Cape Town, South Africa, April 2014. Pat (hardcore and contemporary worship musician), Cape Town, South Africa, February 2014.

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Philip (former surf missionary and current church pastor), Cape Town, South Africa, 2014 and 2015. Reconciled (rapper), Cape Town, South Africa, March 2014. Rory (punk musician), Glasgow, UK, April and August 2010. Ruben (youth pastor involved with surfing ministry), Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, February 2014. Ryan (hardcore musician), Cardiff, UK, May 2010. Steve (punk fan and former punk musician and website curator), London, UK, June 2010. Suvi (metalcore musician), Brisbane, Australia, December 2010. Tanner (small Christian record label owner), Nashville, USA, December 2010. Thommo (hardcore musician and promoter), Sunshine Coast, Australia, August 2010. Tim (hardcore musician), Nuneaton, UK, April 2010. Tomas (former hardcore musician and current pastor) Atlanta, USA, July 2010. Tsebo (rapper), Johannesburg, South Africa, March 2014. Ty (punk musician and pastor), Glasgow, UK, August 2010. Quinton (metalcore musician), Sydney, Australia, September 2010. Ulwazi (rapper), Johannesburg, South Africa, March 2014. Will (metalcore and contemporary worship musician), Sydney, Australia, September 2010. Zach (hardcore musician), Sydney, Australia, December 2010.

Index action sports (see extreme sports) African Americans 1–2, 136, 137, 138–41, 144, 148–9, 152 African traditional religion 4, 93, 123–4, 126, 149–51 Alexander, Paul 4, 58 alternative music 6–7, 21, 39–40, 41, 56, 65, 97–8, 138 (see also hardcore; heavy metal; hip hop; metalcore; punk; ska) alternative sports (see extreme sports) anarchism 49, 57, 66, 73, 77, 100 Anderson, Jon 89, 94, 95, 97 Aniol, Scott 141, 142 apatheism 64, 79, 95 Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen 7, 141 Ashforth, Adam 123–4, 150–1, 161 atheism 51, 61, 64, 76, 79, 80 (see also Dawkins, Richard) August Burns Red 41, 65 Australia 1, 9, 12, 27, 93, 102, 103, 137, 161 music 40, 64, 65, 142 religion 1, 9, 40, 65, 74, 76–7, 78, 92, 161 sport 85–6, 107 authenticity 35, 37–60, 97, 116 Evangelical 35, 37, 46–8, 53–60, 131–2, 146, 153, 156 extreme sports 85, 97, 104 hip hop 131–3, 139, 144 punk 27, 42, 43, 44–6, 49–53, 60, 85, 146, 153, 156 secular 41–6, 59 selling out 44, 53–4 subcultural 20, 25–6, 27–8, 34, 37, 85, 97, 104, 156 Azerrad, Michael 5, 49, 159 Banfield, William C. 1–2 Barr, James 52 Beal, Becky 26, 87, 89, 97 Beaujon, Andrew 40, 47, 64

Bebbington, David W. 2–3 Bellah, Robert N. 18, 21, 42, 116–17 Bennett, Andy 7, 11, 23, 25, 27, 29, 40 Berggren, Jason 146, 147, 165 Bergler, Thomas E. 8, 138 Bible 3, 30, 72, 93–4, 120, 129, 141 Bielo, James S. 11, 12, 19 Booth, Douglas 92, 107, 115 Bottici, Chiara 63 Bottrell, Dorothy 26, 35 Bourdieu, Pierre 107 Bramadat, Paul 2, 12, 20, 29, 31–2, 34, 49, 56, 81, 120, 121, 128, 158 Bruce, Steve 9, 30, 79, 117, 118, 159 Burnett, Cora 102, 103, 106 Calvary Chapel 21, 31, 38, 40 Calvinism 119, 120, 122, 143 New Calvinism 31, 99, 120 Casanova, José 4, 123, 160–1 Catholic Worker 18–19 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 16, 17, 18, 22–7, 32–4 Christian Surfers (organization) 104–5, 159, 161 Cohen, Stanley 24, 25–6, 117 colleges (see students) Comaroff, Jean 5, 150 Comaroff, John 5, 150 Cornerstone festival 21, 39–40, 57 Contemporary Christian music (CCM) 8, 20–1, 41, 64–5, 140, 142 authenticity 37–8, 46–8, 50, 53–60 definition 8 industry 33, 47–8, 53–60 (see also hardcore, Christian; heavy metal, Christian; hip hop, Christian; punk, Christian) counterculture 4, 16, 17–22, 23, 24, 34, 38, 155 counter-counterculture 16, 19–22 definition 16, 17–18, 22

192

192 religious 16, 17–22, 34, 155 (see also Jesus Movement, subculture) country music 34, 142 cultural studies 15–16, 22–8, 32–4 culture wars 77, 137, 138, 152 Dawkins, Richard 1, 71, 80 Denton, Melinda Lundquist 6, 29, 95–6, 117, 128 Driscoll, Mark 31, 99, 120 Dublin, Robert 115–16, 135, 157 Dylan, Bob 48 Dyson, Michael Eric 137, 139 Ellis, Stephen 124, 150, 151 Emery 41, 65 Engelke, Matthew 124, 126 Europe, religion 30, 40, 61, 63, 77, 80, 93, 95, 134 Evangelical/ism authenticity 35, 37, 46–8, 53–60, 131–2, 146, 153, 156 churches 1, 2–4, 5, 9, 20, 29, 30–1, 32, 39, 40, 56, 70, 74–5, 77–8, 81, 82, 100–1, 120, 128, 136–7, 138, 140, 143–5, 155–6, 158, 160 definition 2–4 gender 10–11, 83, 98–9 globalization 4, 40, 160–3 politics 5, 11, 21–2, 34, 83, 136, 137–8, 162 race 31, 33, 136, 137–8, 141, 158, 162 subculture 24, 29–35, 46–8, 53–60, 83, 155 worship 11, 32, 40, 58–9, 74, 162 youth groups 6, 31, 76 youth ministry 6, 8, 21, 31–3, 38–9, 77–8, 81, 82–3, 88–90, 95–7, 99–101, 118, 128, 130, 138, 161–2 (see also evangelism; Pentecostalism; salvation; see also under extreme sports; hardcore; heavy metal; hip hop; individualism; punk; skateboarding; surfing) evangelism 2, 3, 17, 20, 32, 46, 49, 53, 54, 76, 84, 158 aggressive 64, 76, 83, 158 friendship/relational 12, 49, 56, 81, 83, 157, 158–9

Index witnessing 3, 31, 32, 34, 56, 106, 129–30, 155 (see also extreme sports, evangelism and ministry ; punk, evangelism and ministry ; skateboarding, evangelism and ministry ; surfing, evangelism and ministry) extreme sports 1, 2, 6, 7, 25–6, 30, 85–90, 91–6, 107–8, 121–2, 135, 159–60, 161 authenticity 85, 97, 104 definition 7, 86–7 Evangelical attitudes 96–101, 106, 109, 121–2, 128, 135, 138–9, 159–60 evangelism and ministry 1, 30, 86–7, 88–90, 91–6, 106–7, 108–9, 157–8, 159–61 gender 10, 87 youth development projects 87–9, 101–7, 159–60 (see also skateboarding; surfing; windsurfing) fashion (see subculture, style) Finke, Roger 30 flow 90–1, 94, 95, 121, 131, 135, 157 football American 87, 90, 93, 102, 108, 114 association (soccer) 87, 90, 92–3, 108, 118 (see also rugby) Friday Night Lights 3, 64, 93, 102, 108, 114 Frith, Simon 38, 44 Gault, Erika 7, 24, 80, 138, 149, 155 Gelder, Ken 22, 51 gender 10–11, 25, 47, 50, 83, 87–8, 98–9, 136–7, 147, 152, 153 generational conflict/divide 24, 50, 60, 79, 106, 135–6, 138, 144 Gifford, Paul 123, 136, 146, 149, 151 Giulianotti, Richard 102, 105 globalization 4–5, 40, 63, 160–3 God Free Youth 76–7, 80, 82, 84, 157 God So Loved the World 64 Grand Incredible 117–18 Green, Keith 20 Gross, Kelsey Ebben 12, 29, 32–3, 59, 83, 128, 155, 158 Grossberg, Lawrence 44

Index Grundlingh, Albert 88, 102 Gushee, David P. 5, 136 Habermas, Jürgen 63, 66, 72, 79–80 Haenfler, Ross 26, 28, 80–1, 143 Hamilton, Bethany 10, 92 hardcore 1, 4, 28, 51–2, 64, 66, 71, 72, 78, 79 Christian 4, 39–40, 50–2, 57–8, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 79, 98, 146–7 definition 1 Evangelical attitudes 74–5, 98, 125–6, 146–7 Spirit-filled hardcore 39–40, 50, 69, 76, 83, 146, 158 (see also God Free Youth; metalcore; straight edge; punk) Hare Krishna movement 19, 64 Krishnacore 19, 64, 66 Haynes, Maren 31, 120 heavy metal 27–8, 125, 126, 130–1, 141 Christian 29, 40, 56, 64–5, 77, 141 Evangelical attitudes 77, 141, 142, 145, 149 (see also metalcore) Hebdige, Dick 15, 22, 23, 24, 44, 142 hedonism 27, 32, 95, 145 Heelas, Paul 21, 42, 95, 116 Hendershot, Heather 5, 54 Hesmondhalgh, David 16, 25, 54 hip hop 1–2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 15, 28, 29, 34, 77, 125–6, 132–3, 135–45, 148–53, 156, 157, 161, 162 Christian 1, 7, 20, 132–3, 135, 141, 143–4, 149, 157, 162 Evangelical attitudes 1, 7, 77, 125–6, 132–3, 135–45, 148–53, 157, 161 evangelism and ministry 132, 139, 144, 149, 162 conscious 132, 144, 151 definition 1–2 gangsta rap 135, 137, 138 gender 10, 136–7, 152, 153 studies 5, 8, 15, 137, 139, 151 hippies 17–21, 25, 38, 46, 50, 52 (see also Jesus Movement) Hodge, Daniel White 139 Hodkinson, Paul 16, 25, 26 Howard, Jay R. 8, 21, 46, 48, 55, 70, 97, 138, 140, 145

193

individualism 9, 16, 27, 28, 32, 34, 42, 46, 49–50, 82, 103, 116, 117, 157–8 Evangelical 42, 56, 58, 78, 84, 120–1, 122–3 expressive 42–3, 44, 49, 116, 157–8 religious 79, 94–5 Islam (See Muslims) Jenkins, Philip 151 Jennings, Mark 58, 73, 83, 131 Jesus 2–3, 46, 52, 54, 57, 75, 91, 95, 99, 106, 121, 125, 143 Jesus Movement 1, 4, 5, 16–21, 25, 34, 38–9, 46, 155 Jesus People USA 21, 39 Jews for Jesus 20 Knapp, Jennifer 47 Leblanc, Lauraine 10, 52, 70 Lecrae 132, 149 leisure 6, 9, 19, 21, 89, 105, 115–19, 133 casual 113, 115, 118, 128 serious 99, 108–9, 111–19, 121–34, 135, 157 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 24 Lewin, Philip 42, 45–6, 51 Lewis, G. Craige 138, 145, 148–9, 152–3, 161 liminality 87, 89–90, 97, 108, 120 Linne, Shai 141–2 Luhr, Eileen 5, 19, 64–5, 83, 137–8, 145, 158 Lynch, Gordon 57 McCloud, Sean 8, 73, 117, 126 MacDonald, Robert 23–4 McGregor, Liz 88, 92, 108 Mackay, Taryn Jeanie 100, 161 McRobbie, Angela 10 magazines 6, 40, 49, 64, 65 Mall, Andrew 21, 24, 39–40, 155 Malott, Curry 12, 50, 66, 77 Marshall, Lee 142 Martin, David 30–1, 47 Maffesoli, Michel 28 Magolda, Peter 12, 29, 32–3, 59, 83, 128, 155, 158 metalcore 4, 28, 40, 41, 49, 58, 64, 65, 141, 145, 159

194

194

Index

(see also hardcore; heavy metal; scene kids) mewithoutYou 41, 65 Meyer, Birgit 126–7 Miller, Donald E. 4, 40, 57–8 mixed martial arts 98–9 Moberg, Marcus 11, 29, 41, 56, 58, 65, 73, 141, 145, 149 Moltmann, Jürgen 80 Moore, Allan 38, 47–8, 55 Muggleton, David 23, 25–8, 33, 44 Muslims 8, 26, 61, 63, 64, 66 MxPx 41, 54, 85 NASCAR 93 neo-tribe 16–17, 28–9, 43 neoliberalism 103 Norma Jean 41, 65 Norman, Larry 21, 48 On the Rocks 91, 96 Overman, Steve 89, 101, 105–6 Pappas, Tas 89, 102 Partridge, Christopher 48, 73, 137–8, 141–2 Pentecostal/ism 1, 2, 4, 31, 58, 74, 123, 134, 136, 143, 146–8, 151, 160 African 123–4, 126–7, 134, 136, 150, 153 globalization 40, 63, 123, 136, 149, 151, 153, 161 worship 4, 40, 58, 131 (see also Calvary Chapel; Jesus Movement; hardcore, Spirit-filled hardcore) Perfect Wave, The 91, 96 Peterson, Brian 19, 50, 77 Peterson, Richard A. 29, 40, 44 Pinn, Anthony B. 132 popular music (see alternative music; contemporary Christian music (CCM); country music; hardcore; heavy metal; hip hop; metalcore; punk; ska) popular music studies 5, 8, 15, 28–9, 44, 45, 73, 142 (see also hip hop, Studies) postmodern 26–8, 44, 142 postsecular 61–6, 79–80, 84 post-subculture 25–9, 32, 34, 144–5, 155

Powell, Mark Allen 12, 21, 39, 46, 47, 54 prayer 57–8, 91–3, 96, 120, 129, 142, 148, 149 punk 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 22, 35, 37–46, 48–84, 85–6, 87, 106, 135, 142, 145, 156–7, 159, 162 authenticity 27, 42, 43, 44–6, 49–53, 60, 85, 146, 153, 156 Christian 1, 4, 5, 10–11, 21, 38–41, 43, 46, 48–62, 64–6, 68–84, 146–7, 153 definition 1 Evangelical attitudes 74–5, 77, 99, 128, 135, 142–3, 145–7, 152–3, 155 evangelism and ministry 3, 49, 53–4, 56, 59–60, 64–5, 70–2, 74–5, 77–84, 120, 128, 161, 162 gender 10–11, 50 style 24–5, 28, 142–3, 145 worship music 53, 57–8, 60, 69, 72–3, 98, 143 (see also hardcore; metalcore; ska; Straight Edge) race 10, 15, 31, 33, 86, 87, 88, 104–5, 118, 137–8, 141, 150, 158, 161, 162 rap (see hip hop) Rawls, John 62, 67–9, 72, 75, 84 religion studies 8, 73 Rinehart, Robert 87, 105 Robbins, Joel 123, 126–7 Romanowski, William D. 46, 56 Rose, Tricia 137 Roszak, Theodore 17, 18 Routley, Erik 97–8, 138, 140 rugby 87–9, 92, 101–2, 108, 114 (see also football) salvation 3, 81, 96–7, 99, 104–5, 111, 117–18, 127, 129, 132, 161 anxiety 119–23, 127, 129, 130–4, 157 born again 3, 4, 52, 120, 122, 123, 133 Sample, Tex 19, 34, 142 Sanders, Todd 123–4, 126–7, 149, 151, 153 scenes 16–17, 29 scene kids 28, 143 secular culture 8–9, 38, 41–2, 59, 79 secularization 1, 8–9, 30, 34 religious compartmentalization 9, 117–18, 128, 133, 162–3(see also postsecular)

Index serious leisure perspective 99, 108–9, 111–19, 121–34, 135, 157 sexuality 20, 31, 33, 70–1, 80, 83, 99, 136–7, 158 Shildrick, Tracy 23–4 Shires, Preston 5, 19–20, 21, 50 Shuker, Roy 77, 137 ska 40, 46, 54, 58 skateboarding 1–2, 6–7, 10, 26, 30, 85–90, 92–4, 96–101, 104–7, 139–9, 145, 155, 159–61 Evangelical attitudes 7, 97–100, 138–9, 145 evangelism and ministry 1, 6, 30, 88–9, 92–4, 96–101, 104–7, 159–61 race 10, 105, 161 youth development 89, 101–3, 105–7 Sleeping Giant 57–9 Smith, Christian 6, 17, 29–33, 35, 51, 95–6, 117, 123, 128, 145, 158 Snell, Patricia 29, 95–6, 117 social media 80, 155 sociology of religion 8–9, 17–18, 23, 30–3, 116, 118 Sorett, Joseph 140, 144 South Africa 1, 5–6, 9–10, 12, 24, 31, 40, 47, 53, 74, 75, 86–9, 92–3, 95, 100–9, 118–19, 122, 124, 131–2, 136, 137, 138, 143–5, 148–51, 153, 161–161 Afrikaners 88, 92, 101–2, 151 apartheid 12, 86–7, 103, 105, 150 inequality 1, 6, 24, 31, 86–7, 104–5, 118–19, 161–2 music 20, 40, 47, 53, 74, 75, 130–3, 143–4, 148–9, 162 race 10, 31, 86, 87, 104–5, 118, 161–2 religion 9, 24, 31, 40, 47, 74, 75, 92–3, 95, 103–7, 109, 123–4, 136, 137, 138, 143–5, 148–51, 153, 161–2 sport 86–9, 92–3, 100–9, 118–19, 161 youth 5–6, 9–10, 87–9, 105–8, 118–19, 138–9, 162 spirituality 21, 49, 72, 78, 82, 91, 95–6, 108, 127, 139, 157–8 sport 86–91, 92–3, 98–9, 105–6, 111–12, 118 Christian attitudes 89, 105, 122, 135, 138–9

195

youth development 8, 10, 86–7, 89, 101– 8, 115, 159–60 (see also extreme sports; football; mixed martial arts; rugby; skateboarding; surfing; windsurfing) St James, Rebecca 47 Stark, Rodney 30 Stebbins, Robert A. 90, 105, 108, 111–16, 121, 124, 127–8, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 157 Stevens, Marsha 47 Stowe, David 20–1, 48 Straight Edge 15, 26, 45, 50–2, 66, 80–1 Streck, John M. 8, 21, 46, 48, 55, 70, 97, 138, 140, 145 Strhan, Anna 20, 23, 32, 83, 158 students 15, 26, 32–3, 120, 128 subculture 7, 9–13, 15–35, 43, 44, 113–14, 116–17, 122, 137, 155–8 definition 16, 18, 22–8, 113 Evangelical 24, 29–35, 46–8, 53–60, 83, 155 extreme sports 24, 25–6, 85–109, 115– 16, 121–2, 128–30, 157–8 homology 25, 27–8, 59, 95, 141–2, 155 music 24–8, 43, 44–6, 64–6, 74–8, 81–3, 130–2, 135, 137, 139, 140–5, 155–6 resistance 16–17, 18, 22, 23, 24–5, 26, 32, 34–5, 39, 138, 142, 155 studies 7, 10–12, 15–35, 37, 43, 44, 46, 51, 59, 95, 142–3, 144–5, 155 style 20, 24–5, 27–8, 32, 59, 137, 142–5, 155–6 (see also Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; counterculture; neotribe; post-subculture) surfing 1–2, 7, 10, 30, 85–7, 89–109, 115, 117, 120–2, 124–5, 127–30, 133, 135, 157–8, 159–61 commitment 121–2, 124–5, 127–30, 133, 135, 157 Evangelical attitudes 94–8, 100–1, 104–5, 107, 122, 124–5, 129 evangelism and ministry 1, 30, 86, 87, 89–96, 106–9, 124, 127–30, 157–8, 159–61 gender 10, 87 race 10, 87, 104–5 spirituality 2, 90, 93–6, 108, 127, 157–8 youth development 87, 101–8

196

196

Index

(see also Christian Surfers (organization); windsurfing) Swartz, Sharlene 9, 106, 118 Taylor, Bron 89–91, 94–5, 108, 133, 157 Taylor, Charles 35, 37, 41–4, 47, 49, 59, 62, 66–8, 72–3, 95, 116, 157 ter Haar, Gerrie 124, 150, 151 Thompson, John J. 39, 40 Thompson, Stacy 35, 44–5, 51, 68, 78, 156–7 Thornton, Sarah 26–7, 44–5 Tomlin, Chris 162 Tooth & Nail Records 40, 54, 70 Turner, Daniel 85, 105–6 Turner, Edith 90–1, 95, 131 Turner, Victor 89–91

Weber, Max 18, 89, 101, 109, 116, 119, 122 Weidman, Lisa 87, 89, 97, 100 Wheaton, Belinda 25–7, 88, 114–15, 121–2 Wilkins, Amy C. 29, 33 Williams, J. Patrick 42, 45–6, 51 Willis, Paul 24, 25, 165 Wilson, Bryan R. 9 windsurfing 27, 114–16, 121–2 witchcraft 148–51 Woodhead, Linda 21, 42, 95, 116 worship music 4, 11, 40, 58–9, 74, 130–1, 143, 155, 162 punk 53, 57–8, 60, 69, 72–3, 98, 143

Ultimate Fighting Championship 98–9 Underoath 28, 41, 64–5, 141 United Kingdom 1, 15, 23, 27, 63 103, 161 religion 1, 9, 76, 79, 92, 117 United States of America 1, 17–18, 22–3, 62, 67, 83, 116, 151–2, 162 music 1–2, 3, 39–41, 46–7, 54, 66, 70, 75–7, 81, 135, 137–9, 140–2, 144, 148–9, 150, 151–3, 162 religion 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 20–1, 30–1, 32–3, 47, 63–4, 67, 76–7, 86, 93, 96, 103, 116–17, 128, 136–9, 140–1, 142, 148–9, 151–2, 162 sport 92–3, 102, 108, 114, 161 universities (see students)

Yinger, J. Milton 15, 17–20 youth class/inequality 5–6, 18, 23–4, 26, 32, 34–5, 87, 104–5, 106, 112, 118, 161–2 definition 5–7 development projects 8, 10, 86–7, 89, 101–8, 115, 159–60 groups 6, 31, 76 hierarchies 32–3, 88–9, 108 ministry 6, 8, 21, 31–3, 38–9, 77–8, 81, 82–3, 88–90, 95–7, 99–101, 118, 128, 130, 138, 161–2 rebellion 6, 20, 97, 100 socialization 9, 101–2, 136–8, 152, 157 studies 5–7, 10, 15, 22–9, 32–3, 44 (see also generational conflict/divide; South Africa, youth; students) youth subculture (see subculture)

Watson, Nick 88, 98, 106

zines (see magazines)

198

20

20