Liberal Talk Radio

The Thursday Styles section reveals how mohawks are the new monk cut:

“There’s a charm in being the rebel,” said Edmund Gibbs, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of books on alternative Christian culture. Besides, he said, rebellion is consistent with the lessons of the Bible.

“If evangelicalism means a commitment to the radical doctrine of Jesus, you have to be a subversive. Jesus was a subversive.” In the increasingly clamorous Christian marketplace rebellion is where you find it: in full-contact skateboard Bible study groups; in Christian punk, Goth and hip-hop CD’s; in evangelical tattoo parlors; in sportswear brands like Extreme Christian Clothing and Fear God; in alt churches or ministries called Revolution, Scum of the Earth and Punk Girl; in a podcast called Xtreme Christianity, which turns out to be a fairly conventional weekly sermon delivered by a Baptist minister in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.

The caldron for this rebellion can be grass roots or institutional: the publisher of the rebellion handbook, Thomas Nelson, is among the world’s biggest producers of Bibles and inspirational books in English.

If this rebellion is not exactly the sexy shrug of Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” or of Kurt Cobain in “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the come-on is very much the same. “It’s the nonconformist’s view of Christianity,” Mr. Norman said. For a demographic that is used to being marketed to as rebels, he added, the new rebellion “is really a new installment of the original rebellion.” He continued: “It’s hearkening back to a raw faith not encumbered by the American dream, enslavement to a career or having to have two kids and a two-car garage. It gets to what’s worth living for.”

The claim of a Christian counterculture, which recurs periodically in American Protestantism, cuts in two directions, defining itself as counter to the consumer-driven secular culture and to mainstream church culture. For Shane Claiborne, 30, the author of “The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical” (Zondervan), it has meant living for a decade in a monastic community in North Philadelphia, whose members make their own clothing, refrain from sex outside marriage and minister to the homeless and poor.

And if this sounds a little bit like punk-rock social activism or straight-edge asceticism, maybe that just means that there’s a huge Puritannical streak in punk rock social activists and straight edgers:

In a storefront in the East Village, Kenny Mitchell, 34, leads a small church called Tribe, where he sometimes uses his D.J. equipment at services. Part of being a counterculture, Mr. Mitchell said, means working to counter some of the values that get mass marketed as rebellion, including the Big Three of the old counterculture: sex, drugs and the commercial trappings of rock ‘n’ roll.

“I got into punk,” Mr. Mitchell said, “because it was saying things that other people weren’t saying” — thumbing its nose at “the man.” He continued: “Now there is no man. You’ve got Jay-Z and Donald Trump all on the same team. There’s no point being countercultural if those are the alternatives.

“So we’re not against the culture. We’re in love with Jesus in this culture. But what we say is counter to the mass media blurb. Hanging out in the Lower East Side with a group of homeboy hip-hopper guys, if you get into their lives, they’re not spitting every 50-cent line, they’re looking at women or guys without fathers as broken people who need healing. What’s countercultural is the elements of their faith, why they’re not living the lifestyle of MTV, trying to attain the superstar status with cars and chicks, but working on community and healing.”