Hipster Xians in Brooklyn

If you didn’t get enough Jay Bakker from Joseph Huff-Hannon’s “Happy Hour Gospel” last week, be sure to check out our friend Nicole Greenfield’s new essay at Religion Dispatches: “Cooler than Thou: Will Hipsters Wreck Christianity?”

Bakker constantly reminds people in his sermons that his life and experience, his relationship with Jesus is no better than theirs. It is unclear whether Revolution will ever be the tight-knit, everyone-is-equal church community he envisions. Because even though people may be attracted to the message of grace, church in a bar, or to social justice, many ultimately go to see the rebellious son of Jim and Tammy Faye. It is his Christian star-power and his family history that will keep Jay Bakker in the spotlight, preventing him from being a normal hip and young preacher, a job he says any one of Revolution’s members can perform. “Your stories are just as special as mine,” he told an attentive audience soon after the release of Sundance Channel’s six-part documentary series in which he was prominently featured. “Any one of you could be up here doing this.”

But everyone in the place, including, it seemed, Bakker himself, knew that couldn’t be further from the truth. According to Brett McCracken, Bakker is one of the few pastors who strike the right balance between cool and Christianity. In a sea of wannabes, he’s the real thing.

In other hipster-y news, there’s a pretty lively discussion happening on our Facebook page right now about the following: “True or false: Until rather recently, calling yourself an atheist was something like calling yourself, today, a ‘hipster’; you may have been, but you wouldn’t admit it, either to yourself or to anyone else.” Inevitably, it has turned into a bit of a food-fight in the atheism wars.