Anyone looking for the spirit of American counterculture - as a romance, identity or marketing principle - need look no further than the nearest evangelical bookstore, youth ministry or clothing line. A decade and a half after Nirvana's success exposed the strength of secular alt-culture tribes, their evangelical counterparts are having their own coming out in rebel gestures that sometimes recall the early church, sometimes, well, early Nirvana.
The article goes on to talk about "subversive" Christian movements like the intentional communities, the new monasticism and the emerging church. But it mixes these movements with more enterprising efforts to market Christianity as "Xtreme," dude.
The article quotes Edmund Gibbs, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary, who rightly says: "If evangelicalism means a commitment to the radical doctrine of Jesus, you have to be a subversive. Jesus was a subversive." But is goes on to describe "the increasingly clamorous Christian marketplace," where "rebellion is where you find it: in full-contact skateboard Bible study groups; in Christian punk, Goth and hip-hop CDs; 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, Missouri."
And that about sums it up. Slap a cool title on a run-of-the-mill sermon or church service, wear some black eyeliner and a T-shirt from Hot Topic, put some Green Day on the CD player, get a cross or crown of thorns tattooed on yourself, and call yourself a rebel for Jesus.