Christian Hardcore youth believe that punk makes them better Christians by daring them to be “authentic” about evangelicalism. During private interviews, group conversations, and at ministry gatherings, they suggest that punks have something to offer all Christians. In an interview with me at UU, Paul, a hardcore musician, explains how punks help him be the Christian that Christ called him to be:
Some of our best friends in the hardcore scene were completely opposite of what we believed. But we loved on them the way that Christ would love on them and we built a friendship [and] to this day they might not believe what we believe but we still love them like Christ. We’re still close friends with them. We’ll still talk to them on the regular and they respect where we stand because they saw that we lived out what we meant. You know, what we said we believed on stage, we practiced off stage.
According to Paul, an authentic Christian strives to be like Jesus, which means that they must witness to people even when they do not see immediate results (i.e. conversions). When Paul says that his secular hardcore friends “saw that we lived out what we meant,” he says this to
prove that he is a genuine Christian, a person who puts love before judgment like Jesus did. Like Paul, other subcultural Christians say that they “love on” secular punks, which is another way of saying that they continue to care for nonbelievers, especially when they balk at the idea of accepting Christ as their personal savior, make fun of them for being Christian, or “backslide” into sin. In fact, rather than see hostility from the secular community as a deterrent, my
interviewees indicate that it makes them feel closer to Christ, because like Jesus, they are “persecuted” for their beliefs.
Christian punks believe punk culture is good for them because it makes them accountable to Christ and Christ only. Interviewees complain that the church shelters youth from secular temptations. For example, youth groups offer a laundry list of dos and don’ts. They believe this is counterproductive to Christianity because it trains young people to rely on authorities, instead of themselves, to decipher what is right and what is wrong. If young people depend on youth group leaders, pastors, and parents for moral guidance, Christian punks claim they will never mature in their faith. This is because authority figures essentially obstruct their ability to take responsibility for their actions. Consider, for instance, what Jacob, a hardcore musician, told me.
The church teaches kids how to be safe. Don’t drink, it’s dangerous. Don’t have sex before you’re married. Don’t cuss. All these things that are like ─ those are bad but they don’t have anything to do with Jesus. Like don’t drink; Jesus drank. Someone died for you, and because of that, you get to live. But they don’t tell young people that because they don’t think they can handle it.
Jacob feels that the protectionist tendencies of the church are bad because these assume that young people cannot hear the voice of God on their own. Later in the interview with me, he goes
himself to these kids.” According to his logic, the church is mistaken to teach youth that obedience to rules, not piety, is central to faith. Jacob believes young people grow in their faith in God when they have their beliefs tested by non-Christian situations and people. That is why he thinks participating in secular hardcore culture will cultivate piety. The Christian youth who participate in punk culture look to God, not church authorities, for moral and spiritual direction.20
Through the lens of punk, Christian Hardcore youth say they can clearly see the established church for what it truly is: hypocritical, unjust, and insincere. Rob and Vicki, a married couple of “urban missionaries” from the U.S., used punk media to graphically illustrate why Christians should care about London’s “underbelly” (Figure 3-1). To get support for this unusual ministry, they put together a polished, hand-screened zine titled “London Regenerates” (Schellert 2011). In it, Rob and Vicki tell (potential) ministry sponsors that, “We’ve put this into ‘zine’ format to give you a hands-on experience of how a lot of our friends here communicate through creative self-publication.” The zine pairs a story about the forgiving love of Christ alongside snapshots of the alternative looking couple laughing and smiling together. In
subsequent pages, Rob and Vicki pair images of graffiti and squatters with mission statements, hand-drawn hearts, and personal prayers. Through this amalgamation of imagery, they inform readers that God called them to befriend nonconformists, the ones who step out of the herd. The zine reads,
20 The sentiment that a mystical connection to the Holy Spirit can be made individually has a long tradition in American Christianity. In the mid-1600s, Anne Hutchinson argued that she could hear the voice of God and interpret scripture without the help of Puritan ministers. In much the same way that Christian punk rocker Jacob argues that the church is mistaken to put more emphasis on appropriate actions than the voice of God, Hutchinson believed that the church was wrong to suggest that a person could earn their salvation through a “covenant of human efforts” because she believed that salvation came from a covenant of grace, an inward experience of the Holy Spirit (Hollinger and Capper 2006: 28).
Many of the people we love to work with are considered the ‘freaks’ of society – expressing radical lifestyles and philosophies, oftentimes scorning the mainstream, and generally religion. Yet we know that Jesus embraces the marginalized, not because of their peculiarness, but because they’re equally loved. Frequently the Bible even shows Jesus siding with those who are different because they’ve caught on to something that most of society hasn’t: there’s more to life than what advertisers and sometimes even religion leads us to believe.
Next to the picture of Jesus holding the black sheep, the zine illustrates who the “freaks’” are: anarchists, squatters, activists, and alternative music subcultures. Notably, Rob and Vicki not only use the zine to teach the church about punk culture and raise money for their ministry, they also use it to credit the “freaks” for making them better Christians. As punk ministers, they have learned that it is Christ-like to challenge the status-quo (in this case, capitalist and religious institutions) and appreciate people “where they are,” as Jesus Christ calls them to do. The image of Jesus with black sheep symbolizes the principles of Christian punk: Christians must embrace difference because Jesus created difference and asks Christians to ‘love’ those who do not, cannot or will not conform to the mainstream.
As this section on ‘Christian Hardcore Beliefs’ shows, Christian Hardcore youth use punk ideas about individualism to defy religious institutions and reconfigure traditional Protestant evangelical beliefs about the ‘calling.’ From their perspective, punk is a matter of God: God created them to be punk and ‘He’ looks out for them as punk. As they see it, punk makes them more authentic in their spirituality than church does because it pushes them to listen to God, not religious authorities for divine direction. In effect, they believe punk does not rip them away from God; it actually makes them more Christ-like.