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Tuesday, September 19, 2006 Lauren Sandler has given me permission to run a short excerpt from her amazing new book, Righteous, Dispatches From The Evangelical Youth Movement Righteous By Lauren Sandler I ventured out on the American road to seek insight into what I suspected was a mounting Evangelical youth movement. My travels were purely a journalist's journey-I simply wanted to climb over the stockpiles of our new Christian cavalry and to bear witness to a population of new fundamentalists with the future, both theirs and ours, unfurled before them. Criss-crossing the country, I slept on church floors, camped out with activists, and endured to more Christian hard-core music and ecstatic testimonies than I care to remember, lingering and listening in places where I was wanted and where I wasn't. I smelled the sourness of teen sweat in frenzied megachurches, broke bread in young couples' homes, and tasted my own tears in numerous late-night discussions with friends whose pastors call me the enemy. Shattering the perceived blue state- red state dichotomy, epicenters of the Evangelical youth movement are swelling madly even in leftist zip codes of cities like Boston, Denver and Seattle. Within this movement lies something as old as America itself, and as terrifying and alluring as anything Orwell predicted; something that is at once political, emotional, deeply anti-intellectual, and more galvanized than you can imagine. I call this population of fierce young evangelicals the Disciple Generation. The Disciple Generation is an ever-growing population of people ages 15 to 35 who are equally obsessed with Christ and with culture as a means to an evangelical end. People within this age bracket are defined by a shared culture, whether Christian or secular: if you own an iPod, know Green Day is a band and not a Nader rally, and ever considered getting a tattoo, you're probably within the boundary. This is an age group whose transgressive actions -- regardless of faith or demographic, whether in the form of an inked bicep, high school detention, or a fundamentalist credo -- are easily slapped with the label of rebellion. But for Christians within this generation, behavior and beliefs are unlike those of any archetypal rebellion that has come before. For every member of the Disciple Generation raised secular in a car or a commune, or had a lesbian mom or a pothead dad, plenty more grew up in traditional Christian homes, whether that affiliation took the form of an occasional Sunday service or a father who was an active church elder. There's a three-piece suit for every freshly shaved mohawk in this subculture. Yet wherever they began their individual walk with Christ, and however they choose to outwardly identify themselves within the subculture, members of this movement all talk about a meaningless and bankrupt society; a world that offers no anodyne culture outside their faith. Their lives are in fact a criticism of our own. This youth movement isn't one that merely defines itself against its parents' generation; it exists in opposition to all culture and history that excludes evangelicalism. To young evangelicals, our secular world is devoid of the type of love they seek, not parental love or fraternal love or even erotic love, but an even bigger love -- a love called agape. When Christians describe God's love for his children this is the word they invoke, a love so powerful one is moved to proclaim it on car bumpers and coffee mugs. Hand in hand with certainty, agape is what this generation longs for today -- a love that will soothe the pain of breakups and breakouts, heal the wounds from shattered families, make bearable the awareness that we are each a solitary speck in an illimitable world. It's the emotion that secularism, enraptured by its logic and empiricism, refuses to engage. These new disciples have ripped down their parents' white steeples and torn apart the lumber to build a half-pipe or a stage for a rock show. Christian youth is de-institutionalizing the American church for the first time in about eighteen-hundred years. This Evangelical movement isn't just about internally held principles, it's a matter of lifestyle. Young Evangelicals look so similar to denizens of every other strain of youth culture that, aside from their religious tattoos, the difference between them and the unsaved is invisible. In rural Illinois, a guy in a stigmata-depicting T-shirt that said "BODY PIERCING SAVED MY LIFE" told me that he had no doubt that Jesus would come back fronting a hard-core band. In Denver, a crowd of skate punks disagreed—the Lord was surely returning with a skateboard in hand. In Seattle, a father-to-be in his early twenties grinned as he described the Christian world his child would be born into. "It's gotten to the point that when I see someone covered in great tattoos, I assume they're Christian," he told me. "This isn't about imagining the future for us. We're already here. This is already ours." It's hard to imagine an aspect of secular culture lacking a Christian counterpart: one can choose from Christian hip-hop ministries, Christian military intelligence classes, or Christian diet groups in this mirror society. Mainstream radio plays Christian indie-pop. At high schools across the country the in-crowd proselytizes to the out-crowd. A majority of teens and twenty-somethings, many of whom don't even self-identify as born-again yet, scoff at the very notion of evolution, preferring instead to believe that something as astonishing as human life, or the existence of our galaxy must surely be the plan of an intelligent designer. The Evangelical culture is in place, and it's expanding every day to swallow a generation whole. ** Purchase The Book posted by Stephen Elliott 6:20 PM | link | |
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"Any true love story, if told with the urgency and animal intelligence of love, isn't for the fainthearted. On every page of this profound, distilled work of art, Stephen Elliott wrestles with the unknown and unspoken essences of love, and articulates that unknown so beautifully, with such clear-eyed fearlessness... Imagine a glass of pure water with one drop of blood hanging in its center, about to dissolve... Then drink it and be transformed." -Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City "There's an emotional courage to these stories, and a sense of urgency, that are thrilling to encounter. Elliott writes as if his life depended on each sentence. It is not overstating the case to say that he does for the BDSM community in this book what Denis Johnson did for lost druggies in Jesus' Son." - Steve Almond, The Believer Magazine Best of the year: Salon.com, San Francisco Chronicle Reviews: Salon.com, LA Weekly, The Believer Excerpts: My Stripper Year, Just Always Be Good Purchase from Amazon, Powells, Cleis, and your local bookstore 
"Happy Baby is surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism, and drugs." - Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review Best of the year: Village Voice, Salon.com, Chicago New City, The Journal News Awards: Finalist Young Lions Award, Silver Medal California Book Award Reviews: The New York Times, Salon.com, Village Voice Excerpts: Stalking Gracie Part 3 Purchase from Amazon, Powell's, and your local bookstore 
"Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Richard Ben Cramer: the great, all-American genre of the political campaign in extenso (and in extremis) has had its Homers and Boswells. To that list we can now add Stephen Elliott. Hilarious, strange, electrifyingly written, and heart-pumpingly idealistic, Looking Forward to It wins every literary caucus and primary in a landslide." -Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea Best of the year: Village Voice Reviews: New York Magazine, New York Times Excerpts: The Dennis Kucinich Polka, A John Edwards Almanac Purchase from Amazon, Powell's (cheap!), and your local bookstore 
"A Life Without Consequences was harrowing, hard as nails, brutal, and soaring. Stephen Elliott has to be watched, because he knows things almost no one else could." - Dave Eggers, author of A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius and What Is The What Excerpt: Adlai Stevenson House Reviews: Austin American Statesman Purchase from Amazon |
