Christianity is Not Cool

A friendly reminder

I was not a cool kid, in the conventional sense of “cool.” I listened to, watched, and read more or less whatever my parents liked. I labored to please them and experienced much angst in times when I’d displeased them. Over time, I would develop my own tastes and repertoires, but it’s probably fair to say my uncool incubation period was more prolonged than for most children who didn’t grow up in a particular niche. And even later, many things I gravitated to remained distinctly Mom and Dad-coded.

Among my early uncool loves were some artists working in the space of Christian adult contemporary music, which enjoyed its day in the sun before being consigned to the bargain bin by newer fads. Like the mainstream work it emulated, it was never high art even at its best, but bits of it retain nostalgic purchase for me. The most-awarded of these artists was Steven Curtis Chapman, who perfected a winning blend of pop, country, and very soft rock. Perhaps his best-known tune is the popular wedding song “I Will Be Here,” written for his wife during a difficult moment in their marriage.

Chapman projected a certain classically wholesome image that was highly marketable in his milieu. Sometimes that image could serve as a facade for people in that scene, but for others, like Chapman, what you saw was what you got. He passed through the decades unscathed by scandal or apostasy, although not unscathed by deep tragedy. He and his wife have written openly about her chronic depression and about the devastating loss of their youngest adopted daughter to a freak accident in 2008. I remember being deeply affected as a sensitive teen by that tragedy, which unfolded as major headline news in the Christian media world. The way Chapman (and his family) balanced their grief with his fame remains awe-inspiring to me.

I thought of him for the first time in a while the other day when I came across this clip from the archives of the Howard Stern show. In context, Stern and the gang are riffing on bits of interview footage collected by John Melendez (nicknamed “Stuttering John”) at the Grammy Awards. The point of this exercise was for Melendez to elicit “artist on the street” reactions with somewhat odd or unexpected questions, so that Stern and friends could replay the clips later and, in Stern’s words, “bust their balls.”

Chapman happened to be at this particular awards ceremony, nominated in the pop/gospel category. Melendez accosted him, and after a few fluff questions like “Are you related to Mark David Chapman?” and “Do you actually have a record contract?” asked “What do you think of Howard Stern?” In the studio, Stern and friends start to snicker as Chapman takes a very long, uncomfortable pause. They begin to mock his soft southern accent, his hesitancy, his blatant wholesomeness. They know he’s trying to find a graceful way to say that Stern is not his tea, and the struggle amuses them. “I think he’s gonna say that you’re a lost man.” “I think he’s gonna save me,” Stern predicts. “If I just pray to Jesus Christ a lot, everything will be fine.”

Chapman finally delivers a gentle though firm rebuke about the responsibility to use a media platform well, which in his opinion Stern doesn’t do. Things devolve in the studio from there. As a friend was noting, it’s impossible to quote all the dialogue here without sounding like one of those corny Christian radio shows we uncool kids used to listen to on Sundays. Our hero walks down the street, minding his own business, when the neighborhood bully blocks the path to sneer in atheist, “Where ya goin’ dweeb? Church or somethin’?” Yet this is Stern’s actual chosen persona, and he keeps on playing it, even as Chapman proceeds to demolish his schtick with pure Christian kindness, ending with a simple gospel presentation. In fact, it’s as if Stern’s nastiness is directly proportional to that kindness, like Gollum emerging from his cave to squint and rage at the sun. “We hates it, precious! We hates its nasssty yellow face!”

Of course, Stern had a pink slip to do this, because Chapman represented a tribe on whom it was always open season for bullies. This is why I’m less convinced than some by Aaron Renn’s choice to mark the beginning of “negative world” for American evangelical Christians at c. 2014. Renn has his reasons, and there’s a logic to them, but for all that he sympathizes with evangelicals, his work remains very much the product of an American elite. You couldn’t have lived through the noughties, the 90s, the 80s while evangelical (which Renn didn’t, as an urban adult convert) and not have felt that the country was already quite distinctly “negative” towards you.