A Winter Podcast for Youth Group Dropouts
Introducing "Apocryfun" — my new podcast with Roxy Stone from Religion News Service.
My wife said something in this interview that has stuck with me: You don’t realize a scene is a scene when you’re in it. I wasn't sure it was true when she said it but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think she was onto something. For example, when I was going to youth group in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, I didn’t really think of it as a scene. It was just something I did — something pretty much everyone I knew did. But looking that whole thing over in the rearview mirror, it’s become clearer to me what a unique era of American Christianity that time was and how big the shadow it cast has ended up being. That’s a shadow I’m trying to interrogate with the help of my friend Roxy Stone in a new podcast from Religion News Service called Aprocryfun.
The shadow was a product of multifarious forces. A booming economy, the rapid suburbification of White America, a pre-social media myopia about the social issues that would come to define our 20s and the pre-9/11 ennui you see in movies like American Beauty (terrible) and Fight Club (which I used to love, then hated, and now am kind of back to liking). America’s white churches, sensing the existential malaise that only comes from having all but the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy slaked, reacted by pushing what I call “the New Prosperity Gospel” in which health and wealth is swapped out for purpose and meaning. Maybe the reason Kevin Spacey couldn’t keep his hands off Mena Suvari is that he just didn’t have enough purpose — someone only Jesus can give. Armed with this message, churches sprouted across the suburbs like weeds — white, affluent, seeker sensitive and ready to give your nice, comfortable, well-insured and relatively stable life the one thing it didn’t have: purpose.
They were salad days for the Christian publishing industry, which flooded the market with a bunch of books contrasting the boring life you currently had with the wild, revolutionary life God wanted you to have. (“revolutionary” meaning …I’m not totally sure). Purpose Driven Life, Wild at Heart, Prayer of Jabez, Desiring God and the rest all built on that C.S. Lewis quote about making mudpies in a slum, if they didn’t reference it explicitly. Even I Kissed Dating Goodbye was premised on the idea that your romantic life was mid unless you baptized it with the fire of medieval courtship.
These books are, to me, the clearest totems we have of that age. And as I’ve gone back to look into them, it’s been interesting to see how dated they now feel. They’ve been disavowed by the exvangelical set for obvious reasons. But modern conservatives drag these books too, for “winsomeness” and “appealing to the culture” and such. (I read a piece from a very big conservative think tank that took Wild at Heart to task for — get this — empowering women too much.)
For youth group kids, these messages were given a little adolescent pizazz. They still appealed to a sense of aimlessness, and said the life Jesus offered was one of being a “world changer” or a “radical” or, of course, a “Jesus Freak.”
So I thought it might be informative to examine these books in light of contemporary conservatism. Could seeing where these books’ legacies ended up help us reverse diagnose just what in the sam hill happened here? I texted Roxy as much and she texted back the last thing I expected: Let’s do it. So here we are.
The first two episodes are live now at RNS, and you can listen to us discuss Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz and John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart at your leisure. New episodes drop on Thursdays. I’m really excited about some of the books we’ve got coming up.
While I do a lot of freelance podcast work, I’ve never considered myself a particularly good podcaster, but fans of Roxy’s Saved By the City podcast with Katelyn Beaty know she’s got a knack for it. Hopefully, her talents elevate whatever I’ve got to offer. And if she can’t, our trusty producer Jonathan Woodward is there to edit our conversation into something that makes sense.
For the time being, this is a limited series. But stay tuned on that front.
Really excited to see you dig into all this with Roxy. My upbringing were late-00’s, so getting into the “scary Obama years” while trying to figure out faith stuff was real weird as I look back on it now.
Also, don’t sell yourself short - always enjoyed you being on the Relevant podcasts, as well as all the Cape Town episodes. Glad to hear you again on something else!
“America’s white churches, sensing the existential malaise that only comes from having all but the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy slaked“ <this is really something! well said.