Author: Brett McCracken

Title: Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide  

Publisher: Baker Books

The presenting problem, one which worries most pastors and religious observers, is our national decline in church attendance, especially among young adults.  Born and bred in a land of pragmatists, those same leaders and watchers are all asking the same question:  What are we doing wrong?  Perhaps we're not relevant enough.  We're not cool!  But is cool a worthy pursuit for Christ's church? Brett McCracken tackles the question in his well-researched, insightful, and entertaining book, Hipster Christianity:  When Church and Cool Collide.

McCracken first defines his term, Cool, as "an attractive attribute that embodies the existential strains to be independent, enviable, one-of-a-kind, and trailblazing."  "Hip" is the same as cool.  A hipster, then, is a "fashionable, young, independent-minded contrarian."   McCracken notes humanity's drive to be cool:  "We want recognition and elite status; we want to occupy places of invidious distinction."  We want to be ahead of the pack, leading the race.  However, the question soon arises whether such elite status can truly accommodate itself to the message of the Cross.  

Before addressing that concern, our author digs down to the historical roots of "hip," going as far back as Rousseau's egalitarian view of man:  "Wherever the well-bred aristocrat elevates as fashionable or desirable, the lowly hipster sets out to deny, deconstruct, and destroy."   McCracken follows this vessel across the Atlantic to America, "the country born to be hip." Where he traces the path of pop culture and the antithetical counter culture, the latter of which flowered briefly in the sixties, only to be co-opted and mass-produced by "the Man."  This, McCracken shows, has since been the fate of Cool—the fleeting province of a few, eventually swiped by consumerism.   That explains why yesterday's shocking rock is today's "contemporary."