It's In the Code, Ep. 4: Cool Kid Church
Summary
What is “cool kid church?” It’s the gleaming church-that-doesn’t-look-like-a-church in suburbia. It’s the church with the pastor who’s just a “cool guy” talking with the congregation. It’s the church of modern consumer capitalist America. It’s the church of American suburbia and the upper middle class, preaching a Christian message that provides meaning without producing undue comfort. It’s the church that emphasizes a “relevant” Christianity that will speak to you “no matter where you are on your spiritual journey.” But what do we find as we decode cool kid church? That’s the topic of this episode.
Transcript
Dan Miller: Hello, and welcome to Straight White American Jesus and the series "It's in the Code." My name is Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. As always, Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the Capps Center at UCSB, so we thank them.
And as always, I thank all of you who listen to us, who support us in any number of ways. With this series, "It's in the Code: Decoding American Religion, American Christianity," I want to continue thanking those who keep the ideas coming in. Again, I want this to be something that is kind of a collaborative project, right? As people send in the ideas and thoughts and questions they have about how to make sense of the kinds of things that appear in American religion—the way that American, let's say, religionists talk.
I've been really, again, just overwhelmed by the responses I've gotten from folks. You can reach me at danielmillerswaj@gmail.com—getting all my emails mixed up there—so danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. I continue to receive these and look through them and sort through them.
I think I mentioned in the previous episode I was recovering from COVID and have largely recovered from that, so thank you to everybody for the kind thoughts. But it has put me even further behind in responding to emails. So even if I don't get a chance to respond to everything that people send me, please know that I'm seeing them and kind of sorting them and compiling them and trying to respond to them in the series.
So with that in mind, our theme for this episode is what I'm calling "Cool Kid Church." This episode, this theme, focuses on an issue that several of you have raised. It's also an issue that's near and dear to the heart of my co-host, Brad Onishi. And again, it's what I'm calling "Cool Kid Church."
What do I mean by this? What I'm describing—I want to try to paint a picture for a few minutes here of a very particular expression of Christianity. For a lot of you out there, this will be familiar, and for some of you who've maybe never participated in it, it might still be familiar. I'm hoping that I can sort of paint this image and you'll say, "Oh, I've seen that. I get that. I hear that." And for those of you who might have been participating in this kind of Christianity, I think this will ring true for you as well.
It's not always a suburban phenomenon, but I associate it strongly with that. If you've been in any suburb outside almost any major city in America, you'll probably be familiar with this phenomenon. This is especially true in parts of the country with the kind of sprawl that moves out.
Or if you're in a—I used to live in Washington State, in Western Washington. You've got kind of the main cities of Seattle, and then Tacoma, and then Olympia, and they're all spaced out, but basically things just sort of sprawl in between the three of them, so that it's like one big, long strip. It's that kind of phenomenon, right? Anywhere where you live where there's that—where there's a strong focus on entrepreneurship and startups of different kinds. This is the kind of cultural context that we're talking about: suburbia, sprawl, startups, pretty affluent, fair amount of money flowing through and so forth.
When I talk about "Cool Kid Church," the first thing to say is that these are churches that don't look like churches, and they pride themselves on not looking like churches. This is a part of their marketing—and I use the word "marketing" intentionally. These churches market. They aim to present themselves to a very particular demographic and to communicate particular things in that way. They pride themselves in not looking like churches.
You might hear ads for them on the radio. In between the dentist who tells you how friendly and painless dental care can be, and the health club pitching its latest discounts and deals, there'll be a trendy, happy-sounding, cool-sounding ad for the church. "It's not really like a church, you know. Just come in your regular clothes, and this isn't your granddaddy's church. This isn't your parents' church," and so forth.
As you drive through the American suburban landscape, you'll see these places, and they'll range from the mega-churches—the really, really, really big churches that might have campuses that sprawl across acres with lots of different buildings, or maybe it's a converted warehouse—to more storefront kinds of churches. But none of them are going to be in traditional church buildings.
Many might not have any markings of a church at all outside of maybe a cross in the name somewhere. Like the name has a "T" in it—maybe it'll be a cross—but it may not even have that. Very nondescript, very kind of just an almost corporate look to it. They'll have names like EPIC Church, or Just the Fellowship, or Wave Church, or Harvest Life—these kinds of names.
And that thing, EPIC Church, that name in particular, is one that I throw out to Brad, my co-host, because I know that's the kind of thing that just gets all under his skin. So maybe you've seen this—maybe you've driven down the interstate somewhere, and you look off to the side, and there's that big building, lots of cars on a Sunday morning, and it says EPIC Church, or Event Church, or just some sort of vaguely intense-sounding, action, sporty kind of name. That's what we're talking about.
Most of these churches—a lot of them will be non-denominational. That means they're not formally affiliated with a denomination, like the United Methodists or the Baptists or something like that. Some of them will be denominationally affiliated congregations. They are almost always conservative. They're almost always evangelical—and we're going to talk some more about that, I think, in the next episode. But they won't necessarily advertise that.
And if they are part of a denomination, you're going to have to look really hard to find out. I've spent time on the websites of some of these churches, and a couple in particular that I was looking at for another project once—I couldn't even figure out if they were denominationally affiliated. I ended up going to the denominational website for the region, looking in their directory of churches, found the church to find out that it had a denominational affiliation.
So it's all part of wanting to present themselves as not too churchy, as the church that doesn't feel like a church. And so if they're affiliated with a denomination, especially a big one like, say, the Southern Baptists—Southern Baptists, which exist in all 50 states—maybe they're in the part of the country where that "Southern" word is not going to ring the way that they want it to. So they're going to really downplay that denominational affiliation to the point that you may not even find it at all.
If you do, by the way, if you really want to get in the weeds with this—if you go into their website, and they'll usually have a section on "What We Believe," sometimes that "What We Believe" will be taken from the sort of confessional statement of a particular denomination. That's one way to find out sort of where they live denominationally.
But the point is that all of this is about being the church that doesn't feel too churchy. The idea is they want to reach out to those who are known as the quote-unquote "unchurched," meaning people who aren't going to go to church—people who they think are going to be turned off by traditional churches and traditional church buildings and pews and choirs and things like that. So everything about the church, including its name, including its affiliation, everything is going to be built to be what they think of as more—the phrasing is "seeker-sensitive"—drawing in those people who might not go to a regular church.
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