Reading Tara Isabella Burton’s explanatory essay in the New York Times about the millennial underground movement she calls “Weird Christianity,” this old boomer felt a strong sense of déjà vu. In another time of cultural upheaval, in the early 1970s, I was pulled out of militant atheism (itself bred by a conservative Evangelical upbringing) by exposure to the self-same traditional Christian aesthetics celebrated by Burton as an antidote to a “crisis of modernity and the liberal-capitalist faith in individualism.”
Once again, young people are recognizing that Christianity can be countercultural rather than a way to give divine sanction to conventional secular society. And the art, music, and worship practices associated with premodern Christianity are sufficiently alien to secular sensibilities that they can feel “punk” and a refuge from the failed self-confidence of modern life so evident in a global pandemic.
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