COUNTER-CULTURAL CHRISTIANITY PART 1: Reactionary Religion

The Christian culture I grew up in did not want to be known as “religious.” We wanted to be all about relationship - not religion. The idea was that if we built our lives on the foundation of a relationship with Christ, everything else would flow from that because we would be guided by Biblical principles and the direction of the Holy Spirit. It was a great goal, but in practice, we fell far short.

We started defining our Christian sub-culture in reaction to secular culture. In our attempt to be “in the world but not of it,” instead of letting our standards flow from our relationship, we started looking at pop-culture and defining ourselves in contrast to it. The farther the secular pendulum swung in one direction, the farther our “religious” pendulum swung in the other. We became a very reactionary religion. High-contrast Christianity came across to the world as legalistic, judgmental, and cultish because it was all of those things.

I have no idea what life was really like in the 50s, but I grew up in an era where the 50s were lauded as the perfect merger of secular and sacred. Everyone seemed to have common ideals and American pop-culture was a wholesome utopia where everyone could enjoy the same fashion, entertainment, and music. Standards of conduct were seemingly universally accepted and Christians and non-Christians alike could participate equally in cultural definers like dress, dating, and dancing.

Then came two decades of decadence so that by the 80s, Christians had defined their own culture to be anything but what was acceptable in the mainstream. Modesty culture, purity culture, courtship, quiver-full, Christian school/homeschool, homestead, no secular music, no dating, no dancing, no kissing, no movie theaters, no television, Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, Religious Right... And “religious” was right. It is exactly what we had become.

It didn’t take the “world” long to notice. The 1984 film, Footloose, with Kevin Bacon, highlighted the cultural trend among Christians to be completely reactionary. But we never saw Footloose so it would take us another few decades to come to the same conclusion.

A decade ago, I quietly homeschooled my children because I didn’t want to be stereotyped and I didn’t want them stereotyped. I wanted no association with the “religious” culture that is often packaged with homeschooling and is fully embodied by the Duggar family. The Duggars are sincere, well-meaning people, but I had been there and done that, and didn’t want it for my children.

Today, I am proud to be associated with a homeschool culture that I think has soundly defeated those stereotypes. On the last day of classes for this semester, several of our teens ditched class to take part in a photo-shoot. It was a miserably windy day but they found an area right in front of the dumpster enclosure with no wind, and they made it the most beautiful place on campus. They are modest without modesty culture, moral without purity culture, normal, balanced, fun-loving, God-loving, others-loving young ladies. They don’t all play the violin and most have never won a spelling bee. These are all 7th-9th graders (ages 12-15) but the photographer is 17 and I am so proud of the way our older students intentionally build-up the younger ones. I can’t look at these pictures without crying. I am so proud of our students and so privileged to be part of re-defining our culture.