Continuing on the theme of “lowlife authenticity,” Phil Johnson has a great post on that subject this morning.
When anyone takes a shot at this foolishness, the cry usually goes up that conservative Christians are sticking their heads in the sand, need to get a clue, and learn to get out of their pious shell. We need to learn, apparently, how to be relevant while living in the contemporary culture. But it is funny that nobody urges church members to greater relevance by, say, shopping at WalMart. That’s contemporary.
The problem with the advocates of lowlife authenticity is not that they want us to be relevant. The problem is that they do not know what it means to actually be relevant. The relevance of contemporary cool is an evanescent thing. C.S. Lewis once said that whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date. What is currently in according to the dogmas of cool will have, on average, a shelf life of three days.
So the problem is an almost serene lack of awareness of the forces that are driving them. The issue is not this artifact or that one. The issue is that these lockstep rebels have no idea that they are wearing uniforms. And the pretentiousness of these folks — the movie will be The Attack of the Clone Rebels — prevents them from seeing that what they mostly do, all day long, is conform, adapt, copy, mimic, and submit — all in the name of striking a blow for individuality and the rebel soul. Somebody needs to tell these people that the rebel soul is three hundred years old and now qualifies as a geezer. Just imagine this for a thought experiment, one that will illustrate all the principles involved — walk up to a young lady with her eyebrow pierced and say, “Ooo! What an outrageous idea! However did you think of it?”