Outside Popular Evangelical Culture

I have found evangelical popular culture to be generally uninteresting for most of my 30+ years under that designation. If we take the simplest view, that this subculture is descended from both the Camp Meeting and the Renewal/Jesus Freak strains of Christianity, then I suppose I was there for the early parts of that mixing in the 70's. At that time I was up on what books were coming out, what songs and musicians were popular, what conferences were springing up, and what was hot for Raising the Evangelical Child (That would be Carey Landry, Psalty, Arch Books, and Dobson, BTW). We liked some parts better than others, and would pick and choose, of course, but we were up on these things. As my children all spent at least some years in Christian schools, and we have been Covenanters most of those years (a bridge church between evangelical and mainstream), and our friends have been at decidedly evangelical and fundamentalist churches, I remain familiar with a lot of what is going on in that group. My wife and children are far more familiar with these things.

I have gradually become estranged from the cultural aspects. My theology is still evangelical in essence, though we have always had a more liturgical bent than is common. But not only do I no longer know what the new books and the new performers are, I find that when I am exposed to them I pretty much don't like them. I am increasingly concerned that style is pushing out substance. It is easy to think that when the style does not please, of course; but it is also easy to not notice that when the style does please.

The style of the mainstream denominations neither pleases nor displeases me. As their gradual abandonment of some essentials of the faith in favor of more trendy ideas does displease me, I feel no pull in that direction.

One would think that my alienation would be sharp, but I don't experience it that way. As with other things, I am more puzzled than annoyed.