Reformed Hipsters and the Normie Revolution
Reformed churches struggle to minister to two broad groups of people: blue-collar working class and Evangelical normies.
Why? While I’m sure there are multiple factors, I think the biggest is that many modern reformed Christians are a form of hipsters.
A hipster is a person who follows the latest trends in clothing and lifestyle, especially those regarded as outside the cultural mainstream.
For the Reformed Christian, the “latest trends” are more related to the trends within small subcultures that tend to be preoccupied with minority views or practices. These trends are almost always intellectual and aesthetic. While the things they are occupied with are old, their preoccupation with them is novel. Hence, it is still fadish at a personal level.
For example, several years ago, presuppositional apologetics was trendy with some reformed men. I say it was trendy because many of those same men who were preoccupied with “presup” later became preoccupied with Thomism. This is something akin to flipping from a Ron Paul fanboy to a Bernie Sanders fanboy. Presup got too popular (aka too mainstream). Therefore, they shifted to a new trend.
That is just one quick example off the top of my head. Anyhow…
Blue-collar working-class people tend to be much more practical. It’s not that they don’t care about the world of ideas. It’s more that they have little patience for abstractions that can’t immediately be applied. Obviously, there are problems with that as well. It can turn into anti-intellectualism and naked pragmatism. That said, the modern reformed tendency to be overly cerebral is a major turn-off for blue-collar folks. And I get that.
Evangelical normies tend to follow cultural and social conventions. They get a college degree, wait until graduation to get married, have a couple of kids, listen to popular music, do morning devotions, etc. In essence, they tend to play by the “normal rules.” Avoiding the fringe and the weird brings a high level of stability into their lives. However, their normie tendencies can slow them down in reacting to social change, especially if it seems weird. Hence, many normies have trouble integrating into reformed churches which emphasize forms and practices foreign to the mainstream.
Many Reformed churches are proud that the mainstream finds them weird. To them, it’s proof that they are faithful, but it also feeds into their cooler-than-you hipster mindset.
This all matters to me because there is a blue-collar and normie evangelical revolution. People who never would consider reformed Christianity just a few years ago suddenly are. They are open to ideas that they once found too fringe. They are open to preaching that once seemed too brainy. They are willing to consider older traditions.
But everyone has a threshold. If you are too weird or too theoretical, these folks will keep searching.
I think many reformed churches will miss out on this opportunity because they are hipsters. Being weird, fringy, and inaccessible is part of why they find their church so appealing. And they aren’t about to change that.
There is a huge opportunity for any church that can bring the riches of reformed Christianity to the everyday people.
The use of postmil as a marker of personal identity does seem to support your argument.
There is a movement of younger evangelicals toward reformed and orthodox churches but I don’t believe it is simply a pursuit of the novel or new. Certainly some are drawn to the more combative and political stance of Doug Wilson, Joel Webbon, and the like. I think it is deeper than that. Among many reformed church members, there is a large scale rejection of the secular and mainstream evangelical world. Most CREC churches are filled with large families with young children - the majority of which will be homeschooled or in a Classical Christian school. Many will be aspiring homesteaders. The church community itself is unique and strange relative to the mainstream and it is not just aesthetics.
“Many Reformed churches are proud that the mainstream finds them weird. To them, it’s proof that they are faithful, but it also feeds into their cooler-than-you hipster mindset.”
Well said, appreciate these thoughts. Ironically, in this way Reformed churches have at times most reminded me of the years I spent in an IFB church as a kid. Your words describe the difficulty I’ve had reconciling my alignment with reformed theology and the weirdness/discomfort that has felt strangely familiar to me environmentally.