When I was in the seventh grade, I was over at my friend Aaron’s house. Aaron was a couple years older than me, and so by definition was cooler than me. Just before I left, he showed me a CD he just got: Ghoti Hook’s Sumo Surprise. It was my first introduction to punk music of any kind. It was fast, loud, and talked about God. I had never heard anything like it.
I begged him to let me borrow it. I brought it home to show my brothers, who didn’t seem to care for it much at all (to my utter disbelief). But their naysaying wouldn’t deter me. I listened to that CD nonstop for weeks. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but my introduction to the Christian punk scene was probably one of the biggest influences on my adolescent faith.
Why?
Punk and ska music, and Christian punk and ska in particular, was my jam from 1998-2003. I loved it. It both reflected whatever normal and benign teenage angst that I had, while shaping and giving language to my fledgling faith. And, I’ll be honest, I am forever grateful for the ways that the music taught me to think about the world around me.
Punk music 1 is, at its core, an outsiders genre. Punk culture is, to a fault, concerned with its status as non mainstream. The worst thing you could be was a ‘sellout.’ Bands that took money from mainstream labels, or were played on MTV, bore a scarlet letter of shame and were no longer legitimate (interestingly enough, there was often the same kind of shame for Christian artists who signed on to ‘secular’ labels). 2 Deep in the DNA of my faith is this basic understanding that to be a follower of Jesus is to be counter cultural.
And I think that has kept me ever suspicious of cultural evangelicalism, the kind of Christianity that is bought and sold and marketed and safe. A model of faith that cares about appearances and propriety. There was a church near my high school that ran a club for high school bands – the Mad House. It was a dive, but it was a safe space for high school bands to be high school bands – crappy, unprofessional, and supported mostly by a few friends. When the church eventually shut it down, I couldn’t understand it any other terms other than the failure for that church to embody its role to reach out to its community. To me, it was an obvious failure for them to be truly Christian. For the sake of propriety, they had abandoned the gospel.
Part of that outsider’s perspective is seen in how punk speaks truth to power. At the roots of the American punk scene, in Washington D.C. and in Orange County, California, there were collections of middle class kids calling out the charade of the ‘American Dream’: the picturesque stable living environment and suburban home, gained by working as a cog in some giant capitalist machine. This mentality was central in the Christian punk scene as well, which often found itself fighting against the same consumerist tendencies in the church. When I was a Senior in high school, I screamed along with the visceral satire of Five Iron Frenzy’s ‘American Kryptonite’
Buy
Take
Break
Throw it Away
This prophetic role shaped how I understood complacency and how it could destroy a life or a society. I love how punk music is idealist in its critiques, but realist in its narrative. The world is messed up – and that is a problem. And the Christian punks did that prophetic work (IMO) better than their nonChristian peers. By both naming the evils of this world, but by clinging to a hope that there is a world to come, and by rallying that anger into action.
By now, when I listen to those CDs, I am often driven less to action and more to repentance. What would the idealist 17 year old Andrew think of my life now? I hope that my faith is still countercultural and prophetic, but it is hard to mow the lawn of your suburban home while listening to this stuff. Counter factual history isn’t all that reliable; I have no idea what my life would have turned into had I not had this influence. But what strikes me is that almost 15 years after that Five Iron Frenzy album came out, I saw them live (after they broke up and then reunited again) here in Chicago. A concert full of people my age, who encountered this music at the same time. And when they played the song, at the right moment, without prompting, we raised our fists and chanted our ironic mantra of capitalism:
Buy
Take
Break
Throw it Away
I pray that there is still a 17 year old punk somewhere inside of me, ready to fight against oppression and injustice and do so with the hope of restoration and renewal and re-creation. Who knows – maybe Christian punk can save my soul all over again.
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