Authenticity or how the movie Extreme Days killed Youth group culture

It was going to be awesome… a movie… about us!  It was the fall of 2001 and all my youth group friends, got our moms to drive us to the movies and we anxiously awaited the screening of the movie Extreme Days.  It was essentially a movie made by the Christian media for youth group kids.  I, more than ten years later, can’t remember what the movie was about.  I remember there being some paint ball fights, Pax 217, lots of driving around and Rufio.  In the end the movie sucked and it left all of us feeling disappointed.  What’s worse, I believe, is that this movie was the icon of our culture for the entire world to see, and it wasn’t much.

actor Dante Basco but you can call him Rufio

Honestly, I don’t think this movie single handedly ended youth culture as we knew it ten years ago, but it does beg the question: why is it that when it’s time to put Christianity on display in front of mother culture it looks stupid?  What is it about these films (like Fireproof, Facing The Giants, and Passion of the Christ) that exploit our shallowness and ham handedness?

Now to be fair, there are good majorities of people that actually like these movies.  I have a buddy, who saw Fireproof, with his wife and said it brought him to tears.  However, this same friend of mine wouldn’t miss a day of church even if he himself were playing in the Super Bowl.  But this posting isn’t about people like my buddy, it’s about the other 60% (according to rottentomatoes.com) of the world that saw this movie and said it was terrible.  Also, I do believe it is possible to make movies about our humanity, with Christian and family values, that are both beautiful and poignant (i.e. Pixar). 

still trying to figure out what i was crying about at the end of Toy Story 3

So is the answer then, that we do “Christian things” but don’t necessarily call them, “Christian things?”  Not necessarily, honestly, I doubt that calling something ‘Christian’ is what makes people not like it.  That’s playing the persecution card, which really gets us nowhere in this dialogue. 

Emergent Young Adults have a tremendous bull s*** barometer and I believe that it’s a survival mechanism rather than the outcome of being really cynical.  In order to survive Americana in the year 2012 you have to be savvy, because in an age of information overload you can’t give your attention to everything demanding your attention.  You have to know the difference between hyperbolic profit based media and real news.  Between actual Muslims and fundamentalist religious radicals.  Between broken systems of lobbyist controlled government and unfounded campaign promises.  We as the up and coming generation can smell your inauthenticity from a mile away and that’s a good thing.

Which brings me back to Extreme Days and youth culture.  Perhaps, the reason kids are choosing soccer practice, the NFL, and even school over youth group and parents are choosing busyness over a church centered family and young adults are choosing sex, booze, and gentrified neighborhoods over waking up early enough on Sunday morning to go to church, is that we are just like everything else in our culture: hyperbole with out any substance. 

And that’s exactly what these films are!  The movie was called, EXTREME Days and in the end it was totally lame!  And when you think about the Passion of the Christ, supposedly the Jesus movie of the century, it’s really nothing more than a violent exploitation film about a guy name Yeshua who got the crap kicked out of him. 

Father, forgive Mel Gibson, he doesn't know he hates Jews

Perhaps we need to stop making such tall claims.  Certainly, I’ve had profound experiences in following Jesus, but the truth is, the day-to-day inner workings of my faith are generally mundane and rudimentary.  A life of prayer in the name of Jesus often times isn’t a very good story to tell.  But that’s not how we as Christians like to talk about it.  How often do you hear about how turning to Jesus makes life awesome?  How often do you see youth group branding that makes Jesus more like an action hero?  How often do you see kids who grew up ‘in a bubble’ totally stoked about this Jesus guy, discover how awesome debauchery, drunkenness and hooking up feels (not to mention how many more people want to hear that story) and never comes back church? 

We have to stop talking about Jesus in this way.  We have to start telling people what Christianity actually is: a community of people working out their salvation.  Granted, there are times in our story that we experience awesome moments of unity and blessings of the Holy Spirit.  But the truth is most of my Christian experience is in suffering through a chose I made.  Whether it was to forgive someone rather than acting out in violence or abstaining from something to learn to be more disciplined.  Sometimes that experience is extreme but most of the time the experience is mundane or even painful (talk about a hard sell).

I believe this generation craves authenticity and will seek Jesus if we stop trying to sell Jesus.  Until Christian culture can come up with a narrative that is profoundly real, we’re going to continue to ask, when our by-products get put on the big stage of mother culture: ‘is this it?’