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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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?’
