Why does the American religious right get all the attention: is there not also a religious left? Why is it always on the back foot? Why, though such a basic part of the nation’s history, does it seem un-American? It suffers from the same problem as its political cousin: most Americans think of the left as something for metropolitan elites or angry black radicals. (President Obama is associated with both.)
But liberal Christian voices are breaking out. A few young preachers have edged away from conservative evangelicalism, but their criticism of the dominant religious culture tends to remain cautious (why lose the chance of a massive congregation?). A notable exception is Jay Bakker, 35-year-old pastor of a church for the young hipsters of Brooklyn, called Revolution NYC. This is no megachurch, but it might be a sign that a new sort of American Christianity is brewing.
Bakker (pronounced baker) is a smallish chap with big black specs and tattoos almost everywhere, including ‘HELP ME LORD’ on his knuckles. There’s a Southern gothic feel about him, which is borne out by his story. He is the son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the televangelists who were hit by a sex and fraud scandal in the late 1980s. He has today decisively rebelled against the turn-or-burn moralism of evangelical culture, though he retains some of its keep-it-simple-and-soulful style.
In his memoir, Son of a Preacher Man, he tells of the weird world in which he grew up. His televangelist father built a Christian theme park that was for a while the most popular visitor attraction in the US after Disney’s. Jay was the sad young prince of this strange world; his parents were busy asking viewers for donations; his only friends were his security guards. When scandal struck, the frail high-life collapsed into farce: his dad went to jail, his mum had a breakdown and an affair, and Jay went off the rails and did some serious self-medicating, as they say. What pulled him back from oblivion was the sense that he should be a minister to his skateboarding peers. He felt that life was a choice between being a drunk and being a new sort of Christian minister. But he did not become a clean-cut convert to the evangelical ideal; instead he felt called to challenge this ideal, to claim that God accepts all sorts of misfits, including a dyslexic recovering-alcoholic drop-out from a dramatically broken home.
Revolution NYC meets on Sunday afternoons in the back room of a bar in Williamsburg, a trendy part of Brooklyn. It’s a narrow space with a stage at the end, under an arch of showbiz bulbs. Around me, on the afternoon I attend, are a bunch of twenty- and thirtysomethings; a pierced camp guy, a hipsterette wearing a tiara hairband, two or three black people. After a chatty intro from the assistant pastor, a big guy called Vince, who also has a Southern air, Bakker perches on a bar stool and begins his sermon. It’s a laid-back ramble, full of jokey asides. He begins to focus on the concept of grace. He refers to Luther, and to Paul Tillich, with an air of apologising for intellectual presumption. When he reads something out he stumbles, and apologises for his dyslexia. He moves on to a few Pauline passages, relating them to his conversion, his sense that he was accepted despite his rebellion. There’s an air of group-therapy emotional frankness.
The sermon lasts almost an hour — then a short prayer ends the service. Saying ‘Amen’ is the extent of audience participation. Perhaps it is felt that music and liturgy would strike the agnostic visitor as ‘too religious’. At the end a hat is passed round, and we are reminded that Revolution is not subsidised by any larger richer church behind the scenes; it relies on hipster generosity.
Afterwards I chat with Jay over a beer (he has something less dangerous). Much of our conversation takes place in the pub garden, for he is a smoker. Indeed he smokes with a sort of Protestant purpose — rather as Calvin and Cranmer grew beards and got married to show that they were fleshy fallen men, not monks. In his memoir, he recounts that the first youth church he helped banned smoking, and this seemed to him the sort of legalism he was trying to get away from.
Was he aware of the strangeness of his childhood, that he grew up in a sort of family cult? ‘Sure, I knew it was kind of unique. I mean, you know school photos, which you send off to a few relations? When I had a new one done it was sent off to like 600,000 people.’ Does he look back on his parents’ ministry as entirely misguided? ‘Not entirely, no. They were more focused on God’s love and acceptance than other preachers. And yeah it went crazy — I mean, a theme park with a waterpark? They had to raise a million dollars every other day to keep it going. But the impulse was to spread love and joy. When they started out, they were doing a puppet show for kids — it was on the Pat Robertson show, that was how they made it into TV.’ They were trying to put the fun into fundamentalism? ‘Right. And that’s why they were envied by other big preachers, some of whom conspired in their downfall.’ They were scapegoats? ‘Yeah, I guess they were.’
What about the theology: does he look back and feel he was in a sense brainwashed? ‘Not really, I’m basically grateful to how my parents raised me. But you know some of the teaching was kind of scary to a kid. Like the rapture stuff.’ He refers to the popular evangelical belief that when Jesus returns he will suddenly magic away his followers, leaving the rest of us behind. ‘I remember as a kid getting into the house and no one was there, and I’d be crying, going from room to room, thinking, Oh no, I’ve been left behind.’
And the whole point of Revolution is to ditch those beliefs? ‘Yeah, and to challenge the whole idea that Christians have to fit into this image, of purity, obedience. When you look at Jesus, it’s pretty obvious that he hung out with all sorts of weird freaks, and showed that they were accepted. And mainstream religion can’t see that, it needs to make these rules, and tell people they can achieve salvation by obeying them. Like getting teenagers to sign a pledge that they’ll stay virgins until marriage — that’s an example of “works” religion, a denial of grace. In fact, to get biblical about it, that is the spirit of the Antichrist.’
But if you reject all the dogmatism and all the rules, aren’t you left with a thin, insubstantial form of religion? ‘No, we’re trying to create a community that is based in the non-judgmental love of Jesus — that feels like a pretty substantial thing to be doing. But it involves saying we don’t have the answers. We’re just trying to make sense of all this crazy religion stuff, this ’ere Gawd thang,’ he hams it up.
It would be easy to dismiss Bakker’s mission as an attempt to revive a liberal Protestantism that has failed. Doesn’t this emphasis on the social gospel, and this attack on ‘organised religion’, lead to a Christian-tinged humanitarianism? There’s much force in this criticism: Revolution does seem excessively geared to agnostic ‘seekers’, nervous of proclaiming the saving authority of Christ. On the other hand, there is something refreshing, and theologically substantial, in his attack on the legalism of evangelicalism. Most liberals are too circumspect to focus on this crucial issue. In Bakker’s gritty, visceral rejection of the religious culture he grew up in, there may be the seed of something new.