By Paul Grant

Every American Christian alive today has experienced cool. It’s been around for generations. For many of us, including many believers, cool has at times been the central organizing principle in our lives. Perhaps I am included there. I hope not, because in many respects cool is incompatible with a healthy life in Christ.

I define cool as the private performance of rebellion for rebellion’s sake:

— Cool is an attitude that people wear for self-protection.

— As a performance, cool requires an audience of outsiders to have any meaning. And as a performance, cool only exists moment-by-moment.

— Cool projects categorical disrespect for authority.

— Cool’s rebellion is for its own sake. It’s not about changing the world; it’s about the thrill of being oppositional. Cool doesn’t want to change the world, because real change involves the serious work of studying, building relationships, and strategizing. Cool just wants to be cool.

Emerging out of the moral entropy of transatlantic slavery (the words “hip” and “dig it” come from African languages), cool went mainstream with the birth of rock and roll. Eventually cool conquered the advertising world, television, basketball, pornography, and, unfortunately, much of the American church.

The same year that Elvis walked into a studio in Memphis, Martin Luther King began his public ministry. King was a reluctant rebel. But his calling was from Christ, and to the very end he viewed his message as evangelistic and invitational.

King’s brand of rebellion was not cool. It always counted the cost, and looked forward to an end of resistance. He thought a lot about the church living as a community and witness to a broken and divided world. Here’s a speech he gave describing his fears, and how God answered them: Click to view video

But church was distasteful for the hotheads who followed, be they the Black Power movement, who weren’t interested in interracial community; or the white counterculture, who weren’t about to submit to the high moral demands of the church. And why should they, at the very moment when rock and roll was promising a new world, free from restraint and conformity? Here’s the opening scene from 1969’s Easy Rider: Click to view video

There’s a problem with transgression: it’s not sustainable. The joy of transgression lies in the crossing of fences, more than in what’s found over there. The urge to transgress is never satisfied, always needing more boundaries to cross. Starting with rebellion for its own sake, cool can never find a home. It is destined to ride away into bored loneliness.

In such a context, the gospel is a real message of hope. By forgiving sin and sending his spirit, God created a community – the church – that had the power to create love. The church is the only hope for a cool world, precisely because of the lonely existentialism implied by rebellion for rebellion’s sake.

We may have the words of life, but we’ve often preferred to be cool. So we pitch slogans like “Jesus is a Rebel,” and, from the sixties, “Jesus is just the best trip, man.”

People who come to Christ because he’s cool will have to unlearn the message later. Is Jesus really the best trip, man? No. Following Jesus is sobering because he leads us to the poor, the hungry, the naked and the imprisoned. If we proclaim Jesus as a never-ending high, we’re lying to the lost.

Is Jesus really a rebel? Not really. He was a dutiful son first, and a devoted friend. He explicit that the authorities were not taking his life: he was laying it down. Furthermore, he calls us to an incredibly uncool set of actions: to follow him; to make disciples of others; and to lay our lives down for his sake. Obedience, evangelism, and sacrifice: decidedly not cool.

In other words, following Jesus into the world’s despair will make us look uncool. But the world will mock the church no matter what we do, so we needn’t worry about respect.

Besides, behind a lot of the world’s contempt is a plea for the church to be the church. When we are able to submit to one another in Christ, to really belong to one another, and to announce God’s reign to a lost and lonely world, we’ll be putting shameless cool to shame.

Paul Grant is a deacon at Fountain of Life Church in Madison, Wisc. (USA), an editor with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and author of Blessed Are the Uncool: Living Authentically in a World of Show.