Rapture Ready!

In the beginning An airfield in rural Kansas, September 2005. The last echo of guitar feedback pulsed through the afternoon air as tattooed roadies carried equipment off the stage and the mosh pit untangled. A lanky teenager made his way out of the crowd and ran to where his friends were waiting on the periphery, sweat smearing his thick black eyeliner. "Awesome performance." He grinned broadly. "They prayed likethreetimes in a twenty-minute set." I glanced around. If anyone else thought this was a strange criterion on which to evaluate a rock concert, they didn't show it. Not for the first time, I wondered what I was doing here, at a Christian music festival where the merch tables sold "Got Jesus?" T-shirts and Bibles that looked like beach novels. Dustin, the sixteen-year-old prayer fan, continued his rapid-fire appraisal of the hard-rock band Disciple. A black-clad girl named Amanda gazed at him admiringly, and I began to suspect that her T-shirt -- "I'm a sucker for guys in eyeliner" -- was not chosen by accident. Amanda's friend Alexis smiled mischievously at her. Alexis is my sister-in-law. These were her friends. This was her world. Teenage hormones, rock 'n' roll...and Jesus Christ? It occurred to me that I had never before been in a situation where everything felt simultaneously so familiar and so disorienting. I had met Alexis only two days before. She's the much younger daughter of my wife's formerly estranged father and his second ex-wife. So it's not exactly a close relationship. The first time I saw her she was wearing a form-fitting black trench coat, studded knee-high boots, and a shoulderless red shirt, for a look you might call neogoth meets Harajuku girl. She was as chic as any sixteen-year-old should be, and I wasn't sure why this surprised me more -- because she lives in Wichita or because she is an evangelical Christian. I'm a liberal New York Jew in my mid-thirties, but we hit it off well enough, and I thought it might be fun to tag along for the trip to SHOUTfest in Neodesha, a hundred miles east. Picking up my ticket at the gate, I looked over the dozen bands who would be performing on two stages. Jump5, ZOEgirl, Skillet, Disciple. I didn't recognize a single name. I wasn't expecting to, but it was still an unusual experience. I'm fairly pop-culture savvy. I download the latest singles from iTunes, my Netflix queue has five hundred movies in it, and I can name all seven Harry Potter books, all six James Bonds, and both of Britney Spears's husbands (at press time). And now I was getting a taste of a teeming subculture that was almost completely off my radar. Sure, I knew Christian rock existed -- was Stryper still around? -- and the wordsLeft Behindhad a familiar ring, but I'd never really given this universe much thought. And it is an entire universe -- vast, complex, and with strange rules all its own, like a mirror universe from a science fiction tale, where everything is the same on the surface, only Spock has a beard and worships Jesus. As we made our way into the field, a volunteer handed me a yellow sticker that read "The Logan Show." "Who's Logan?" I asked. "Omigosh, he's the host. He's so funny! He's like the Christian Jon Stewart." This is a book about popular culture. It's about entertainment, leisure, and shopping. It's also about politics and the culture war that engulfs America. And it's a little bit -- but not as much as you might think -- about religion. True, it is by definition impossible to draw a distinction between evangelical faith and the consumer lifestyle of evangelicals, but I drew one anyway. From the beginning of my research, I made a decision not to set foot in a church, mega or otherwise, unless it was to attend an event that any neutral observer would describe as performance rather than worship (even if the people hosting it might beg to differ). While you'll hear a fair amount about Christian faith and Christian valuesRadosh, Daniel is the author of 'Rapture Ready!', published 2008 under ISBN 9780743297707 and ISBN 0743297709.