Limp Bizkit: My life is an open book, so here you go. One of the production workers came into the cooler the other day looking for product, and he had on a black T-shirt with horses on it. I kept staring at it because it looked really cool, so I finally asked him what it was. He said it was some kind of Snoop Dogg album cover, and then, almost apologetically, he added something like, “I know that’s probably not something you’d listen to.” He seemed a little embarrassed even saying it, as though he had already concluded that someone who follows Christ wouldn’t have any interest in that kind of music.
I told him I honestly don’t know much of anything about Snoop Dogg’s music, but I’ve seen him on TV a few times, and I like his personality. He seems real. He seems funny. He seems like someone I could sit down with for a couple of hours and genuinely enjoy talking to. As he started to walk away, I felt like I needed to say one more thing, so I stopped him and said, “just so you know, I do like music. I don’t listen to a ton of it, but I really enjoy Lana Del Rey, and when I’m on my spin bike I love throwing on Limp Bizkit’s Woodstock ’99 set. I think it’s one of the wildest and most entertaining live performances I’ve ever seen.”
He looked at me like I had just confessed to armed robbery and said, “I actually went to a Limp Bizkit concert.” And I thought to myself, maybe we’re not as different as we imagine. Maybe beneath all the labels and assumptions and moral posturing, we’re just human beings trying to get through life, laugh when we can, and find a little enjoyment in a hard world. And maybe we all need the same Christ far more than we need a carefully managed image.
That little exchange stayed with me, because it exposed something that has been bothering me for a long time. He assumed that because I’m a believer, I must know nothing about that world, or at least want nothing to do with it. And to be fair, maybe that assumption makes sense. After all, Snoop Dogg is associated with things respectable people are not supposed to smile at, and Limp Bizkit certainly isn’t what anyone would call safe, wholesome, family-approved entertainment.
In that 99 Woodstock concert, the lead singer is tossing out f-bombs, the crowd is losing its mind, and the whole thing is chaotic, loud, and ridiculous. I get that. I’m not telling anyone to go listen to Limp Bizkit. If that kind of thing bothers your conscience, stay away from it. I mean that. But I am saying something else. I think many believers have become so obsessed with appearing separate from the world that they can no longer speak to the world like normal human beings. We have trained ourselves to be shocked by all the wrong things. We can’t just say, “yeah, that guy is probably a mess, but he also seems funny,” or “that concert was insane, but I can see why people had fun.” Everything has to be filtered through this strange moral-political grid where we prove our seriousness by acting scandalized at all times. And that spirit, I think, is doing real damage.
It produces a kind of artificial Christianity where believers are expected to have all the right reactions, all the right dislikes, all the right enemies, all the right cultural disgusts, and all the right talking points. We don’t merely want Christians to love Christ, we want them to embody a whole way of thinking, reacting, and presenting themselves that often has more to do with conservative culture than with Christ. We want them to have the approved politics, the approved outrage, the approved entertainment standards, the approved vocabulary, and the approved list of people they would never be caught associating with. At some point that stops being Christianity and starts becoming conservatism with a Bible verse attached to it. And that is exactly what concerns me.
The more I look at modern Christian culture, the more it seems that Christ is being buried under layer after layer of cultural conservatism, until what remains is hardly Christianity at all, but a political temperament dressed up in religious language. We know how to condemn the vulgarity of the world. But do we know how to love sinners? Do we know how to speak to ordinary people without acting as though we’re a different species? Do we know how to leave room for the fact that unbelievers are still human beings, not merely case studies in moral collapse?
That man in the cooler was actually trying to be respectful. He cared enough about my convictions to assume I wouldn’t want to hear about certain things. I appreciate that. But I also hate the thought that Christianity has become so identified with a certain conservative image that both believers and unbelievers feel they have to watch themselves, censor themselves, and hide ordinary parts of who they are in the presence of others. That’s a problem. If the world feels awkward around us because we love Christ, that’s one thing. But, if it feels awkward around us because we have wrapped Christianity in a suffocating layer of cultural conservatism and political identity, that’s another thing entirely. And I fear that for many believers, that layer is no longer merely wrapped around Christianity. It has begun to replace it. Christ is still named, of course. Bible verses are still quoted. Moral language is still used. But the atmosphere is different. The burden is different. The emphasis is different. The instinct is no longer simply to point sinners to Christ, but to hand them a whole moral and political identity and call that faithfulness. MPJ