Come as you are

At Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Snoop Dogg figures in sermons, housewives cradle babies in tattooed arms -- and religious fundamentalism rules. Meet the Disciple Generation, the fierce new face of American evangelism.

By Lauren Sandler

Read more: evangelicals, Life

Sept. 13, 2006 | SEATTLE -- It's Father's Day and Mark Driscoll is blessing babies. A stocky, square-headed figure in a black shirt and jeans, with a leather cord around his thick neck, Driscoll stands against a backdrop of a giant brushed steel cross and a phalanx of electric guitars, praying over the "lovely wives and godly husbands" lined up on the stage of Mars Hill Church. Located in a former warehouse in Seattle's hip Ballard neighborhood, where drive-through espresso joints out-number churches ten to one, Driscoll's megachurch is a sprawling industrial space of corrugated steel, painted charcoal and muted taupe. Inside, the walls are hung with a member's graffiti art, lit by Starbucks-style colored glass fixtures blown by a congregant.

In a husky voice, the 35-year-old pastor prays for the continuous fertility of his congregation. "We are in a city with less children per capita than any city but San Francisco," he declares, "and we consider it our personal mission to turn that around."

The way Driscoll sees it, the more babies his conservative Christian congregation can produce in this child-poor city, the more they can redirect local politics, public education, and culture in one of the liberal capitals of the world. To complete his trifecta of indoctrinating, voting, and breeding, Driscoll has developed a community that dwarfs any living experiment of the '60s. To say that Mars Hill is just a church is to say that Woodstock was just a concert.

Mars Hill wrests future converts searching for identity and purpose from the dominion of available sex and drugs that still make post-grunge Seattle a countercultural destination. Driscoll promises his followers they don't have to reprogram their iTunes catalog along with their beliefs -- culture from outside the Christian fold isn't just tolerated here, it's cherished. Hipster culture is what sweetens the proverbial Kool-Aid, which parishioners here seem to gulp by the gallon. This is a land where housewives cradle babies in tattooed arms, where young men balance responsibilities as breadwinners in their families and lead guitarists in their local rock bands, and where biblical orthodoxy rules as strictly as in Hasidism or Opus Dei.

Following Driscoll's biblical reading of prescribed gender roles, women quit their jobs and try to have as many babies as possible. And these are no mere women who fear independence, who are looking to live by the simple tenets of fundamentalist credo, enforced by a commanding husband: many of the women of Mars Hill reluctantly abandon successful lives lived on their own terms to serve their husbands and their Lord. Accountability and community is ballasted by intricately organized cells -- gender-isolated support groups that form a social life as warm and tight as swaddling clothes, or weekly coed sermon studies and family dinner parties that provide further insulation against the secular world. Parents share child care, realtors share clients, teachers share lesson plans, animi buffs share DVDs, and bands share songs.

After Driscoll prays for the continued fertility of his congregation, and the worship band cranks out a few fierce guitar licks, the sermon begins. Pacing the stage like a stand-up pro, blending observational humor about parenting with ribald biblical storytelling, Driscoll peppers his message with references to his own children as midget demons and recalls his own past in stories about duct-taping and hog-tying his own siblings. He riffs about waiting in a supermarket checkout line behind a woman who said to him, "You sure got a lot of kids! I hope you've figured out what causes that."

"Yeah," he flipped back. "A blessed wife. I bet you don't have any kids." The congregation hoots and hollers. "That shut her up," he mutters.

In today's sermon on Genesis, chapter 37, Snoop Dogg, the man who penned the memorable lyric, "Now watch me slap ya ass with dicks, bitch," plays a supporting role. Driscoll conjures Joseph's famous coat by showing an image of Snoop in the coat he wore to play a pimp in "Starsky and Hutch." "The next time you read Genesis, think of Snoop," he chuckles.

Driscoll's mood darkens as he discusses how Jacob shunned Joseph's brothers, and imagines their pain at not being anointed the favorite son. Pausing a studied beat, he looks out over his rapt charges and lowers his voice. "Some of you know what it's like. You were the one that wasn't loved. I can see it on your face and I'm sorry," he practically whispers. "Some of you are still living life in reaction to your father. I'm here to tell you, you don't have to. There is a providential God who can fix you, and his name is Jesus. He's your only hope."

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Driscoll and his Mars Hills followers epitomize the mounting evangelical youth movement in America. Within this movement lies something as old as America itself, and as terrifying and alluring as anything Orwell predicted; something that is at once political, emotional, deeply anti-intellectual, and more galvanized than you can imagine. I call this population of fierce young evangelicals the Disciple Generation.

The Disciple Generation is an ever-growing population of people ages 15 to 35 who are equally obsessed with Christ and with culture as a means to an evangelical end. People within this age bracket are defined by a shared culture, whether Christian or secular: if you own an iPod, know Green Day is a band and not a Nader rally, and ever considered getting a tattoo, you're probably within the boundary. This is an age group whose transgressive actions -- regardless of faith or demographic, whether in the form of an inked bicep, high school detention, or a fundamentalist credo -- are easily slapped with the label of rebellion.

But for Christians within this generation, behavior and beliefs are unlike those of any archetypal rebellion that has come before. For every member of the Disciple Generation raised secular in a car or a commune, or had a lesbian mom or a pothead dad, plenty more grew up in traditional Christian homes, whether that affiliation took the form of an occasional Sunday service or a father who was an active church elder. There's a three-piece suit for every freshly shaved mohawk in this subculture.

Yet wherever they began their individual walk with Christ, and however they choose to outwardly identify themselves within the subculture, members of this movement all talk about a meaningless and bankrupt society; a world that offers no anodyne culture outside their faith. Their lives are in fact a criticism of our own. This youth movement isn't one that merely defines itself against its parents' generation; it exists in opposition to all culture and history that excludes evangelicalism.

To young evangelicals, our secular world is devoid of the type of love they seek, not parental love or fraternal love or even erotic love, but an even bigger love -- a love called agape. When Christians describe God's love for his children this is the word they invoke, a love so powerful one is moved to proclaim it on car bumpers and coffee mugs. Hand in hand with certainty, agape is what this generation longs for today -- a love that will soothe the pain of breakups and breakouts, heal the wounds from shattered families, make bearable the awareness that we are each a solitary speck in an illimitable world. It's the emotion that secularism, enraptured by its logic and empiricism, refuses to engage.

The new disciples are ripping down their parents' white steeples and tearing apart the lumber to build a half-pipe. Christian youth is deinstitutionalizing the American church for the first time in about 400 years. This evangelical movement isn't just about internally held principles, it's a matter of lifestyle. Young evangelicals look so similar to denizens of every other strain of youth culture that, aside from their religious tattoos, the difference between them and the unsaved is invisible.

After all, shared culture is an opportunity for people to connect and gain one another's trust. Culture -- your favorite music, sport, pastime, style, you name it -- presents an opening for evangelism. Once bonds are forged over a beloved band or football team, then the Evangelical "message" can work its way into a relationship. Once the message is heard, a world opens in which God's love, as well as your cultural predilections, provide spiritual isolation from the secular world. It's hard to imagine an aspect of secular culture lacking a Christian counterpart: one can choose from Christian hip-hop ministries, Christian military intelligence classes, or Christian diet groups in this mirror society.

The evangelical culture is rooted in place, and it's expanding every day to swallow a generation whole. Shattering the perceived blue statered state dichotomy, epicenters of this Evangelical movement are even swelling madly in leftist zip codes of cities like Boston, Denver and Seattle.

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