New York, USA - BY phone from Nashville Bryan Norman was talking about rebellion, God and the mullet haircut. Mr. Norman, 26, is the editor of a gothic scripted, visually hyperactive book called "The New Rebellion Handbook," and he took a particular line on the romance of the rebel.
Luke Braddock of the Livin It skateboard ministry.
"Rebellion," he said late last month, "is the truest expression of the fully committed believer in Jesus."
Anyone looking for the spirit of American counterculture — as a romance, identity or marketing principle — need look no further than the nearest evangelical bookstore, youth ministry or clothing line. A decade and a half after Nirvana's success exposed the strength of secular alt-culture tribes, their evangelical counterparts are having their own coming out in rebel gestures that sometimes recall the early church, sometimes ... well, early Nirvana.
"There's a charm in being the rebel," said Edmund Gibbs, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of books on alternative Christian culture. Besides, he said, rebellion is consistent with the lessons of the Bible.
"If evangelicalism means a commitment to the radical doctrine of Jesus, you have to be a subversive. Jesus was a subversive." In the increasingly clamorous Christian marketplace rebellion is where you find it: in full-contact skateboard Bible study groups; in Christian punk, Goth and hip-hop CD's; in evangelical tattoo parlors; in sportswear brands like Extreme Christian Clothing and Fear God; in alt churches or ministries called Revolution, Scum of the Earth and Punk Girl; in a podcast called Xtreme Christianity, which turns out to be a fairly conventional weekly sermon delivered by a Baptist minister in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.
The caldron for this rebellion can be grass roots or institutional: the publisher of the rebellion handbook, Thomas Nelson, is among the world's biggest producers of Bibles and inspirational books in English.
If this rebellion is not exactly the sexy shrug of Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" or of Kurt Cobain in "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the come-on is very much the same. "It's the nonconformist's view of Christianity," Mr. Norman said. For a demographic that is used to being marketed to as rebels, he added, the new rebellion "is really a new installment of the original rebellion." He continued: "It's hearkening back to a raw faith not encumbered by the American dream, enslavement to a career or having to have two kids and a two-car garage. It gets to what's worth living for."
The claim of a Christian counterculture, which recurs periodically in American Protestantism, cuts in two directions, defining itself as counter to the consumer-driven secular culture and to mainstream church culture. For Shane Claiborne, 30, the author of "The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical" (Zondervan), it has meant living for a decade in a monastic community in North Philadelphia, whose members make their own clothing, refrain from sex outside marriage and minister to the homeless and poor.
When he applies the language of rebellion to his faith, Mr. Claiborne said: "I'm trying to reclaim the language. I think it resonates with people because Christianity has been anything but radical. It's been stale. When you ask people what they think about church, it's sad. But Jesus doesn't have the bad reputation that Christianity has.
"What we do looks extreme because it's an indictment of the idea of Christianity that so many of us have settled for. When we look at the early church, it was very revolutionary. Jesus sat down to rethink revolution. He was able to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free."
For historians of faith-based rebellion, the new shagginess strikes a familiar American chord, tapping an anticlerical tradition that dates back to colonial times, when ministers like John Henry Goetschius excoriated high churches for "their old, rotten and stinking routine of religion."
Larry Eskridge, the associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Illinois, compared the current stirrings to the Jesus People, a movement that began in Costa Mesa, Calif., in the late 1960's, borrowing heavily from the hippie counterculture and mixing beach baptisms, conservative theology and grooming habits that were not always welcome in the churches of Orange County.
Before the Jesus People, evangelicals tended to distance themselves from the more disreputable fads of popular culture, Professor Eskridge said. "The Jesus People began co-opting marketing slogans and utilizing buttons, bumper stickers and posters to their own purposes."
The Graffiti Baptist Mission in the East Village.
The difference between that rebellion and the current one, he added, is that the secular counterculture of the 60's, while often hostile to organized religion, was essentially amenable to the young evangelicals' message. The Jesus People simply claimed kinship with the figure in long hair and sandals, recasting pop culture in spiritual terms.
But more recent secular popular cultures, Professor Eskridge said, are hostile to organized church structures and to rank-and-file evangelicals, who are seen as intolerant. "With the culture wars and the rise of evangelicals generally, you've got a segment of the secular counterculture that has staked out an identity as antievangelical," he said. "So some of what we're seeing now is a movement to claim that turf back."
In a storefront in the East Village, Kenny Mitchell, 34, leads a small church called Tribe, where he sometimes uses his D.J. equipment at services. Part of being a counterculture, Mr. Mitchell said, means working to counter some of the values that get mass marketed as rebellion, including the Big Three of the old counterculture: sex, drugs and the commercial trappings of rock 'n' roll.
"I got into punk," Mr. Mitchell said, "because it was saying things that other people weren't saying" — thumbing its nose at "the man." He continued: "Now there is no man. You've got Jay-Z and Donald Trump all on the same team. There's no point being countercultural if those are the alternatives.
"So we're not against the culture. We're in love with Jesus in this culture. But what we say is counter to the mass media blurb. Hanging out in the Lower East Side with a group of homeboy hip-hopper guys, if you get into their lives, they're not spitting every 50-cent line, they're looking at women or guys without fathers as broken people who need healing. What's countercultural is the elements of their faith, why they're not living the lifestyle of MTV, trying to attain the superstar status with cars and chicks, but working on community and healing."
Even the Christian rock world, which is an outgrowth of the Jesus People movement, has spawned its own equivalent of the secular indie-rock ethos of the 1990's. Shawn McDonald, 28, an altish acoustic performer, whose biography includes problems with drugs and the law, said his rebellion wasn't against the faith. "If I look at Jesus' life, the things that he did, I see a guy that went against the crowd and did things that were not pretty in a lot of people's eyes. So I feel going against stuff is just what I'm called to do."
But the popular images of rebellion do not reflect the ways most young people think about their faith, said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an author of "Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers" (Oxford University Press), an analysis of interviews and survey data on adolescents.
"We found most teenagers are not rebellious when it comes to religion," Dr. Smith said. "So the rebellion is quite superficial. It may resonate with teenagers in some way, but I don't think it's tapping into some deep cultural rebellion at all. A lot of it is marketing. Maybe it does grab some people's attention, but it's more product design than deep cultural resonance."
There is a contradiction perhaps in evangelicals adopting the stance of the rebel outsider at a time when they have more influence and visibility than they have had in generations. But the same was true of radical youths in the 1960's counterculture, who were more affluent and numerically strong than any generation before them.
Dr. Smith compared the romance of rebellion to the middle-class fascination with hip-hop culture. "Spoiled suburban white kids act like rappers, and there is a real connection to something, but really it's not what their lives are fundamentally about," he said. "Their lives are about wanting to go to Duke University."
As compelling as the images of rebellion are, they do not in themselves constitute a fully sustaining faith, said Donald Miller, 34, the author of "Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality" (Nelson, 2003), a best seller among young Christians.
"It's a cart-before-the-horse thing," said Mr. Miller, who frequently speaks to Christian youth groups and works with campus ministries. "If you're a Christian, you need to obey God. And if you obey God, you're going to be seen as a rebel, both within American church culture and popular culture. But that's not the point. The point is to obey God."
Mr. Norman of "The New Rebellion Handbook" would agree. For all his book's jangly graphics and bite-size lists, the text is heavy on Scripture and not for the uninitiated.
But he said that even the initiated need to be reached in their own language, which is not necessarily that of the church. "The idea is that we are creating a marriage between the packaging that this audience needs in order to be drawn in and content that transcends the packaging."
He recalled an image from his younger years, when he wore his hair in a mullet. "In seventh grade that disqualified me from being in certain groups, just because it wasn't cool," he said. "With the 'new rebellion,' we don't want to be disqualified because it isn't cool looking.
He added: "The packaging is our social collateral, our key to cool. We're allowed in. Its our secret knock."
But he doubted he would ever wear a mullet again.