Cooler Than Thou: Will Hipsters Ruin Christianity?

It was pouring rain, cold rain, on an early March morning, as I headed to Brooklyn Label, a café near my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I was meeting Vito Aiuto, pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg, a plant of Redeemer Presbyterian, one of the largest and most influential evangelical churches in New York City.

I arrived drenched and he arrived late, wearing a utility shirt, jeans, and a maroon wool hat he never removed. We sat at the counter, sipping bottomless coffee from oversized mugs, and talked about our neighborhood and how to build community, his experience starting and leading a church, music, education, and his recently adopted son. Aiuto told me that he tries to keep things simple at Resurrection; he lets the congregation decide the church’s programs and activities. He also admitted that ministering in the hipster neighborhood of Williamsburg is both a blessing and a curse, that although Resurrection mainly attracts young and educated artist types, he has an explicit goal of ensuring it is not a “hip” church. There are no gimmicks to draw that crowd in.

According to Brett McCracken, however, Resurrection Presbyterian is the quintessence of hip, one of seven examples of Christian hipster churches he profiles in Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. He defines a hipster church as disproportionately packed with hipsters—“tattoos, scruffy beards, and skinny jeans galore” in Resurrection’s case—media savvy, fashionable, artistic, culturally aware, socially concerned. Resurrection meets all these criteria, except perhaps for its minimal reliance on technology both during and outside of services. And while Aiuto didn’t make the list of iconic hipster Christian figureheads, McCracken lauds him as a “full-blooded Christian hipster who is a reverend but also an indie musician.”

Aiuto’s indifference toward his own hipness (a trait McCracken repeatedly highlights, mentioning the pastor’s band and close relationship with Christian hipster darling Sufjan Stevens) along with his resistance to prioritizing a hip congregation, are precisely what, by McCracken’s estimation, make Aiuto and his church “hip.” For a central part of being hip is not trying to be, or at least not caring whether you are or not. And you certainly can’t be hip if you label yourself as such. “Pastors who think they’ll win over the cool kids by forming the church in the cool kids’ pop-culture image,” he writes, “are liable to find themselves even less relevant than when they started.”

Criticizing “Cool”

For McCracken, there are two types of hip churches, two types of hipster Christians: the natural and the marketed, the authentic and the wannabe. Both Resurrection and its leader fall squarely into the former categories. And after presenting a brief history of the evolution of cool and proffering definitions of key terms—the hipster, for example, is defined in a remarkably vague way as “fashionable, young, independent-minded contrarian”—McCracken explores both sides, glorifying the likes of Aiuto and Resurrection and criticizing the wannabes, somewhat playfully, for trying too hard, for “bending over backward to meet the culture where it’s at,” for being too high-tech, too shocking, too “rebellious.” But in part three of Hipster Christianity, McCracken, a self-described “hipster Christian,” adopts a different tone altogether, a tone decidedly more Christian than hipster, lashing out at culture, at “the outside,” at cool itself, for thrusting Christianity into “an identity crisis unrivaled in the history of the faith.” Christianity and cool are at odds, he argues, irreconcilable forces that, when engaged with each other, breed narcissism, incite recklessness, and encourage deviation from faith.