{"id":49165,"date":"2020-05-15T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=49165"},"modified":"2020-05-14T15:33:24","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T19:33:24","slug":"weird-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2020\/05\/weird-christianity\/","title":{"rendered":"Weird Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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Some Christians, particularly younger adults, are reacting against the emptiness of secularist culture and what they see as the superficiality of American Christianity of both the right and the left by embracing \u201canti-modern\u201d Christianity, with its sacramentalism, liturgies, and ancient theologies.<\/p>\n

These counter-cultural Christians prize Christianity in all its \u201cweirdness\u201d\u2013that is, its mind-blowing supernaturalism\u2013and call themselves \u201cweird Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the topic of a long article in the New York Times<\/em>, no less, by Tara Isabella Burton, who describes herself in those terms, Christianity Gets Weird:\u00a0 Modern life is ugly, brutal and barren. Maybe you should try a Latin Mass<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Many of these self-described \u201cweird Christians,\u201d who have built up a substantial presence online and on social media, have\u00a0 become hyper-traditionalist Catholics who love the Latin Mass, even if they can only watch it online.\u00a0 Some, like the author of the article, are Anglicans.\u00a0 As religion journalist Terry Mattingly points out<\/a> in his discussion of the article, they can also be found among the Orthodox.\u00a0 AND, he writes, to my great amusement at reading about my church body, \u201cThere are some in the high-church congregations among the Missouri-Synod Lutherans,<\/strong> as opposed to doctrinally progressive Lutheran churches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here are some excerpts from the New York Times article<\/a>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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More and more young Christians, disillusioned by the political binaries, economic uncertainties and spiritual emptiness that have come to define modern America, are finding solace in a decidedly anti-modern vision of faith. As the coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns throw the failures of the current social order into stark relief, old forms of religiosity offer a glimpse of the transcendent beyond the present.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Many of us call ourselves \u201cWeird Christians,\u201d albeit partly in jest. What we have in common is that we see a return to old-school forms of worship as a way of escaping from the crisis of modernity and the liberal-capitalist faith in individualism. . . .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n