Subculture as Liturgy: Resistance and Worship among Subcultural Christians

Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives

CCMC, Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, England, August 3, 2013.

Material from this paper was published in “This is a Chance to Come Together”: Subcultural Resistance and Community at Cornerstone Festival.

Abstract

In his seminal book on subcultures, Dick Hebdige (1979) argued that subcultures define themselves against a dominant culture, expressing their resistance via stylistic and ideological resignifications and transgressions. Subcultures, their styles, and their ideologies are ultimately incorporated back into the dominant culture, Hebdige argues, making the formerly deviant practices and products safe for mainstream consumption. While Balmer (1989) and others have positioned American evangelicalism at large as a subculture, other writers have explicitly noted the resistant potential of Christian communities on college campuses (Wilkins 2008, Magolda and Ebben Gross 2009) and among youth more broadly (Sandler 2006, Luhr 2009), often linking them to the countercultural Christianity that emerged in the late 1960s as the Jesus People Movement (Shires 2007).

Based on several years’ of ethnographic research, this paper examines the musical practices of two subcultural Christian communities in the U.S.: Nashville’s Anchor Fellowship and western Illinois’s Cornerstone Festival. In contrast to Balmer, I argue that these subcultural communities’ styles and ideologies often distinguish participants from what they perceive to be dominant evangelical practices, while their faith distinguishes them from secular popular culture. Music and congregational song are very important to these liminal spaces, challenging old boundaries and defining new ones. Subculture itself becomes liturgical, and the political potential of corporate worship and popular music is often made explicit. In illustrating these communities, their sounds, and their ideologies, this paper both demonstrates the utility of subcultural theory to the study of congregational song and challenges Hebdige’s dialectic of incorporation.