Standing in Hopesfall’s sunlight, unable to chant with my kindred about Jesus, wasn’t the final nail in my childlike faith’s coffin.
And my friends had found Christian oddballs like Rich Mullins, Thomas Merton, and these musicians playing competent and sometimes excellent hip-hop, metal, and punk, songs about things besides praise or evangelism, the things non-churchy people assume all Christian music must be about. Spending childhood years in a diverse city, and making friends via work or school or sports, made me realize the way we’d heard entire demographics described by some Christians didn’t square with reality. Y2K passed without any Rapture, making me rue my elementary-school hours spent reading Hal Lindsay in fear of being left behind. I’d been way into dinosaurs as a child, so Young Earth Creationism was never my thing, which planted seeds of doubt about anything else a Creationist grownup said. In hindsight, I’d been shedding stuff for years. A term for self-imposed distance from God, to be corrected by better Christian behavior and Grace and so forth. In that sunlight, backslidden was the term in my head. I stood to the left of their stage, in front of the pit, unhidden from sunlight peering under the tent, as a typical thing happened: a “united in Christ, united” chant, a way for the crowd to yell a hug together.Īnd I wondered whether it’d be a lie for me to chant along, because something within me had failed to stay the same. But the internet says July 5 was when Hopesfall played Cornerstone 2000. It’s weird, being able to go back 21 years and pinpoint the date I first suspected I was unmoored from the person I’d always thought of as myself. We’d been inside heavy Christian music for years, but still couldn’t believe Extol and Underoath were playing black metal, the soundtrack of mid-‘90s Norweigan church burnings (never doubt the willingness of Christians to make anything about Jesus). Me and the boys fancied ourselves music experts, always firing up new bands, so we took notes on stagecraft, like figuring out MxPx’s snap count for each song: lead singer spits on stage, one, two, three, go. I had a camp crush on a tall blond girl from somewhere west.
We got used to the cow smells of Bushnell. Zao was my favorite non-rap group, and their singer wordlessly thanked two of us who told him his bleak lyrics had led us through bad times. Me and my internet friends rapped beside a mud path for money. Everyone’s tent flooded, but everyone was happy. This was my pre-college road trip, so I remember everything. We crossed paths many times before we met 17 months later. I met some internet friends IRL, which felt bleeding-edge futuristic. It does not store any personal data.I went once, in 2000, with much of my youth group crew, the bros I quoted The Birdcage and played all-night Mortal Kombat with. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
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