Losing the Geeks
Have you ever noticed that geeks are often more socially liberal than non-geeks?
Yes, I know technically he’s a nerd not a geek, but we’ll fold both in for the sake of discussion.
Seriously, if you spend time around the various geek fandoms, you’ll notice that social liberalism dominates their mindsets. They may be rightist and socially liberal (your average libertarian) or full on leftist, but you generally find relatively few hardcore geeks that identify as social conservatives. This has repercussions.
Geek culture has preceded or predicted a lot of the liberal movements in culture. Gay marriage? Science fiction has been cheerleading that (and wilder things) since the New Wave of the sixties. Fifty Shades of Gray? Started as fan fiction, which geeks have been behind for decades, and which is heavily involved with sex of all types, some aberrant as hell. Anti-creationism and atheism? Chances are you’ll mostly find it in the geek community. You could probably trace a whole horde of beliefs that have become part of the average liberal’s mindset back from geekdom.
And Christianity has lost and failed the geeks time after time.
When geekdom started to take off, the Christian church reacted with fear. The prime example was Dungeons and Dragons, but video games, comic books, science fiction and fantasy books, and more were looked at with a critical eye at best and full on accusations of demonic influence at worst. There was a movement growing up around technology and culture that would wind up shaping the world in so many ways, and the church thought bar codes were the mark of the beast. The church became something that was behind the status quo, rather than being for the outsiders.
I owned this. Seriously, this was not unusual for the time.
Even now, the church is still like this.
If you aren’t tired of my rants about Christian culture already, one of the most puzzling things is that while we are in the age of the geek, Christians have done little or nothing to reflect that. We have a relatively small amount of authors who publish independently or in tiny presses comics, novels, and a few other things. But Christian culture if anything has become even less geeklike over time, and doubling down on their main audience: mundane, older housewives and their families. They don’t even bother with it enough to be wrong about it: instead, there is silence and ignorance, except for the few things they co-opt. God, do those Christian homeschoolers love their Minecraft.
I think this is a part of how we lost the culture.
The thing about culture is that usually small, avant-garde movements are what influences it. I’ve been reading about the Futurists, and what surprises me reading manifestos written a hundred years ago is how fresh and modern they sound. These small movements often have power and grasp far beyond what people think. A lot of rebellion and youth culture we owe to the Futurists: the worship of speed, the hatred of the past, the love of youth and dislike of the elderly. In modern times, geekdom is something like that, and we now live in an omnipresent age of the geek. An age with little Christianity to it.
I think we are at a point where we can no longer afford to ignore this. I don’t think Christianity has the luxury of reacting to new social movements from a position of fear. If the church wasn’t afraid of D&D back then, and didn’t try to neuter or control it, we might have had a lot more influence than we did. But we couldn’t have reacted in a worse way then, turning off generations of kids by thinking a little book and some dice could lead them to Satan.
The church needs to look at things with clear eyes, and more importantly, without the reflexive fear that new things weaken us. This isn’t a call to toss out doctrines, but to realize that God is stronger than the world and will not let us go. Not everything is an enemy which must be neutralized, or hidden from; sometimes it’s just a person saying something or making something. Ideas are not magical forces that overpower us regardless of our choice. Only then can we move among culture as equals, and confidently.
Because honestly, as it is now Christianity sucks. Choosing to align with the Duck Dynasty types, their wives, and worse is just pushing people away. I don’t think geeks are going to sit through one of the endless TV Bible adaptations, or the books with pop psychology given a coating of Christ-speak that our “teachers” give us. And the guys who are doing the good fight need help, and the weight of the Church behind them. Otherwise, well, we haven’t seen nothing yet. And we deserve that, too.
