So what's the deal with this place?

Lord’s Gym. Tommy Hellfighter. Scripture Bob Bible Pants. Praystation.

A lot of people, when they think about Christian/Evangelical culture in North America, immediately jump to political and social conservatism. That’s a strong component, obviously, but it’s rarely the bit that stands out in my memory. It’s the apparel that I’ll always recognize — the wink-wink nudge-nudge corporate logos repurposed with ‘Christian Meaning’. What is it that made us so keen on that stuff?

I mean, it can be funny when Fark generates faked up logos and movie posters, but they’re doing it for kicks. Somehow, we convinced ourselves that wearing a T-shirt with the Reeces Pieces logo (but with Jesus, instead of Reeces!) was a daring, culture-jamming act of evangelism. It felt dangerous. It felt cool. In retrospect it’s kind of embarrassing: with two thousand years of history, a heritage of philosophy and world-shaping culture, and an explicit responsibility to care for the poor, is Christianity really reduced to gotcha-marketing? I don’t think so, but heck if that stuff doesn’t sell…

Thus, Growing Up Goddy. What better name to capture the peculiar weirdness or growing up as an Evangelical Christian Gen-X-er? Here, we’ll be reminiscing, dissecting, respecting, and laughing at the idiosyncrasies of American culture-Christianity. As a bunch of ex-pats, we’re not particularly interested in “exposes” or “apologetics” — Salon Magazine and Christianity Today cover those bases pretty effectively. But maybe as we talk through our memories and our experiences, explain the good parts and the bad, the mundane and the weird, the incredulous folks who only know it from televangelists and Republican conventions will be able to understand the world and its inhabitants a bit more. And maybe — just maybe — the folks who live in that world will understand what it looks like to those on the outside, whether or not they follow Christ.