Brett McCracken is a graduate of Wheaton College and UCLA. His day job is managing editor for Biola University's Biola magazine. He regularly writes movie reviews and features for Christianity Today, Relevant magazine, and ConversantLife.com.

In Hipster Christianity (Baker Books), Brett examines an emerging category he calls "Christian hipsters"--an unlikely fusion of American obsession with being "cool" and the realities of a faith that is often seen as anything but. Brett was kind enough to answer 5 Questions about his book and what it's all about.

What does “Hipster Christianity” mean?

Hipster Christianity is, in short, the fusion of hipster culture—independent, alternative, anti-mainstream, fashionable—with Christianity. It’s a world of mostly twentysomething Christian evangelicals who grew up on CCM and hysteria about being in the “end times,” but now care more about things like social justice, creation care, and whiskey tasting. It’s a world where things like Left Behind, Jesus fish bumper stickers, and door-to-door evangelism are relevant only as a source of irony or nostalgia. It’s a world where Braveheart youth pastor analogies and Thomas Kinkade and anathema. Hipster Christianity is about rebelling against the legalistic, overly political, apathetic-about culture evangelicalism of the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a new iteration of youth-oriented, alternative, countercultural Christianity—the offspring of the Jesus movement of the 60s-70s but less Pentecostal and more liturgical (in a “postmodern pastiche” sort of way).

Why do you think our Christian culture works so hard to be hip and cool?

I think it's only natural for anyone to desire to be hip/cool. We all would prefer to be on the "inside" rather than on the periphery. For Christian culture, the desire is perhaps a little more acute, for a number of reasons: 1) There has been an "uncool" chip on Christianity's shoulders for decades; 2) The youth are leaving the church, and so naturally we want to present a "cool" Christianity that will bring back or keep the kids coming; 3) There's an increasingly wide gap between the truly hipster churches and the hopelessly uncool churches, and the latter are forced to find ways to bridge the "cool" gap whether they want to or not. If you're a 50 year old Baptist church in an old building with an aging congregation, and down the street a new warehouse church called "Jericho" is attracting all the town's young Christians, your future viability depends on a concerted effort to "get with the times" and become more relevant. It's sad, really. But this is the situation many otherwise solid, Biblical churches are finding themselves in.

What does the whole "Sunday's Coming" movie trailer spoof tell us about the church's efforts to be hip and cool?

I think that video was a hit because it made fun of the decidedly un-cool/formulaic/lame nature of the average evangelical “wannabe cool” church today. Evangelicals laughed and passed it around in droves because they could collectively identity and purge their shame of having been associated with such ridiculousness. “Hipster Christianity” is similarly self-aware and defined by a “we are beyond that” elitist spirit, reacting against the evangelical tendencies to try so hard to be cool. They are NATURALLY cool, they will argue, denying “hipster Christian” labels at all cost because to be implicated as such is to be called out as just the most recent manifestation of evangelical Christianity’s long and sordid search for cultural relevance or “cool.” So in the case of “Sunday’s Coming,” it’s not the subject matter of the video that represents hipster Christianity (quite the opposite actually), but rather the way in which the video was consumed, processed and (possibly) passed along by young evangelicals desperate to distance themselves from stodgy megachurch/mainstream Christianity (though many Christian hipsters simply ignored the video or scoffed at it from the outset).

The video tells us 1) The church's efforts to be hip and cool today will look silly in a few years and will be easily parodied. 2) The video itself represents the importance (for hipster Christianity) of self-conscious irony and collective finger-pointing at "the wrong way." Hipster Christianity is above all a rebellion against the "wrong ways" to do Christianity--and the Sunday's Coming video represents a lot of those wrong ways.

You spent some time at The Kilns in Oxford writing this book. If C.S. Lewis were alive today, what do you imagine he would say about "Hipster Christianity"?

I think he already chimed in on the topic in his essay "The Inner Ring," which is in The Weight of Glory. In "The Inner Ring," Lewis talks about the danger in being what he called an "Inner Ringer"--one who is desperately trying to claw into the inner circles of culture and society; one who prizes things and appreciates culture only insofar as it helps improve his or her status as insider/elite rather than outsider/common. The problem with this wannabe cool, "Inner Ringer" mindset is that it blinds us to our true desires and true enjoyments, replacing them with an overarching desire—pervasive and deeply ingrained in humanity—to want to be in the know. But As Lewis notes, the inside of the circle will never satisfy us if the whole goal was always just to cross the invisible line from outer to inner. If you only wanted to be "in," the pleasure will be short-lived once you get inside.  "As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want," writes Lewis. "Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain."

I think Lewis would see Hipster Christianity as a potentially hazardous, unseamly manifestation of the "Inner Ringer" mentality, a negative trajectory for a church that has always been better off accepting "outsider" status as part and parcel of an authentically lived, Gospel-centered life.

How do you think your book can, as you put it, “advance the cause of Christ and not muddle it up”?

It has been my hope and prayer from the beginning that this book would not simply be another "this is how Christianity has gone wrong" or "this is how we should re-do Jesus" books, which tend to "muddle up" our sense of Christianity identity in an already confusing age. Rather, I wanted to create a book that steers us a bit back on course, arguing for the power and simplicity of the good 'ole, unadorned, power-in-the-blood Gospel which never goes out of style. In the book, I want to suggest--by rendering hipster Christianity in high relief--that the thing about our faith that will last, the thing that will draw people in, has nothing to do with how cool it looks or how "relevant" it seems. It has everything to do with being as faithful to Christ's calling as possible, and giving ourselves in love for the world, caring little for how we look in the process.