Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
Five summers ago, I was a just-out-of-college intern for the C.S. Lewis Foundation, working on the Oxbridge ’05 conference in Oxford and Cambridge. It was one of the most enchanting, life-changing summers of my life. On top of the many brilliant lectures I heard in Oxford and Cambridge, I had dozens of conversations over pints and pipes—at pubs at 2 in the morning, after an evensong service in some magical cathedral, or in the garden of The Kilns (C.S. Lewis’ home in Oxford). These were the conversations that sparked the first true ideas that would eventually become Hipster Christianity. When I got back home later that summer, I wrote “A New Kind of Hipster” for Relevant. Five years later, Hipster Christianity is out in stores (as of Aug. 1—the official release date).
I grew up in a church that celebrated the Fourth of July every year with a big patriotic musical. That was the one Sunday of the year when everyone was encouraged to "dress casual," the service included a lot of patriotic songs, and the preaching focused on how America needs to get back to her Christian roots. Songs were sung about how we are one nation under God. Military veterens dressed in their uniforms. There was a color guard that marched in with the American flag and led us through the Pledge of Allegiance. Come to think of it, the entire sanctuary was decked out in American flags, and everyone dressed in red, white and blue. Following the worship service, there was always a church picnic on the grounds.
