An Essay on Expanding the Imaginative Horizons of Christianity

Some thoughts on learning what we can from a long-dead subculture

My last two essays have used music as a means of getting at some kind of more important, more abstract truth, and the essay that follows continues with the tradition. Hang in there for a little while and we will get to Christianity, I promise.

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Most adults become nostalgic for their childhood at some point in their lives, and most adults tend to look back at the world of their youth as a time when life was “simpler” or “better.” I am no exception to the rule, and for years have longed for a return to those glorious years we know as the 1990s. Those older than me likely see nothing all that remarkable about the decade, and those younger than me likely see the decade as mere prologue to 21st century life. But to me, the 1990s were a wonderful time to be a child. Looking back on the decade now, I see a way in which culture and subculture belonged to one another—strengthened and challenged one another—in a manner that makes the 1990s unique. Before the 1990s, subculture and culture clashed (sometimes violently) or subculture lacked the strength to challenge established social norms. After the 1990s, to belong to a subculture increasingly meant retreating—distancing yourself—from the broader culture. But for a few remarkable years, maybe from the fall of 1991 to the summer of 1994, a subculture emerged from the matrices of American social life that was strong enough to challenge—and to change—established cultural norms. In turn, the cultural pushback against the emerging subculture challenged—and for a time strengthened—the movement that threatened to recede back to the fringes of society.

What I am talking about is grunge, a form of alternative rock music, that emerged as a subculture in the early 1990s and for a few years consumed the attention of the American public. No previous subculture had experienced the kind of success that marked the rise of grunge in the early 1990s. Grunge went mainstream in a way that other musical subcultures never could, and much of that had to do with historical circumstance: music videos created a space for cultural resonance that had not existed in decades past; the cultural glamor of the 1980s collapsed with the end of the Cold War and society was ready for a ‘more authentic’ kind of music; a young, ‘hip’ President of the United States was elected who recognized the merits of the grunge subculture in a way that established alternative rock as a vital element of the broader culture. From the music developed a semi-cohesive way of living in the world: flannel shirts and torn jeans; long hair; suspicion of authority; the rejection of commercial society; a sudden regard for authenticity and the fear of becoming a ‘poser’; political idealism; a yearning for freedom; a confronting of the social ills of isolation, neglect, trauma and abuse. For a few short years in the early 1990s the grunge subculture captured the attention of the American public before disappearing as suddenly as it arose, a victim of its own self-immolation and a rapid shift in the musical genres that dominated the charts in the second half of the decade (boy bands and nu metal).

The grunge subculture has been on my mind recently because I made the decision to work through a new book on the band Pearl Jam by author and music critic Steven Hyden. The question that drives the narrative of the book is simple enough: why did Pearl Jam survive as a band when every other group or artist of the grunge subculture did not survive? Nirvana, Sound Garden, Alice in Chains, Mother Love Bone, Stone Temple Pilots—each of these bands suffered from addictions and anxieties that would sometimes result in irreconcilable creative differences, sometimes result in overdoses, and sometimes result in suicide. But somehow Pearl Jam survived the very subculture that crippled so many of their peers. And Hyden wants to give an account in his book of how this happened.

The account that Hyden offers turns on a live performance Pearl Jam gave at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) on September 2, 1993. At the time, Pearl Jam was the biggest band in the world and grunge music dominated the American mainstream. The video for the hit single “Jeremy” from their 1991 multi-platinum album Ten had rested at the very top of the MTV rotation for months and the VMAs were expected to function as a further confirmation of Pearl Jam’s world-dominating status. Later that fall, Pearl Jam would release their sophomore album Vs., which would go seven-times platinum and for five years hold the record for most album sales in a single week. We can only imagine the crowd that gathered at the MTV Video Music Awards in September of 1993, the shaggy hair, adorned in baggy flannel and ripped denim, longing to behold the performance of a band that defined the subculture to which they belonged.

What Pearl Jam gave to the crowds on September 2, 1993 could not possibly have met expectations. Having received a feature set for the awards show—a full ten minutes of airtime—for about 2 1/2 minutes Pearl Jam played a new song from an album not yet released, something few in the audience would have known. None of the cherished hits from Ten were performed. The song “Jeremy,” whose video would claim a host of awards that night, did not make the set list. Having finished their performance of “Animal”—the short, yet-to-be-released song that opened the set—Pearl Jam looked to their left and welcomed Neil Young onto the stage. I can’t imagine how confusing the moment must have been for many in the audience. My guess is that few in the crowd knew anything about Neil Young. Young belonged to their parent’s generation, and the young men and women of the grunge subculture wanted nothing to do with their parents. Moreover, Neil Young—at least in terms of popular success—was mostly irrelevant in 1993. A titan of 1960s/1970s rock and roll, the 1980s were a wasted decade for Neil Young. His 1989 release, Freedom, was something of a recovery of form, and the single “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” rose to #2 on the U.S. Mainstream Rock charts, but no one who loved grunge in 1993 would have cared much for Neil Young or his career.

But Pearl Jam did. And there was Neil Young, walking onto the stage of the 1993 VMAs like he belonged there, in front of a crowd who did not know him. You can watch a video of the performance and get sense for yourself of the uncertainty seizing the audience as Young plugs in his guitar and Eddie Vedder (lead singer of Pearl Jam) makes the joke that the audience knows who Neil Young is. And then Neil Young starts to play . . . one of his songs, not the Pearl Jam anthem that everyone in the crowd would have expected. Young launches into the opening riff for “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” and for the next seven minutes he is the absolute star of the show. The musicians twenty years younger than Neil Young who share the stage with him—musicians who belonged to the biggest band in the world at the time—wholeheartedly defer to Neil Young’s lead. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a Native American necklace hanging just a few inches below his greying mutton chop sideburns, it could not be more obvious that Neil Young did not belong to the subculture whose attention he demanded through his furious guitar work and high pitch yelp of a singing voice. For seven minutes the biggest band in the world conceded completely to a cultural has-been from a past generation, responding to his every provocation, following his lead, comfortably assuming the role of a backing band on the night that ought to have been something of a coronation for them.

Pearl Jam and Neil Young at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards

Steven Hyden says that this is the performance that saved Pearl Jam’s career. While other bands suffered from the addictions and anxieties that would destroy them, Pearl Jam saw something in Neil Young that they earnestly desired for themselves: the kind of powerful authenticity that could command the attention of a subculture regardless of whether one belonged to it or not. There was no doubt on September 2, 1993 that Neil Young—the way he walks onto the stage as though he belongs there, the way he draws the best out of the musicians who surround him, the way he simply does not seem to care about the audience in front of him—was absolutely his own man. Pearl Jam realized on that fall evening that if they held themselves together, kept away from the addictions that were killing their peers, and let the music—more than anxiety and social pressure—give shape to their career, then they could live differently than the other bands who had created the grunge subculture with them. Neil Young showed Pearl Jam that they did not need to be a band who met the expectations of a subculture; they only needed to be Pearl Jam.

Let me make a hard pivot to talking about Christianity. Back in September, Dr. Larry Chapp visited us at the Baltimore Basilica to give a presentation on Dorothy Day, the Second Vatican Council, and the Universal Call to Holiness. You should read the lecture for yourself. Dr. Chapp is a fine theologian, but a theologian who retired early from a life spent in academia to establish a Catholic Worker Farm in Harvey’s Lake, Pennsylvania with his wife, Carrie. Today, Dr. Chapp runs a website and a podcast series, works his farm, and goes about the country giving presentations on the Christian life.

I loved the presentation that Dr. Chapp gave at the Baltimore Basilica. My favorite moment in the lecture came maybe just before the midpoint, when Dr. Chapp identified the method of the early Church that made it possible for Christianity to distinguish itself against the background of pagan culture. He says that:

The Romans accused the first Christians of being “anti-social” and “anti- human” because the Church insisted that our spiritual center of gravity resides outside of the nexus of everyday social commerce and within the nexus of a regime of grace that explodes the old wineskins of the “normal”.

What the early Church, by contrast, dared its followers to do was to imagine that what seems to be most “real” (everyday, commonsense, compromised living) is in fact an illusion. And it called us to dream differently and more radically.

At this point, Dr. Chapp set his text to the side and spoke to us directly about the power and necessity of the imagination for the Christian life. We human beings can only desire what we know, and often what we do not know we must imagine for ourselves so that we might possess the desires we need to motivate great action, effect real change, and make another kind of life seem possible and attractive. The remarkable success of the early Church turned on the capacity of saints and scholars to expand the imaginative horizons of the pagan world. These new imaginative horizons incited sincere desire within the lives of those who would become Christians, and as those new imaginative horizons continued to expand, so did the Christian world: hospitals were established; schools were opened; cathedrals were built; pilgrimages became an indelible mark of the Christian life; statues and paintings, chants and frescoes expressed the interior impulse of culture that dared to “dream differently” than the society that it replaced.

What followed was a question: who is going to show our children that another kind of life is possible in a culture that gives pride of place to self-will and personal pleasure? Who is going to expand the imaginative horizons of the youth of the Church? A life that cannot be imagined is a life that cannot be desired. And a life that cannot be desired is a life that cannot become realized—instantiated—within the life of a Christian. The operative norm in the Church today is for Christians to live according to the bourgeois standard of the culture that surrounds us: we want comfort and stability; a plan for life that is practical and logical; virtues that dispose us to compassion and that do not risk offending anyone; love that gives meaning to life but that does not demand more of us than we want to give. And then, within that kind of cultural framework, we live our Christian lives: we get to Mass most Sundays; we try to pray each day; we get involved in different community events; we volunteer each month at the local homeless shelter; we tithe 2-4% of our income. The Christianity that most Christians live today conforms to the bourgeois standards of the culture that surrounds us.

The consequence is a dying Christianity in the west. There is nothing distinctive about the Christian life for too many Christians. There are no expanded imaginative horizons that incite within us the kinds of desires that build cathedrals, establish hospitals, open schools, create beautiful works of art, and result in the living of a life that is remarkably, distinctively other than the culture that surrounds us. What is absent from our Church today is the universal desire for radical holiness, says Dr. Chapp. He surveys our options and concludes that:

We might think that we can have our cake and eat it too, that we can be a kind of “halfway” Catholic while keeping both feet firmly planted in the worldview of modernity, that we can pass on the faith to our children by simply taking them to Church once in a while, but we will be fooling ourselves. The “beige Catholicism” that Bishop Robert Barron describes as the boilerplate default position of the average suburban parish is not compelling, is not beautiful, and is viewed by many as a boring and drab affair that simply cannot compete with the more exciting allurements of the modern world. It simply does not grip, it does not bite, it does not gain traction, and it does not challenge us to the kind of sanctified heroism which alone can excite the soul.

We have made Christianity boring, our youth are not attracted to the life, and there are too few Christians living today who possess the capacity to expand the imaginative horizons of a generation that needs to experience a wholehearted desire for God.

Allow me to make an absurd analogy: what I see with absolute clarity in the performance from the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards is Neil Young—a has-been from a past generation—expanding the imaginative horizons of a band at the forefront of a dominant subculture. Neil Young showed the members of Pearl Jam that there was a different way to live in the world . . . a different kind of life that they could have for themselves if they could only desire it and claim it. The other bands of the grunge subculture self-destructed—overdoses, suicides, years of battling substance abuse and addiction. The members of Pearl Jam went a different way, claimed for themselves a different kind of life. Many of their peers—those who could not find a way to live differently from the subculture they helped to create—have long since died. Pearl Jam still tours just about every year, create new music, and live in relationship with the fans who followed them.

The grunge subculture, for a few years, possessed a power and influence that most subcultures of most generations never experience, and Pearl Jam found a way to let it all go, to escape the subculture that would have consumed them, because someone expanded for them the imaginative horizons of the possible. The pattern of imaginative expansion repeats throughout history: there are those who see reality differently and inspire those around them to want a kind of life that was never known to be possible. Sometimes those who dream differently are old rock stars, but far more important are those who are saints—saints who show us that we do not need to live according to the standards of the culture that surrounds us.

My point is not that we need more young people listening to Pearl Jam in the Church today (except maybe we do). My point, rather, is that we need to show the youth of our Church that a different kind of life is possible than the life that is forced upon them by our culture. The life of comfort and practicality cannot incite authentic Christian desire. Only real—radical—holiness will do.