Goths for Jesus

Christian Century, July 28, 1999 by Jason E. McBride

One person said that she had been born a Goth, and that it was a comfort to come to a place where Christian Goth was recognized as a possible strategy for evangelism. In fact, the young man who was dressed in the elaborate black costume told me he serves as a missionary in London to its underground community.

Still, unsavory associations due to mainstream stereotyping have their cost. One girl tearfully related how, after the shootings at Columbine High School, where the murderers were identified with Goth-style clothing, her church had shunned her. (The original crosses that were built as memorials for the dead at Columbine had been reassembled at the festival, adding further to its eerie mix of cultural symbols.)

Attracted to its style, proponents of Christian Goth resisted admitting that there might be serious incompatibilities between the cultural props and meanings of Goth (like its bleak posturing and macabre fascination with death) and the ultimate message of Christianity. As with hard-metal moshers--whose violence makes them even more unpalatable--their tendency was to think that inserting the gospel into any musical form redeemed that form for Christian use.

There are precedents, of course, for the Christian use of secular sources. Renaissance composers used popular folk songs as cantus firmi for their masses, and Luther adapted familiar drinking songs as hymn tunes. Fin-de-siecle evangelicals employ all styles of popular music and its attendant culture to spread the gospel. But many seem surprisingly uninterested in the relation of form and content, and satisfied merely with reproducing forms of popular culture, however questionable. Like the cathedral gargoyles, whose phantasmagoric appearance still remains a curiosity, the Christian Goths are unsettling forms in the artifice of Christian pop.

Jason E. McBride is a CENTURY editorial assistant.