Rapture Ready!
Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture
In the beginningAn airfield in rural Kansas, September 2005. The last echo of guitar feedback pulsed through the afternoon air as tattooed roadies carried equipment off the stage and the mosh pit untangled. A lanky teenager made his way out of the crowd and ran to where his friends were waiting on the periphery, sweat smearing his thick black eyeliner. "Awesome performance." He grinned broadly. "They prayed like three times in a twenty-minute set."
I glanced around. If anyone else thought this was a strange criterion on which to evaluate a rock concert, they didn't show it. Not for the first time, I wondered what I was doing here, at a Christian music festival where the merch tables sold "Got Jesus?" T-shirts and Bibles that looked like beach novels. Dustin, the sixteen-year-old prayer fan, continued his rapid-fire appraisal of the hard-rock band Disciple. A black-clad girl named Amanda gazed at him admiringly, and I began to suspect that her T-shirt -- "I'm a sucker for guys in eyeliner" -- was not chosen by accident. Amanda's friend Alexis smile ... read full excerpt from Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture ebook