Alice Cooper Interview

Alice Cooper Is A Christian

I was speaking with a very conservative cousin of mine who was going to a Christian college about the seeming reluctance of the Baptist church to accept new points of view and their tendency to be a good...oh...20 years behind. He pointed out that the congregants with money are older and resistant to new ideas.

The funny thing about this concept is that, from my point of view, the church isn't the only place we're seeing evidence of this. A while back, I watched part of a series of stories on one of the news magazine shows about the impact of the Baby Boomer generation and how Madison Avenue has departed from the old standard of selling to the 20-something crowd, because the money that's there doesn't compare to the money in the now 50-something Boomers. If you look around, that affects so many industries, including television. Sure enough, so many shows we've seen in the last decade that appeal to younger audiences have a much harder time competing (or even being given a chance to compete) than they might have had the target audience for advertising actually been the audience those shows were written for.

It makes for a weird kind of generation gap just about everywhere.

Like the church.

I find it very difficult to walk into a church that is still going through the motions that filled the pews 20 years ago. They're not reaching the younger generations who have been through so much more and live in a state of further enlightenment than those that have gone before them. A lot of them are still preaching that emotional and mental illness is a matter of spirit, not physical ailment, which in turn, keeps people from seeking professional help. Their youth programs are dead, because they're not reaching kids and the problems that face them in today's world.

In fact, my own problems with organized religion in general is based in a lot of this. It encourages wearing blinders and non-acceptance of the very people believers should be trying to reach. It encourages condemnation without mercy in spite of the fact that we were given a living example of compassion and acceptance. It teaches separatism through "be not of the world" without including the "We must walk in the world, but...".

So, finding unorthodox Christians in every walk of life, even in hard rock? That's too cool to me. It gives me hope that those who have so much difficulty with the traditional Boomer approach to religion can see that not all of us are close-minded stuffed shirts or closet hypocrites.

/rant