Evangelical Youth Culture: Alternative Music and Extreme Sports Subcultures

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Description

This book offers a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich study of the intersections of contemporary Christianity and youth culture, focusing on evangelical engagements with punk, hip hop, surfing, and skateboarding. Ibrahim Abraham draws on interviews and fieldwork with dozens of musicians and sports enthusiasts in the USA, UK, Australia, and South Africa, and the analysis of evangelical subcultural media including music, film, and extreme sports Bibles. Evangelical Youth Culture: Alternative Music and Extreme Sports Subcultures makes innovative use of multiple theories of youth cultures and subcultures from sociology and cultural studies, and introduces the "serious leisure perspective" to the study of religion, youth, and popular culture. Engaging with the experiences of Pentecostal punks, surfing missionaries, township rappers, and skateboarding youth pastors, this book makes an original contribution to the sociology of religion, youth studies, and the study of religion and popular culture.

Reviews

Probably the smartest book Ive seen on the topic of evangelical Christian youth culture, and easily the most global in scope. Grounded in state-of-the-art social science and cultural studies methods, based on research and interviews conducted on four continents, this study probes the complexly ambivalent relationships between Christian and secular subcultures devoted to popular music and extreme sports. No one interested in understanding contemporary youth culture, religious or otherwise, should miss this consistently insightful, rigorous, and witty book. * David Stowe, Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University, USA *
Offering a sharp critical lens on an impressive range of sociological and ethnographic research, Abraham provides smart insights on the complicated integration of evangelical Christianity into a variety of alternative scenes. This book is particularly valuable for its attention to global-local dynamics in processes of religious culture-making. * Anna E. Nekola, Assistant Professor in Communication, Music, and Queer Studies, Denison University, USA *
The author is providing a window onto a little understood part of youth culture. The book will be well received. * Andrew Singleton, Associate Professor of Sociology of Religion, Deakin University, Australia *
This book offers rich data, and demonstrates astute engagement with - and an original contribution to - debates on contemporary evangelicalism and contemporary Christianities, religion and popular culture, and religion and youth cultures. * Anna Strhan, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Kent, UK *

Author Bio

Ibrahim Abraham is Postdoctoral Researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, Finland.