Demographics, Personality, and Faith
I hate being a demographic – or more specifically fitting exactly into a profile for a particular demographic. I get annoyed by the constant assumption that I am voting for Obama BECAUSE I am young, white, and educated. As if I am a mindless lemming just following the pack. Or then there's the assumption that just because I like the books and am a young mother, I can be alternately ridiculed and marketed to as a Twilight Mom. Can't I just enjoy the book? By creating these categories one can be dismissed and ignored because others assume they understand everything about you. You are a known factor – uninteresting, predictable, and easily dealt with. The opinions of known factors are generally worthless.
I know there is value in profiles and categories, I just prefer to be different. I don't like to be dismissed without being understood not do I appreciate it when others assume I fit neatly into any given category. Recently Mike and I were discussing how we have always defined ourselves in opposition to whatever we are a part of. Maybe that comes from growing up always being the nerds on the outside in school, but it's developed into a habit. We can't read a book or hear a lecture without analyzing it for where we disagree. In many ways that is a good thing – I've been in congregations where the entire audience so tunes out the pastor that he could be preaching from the Satanic Bible and they would just nod their heads and smile. I like the ability to think deeply and examine my world. Sure that means I often don't know where I belong. I'm generally either the most liberal or the most conservative in any group I am in (more on this later). And even given that this is part of who I am, I also value community too much to be categorized and dismissed as just an individualist. It's a strange balance.
So of course I hate it when I get categorized and dismissed as an emergent as someone who is merely against or in reaction to what has come before. Those who categorize us as such generally seem to do so in an attempt to ignore us. They assume they understand our motivations and therefore can dismiss us based on those false assumptions. So I find the books and articles that set out to define the typical emergent or emerging church to miss the mark. We aren't that easily defined or reduced. Maybe too many of us like to be different. But being different doesn't always mean being in reaction against or in rebellion. It can mean looking forward for the positive not just looking backwards at the negative. It means questioning ourselves just as much as we question everything we encounter. It's about growth and openness to be used by God. And those are things that can never be set in stone as known factors. God's work in this world is ever changing. Fresh winds blow, new patterns develop, and new disciples are made. The expression of the faithful looks different in every time and place. And I like that.
It's good to be different and mess up those nice and neat categories. Demographics be damned – let the church be who we are and be used by God as God desires us to be used. Faith in a dynamic and active God defies all categories and profiles.
Or at least it should.
Tags:
julieclawson(at)gmail(dot)com 
I definitely agree with you. I hate being put in a box that way–categories have their uses, but those uses are very, very limited. One time at the college cafeteria they were serving black eyed peas. My roommate (from Minnesota) noticed I didn't take any and she said "What?! No black eyed peas? But you're from the South!"…as if where I grew up predetermined my food tastes. People are individuals–at the end of the day you have to take them as they come.
amen! may we continue to tear down walls and definitions.
As someone who's main introduction into the Emergent conversation was reading "Generous Orthodoxy" – I really found myself drawn in because of an opposite approach to the stereotype you've described. I get passionate about this stuff because it's taking the church context I'm in, and listening to people that I disagree with, to find things that I agree with, and can change what I'm doing in a positive manner. McLaren taught me that I don't need to be a Roman Catholic, for Catholicism to have something of value to contribute to my theology.
its very hard for people not to be reactors. By and large, people, at least in this country react. The sixties were a reaction to what came before. And on it goes. The left likes to think conservatives are all driving around killer SUVS, the better to demonize us, I guess. Very few people bother to be themselves. Most people find a group to associate and they conform. Doesn't matter if they are evangelicals, liberals, a bunch of emo kids rebelling against their suburban corporate parents or whatever. Few people are truly individuals. Those that are have reached an unusual level of maturity. whenever I see people TRYING to be different, its obvious that they are NOT being themselves.
Ah yes. I've found that people have often assumed that because I think abortion is immoral, I must think that war and capital punishment are OK (demographics prove it, don't they?)
I remember how tense people in our church youth group got when a visiting speaker, who was meeting them for the first time ever, said "Half of you are on drugs — statistics prove it."
But St Paul told us not to conform to people's expectations (Romands 12:2).