I like reading socio-cultural histories and following the patterns of cultural trends. I am in no way fashionable or trendy myself. I couldn’t tell you what sort of music is popular these days or what sort of clothing is in (I wear blue jeans, t-shirts, and birks). But I love reading about how the evolution of fashion affected, say, the women’s right’s movement. Or even about how the transformation of the “book” from scroll to codex to electronic medium influences how we psychologically interact with the text. So books like A History of Reading and Freakonomics fascinated me.
Since reading Freakonomics a couple of years ago, I’ve been intrigued by the history of names. The rise and fall of naming trends, the sounds that enchant a generation, the cultural events that send a name soaring or plummeting in the charts. I look forward to the Social Security Administration’s yearly Mother’s Day gift of the 1000 most popular names from the previous year. I am addicted to sites like the Baby Name Wizard that tracks current trends and reports of historical patterns. Yes, it is nerdy, but I like these attempts to understand the cultural zeitgeist.
So I’ve been lurking at the edges of recent conversation at Andrew Jones’ blog about the names emerging and emergent. The question posed was if those terms are a help or a hindrance to those of us within this conversation. Or as some interpreted it – is the shelf life of those terms rapidly coming to an end. Are emerging and emergent the ministry equivalents of Jennifer and Jason, or to be contemporary, Madison and Jacob – useful popular names for a season but which have become so overused and trendy that those who think about such things don’t want to use them anymore?
I found the comments in the discussion interesting. Sure there were those who freaked out about using any labels at all. Others threw up their hands in despair at the idea that some people have given emerging/emergent a bad name and so therefore we must promptly abandon them. Some were more ambivalent saying that a name doesn’t define who they are as Christians, and a small few actually said they liked the names.
What I found most intriguing was how this name discussion parallelled the biggest trends in baby naming – essentially that the trend these days is to be unique (not trendy). Of course the irony is that everyone is just giving into the trend of not being trendy. But our culture places so much value on individuality and not being one of the crowd that of course anti-trendiness and uniqueness have become virtues.
But have we ever stopped to think that in the mad dash to avoid cultural trends what we are really doing is refusing to be part of a community. By snubbing our nose at a label we are rejecting those who own that label. We say “we are different and better than you so therefore we don’t want to be associated with you.” Sure in the history of naming there perhaps are appropriate occasions to do such things (did all the Adolph’s start going by their middle name after WW2?). But to eschew a name/label because it isn’t unique enough or just isn’t “me” represents the height of individuality. And I thought that one of the things that pesky emerging/emergent label conveyed was a shift away from individuality towards community. But maybe that’s not what people really want.