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If you've ever seen God in a tattoo or had a revelatory experience listening to R.E.M.,
Virtual Faith is for you. Tom Beaudoin has spent his whole life parked in front of the TV, surfing online, and jamming to the radio--that is when he hasn't been church hopping, getting graduate degrees in theology, or serving in the Israeli army. His book is the most comprehensive and accessible reading on the religious nature of irreverence among members of the so-called "Generation X." While Beaudoin skirts some of the most contentious issues raised by Gen-X pop culture (neither "Marilyn Manson" nor "homosexuality" appears in the index), his book is groundbreaking and important simply because it makes a bold move: he aims two rays of light--God's and Madonna's--straight at each other, and actually takes seriously the wild spectrum that results.
--Michael Joseph Gross
From Publishers Weekly
Proclaiming itself as the first book to focus directly on the religious experience of Generation X, Beaudoin's book is a provocative interpretation of the spiritual side of the popular culture that, he argues, has so deeply informed today's 18- to 34-year-olds. Beaudoin, a lay preacher currently working on a doctorate in religion and education at Boston College, argues that, despite popular conception, Gen-X is strikingly religious. The author gushes a book-length apologia for his generation's unabashed "irreverent spiritual quest," which includes the "meaning-making system" of their popular culture, their condemnation of authority and the institutional church and their simulated "virtual faith." This is a faith located not in traditional religious institutions but in the simulated material environment of video games and MTV videos. Beaudoin is an energetic writer, but his thinking is often sloppy and, in some cases, absurdAas when he contends that Gen-Xers have undergone Christlike suffering simply by being born into the turbulent era of the 1970s and '80s, into divorced families, into a fearful, fragmented society overhung by the nuclear cloud. Given his lack of perspective, it's easy for him to explain his generation's turn to shocking, unorthodox means to satisfy their spiritual hunger. He decodes the messages of "Xer theology" from unlikely sources: the sensual and spiritual imagery in music videos, the marking of pain and "gift of religious experience" in body piercings, identification with society's outcasts through ripped jeans. Beaudoin would have us believe that the irreverent, arrogant-unto-death thief on the cross embodies true spirituality, while the repentant thief is weak, hypocritical and outside Jesus'paradise.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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