If Brooklyn hipsters found God
Brooke Moreland woke up this morning, rolled over and said to Joseph Weisenthal, “I just had a dream that would have really annoyed you.”
And then Brooke told Joe her dream.
“I would have hated having that dream,” Joe confirmed.
Normally I wouldn’t post a dream to Idea Province, but this one was actually a pretty brilliant commentary on hipster culture in Brooklyn.
The working thesis of the dream was: “What if Brooklyn hipsters got really into Christianity all at once?”
It opened with Joe and Brooke walking into a Church in Brooklyn. But this wasn’t just any Church. It was a church created by and attended solely by hipsters. Many of them originally from Austin.
They weren’t exactly dressed in typical hipster fashion, however. It was church fashion. But vintage church dresses with a hip edge to them. And at this particular time, church hats and vintage bonnets were in with the hipster religious crowd. Cool looking vintage bonnets.
The preacher was this really cool, young, leather jacket-wearing rock star kind of guy. He had some story, like that he’d been visiting some poor countries and witnessed a miracle or something like that. He was also talking about how hard it is for hip young people like them to be religious. He was really inspirational, and the crowd loved him.
Julie, this tall girl who used to work at the Spiderhouse coffee shop in Austin, was in the front row. Everybody knew that she was dating the preacher, and that was a real status symbol. She was watching him preach with a huge, proud smile on her face.
Preachers were the new rock stars. Instead of worshipping the gods of rock, they were worshipping… God.
Of course, these being hipsters, there was some ironic distance to it all. There was always an undercurrent of “Isn’t it weird that we used to scoff at Jesus and now look at us worshipping him.” But it wasn’t a total joke. They were all believers. It’s just that spirituality was the new thing to do.
There were a bunch of reporters there to cover this new cultural phenomenon. One person was doing a photo story, and a TV reporter was practicing taglines: “Instead of going to rock shows, these young New Yorkers are getting a healthy dose of spirituality on Saturday nights.”
A reporter for 11211 Magazine, the hipster produced magazine about Williamsburg, was interviewing a hipster Churchgoer. “We used to go to shows every night,” the newly Christian hipster said. “But that got old, and now we go to Church.”
Joe, for his part, was rolling his eyes the entire time. He was horrified. Brooke was just bewildered and amazed she’d never heard about this before.
One detail in Brooke’s dream was hazy. She remembered that the church was near a bridge, and that this was significant somehow.
“Was it Dumbo?” I asked.
“Yeah, it might have been Dumbo. Or maybe the Williamsburg bridge,” she said.
But that wasn’t the most important part.
I don’t know. This actually seems like it could happen.
6 years ago