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168 Sarah M. Pike

staffed by a young man “sporting a ceiling-scraping Mohawk and a leather
jacket festooned with patches from punk bands who’d probably have had
coronaries if they saw where he was working” (Beaujon 2006). When it comes
to Christian youth music and style, common stereotypes simply do not fit.
A Florida mother, Jackie Roberts, drove a carload of kids to Cornerstone in
2003 but, she said on her blog, it “wasn’t the contemporary Christian music
scene they expected…as they passed lines of hippies, punks, Goths, brightly-
colored Mohawks, and lots of tattoos” (Hertz 2003). They had driven into
the heart of the Christian youth music counterculture. Cornerstone has
made a name for itself by inviting Bible believers to investigate diverse forms
of popular culture.
Cornerstone is very much like Burning Man in that thousands of participants
undertake a kind of pilgrimage and expect to have their hearts and minds
transformed at the festival. Though one might assume they would be at
opposite ends of the festival spectrum, both Burning Man and Cornerstone
offer a range of music and dance and religious services, altars, and shrines.
The hundreds of bands that play at Cornerstone cover all genres from punk
to world beat, with only two criteria: they have to be good, and they have
to be saved. The biblically-based messages, pro-life slogans, abstinence from
drinking, and sex policies of Cornerstone, for example, make it clear that
this is not the Woodstock of the 1960s even though it has been called “Jesus’
Woodstock” by Christian journalist Todd Hertz (Hertz 2003).
Nevertheless, Cornerstone is a striking case of the Christianizing of alter-
native cultures and popular media. The Imaginarium is the site at Cornerstone
that goes farthest in inviting festival participants to encounter popular culture
and make it their own. One of the Imaginarium’s programmers describes
activities at the tent as “a cross between a Star Trek convention and the
Micky Mouse Club” (Hertenstein 2006). Festival-goer Kathleen Lundquist
puts it this way:

It’s the place where Christians of all stripes meet to study, dissect,
and celebrate popular culture—everything from Godzilla to Flannery
O’Connor to the X-Files to Lord of the Rings to Frankenstein to Jason
and the Argonauts to Jules Verne to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
(Lundquist 2006)

Each year the Imaginarium sponsors a theme around which its program-
mers organize events, films, speakers, and workshops. The themes tend to
focus on the margins and extremes of popular culture: Marilyn Manson
instead of Paris Hilton, cult films instead of Hollywood blockbusters.
Stories about Cornerstone suggest that the appropriation of alternative
music and style is on the rise in Christian youth outreach. The Web site