The recent movie On the Road  is a film version of the famous Jack Kerouac novel and it brings back to public attention the beatniks. The novel has been popular ever since it came out in 1957 (interestingly, he completed it in 1951, but couldn't get any publishers interested in taking it on since the story of hard drinking, hard living, and free loving was too much at first for mainstream publishers). But the novel was almost immediately commandeered by rebellious youths, and it has been used ever since as a kind of template for how to be cool by dropping out of middle class dullness. Many readers have embraced the beat mystique, from the time it was written through the 1960's counter-culture and from then on with every decade of hedonistic drug and alcohol-fueled scramble for "freedom." Today's Goths, for instance, (or are they already declasse?) mark out by their clothing, their music, and their attitude that they are way beyond dreary bourgeouise conventionality.

In spite of the in-you-face breaking of taboos and hedonistic romping in the novel, there is actually a serious angle to Kerouac that Christians do well to heed. The middle class can be dull. It can be conformist and oppressively anti-Christian even in the midst of Christianity in the way that it requires fealty to certain codes of behavior and certain idolatries instead of Christ. We need to drop out of it [Middle Class conformity] in some sense. In fact, it is a persistent religious insight across all religions that we need to drop out of the world in some sense. All religions and all religious perceptions (such as those of Plato) recognize that ordinary life is to some degree delusional.

Jack Kerouac

Keep in mind, too, that it was originally a conservative Republican soldier who told Americans to watch out for the military industrial complex (I like Ike!).

 Unfortunately, I think that most of those who read Kerouac's novel will take away from it only the parts that glamorize drunken sex without understanding that by the end of the work, all of the characters are burned out by their irresponsible flight from normality. Their rejection of the bland, secular world with its propaganda to buy your way to happiness is a correct instinct that is at bottom relgious, but rather than turning to religion--of whatever kind--to give shape to their longings, the various characters have nothing but their own needs to propel them, and so they fail in their quest for enlightenment. This is also a truth of the novel, one that will be ignored by this generation of readers and probably by subsequent ones.

Only by dropping out in the sense of giving one's self away to God is the true Christian beatnik road to somewhere.

Rembrandt's beatnik Jesus