Something being authentic sounds great.  Authentic leather, not naugahyde.  You go to the National Archives in Washington, DC to see the authentic Declaration of Independence, not a cheap copy.  That was the meaning of authentic for the early years of my life, what I would have thought the word, authentic, meant.  If you buy an authentic Babe Ruth bat, you don’t want it to have been mass produced in China.  Some external, verifiable means must be made to show the Babe had his fat fingers around that bat handle.  I took a mission trip to Mexico in high school and in the market, a man selling watches would pull one out to sell, declaring, “Only one of its kind!”  He sold it for a low price and then immediately pulled out an identical watch, saying again, “Only one of its kind!”  He sold watches that were not authentic.

The word “authentic” is now being used in an inauthentic way.   Now it is a commonly used word to justify bad beliefs and behavior from adherents.  They call what they’re doing authentic, but it is now a postmodern technical term.  Don’t think they mean “authentic” when they say it.  Now, however, young people especially like “authentic” better than authentic.  They aren’t authentic Christians.  They are “authentic” Christians.  They get more approval for being “authentic,” than authentic, but when they stand before God, He will inform them that they are naugahyde.  They are not the real thing.  They will be judged, not upon their own feelings or impressions, what they like, but based upon what God says.

Before I dig into the lie of “authenticity,” you should consider too that the word “alternative” today relates to authentic.  When I was in my teens and twenties, we started hearing about someone with an “alternative lifestyle.”  It seemed like a joke at the time.  A sad one.   Alternative is a big tent word to describe something “authentic to the subject” or “authentic to the person.”  It has mainly related to arts, but this is also where postmodernism got its beachhead.  Art was the first casualty of postmodernism, but it also, like a virus, started superspreading to other realms of reality.  It still uses art to spread, like the coronavirus attacks the respiratory system, postmodernism latches hold of art easier and then spreads from there.

If you see a weird avant-garde photograph or painting, maybe a toilet seat hanging from the wall with graffiti on it, you might think, ugly.  Others call it alternative and then authentic.  Someone is an authentic person if he does what you tell a toddler is scribble-scrabble.  Apparently it takes more ability to do it as an adult.  I was going to say, skill, but I couldn’t write that word for what they do.  Actual art takes skill.

Some “authentics” or “alternatives” do have some ability, but they make their niche, find their audience by pushing something new or different, that rings true and good and beautiful to themselves.  Their audience feels smart accepting their edgy, gritty alternative production, because it is authentic.  They acknowledge that they “get it.”  There is nothing to get.  There was nothing to get when Andy Warhol reproduced his Campbell’s Soup can, except to be authentic to himself, embrace his inner Warhol.

To give the impression that they are playing three dimensional chess, “authentic” is too called “next level.”  Someone has reached another level, like he’s taken the elevator up to a floor not yet built.  Why be held back by an actual building?  Let your mind go somewhere different. This is in the “next level” like Steve Jobs talked about when he said he used LSD in the days just before starting Apple in order to “think different.”  It is having a personal experience, going somewhere in one’s own imagination, that pushes into something no one has done before.  Sometimes, even often, there are good reasons why someone has never done something.  A person’s strange thoughts or impulses, arising from a heart deceitful and desperately wicked, do not correlate to objective beauty, lacking in the symmetry, order, and proportion of God’s creation.

I recently saw someone pushing the photography of an “artist,” who looked like a recent or present meth addict, taking photos of young alternative musicians in variations of neon light, leaving the appearance of diverse states of darkness and odd colors.  Some of his photos, like some of my bad ones through the years, were blurry, except on purpose.  They were not real.  They were not what a person really looks like.  And that’s why they are “authentic.”  They take the point of view, even if demented, of the subject, and by approving of it, you are accepting this different point of view, the alternative point of view, like the acceptance of an alternative lifestyle.

Here’s a man with a wife and children.  They look normal.  Here’s a man with another man.  One of the two appears a little different, more like a woman.  This is an alternative lifestyle.  In reality, it is a perversion of what is good.  On the leftist value list, it is, “love is love.”  It’s love to him.  It’s authentic to him.  Authentic never had this meaning before.  This is good evil and evil good.  This is beauty in the eye of the beholder.  They want to make the alternative normal and authentic by changing the word.  Language is power in postmodern philosophy.  They change the perspective.  This is again part of critical theory.

Let me clue you in.  What I’m describing in truth is just rebellion.  They are people who want to do what they want to do and be accepted for it.  They don’t want to be judged by objective standards.   There’s something very interesting to this, because these same proponents don’t live in that world.  It is not a world that really exists.  It is made up by them.  For example, they don’t want an avante-garde maid with an authentic view of “clean.”  Clean is still clean, just like the coronavirus is indifferent to authenticity.  They don’t want to fly in an “authentic” airplane, work in an “authentic” skyscraper, or cross an “authentic” bridge.  They don’t want planes built with arbitrary standards, beautiful to the beholder, but instead still according to musty old laws and standards.  They don’t, however, want that reality in their judgment of themselves, because then they can get away with what they want.  When you approve of them or just play along with them, this is not three dimensional chess, but a fool or a group of fools or at least scorners.

The English word “genuine” comes from genu, the Latin for knee, and it originated with reference to a custom of a father acknowledging paternity of a newborn child by placing it on his knee.  It really was his child.  His feelings didn’t matter.  There really was a reproductive act followed by conception and birth of a child.  Now someone is “genuine” if he acts however he wants.  His natural hair color is brown, but he’s not being true to himself if he doesn’t dye it light blue.

When Jesus said the truth would set you free, He wasn’t talking about being true to yourself.  People are judging you, you know, and instead of just caving to those around you, like parents, go off and do what you want, chase your dream, and be true to yourself.  That is now being genuine, the real mccoy.  No, truth was actual truth, the Word of God, and paying attention to and following what God said would set you free, free from sin (John 8:32-36).  There is an actual objective standard, one that doesn’t relate to your feelings or what you want, but to what God says, that is true.

In the spirit of language being power within postmodern philosophy and the more narrow critical theory, changing the meaning of the word authentic brings so-called “power” to the proponent of such progressivism.  God’s Word says, don’t do what you want to do, but do what God wants you to do — “he that doeth the will of God abideth forever” (1 John 2:17).  The new authenticity exalts the legitimacy of one’s own desires and then acts on them.  For a young person, he might add, I’m going to stop trying to please my parents and do whatever I want to do.  I’ll set up “boundaries,” again not with the normal meaning of the word, but with a meaning that I get zero counsel, intervention, or actual truth from my parents.  If the parents cross those arbitrary boundaries, they violate personal space like a trespasser, like a breaking and entering crime.

The power of changing the definition of authenticity brings faux liberation to the one using the term.  It isn’t really liberation, because it is bondage to sin and depraved self and the world system.  It makes a virtue out of the quixotic pursuit of being true to yourself.  If you are not “true to yourself,” then you are a fake.  Where does this stop?  You want to fornicate with multiple women, and if you don’t, then you are just being a fake.  Someone tells you this is wrong, but that’s just wrong to the speaker.  Even by listening to this person, you are just pandering to them.  That’s not authentic, it’s fake, not real.

The “authenticity,” which isn’t authentic, that I’m describing in this piece, has come into the worship of a church.  Professing Christians want to give something real to God, something they really feel, and that is whatever they feel.  What they feel is gritty and urban and sensual.  The judgment on this comes from the view of the subject.  Worship, however, is based on the view of the one worshiped.  What does God want?  Looking at reality only or primarily from the perspective of the subject, especially on worship, misrepresents reality.  God is not pleased.  Very God is not really pleased.  You may comprehend in this lifetime how much He dislikes it, but you will in eternity.  It really is not worth the risk of waiting to find out.

Part of “authenticity” revolves around being free to be who you are.  It isn’t “who you are.”  It’s just what you want.  God defines who we are, not ourselves.  He is the Creator, the Designer.  Another aspect of this is that for someone to be free to make the choice, he must be able to make the choice he wants, which means not condemning that choice.  Whoever condemns the choice is taking away freedom, because he brings “psychological damages.”  The guilt-riddenness might result in suicide, because of the rejection of the choice.  The accusation here is the power of language to murder the one, who committed suicide.  Especially young people are buying into this to bring liberation. 

At one time, what is now called “authenticity” would have been recognized as hedonism.  Leaders reward the impulsiveness that Paul called on Timothy to flee.  Holiness and piety are labeled prudery and transparently fake.  Those supporting objective truth or transcendent goodness and beauty are mere whitened sepulchers, painting on their religion from the outside with their externals.  What is missed, however, is that they purvey their own left-wing legalism, a new standard mandated around personal freedom.  Without allowing for authenticity of spontaneity and originality, the freedom constantly invent, and opportunity to dress and perform as one wants, they won’t stay.  They’ll cancel.  This threat weighs heavy on decision making, providing a totalitarian loss of freedom to anyone who sees it differently.

If people will not feel guilty or regret in this lifetime, except for not “chasing their dreams,” they will face God, nevertheless.  This effects their entire eternity.  At the root of human flourishing is the eternal kind.  This sacrifices the permanent on the altar of the immediate.  I hope they fail at doing what they want to do.  Failure in the short term has a better opportunity for long term success.

Churches don’t want to lose their young people.  A majority of evangelical churches and to varying degrees even fundamentalist churches pander to authenticity themselves.  They justify the changes by marginalizing them as cultural issues.  They are doctrinal conservatives and cultural relativists.  They haven’t given up on justification by faith, they would say, but they want to keep the next generation, so they accommodate this lie.