Punk Rock Priests Offer Up Their ‘Parallel Love’ in Music and Sacrament

The evangelical indie rock scene of the 1990s can be difficult to explain. A rebellious, unhinged underground movement that emerged from megachurch basements and religious colleges? A generation of musicians who broke ties with conservative Christianity but maintained a fan base built through youth groups and Young Life? You kind of had to be there.

Perhaps no band typifies the many paradoxes of this scene and its fallout than Luxury, formed in small-town Georgia in the early 1990s and still together today. The band itself is also hard to describe: maybe Morrissey fronting Fugazi, with sad Radiohead piano, English-major allusions, androgynous sexuality—oh and by the way, three out of five members of the band are Eastern Orthodox priests. (This is called burying the lede.)

And so Parallel Love, a documentary film by Matt Hinton, cannot help but be as strange and wonderful as the band it portrays and the music scene they stumbled into and (mostly) out of. Hinton’s first documentary, Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp, also touched on uniquely American religious music. His feature on Luxury, originally released for a short theatrical run in 2019, is available on Amazon, iTunes, and other streaming platforms on May 18.

If you’ve already heard Luxury, you may need no convincing that this band is interesting and worth nearly an hour and a half of screen time. For my money, they are quite simply one of the best, most compelling rock bands of all time. Instrumentally, they toe the line between precision and chaos, presenting a snarling, tangled mess of guitar riffs and feral drums anchored by fat punk basslines, overlaid by an ethereal crooning vocal. It’s gorgeous.

I don’t know anything about this band or the music that they have written but it isn’t necessarily ironic or that jarring.

There is a subculture of punk known as “straight edge” where the segment of the subculture doesn’t drink, do drugs, or engage in promiscuous sex.

Ian MacKaye of Fugazi came up with the term straight edge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_MacKaye

>>Along with his seminal band Minor Threat, he is credited with coining the term “straight edge”[2] to describe a personal ideology that promotes abstinence from alcohol and other drugs, though MacKaye has stated that he did not intend to turn it into a movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_MacKaye#Straight_edge_philosophy

The song “Straight Edge” was written by MacKaye for his band Minor Threat and was released in 1981 on Minor Threat’s self-titled EP. It was a song that described his personal life free of the drugs and the self-destructive idea of “sex as a conquest” which served as a part of the “sex, drugs and rock’n roll” banner originating as a rebellion in the 1960s – smoking, drinking, and drug use. The song came about through MacKaye witnessing his friends abusing alcohol/drugs and acting recklessly. He decided early on that it was not the lifestyle for him, having never fit in with it. MacKaye’s main goal was to fight against the people around him who abused substances.[28] His decision to abstain from substances began to influence youth culture as Minor Threat gained popularity through numerous live shows and sales of their EP. Although to MacKaye the song did not represent a philosophy or a movement, over time people adopted the philosophy of the song and many bands began to label themselves straight edge, founding the straight edge movement. Although straight edge is not explicitly supportive of vegetarianism, MacKaye has stated that he is a vegetarian because he regards it as a logical progression of his views.[29] He follows a strict vegan diet.[30][31] In interviews especially in his later life, MacKaye has often become annoyed with questions about being the founding father of a movement he never intended to start:

“I’m credited because I coined a phrase and wrote a song about it. I’m not going to spend any more energy than I already have explaining that. From the very beginning I’ve tried to say that this is not my opinion. That whole thing just makes me realize I don’t have any control over what people think of me. And I don’t really give a ****. I think that the idea of straight edge, the song that I wrote, and the way people have related it, there’s some people who have abused it, they’ve allowed their fundamentalism to interfere with the real message, which in my mind, was that people should be allowed to live their lives the way they want to. It was just the title of a song that I wrote but certainly never intended to start a movement.”[32]

Although “Straight Edge” gets the most attention, MacKaye wrote other songs with Minor Threat describing his clean lifestyle as well, most notably “Out of Step (With the World),” in which he said “I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I don’t ****. At least I can ***ing think.” “In My Eyes” is also at least partially about his philosophies, with lines such as “You tell me it calms your nerves; you just think it looks cool.”

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