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# Pierced for Our Postmodernism? - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/pierced-for-our-postmodernism/
- Published: 2010-08-17T05:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-05-18T17:30:05.000Z
- Description: I have plans to return to the issue of homosexuality sometime soon to affirm Ross’s excellent clarification, address Jan’s excellent query, and to try to respond to a few comments. But the past few days, my thoughts have been consumed […]
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Matthew Lee Anderson, Evangelicalism

I have plans to return to the issue of homosexuality sometime soon to affirm [Ross’s excellent clarification](http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/when-battles-are-lost/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), address [Jan’s excellent query](http://www.theviewfromher.com/?p=3212&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and to try [to respond to a few comments](https://mereorthodoxy.com/?p=3995).

But the past few days, my thoughts have been consumed by issues surrounding body piercings and tattoos. In case you haven’t heard, they are a big deal among younger evangelicals (40% of us have ’em), and traditional evangelicals–demonstrating, as they tend to do, an acute ability to be about 10 years too late–[have started to rethink them](http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100531/would-jesus-get-a-tattoo/index.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

I’m n9t going to put all my cards out on the table. [You’ll have to wait for the book for that](https://mereorthodoxy.com/?p=2129).

But I will say this: Kevin Van Hoozer, who is very smart, thinks body piercing (and, I’m guessing, by extension tattoos) can be read as one way in which the contentious phenomenon known as “post-modernism” has made its way down into pop culture. I quote:

*“Body piercing can be viewed as an attempt to “write the meaning” of the body over and above its biology. One’s body and one’s self-identity are viewed as aesthetic projects, undetermined phenomena that invite further construction, not just passive reception. There is apparently some satisfaction in the feeling that one has a degree of power over the project of constructing one’s identity.”*

Van Hoozer writes like a parent bemused by what all the kids are up to (“*apparently* some satisfaction”). And that’s a tad amusing in itself.

But I’m curious to hear from you, oh reader: **Did you get a tattoo or additional piercings, and why?**