You can taste the tobacco, smell it on your clothes hours later. Granted I’m a clean-cut guy. A dork. But tonight I was painfully and forcefully reminded of it. After the stodgy, squeakiness of EPA I went to a local hole in the wall bar to hear Romantica play. Talk about culture clash. Alcohol trash and cigarette mash. Looking around the smoke filled room I felt like I was 12.

The show was at the Turf Club, a bar located right next to the bus stop I walked to for two and a half years. I always thought the Turf Club was just a hole in the wall little bar. I was only partly off.

We went to the show with a few other clean-cut friends, and watched the place fill up with hip, trendy folks who seem to frequent bars all the time, imbibe their drink of choice and chain smoke.

Now I come from a pretty conservative background that I’ve trying to distance myself from as much as possible. I’m so conservative that I’m just now getting used to the idea of drinking alcohol as an acceptable activity. When a friend orders a drink I no longer freak out. But that step has taken some time.

Then put me in a situation where it’s just one or two drinks, the pitchers keep coming. And the chain-smoking. I can understand drinking, sort of. But I don’t get smoking. Maybe watching my grandfather sneak a smoke behind the garage, and later puff away outside the nursing home like it was the last thing he could still feel has forever tainted me. My eyes were literally watering and I couldn’t have stayed in the bar any longer than I did. I actually couldn’t drive home my eyes were watering so bad.

Am I really so sheltered? Or is the bar scene just not for me.

What really made me wonder is the question of faith. I knew at least 20 people in that bar from Bethel, some in varying degrees of intoxication and lung cancer. I knew another 20 indirectly from some friend or another and could reasonably assume they were connected to some faith community. Like I said, I’m just getting used to the idea that Christians can drink alcohol, but there does come a line when it’s no longer responsible. I can only guess more than a few were crossing that line.

It reminds me of Jesus Sound Explosion and the recovering evangelicals Mark Curtis Anderson describes. I felt like I stepped into a chapter in that book. With so many connections to different faith communities at one time or another in that room, I wondered how many still had faith. I certainly can’t judge from a few drinks and a cigarette, but I couldn’t help but wonder. How many had become ex-evangelicals like Anderson? How many were simply disillusioned with the church but still had a deep-rooted faith in God? How many were feeling the same culture shock I was and were simply doing a better job hiding it?

It felt like different worlds colliding. The squeaky clean world of Christendom with the seedy underbelly of reality. With so many twenty-somethings gathered in one room with some sort of spiritual connection, it felt a bit like church. Except for the Marlboro branded incense.

To really drive the dorky feeling home, it wasn’t just the drinking and smoking that made me feel like I was 12. The trendy clothes, hair cuts, and accessories made it painfully obvious that I buy my clothes on clearance at Target and have no fashion sense whatsoever. Even my recent rock star haircut didn’t stand a chance.