By Walter Henegar

If no one has recommended that you read Blue Like Jazz, it’s only a matter of time. Since its release in 2003, Donald Miller’s unconventional memoir, subtitled “Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” has passed rapidly through the hands of mostly younger evangelicals, generating whispers of giddy discovery in coffee shops, dorm rooms, and narthexes across the country.

The book is so refreshingly different from most Christian writing that people have been known to read it in days and buy several copies for friends. By the spring of 2005, Blue Like Jazz had sold more than 150,000 copies, and Miller’s sophomore release, Searching for God Knows What, is already capturing readers eager for more. He has three more books in the works, including a rewrite of a pre-Blue road trip narrative.

Miller thinks his readers are mostly disenfranchised evangelicals, but they’re also giving his book to their non-Christian friends who are also disenfranchised from evangelicalism. Last fall, Campus Crusade for Christ purchased 65,000 copies of Blue for their evangelistic Freshman Survival Kits, sent to hundreds of campuses nationwide. And Miller himself has been transformed from a neo-bohemian freelancer to one of the most sought-after speakers in the country. In February he told a Portland newspaper that most of his fans just want to have a beer with him, adding, “I’d be an alcoholic for free if I lived in the South.”

If you want to feel the hunger…

Who is Donald Miller, and why does he speak so powerfully to so many people? The short answer is that he’s an earnest Christian who stumbles through his faith and describes it well. Raised as a Baptist in Houston, Texas, the 33-year-old former youth minister is currently single and living in Portland, Ore. Weird, painfully honest, laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes boorish, and occasionally profound, he ’s a perfect case study in the phenomenon described in the article “A Growing Hunger for Authenticity in the PCA” (byFaith, Jan-Feb 2005). If you want to dissect this trend, read Robert Webber’s book, The Younger Evangelicals. But if you want to feel the hunger, to watch it ferment and foment in the space between actual people, then you must read Blue Like Jazz. And if you’ve ever felt that hunger yourself, you will be astonished by how brilliantly Miller articulates what it’s like to be a Christian and a human being in the 21st century.

Blue Like Jazz reads like a blog, meandering journal-like through Miller’s life, his friendships, and the causes and concerns that interest him. Yet he rarely leaves a scene—even the unlikeliest of scenes—without some wider didactic reflection. Thus a late night watching Ted Koppel becomes a meditation on sin: “Nothing is going to change in the Congo until you and I figure out what is wrong with the person in the mirror.” A visit to his profane carpenter buddy becomes a lesson on tithing, and a nature show about penguin mating patterns illustrates the stubborn gift of faith: “It feels so much more like something is causing me to believe than that I am stirring up belief.” His short chapters, with titles like “Church: How I Go Without Getting Angry” and “Community: Living With Freaks,” are really more like essays with merely chronological connections. Searching For God Knows What, on the other hand, is a more deliberate book, laying out a case for the gospel in the same engaging style, but with more explicit appeals to the biblical story of redemption.

Hard to pigeonhole

Miller’s Web site credits Anne Lamott, whose own memoir, Traveling Mercies, gave him “permission to be human and to interact with God without all of the mind-melt that comes with growing up in a religious family.” Christianity Today picked up on the influence, describing him as “a cleaned-up, Gen X Anne Lamott with testosterone.” In fact, Miller lives with several roommates in a house they call Testosterhome—evidence of his juvenile male humor that still manages to amuse, rather than offend, most women. He also shares some similarities with twentysomething prodigy Lauren Winner, who wrote Girl Meets God about her conversion to Orthodox Judaism en route to Christianity. Yet where Winner drops esoteric scholarly references, Miller is more likely to quote Sting than Schleiermacher. Blue Like Jazz even includes two cartoon strips drawn by the author.

Miller is at least tangentially related to the Emerging Church movement, which is currently stirring controversies across the country. The acknowledgements in Searching for God Knows What thank Emergent figureheads Brian McLaren and Chris Seay, but he also tips his hat to Martin Luther and John Calvin, as well as Derek Webb, the rabidly Reformed former frontman of the band Caedmon’s Call. If the Emerging Church is hard to pigeonhole, then Miller at least shares that trait.

As with all of us who aspire to represent the faith, Miller possesses great gifts which can also be weaknesses. Sometimes he expresses the gospel with arresting clarity, as when he sees a woman buying groceries with food stamps: “I love to give to charity, but I don’t want to be charity. That’s why I have so much trouble with grace.” Other times his gift for reformulating ancient truths can threaten the freeness of this same grace: “Jesus didn’t just love me because it was the right thing to do. Rather, there was something inside me that caused Him to love me.” As grievous as this statement is, he fortunately doesn’t follow through with all of its implications.

The pervasive reality of sin gets a lot of page time, including numerous personal examples of lust and meanness and self-righteousness from his own past. When a friend points him to John 3:19 (“men loved darkness instead of light … ”), he echoes: “Because of sin, because I am self-addicted, living in the wreckage of the Fall, my body, my heart, and my affections are prone to love the things that kill me.” And in Searching for God Knows What, he constantly reflects on, and circles back to, the significance of Adam and Eve’s fall in the garden.

Attempting to set forth the gospel in strictly relational categories, Miller can sometimes allow therapeutic language to muscle out the theological. Both vocabularies have their baggage, but the former likely smuggles in more unbelieving presuppositions. Thus Blue Like Jazz includes a chapter called “How to Really Love Yourself,” which describes sin largely in terms of unmet needs, and God’s love primarily as affirmation. Aware of this imbalance, Miller added an afterword to Searching for God Knows What that affirms his belief in the atonement and respect for systematic theology, despite their relative absence in the book.

With these cautions in mind, there’s still something persistently biblical about his recurring theme that “Jesus likes and even loves people.” As basic as it sounds, Miller constantly exposes the many ways the American church subtly suggests otherwise: “At church they told us we were children of God, but I knew God’s family was better than mine, that He had a daughter who was a cheerleader and a son who played football.” He describes a suburban congregation he used to attend as “like going to church at the Gap.”

Targeting Those Who Are Made in God’s Image

By contrast, Miller deliberately extends himself to the über-liberal students of Reed College in Portland, forming a motley Christian group irreverently named Oh, For Christ’s Sake. During the schools’ annual festival of drugs and debauchery, the group builds a confession booth in the middle of campus. When curious revelers eventually wander in, Miller, in full monk attire, confesses his sins and apologizes for historical wrongs committed in the name of Jesus. This reverse confessional, which as since been duplicated across the country, effectively re-erects burned bridges between believers and unbelievers, reinitiating a conversation that turned hostile years ago. Miller “gets” what so many evangelicals miss: The world doesn’t want us to mimic secular culture in order to be relevant. They first want us to explain ourselves.

While reading Blue Like Jazz, Miller’s eclectic group of friends begins to populate your dreams: Penny the disillusioned minister’s daughter, Tony the Beat Poet, Andrew the Protester (who looks like Fidel Castro), and Mark the Cussing Pastor. They’re not equally lovable, but you find yourself wishing they were your friends, and wanting to step out of your church cocoon to get to know someone unlikely.

Part of his friends’ appeal is that they’re culturally bilingual, fluent in the godspeak of evangelical consumerism as well as the angst-saturated postmodernism of contemporary music, art, and films. Another appeal is that they’re cool, which can be good and bad. The good part is that they understand well how people see Christianity from the outside. The bad part is that coolness can devolve into self-righteous, soul-patched, God-is-not-a-Republican elitism. Miller’s pastor Rick McKinley admits that he expected their church, Imago Dei, to become “the cool, young church” in Portland but thankfully reports that “God really broke us of that” because “biblical community in Christ is common and eclectic. Our target audiences are those created in the image of God.”

And perhaps that’s the best way to summarize Blue Like Jazz: Donald Miller has written a book that, for all its quirks and flaws, has something to say to every human being—all of whom, he would insist, are created in the image of God. Thoughtful evangelicals will find in him a brother who feels the friction of living between cultures, and outsiders to Christianity will find a sympathetic soul who understands their world and yet points them beyond it. By winsomely clearing many of the stumbling blocks that clutter the religious landscape, Miller throws new light on The stumbling block—Christ crucified—which should bring all of us to our knees.