Culture Creep

Part 7 of the Epic Mini-Series: God is Good. Mullets are Bad.

The real danger in mixing it up with culture is that it’s NOT like touching a hot stove, messing with a bull, or immediately regretting calling Chuck Norris’ mom, Sir.

Culture is better described as the undertow that occurs on beach fronts. 

It starts with putting your toes in the water.  This is noice.

Then, you wade out.  Lovely!

Talking with friends, lying on your back, and before you know it you’re having fun, and…you’ve been swept a quarter mile from shore and upon realization you try to head back. 

But, all your efforts to go back the way you came aren’t working, and even though it seems your original entry point is just…right …there, it feels like everything you wanted before, is now everything that’s working against you and it’s an all-out brawl against the invisible current just to keep from being dragged deeper, or going under entirely. 

So, even though it feels like emotionally charged policy insertions in response to previous employees’ indiscretions, it bears repeating that Leviticus 19 is not our Manager Most-High being reactive to error or even the possibility of it repeating. 

GOD is proactively wanting to keep His Holy people from ending up in the last place anyone wants to be – at the bottom of a slippery slope with a venereal disease – by instructing them to stay away from culture’s community water park in the first place. 

AND NOW, it’s suddenly become clear to me why the mullet is GOD’s chosen object lesson for, and stern warning against, mixing it up with culture:

The hairs on your scalp grow at a pretty constant rate.  That means, mullets don’t occur naturally, in Nature.  While THAT alone makes my point that GOD never intended for mullets, ever…we have an Aussiedoodle at home…so, yeah.

Also contrary to Natural Law, mullets are neither an accident nor an aesthetic improvement.  Only unusually, mullets occur after someone loses a bet or actually thinks it’s a better look.

Instead, let’s be honest: what usually happens when guys get mullets: it's because everybody else around them are doing the mullet, or that guy on TV is doing the mullet.  

Mullets happen because one guy says, ‘hold my beer’ which provokes another guy’s passive rebellion against social norm, and another guy that lives in mom’s basement has nothing to lose, so why not? 

IF, you have a girlfriend – it’s despite your mullet.  The only way you’re gainfully employed while sporting a mullet is if you fix other people’s cars in your own driveway, you get the mullet after you get the job, or drive a race car.

 I could keep going, but what I’m saying is, on its face – or literally on anyone’s head – the mullet can’t be of GOD’s Kingdom, because it hamstrings His first-ever command to all human beings, ever: be fruitful and multiply. 

While I’m pretty sure you can discern sufficiently between the lines of that GLORIOUS summation of previously loose moralistic strands to see that emulating the culture actually emasculates your intended spiritual destiny – I’ll go ahead and ask the extremely rhetorical question anyway:

Isn’t it JUST a haircut?

Yes AND No.

GOD knows the haircut won’t kill you, obviously.  It is just hair, and hair grows back.  Which – and the irony is NOT lost on me – is metaphorically literal: Grace upon Grace. 

And, what you decide to look like on any given day probably doesn’t have any serious implications to overall outcomes – unless you have a job interview coming up, or you’re about to ask your future father-in-law to ‘hold your beer’, while you do a cannonball into his gene pool.

But, IF (and that’s a big, IF) it’s true that there’s nothing inherently wrong with having a mullet, the fact that GOD specifically and emblematically uses it to both, cull, and call out cultural no-no’s MUST mean something. 

So, if it’s not the what, per se (and that’s a BIG, per se) the issue then naturally falls to what’s between the shaved-in lines: why you got the haircut in the first place. 

And when it comes to mullets, as I’ve CLEARLY proven, THAT comes down to either, the baseline thinking in-between your ears of everyone else is doing it…or, the spirit of stupid.

And GOD – the Universe’s Ultimate Parental Unit – knows that 'everyone’s doing it' is a REALLY dangerous mentality to have – ESPECIALLY if you’re a primitive nation of vagabond orphans composed mostly of a single generation of people with a preexisting, deep, generational father wound; still reeling from having just lost their parents, older siblings, extended family (which is a big deal in their culture) and everyone else they knew, obeyed, or respected back in the wilderness; have never known a permanent address, let alone floors, fixed schedules, or solid food; and, have documented trust, entitlement, and impulse issues. 

So, if you’re their Heavenly Father – how to do you keep them safe for now AND for all eternity? 

Do you sit one million primordial people down and explain everything they’re inclined to do because they can’t read between the Freudian lines of their repeating family history?

Or, do you just point at the harmful behaviors and things that you want them to avoid and say,

“DO NOT TOUCH.”

And that, is what He metaphorically literally, did.

Actually, He did it A LOT. 

God is Good. Mullets are Bad. “Culture Creep”  Behold(en), still. Copyright © 2023-25 Behold(en), still.