Yeah, this is one of those religion-themed posts.
So, Contessa’s parents were in town this weekend, and, because we figure they aren’t nuts about the small, liberal Presbyterian church that we attend super-infrequently (lately, only when our parents are in town, koff koff), we visited a Very Big Church that had been recommended to us by a friend and that we thought might be to their liking.
It was a pretty standard model of a Very Big Church of a certain persuasion—casual, contemporary service, a sermon with a lot of emphasis on Christianity 101. Not my cup of tea, but clearly it’s a cup a lot of people are drinking from. Plus, they’re organizing a whole lot of Katrina relief work, so they’re obviously doing some good in the community. So this gripe isn’t about this particular congregation, but about a trend I’ve noticed in similar Very Big Churches over the years, especially lately: an obsession with mind-numbingly dull music.
Now, the church I grew up in has its share of mind-numbingly dull music, too. I cringe whenever I see “How Great Thou Art” listed in the program there, because it takes, on average, 45 minutes to sing. Since they’ve had the same pianist for as long as I’ve been alive, she must know the song by heart now, so it can’t be unfamiliarity with the material that makes her hunt and peck for each key like a septuagenarian CEO with his first laptop. Maybe she’s working on some kind of subtle, anti-establishment deconstruction of the song, where the gaps between notes are supposed to represent the hollowness of faith in the modern world, but I suspect that’s not the case. Anyway, it does go on. Exhaustion from excessive standing during hymn singing is the leading cause of death among the aged and infirm in my parents’ church. Regular worship service is frequently followed by an impromptu funeral, and since they use the same pianist for that service, there are usually still more funerals to follow, and parishioners spend Sunday afternoons in a bleak Sartre-scape of collapsing crones and spinsters, until finally the cycle runes its course and the few survivors stumble, scratching their stubbled faces and rubbing their rumbling stomachs, into the light of a setting sun bloated like a water-logged corpse.
So, not that kind of dull. But worse: the dull of bad “praise” music. You know the genre if you’ve spent much time in a Southern Protestant church: two or three lines, couched in simple language and played in simple arrangements, allegedly expressing an essential truth about Christianity—repeated over and over again for 20 minutes or more. Rich Mullins’ “Awesome God” is probably the most famous—and, frighteningly, the least egregious—of these, the Platonic ideal of the praise song, reflected dimly in a thousand and one even more tedious iterations.
Not all “praise music” is like this, of course. Sometimes there are sprightly melodies, or clever lyrics, or something that makes them fun to sing with a bunch of other people. There are some that I downright like. But more often they’re like the ones from this past Sunday: repetitive, portentous, droning, and did I mention repetitive? I’m not even sure you can call them “songs”—they’re more like tiny bursts of information, barely set to music. They all have the same message—“God and/or Jesus is Awesome”—and written with exactly that much care and craft. Rather than preparing hearts, minds, kidneys or spleens for worship, for any kind of encounter with the divine, they have the effect of deadening the senses. During the interminable singing, I honestly thought at least once of the ways that the military sometimes uses repetitive music to break down a prisoner’s resistance to interrogation. But even assuming such sinister motives are merely the creation of my own paranoid hat-rack, it’s depressing how lifeless and beige the songs are. It seems like these songs were written by people who were told that God is Awesome, believed it, and never bothered to think about it again. “Tell, don’t show” seems to be the operating principle, adopted probably because it’s the opposite of that rule taught by those godless liberal commie creative writing teachers.
This kind of content-free “worship” music has reached its popular peak and its artistic nadir with the song “I Can Only Imagine,” by the Christian group MercyMe. The song has become a staple of Contemporary Christian Radio, a regular feature during the “special music” portion of any number of evangelical worship services, and a crossover hit—I’ve heard it on country radio. This story from the people at the American Family Association details its success.
If you clicked the link above and read the lyrics, you probably saw immediately why this is such a terrible song. It’s a song ostensibly about imagination, yet it enacts a total failure of imagination. The imaginative world of this song is utterly impoverished, empty, a white-space null-void; the songwriter seems to drawn heavily on Silver Age depictions of the Phantom Zone for his ideas about what heaven is. In a song about imagining the sublime possibilities of heaven, he comes up with exactly three possibilities, three sets of binaries to choose among: dance/be still, stand/not stand, and sing/not sing. That’s all we get. One assumes that the members of MercyMe believe that God has endowed humankind with the power of imagination, of creation; indeed, in some religious circles, the urge towards artistic creation is seen as a prime of example of humans having been themselves created in the image of God. But it seems that for MercyMe, and the composers of so many of these “praise” songs, see a universe teeming with bizarre and unusual possibilities not as evidence of God’s Awesomeness but as a distraction from it. They long for a world stripped of complexity, ambiguity, paradox, idiosyncracy and replaced with simple either/or choices—choices, I might add, that they don’t even get to make themselves, but which will presumably be spontaneous reactions. I don’t mind saying I find this vision of the afterlife a little terrifying.
To put it in evangelicalese, I don’t think those who write and perform this type of “praise” song, or the music ministers who devote so much time to them, are being very good stewards of the gifts they’ve received. So, as joylessly as they may sometimes be performed, bored as I may be with them after a few decades of Sundays, I’ll stick (mostly) with the old hymns, the traditional hymns, the ones that frequently aspire to poetry and that sometimes even achieve it. Even though thick accretions of familiarity and contempt often make them almost impossible to experience in any meaningful way, occasionally one will shake the dust out of its hair and knock me senseless with the beauty of its words, its music, its sentiment. Like, for instance, the banjo-driven rendition of “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” by Sufjan Stevens, which is just about the greatest thing ever. (You can download an MP3 at that link there, and you should). Against this, “I Can Only Imagine” sounds like flimsy pasteboard. If flimsy pasteboard had a sound. You know what I mean.
UPDATE: if the link I posted there is dead, you can download all three albums-worth of Sufjan Stevens Christmas and religious music here; three zip files of MP3s, each song a treat.
Fantastic observations, Professor, and very similar to my own. So much modern Christian music seems to do the exact opposite of what you would want church music to do – it numbs the brain and spirit, and makes so much of what comes after the music sound like mushy, disconnected platitudes.
I observed this phenomenon in action yesterday: the Church I go to has a mixture of newish “praise” music with a few old stand-bys thrown in. So they sing some banal praise song with tortured lyrics emoting general spiritual radicalness, and then follow it with “Near the Cross”—which is a heartbreaking, moving, simple, immaculately conceived peace of music. The juxtaposition made the first song look like 7th grade poetry project on monosyllabic rhyme. I sat there and thought how I wanted someone to play “Near the Cross” at my funeral.
Yeah! If you asked me, I’d say “man, I hate ‘Christian’ music.” But then you’d get me drunk, and I’d pull out the Carter Family and Elvis and Sam Cooke and we’d listen to “Peace in the Valley” (one of my favorites, of any genre, ever), “I’ll Fly Away,” “Amazing Grace” . . . there’s so many great songs, sung with passion.
And, with questioning. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is always listed as a gospel song. But the singer is scared of death, and loss—the very title is the question—will we meet again once we die? And in the next-to-last verse, the family gathers and sings hymns, not necessarily out of faith, but out of the peace and reassurance familiarity can bring in times of sorrow. Because of the loss of their mother, the very faith of the singer has been shaken.
That same questioning is echoed, maybe not coincidentally, in U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The singer there is comfortable with faith and religion (“You broke the bonds/And you loosed the chains/Carried the cross/of my shame/You know I believe it”) but frustrated with the physical world (“. . . but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”). Hands down my FAVORITE “praise” song—because the praise is implicit, reverent, and understood, and the song grapples with real life. It’s not the robot-speak of “GOD IS SOOOO GREAT!!,” it’s expressing how human beings might love God and feel lost and frustrated.
Great post, as always!
Most awesome bit of writing, Prof.!
The “Now, the church I grew up in” paragraph above is the best thing I’ve read in (ahem) a month of Sundays.
This is wonderful, Prof.
Last month I saw Sufjan play at Trinity-St. Paul’s in downtown Toronto. It’s an old cathedral with a small, two-story sanctuary filled with wooden pews that are too close together, leaving you with three inches too little legroom. The sound system sucked, and it was hot as hell in there. Even with the windows open there wasn’t more than a whiff of ventilation.
But, dear lord, hearing him sing “Abraham,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and “Casimir Pulaski Day” in a place like that, it just about broke my heart. During “Abraham,” I actually leaned forward and started praying—something I haven’t done in ages.
Great post, prof.
I recently left my job as a Protestant minister for a major Willow Creek clone here in my little part of Canada because it’s I know I would not have been able to minister authentically since, um, I’m going to become a Catholic. But aside from that rather minor reason there are:
3 Reasons I had to give up Seeker Services:
1. Fill in the ___ displayed on Power Point.
2. Easy ____ to difficult questions.
3. Four solutions.
4. Three point ______ set up by movie clips, live “drama” and the kind of praise pablum your describe so perfectly.
P.S. Thanks to Darren for the link to your post.
quote of the day (high on the geek quotient)
…the songwriter seems to drawn heavily on Silver Age depictions of the Phantom Zone for his ideas about what heaven is. – Professor Fury, Pretty Fakes
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[...] Age depictions of the Phantom Zone for his ideas about what heaven is. – Professor Fury, Pretty Fakes
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on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 4: [...]
[...] ufjan Stevens, Illinois. I seem to be writing a lot about Stevens this year–here and here, for instance. Well, for good reason. This album is a lot of things–among them, it’s the perfect s [...]
Great post, Prof. Thanks.
Alas, the Stevens link is dead. Any other ideas?
Yes, yawn. Bounced here via Mike.
How Great Thou Art has long been a cliche. The reason that organist seems to hunt and peck is…SHE IS ASLEEP. Believe me, I know.
I’ve never been able to fit the words into the tune of Awesome God.
But mercifully, there are a few eternal truths set to indelible tunes which can be sung, chanted, jazzed, prayed, reset, enlivened, recalled…and these never get stale.
I offer:
All Creatures of Our God and King (Forget political correctness…sing loudly at a smart tempo. It’s attributed to St. Francis for pity’s sake.)
Amazing Grace (Because it is acceptable in a bar or a catherdral, and when you sing it you can hear Jesse Norman and bagpipes at the same time. You can make a spiritual out of it, which is something for a hymn written by a redeemed slave trader. And even if this is the millioneth time you’ve sung the thing, the accompaniment can lift it from the banal to the sublime, if the organist stays awake.)
Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah (a hymn which is surprisingly politically correct for its age). Give me a Welsh melody any day. Some people find them a hard sing, but this is compensated for by the haunting suggestion of Bryn Terfel and a chorus of miners in full voice. It doesn’t matter if contemporary congregations don’t understand the imagery. A little mystery is what faith is all about.
You just say this about How Great Thou Art because you never heard my grandmother play the big black piano in her little livingroom with her wrinkled hands and sing O Store Gud.
The typical ranting of an “out of touch with society old foggy” who would rather live in the past than the present! This is not the 15th or even the 18th century, it’s 2006 and if the church is going to reach today’s seekers it has to be culturally relevant not stuck 100 years in the past. Many of the “Old Hymns” where themselves written to the tunes of Saloon Songs or Folk Songs or that era. Do we continue to sing songs that only appease religious traditionalist at the expense of our modern population? Or do we sing songs that express the current terminology of fellowship with God?
Perhaps this is the reason that the traditional church is dying and the contemporary church is thriving. Call us shallow, simple, or ignorant (not written in the article but I am sure spoken in private) but also call us SAVED! The message is sacred not the method!
Woo-hoo! And out of touch old fogey by age 30! Did anyone have 30 in the Prof’s Fogeydom Pool? I had 43 myself, but it looks like a lowballer is going to walk away with the pot.
Seriously, though, Tim, thanks for your comment, but I think you’ve misread my post. I’m not arguing that older hymns are inherently better because they emerged from some ostensibly “purer” place—as you point out, they’re often genre hybrids—or that all new religious music is bad. (Though you’re right to assume that I’m ambivalent about the sort of thing that so often passes for “relevance” in the modern church, but that’s another ball of wax). But let me be clear: It’s not that I think contemporary worship music can’t or shouldn’t be conversant with contemporary musical idioms. After all, I cited main man Sufjan Stevens at the end of the post, the artist whom I’d credit as the most gifted writer of contemporary Christian music working today. I linked to his cover of an old standard, but I might just as easily have pointed to something like his song “The Transfiguration,” which you can download by clicking here, or one of the more joyous numbers from Michigan or Illinois.
So, as I say, this isn’t the old and good versus new and bad argument that you’re making it out to be. I’m not arguing that there’s inherently more God in an eighteenth-century folk ballad than in a three-minute pop song. I don’t hate “I Can Only Imagine” because it’s a pop song; I hate it because the picture of God it offers is so badly drawn, so poorly imagined. (And because it’s not a very good pop song, for that matter.) It’s a profoundly uninspiring picture of God’s very inspiring nature. You say “The message is sacred not the method,” and I’d agree with that—but the wan, rote message of “I Can Only Imagine” seems to me to have very little to do with the full, rich message I read in the Gospels. Just because Paul says that now we see as in a mirror dimly (or through a glass darkly—pick your translation) and that we will see face to face in the world to come, that doesn’t mean that we have to settle for that dim vision in the here and now, doesn’t mean that we can’t strain our eyes a bit to catch a glimpse of that brighter vision. It would be a shame if the “contemporary church” you speak of settles for the anaemic and impoverished understanding of God communicated in songs of this sort. No one’s arguing that you have to jettison praise songs of the “Yes, Lord, Yes, Lord, Yes Yes Lord” variety—well, maybe of thatvariety—but I’d argue that it’s downright irresponsible not to supplement such rousing tunes with songs that strive to convey a more complicated view of God—and there’s no reason they can’t be rousing, too.
I hope this clarifies what I was trying to say. Also, I do have to say that I take exception to your presumption that I privately characterize you (I’m not quite sure who the “us” you speak of is, exactly) as ignorant—that’s not the case, and it strikes me as a very uncharitable assumption on your part.
[...] out Psalty, this attitude is not uncommon elsewhere in the church; I hate it when churches project the lyrics up on a screen instead of pointing to a page in the hymnal, because I want to see what verses we [...]