why I disdain most modern christian music

We live in the spiritual third world. Like the economic third world, we too are dying of starvation. Oddly enough, the economic third world has the very thing we are starving for - spiritual reality. What I mean is that in the west we tend to downplay the effect of evil forces, as though it is just some theological concept. We hold this tendency because the devil does not often manifest himself in blunt and obvious ways, true spiritual reality is withheld from us. In my opinion this is possibly the greatest trick he has ever played.

This western reality stands in direct contrast to that of the economic third world. Where the majority knows beyond a doubt that evil forces are not only active, but also personal, because overt spiritual warfare is commonplace.

It is this that we are starving for and in order to satisfy our unfulfilled desire we substitute emotionalism. That’s not to say that a deep spiritual experience cannot and will not involve emotions, but I’m afraid we tragically confuse the two, equating one with the other.

In his book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis depicts human beings as three concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his thoughts (or intellect) coming next, and finally his emotions (or fantasy). With this in mind, Screwtape, the senior demon, advises his junior tempter, Wormwood, “You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy [God]: but you must keep on shoving all the [God-like] virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable [evil] qualities inwards into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the Will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don’t, of coarse, mean what the patient mistakes for his Will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy [God] calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from Our father’s [the devil] house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there”

In other words, Lewis suggests that the devil will kindly clear the way for us to lay down our lives at the foot of the cross. “Fill your thoughts and feelings with those of God! Admire and worship Jesus!” . . . preaches the devil. "Applaud what he preached and stood for," goes the devil’s chorus! . . . "Just do it without caring about the same things," goes his silent refrain. "Adore his cross! Lay your life and sins down! . . . Just do it without picking up your own cross." “Please oh please,” he cries so sweetly, “just don’t goes as far as to do what he did. Don’t take his radical words seriously. Don’t learn that you’re called to live by faith, and to suffer, and to die for the sake of Love.” Como say what!? Really? Why would he do such a thing? Because he, like Lewis, knows all to well that when all is said and done, the way we live - whether our Will was aligned with Love, is all that matters after grace.

It is my belief that we are totally confused as to what this Love even looks like. Which is a bummer, because apparently Jesus thinks our understanding and embodiment of such Love is rather important, treating it as nothing less than a matter of life and death.

Frederich Buechner says this, “In the Christian sense, love is not primarily as emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well being even if it means sacrificing our own well being to that end . . . Thus in Jesus’ terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.”

You see we have to reorder and reform our view of love because love is not primarily emotion. No, far from it. God’s love, the love of Christ is a redeeming love that is primarily palpable and tangible. And for us to love is to join into His worldwide project of redemption (almost as if we believe the radical things Jesus said).

So with these ideas in mind - this reformed idea of love and the discussed scheme of the devil, I want to use them as a lens through which to view modern church music.

I intentionally call it church music because I’m afraid calling our music “worship” is terribly dangerous as it is unintentionally causing people to leave the faith because they don’t understand that singing “worship” music isn’t true worship.

Beuchner says this concerning worship, “To worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do it. One way is to do things for him that he needs to have done – run errands for him, carry messages for him, fight on his side, feed his lambs, and so on. The other way is to do things for him that you need to do – sing songs for him, create beautiful things for him, give things up for him, tell him what’s on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice in him and make a fool of yourself for him the way lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love.”

Praise music falls under the second category of worship mentioned because it’s something we do for ourselves. And in light of the C.S. Lewis quote previously discussed, such singing is in itself meaningless because it is pure thought and emotion. David Crowder follows suite saying it is at best “ritualistic and provoking of God.”

What lies beneath Crowder’s comment is the acknowledgement that true worship is found in the way we live. In the words of Beuchner, this is when we serve God by doing things for him that he needs to have done. And in the words of Lewis, this is when we conform our Will, or our desires, to his. Essentially they are all expressing the same idea: true worship is Love (as Beuchner describes it), counting one’s life as worthless, and joining in the suffering of Christ in order to tangibly further the well being of others. Any other form of worship - the things we do for him because we need to are only meaningful in as much as they translate into true worship.

Unless we come to recognize this and articulate this often and well, then the church will continue to see people walk out the doors, never to return to the faith because this overly-sentimental ride we offer never fails to grow stale.

I call it a ride because the music has taken on this form that draws out intense emotion through dramatic builds and emotionally driven lyrics to manipulatively draw out emotion. Consequently, people listen to the music and go to the shows (which are just that), or sing in church (which can also be just that), where they are hit with an emotional high within a super-spiritualized atmosphere. This leads to the assumption that God is in the music. And often He is. As Lewis states, “God will set us off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to us, with emotional sweetness…But sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from our conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves us to stand up on our own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.”

My point here is that our musical practices are playing into the hands of the devil because by glorifying this initially stage of His presence through our music, this emotional sweetness, we’re crippling ourselves for the time when God withdraws, leaving us to stand on our own legs to carry out his duties. (Or worse yet, it’s causing us to miss this reality of our calling as disciples to “carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.” The greatest worship, the most threatening to the evil one’s cause is that which comes from a human who “looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” In the best sense, we are called to suffer and die (see January 26 post).

Maybe a re-read of the Lewis quote from above is necessary to fully let that sink in. Or maybe you’re already beginning to catch a glimpse of how the “worship movement” is playing a vital role in nurturing us into over-sentimentalists, causing our tragic modern day misunderstanding of Love and in effect, leading us to miss the unbelievably demanding cost of discipleship.

The culture associated with the “worship movement” is lending a great hand in this subtle process as well. For one, it’s turning people away because the language we use, this funky-feeling-west-coast-spiritual talk, has in a sense become an inside language. We’re attracted to this spiritualized jargon, this bland speech of pop psychology and self-help that is “thoroughly comfortable and satisfyingly unchallenging”, filled with heavy weight theological words that we can’t understand and Christian euphemisms, because it gives us this sense that we’re closer to God than we really are. It’s a form of therapy, in place of mystery. It gives of this sense that we’re “in” (as if being in was what it was even about.)

Furthermore, our not of this world language is repelling, and it’s perpetuating a club mentality because it is not accessible to the believer and non-believer alike. This is why some churches have developed “seeker-services”, adapting “worship” for those who are struggling to accept the Christian scene. In response, we must learn to incarnate our language in the five senses, focusing on earthly things as Jesus did and furthermore we have to stop using these Princeton review theological bangers that even the highly thoughtful struggle to comprehend because it’s a form of idolatry, a way of making God small and manageable. (See Kathleen Norris’s book, Amazing Grace. “God Talk”)

The ultimate consequence of our club-mentality is that it puts the church at a disadvantage by greatening the chasm between us and the very people we’re trying to reach. This problem is being further perpetuated by the way we sing songs. To be plain and simple, it downright freaks people out. But hey, who I am to judge how people sing? Can’t any style of singing, whether it is highly charismatic or whether it is extremely reserved be completely empty? Yeah, totally, but try and move beyond this with me and look at the greater picture. Only then will these thoughts and those above hold any real significance.

Maybe you too have experienced this, but rarely do I not step in a white people’s praise session and encounter this off-putting awkwardness and downright weird environment filled with self-consciousness caused by one guy trying to look more spiritual than the next. It’s an ugly competition that’s so far from the heart of singing praises to our Lord. I’m really not sure what I mean to propose by this, but if looking spiritual is what we’re after, like we’ve found God in the music, or like we have this super sweet crush on Jesus, then I’m afraid we’ve entirely missed the life Jesus called us to live and instead have found the life he warns against.

To continue on the theme of missing the point, I’m afraid the Christian music culture tragically looks entirely too much like culture. For the most part I’m referring to our image making pursuits aiding in materialism. In short, it’s causing us to further disregard the core message of the bible that turns the social logic of consumerism and materialism upside down for the sake of Love. Which then leads to the terrible recognition that the bible clearly seems to suggest we’re forsaking our own lives in doing so.

So my purpose in this is not to deny the place of music, or to deny that God can be found in it, or to entirely denounce any connection between emotional experiences and the spiritual. My purpose is to re-examine our musical habits in the church, recognizing that there are no black and white answer here, and in that tension seriously consider the subtle, yet unimaginably significant and dangerous effects of our practices.

a random reflection on a night

My experiences have shown that Christian circles (or call them “communities” since throwing around that word like we understand what that means seems to be the in thing) have this tendency for conversation to think ourselves as great, and speak of heavenly things. As inherently good and necessary and exiting it is to shade our eyes with our hands and gaze up into the sky to watch what is happening (That which we can’t see happening. That which is beyond our comprehension), we first and foremost have got to drop our heads and realize who are we to even look up there? (One only hopes God is more touched and amused than irritated with our study of him and his ways.) All I mean to say is that I think we have to begin seeing ourselves as lowly and speak more and more of earthly things. By earthly things I mean the passions of the soul – the temptations we struggle with one a daily basis because in the end when all is said and done, this is what really matters.

Lately I’ve been wondering if the reason that we are tempted to focus on heavenly things is because we get to this point that we are no longer committing the “major” sins. Take sex for example. It’s like we become so comfortable knowing that we aren’t physically active that we become desensitized, unaware that the pool of non-physical sexual transgression that we once playfully waded in has since pulled us under, with the water now rushing into our lungs. It’s like we create some imaginary mental chasm between having casual sex, and thinking and being entertained by the very same thing as if they “aren’t a big deal.” It’s thoughts like these that the evil one loves, because unlike us, he never seems to forget that Jesus equates the thoughts of our hearts with the actual crimes, making anger, insult, and belittling tantamount to murder, and lust to adultery.

C.S. Lewis describes sin in terms of a slippery slope, emphasizing that the devil has figure out long ago that tragedies are far less effective than little sins that we pass without much a thought as no big deal. He’s so right. We have this tendency to dumb down sin. Like it’s naughty. But sin isn’t naughtiness, it’s tragedy. This idea isn’t supported by any moral base arguments; you can’t get or not get this. It just has to soak into one’s psyche.

Tonight I’m bummed and frustrated because I was with a group of committed guys that just weren’t thinking and passed off some “small” sins as anything but tragic. That said, I recognize we all do this daily and I’m probably more guilty than most, but tonight I just couldn’t see things as anything less than tragic. So I spoke out and said “this isn’t right.” Somehow I even managed to do this tricky little task in a totally un-abrasive way. What affect my words had, who knows. What I do know is that the responses of those who I later expressed my frustration with didn’t really seem to get me. I take that back, they understood my logic was good and that what was being said and done was not right, but I got this vibe that they thought I was taking things too far. Like I was forgetting to be graceful and being too judgmental (which is probably more or less an effect of our culture of tolerance).

But I wasn’t judging anyone. When God says that judgment is reserved for me alone, he’s talking about salvation. I didn’t come anywhere near to condemning anyone tonight. In fact, I firmly believe that every one of those guys will go on to do great things to further the gospel with their lives. No doubt about it. By saying I don’t think something that someone is doing isn’t right is not judging someone. If anything, it’s a form of grace.

It’s like we all want to love Jesus, but when someone goes as far as to strive for radical, un-compromising commitment as a thoughtful follower of Christ, we think they’re weird and begin to whisper the attractive message of the evil one to “chill out”. Just try and be a uncompromising, committed and thoughtful Christian, it’s terribly hard. And if you’re feeling especially daring, try and do it on a Christian college campus. Soon enough you’re likely to find yourself becoming rather unpopular.

Tonight I’m feeling some holy rage and it’s brought these dead bones of mine back to life. If only I could live with such passion every waking moment, fully embracing the beauty of such radical commitment in response to an all-consuming love for the One to whom we owe everything.