I’m kind of interested in this new conservative website Culture 11, mostly because they are paying me to write for them occasionally, but partly because they seem interested in engaging with non-like-minded folks like me.
Anyway, I just found an article on Christian music and politics that I thought was kind of interesting. It’s by a fellow named Matthew Stokes, and it read in part:
Do we want artists who oppose, say, the Iraq War with a Christian conscience? I’m not opposed to songs in that vein, actually, but find me a Christian artist who opposes the war without falling back on Moveon.org platitudes and is willing to acknowledge that terrorism in the present age is a real issue. Of course I want Christian artists willing to shine “the light of God on the darkness of racism,” but let’s make sure that it doesn’t turn in to white guilt lectures or typical academic claptrap. And by all means, speak the truth about the realities of poverty and corruption, but let’s always make sure that the facts are straight and we aren’t engaging in class warfare and we aren’t resorting to the State as the solution to these problems. And for heaven’s sake, if Spencer wants to reference Steve Earle, fine, but Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger? I admit they were great songwriters, but let’s avoid the apologists for Stalin and, in Seeger’s case, Hitler. Seriously. And while we’re at it, so what if kids hear that MLK was an adulterer – he was. Does that discount his work? Not in the least; he was a marvelous Christian leader in many, many respects. But if we’re talking about Christians and social change, Charles Wesley and William Wilberforce did a far better job of holding up both the Gospel and the issue of social reforms. And since when is “social Gospel” a slur? I always thought activist Christians had embraced the term. I’ve got a stack of books suggesting that they have and continue to do so.
Anyway, I wrote an (anonymous) response in comments which I’d reproduce here for both of my readers who look at my non-comics related posts….
I’m not a fan of your politics, but I think your general point is correct; there is no engagement without politics of some sort. On the other hand, though music may have politics, it isn’t itself politics — at times here you sound like you want position papers. The radio is not, and shouldn’t be, the Heritage Foundation.
Pete Seeger apologized for Hitler? I’d like to see the link on that, then. And he has since repudiated Stalin, I think quite sincerely.
Merle Haggard is a sometimes (though not always) thoughtful and Christian songwriter who certainly isn’t a leftist Democrat. I don’t think he’s an especial fan of the war, though his songs about it tend to be somewhat elliptical.
Still, the parts of the music industry that are most obsessed with politics at the moment are probably rap and metal. Rap’s a good place to go for discussions of race that aren’t about white guilt or academic claptrap. They tend to be about practical matters, like police harassment, poverty, educational disparities, stuff like that. There’s also black nationalism — which is not at all Democratic Party line, and which (as I think Eugene Genovese tends to point out) is in fact quite conservative in certain ways. Not least in the subordinate position often reserved for women, unfortunately.
And a lot of metal, of course, is quite pro-war — though not, perhaps, exactly in the manner that you’d wish. (There is a fair bit of Christian metal too, incidentally. Mortification is a band that’s pretty good.)
On the other hand, though music may have politics, it isn’t itself politics — at times here you sound like you want position papers. The radio is not, and shouldn’t be, the Heritage Foundation.
Amen to that. In comparing the ideology of the tv show MAD MEN to that of the progressive/indy music on display in the doc WHY SHOULD THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD MUSIC, I put the particular dilemma of contemporary (read: white and conservative) Christian music thusly:
“The fundamental problem with Christian rock is that, rather than build on an authentically religious tradition of struggle, it’s made to serve two masters: mass culture and fundamentalism. It fails both because it has no soul, no aesthetic inner life, being entirely outwardly directed. Like a modern ad, it tells you no more than what you already bring to the table. On the one hand, it’s designed to appeal to the “secular audience” (i.e., the largely Christian audience in the U.S. — if the census is any indication — that aren’t Christian enough for the extremists). Here the connotation is that Evangelicals are just like you (evidently just as bland as you), and after conversion you can keep on liking the same stuff that you liked in your heathen days. This message is doomed to fail, I suspect, because it’s saying there is no essential change in who you are when coming over to their side, so why bother? On the other hand, the music is designed to appeal to the “Christian audience” (i.e., those teens raised with a severe pop cultural immune-deficiency order) who really like music, but live in fear of its not serving God, only itself — in a word, idolatry. By giving the fundamentalist youth what they want, the ability to rock, while only reinforcing their cultural seclusion, the music is depleted of its potential aesthetic-objective vitality, instead serving as agitprop. In making rock music easily consumable, the dialectic between beliefs and the world is cut short. The religiously conservative audience doesn’t have to struggle with popular art any more, because it’s now being made with only one message in mind: buy Christian. With the Christian rock scene, the religion has become just as much of a commodity as the music that it copies, easily consumable in one’s leisure time.”
If you haven’t seen the aforementioned doc, you’d probably find it interesting.
As for something you said in your essay:
Throughout his career, Johnny Cash would pray to Jesus in one track and murder his woman in the next, and hardly anyone batted an eye. But in the world of black music, shuttling between sacred and secular as [Michelle] Williams has done is a lot less common.
I’m not sure there’s much of a difference here. For example, Al Green and Prince regularly flipped back and forth, before (supposedly) committing themselves entirely to Christianity. For me, Green’s early music is far more authentically religious than his later, more ideologically aimed stuff. It, like a Cash album or old Delta Blues, connoted a struggle with faith, rather than something easily consumed.
Hey Charles. The difference between Cash and black artists like Green is, to me, exactly that Green eventually felt he had to choose the sacred over the secular. That happens repeatedly to black artists; it very rarely happens to white ones (Wanda Jackson is one contrary example, but I don’t know that I can think of any others off hand.)
Prince is too much of a weirdo to serve as much of an example of anything, I think. The spirituality in his early albums, in any case, is decidedly heretical.
I don’t really follow Christian rock, so it’s hard for me to respond to your essay intelligently. I do like some Christian artists who work in the indie realm — Daniellson Famile and Sufjan Stevens are the two that come to mind right off….