Can Popular Music Ever be a Conduit for Christian Values?


(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)

Music of Faith

With a heavy hybrid rock/rap sound, P.O.D. sings, “We came here to rock this jam, to spread His love is the master plan,” then ridicules parties where the aforementioned sins are present: “Don't wanna be caught messing around cause a party ain't a party if it gets shut down.”

For years people of faith have complained about the output of Hollywood, arguing that popular media failed to reflect their values and beliefs, but instead of celebrating the presence of artists like P.O.D. in the rock culture, a book by Chuck Colson and cultural thinker Nancy Pearcey seems to attack the very notion that the devout can play popular music. Perhaps unwittingly, the two are creating a climate that could spook young people of faith out of pop music, returning to a time when MTV and American radio were dominated by groups like 2 Live Crew and songs like “Sympathy For The Devil.”

In How Now Shall We Then Live? Colson and Pearcey include these unfortunate lines:

“The sheer energy of rock — the pounding beat, the screams, the spectacle — is intended to bypass the mind and appeal directly to the sensations and feelings. Thus rock music by its very form encourages a mentality that is subjective, emotional, and sensual — no matter what the lyrics may say.”

Not content to stop at popular music, the duo also advances the notion that there is another art form that cannot possibly be redeemed — the television soap opera. This point in particular is confusing because the pair goes on to praise the TV series Touched By An Angel, a cousin to the soap opera, for its accurate depiction of a Christian worldview.

To be sure, Colson and Pearcy do argue in other parts of their book for a more responsible and enlightened approach to popular culture, indicating that people of faith must not “ignore our responsibility to redeem the surrounding culture,” and later adding that “turning our backs on the culture is a betrayal of our biblical mandate and our own heritage.” They also cleverly note the need to embrace “the cultural commission” and not just “the great commission.”

But in promoting the questionable view that popular music cannot ever be a conduit for Christian values, the authors are discouraging the efforts of courageous artists like P.O.D. who have clawed their way out of the cultural gulag of “Christian Rock” and finally made their way onto the cultural map of American pop culture. P.O.D. is only the latest in the long march of these groups out of the subculture and into the mainstream.

Another of today's hottest records is “Human Clay,” by a group called Creed, a band fronted by Scott Stapp, the son of a lay minister. Creed's hit single, “Higher,” one of the most requested in the country, is an unambiguous peek into the afterlife. “Can you take me higher,” Stapp sings, “to a place where blind men see…to a place with golden streets…let's go there, let's make our escape…let's ask can we stay?”

Sixpence None The Richer, an Austin, Tex.-based band, lit up the charts last year with its number-two single, “Kiss Me,” a romantic song that celebrated the kiss but then added a nuance of probity with the line, “We'll take the trail marked on your father's map.” The band that took its name from a line in C.S. Lewis's book Mere Christianity went on national television and talked up the book on popular shows such as Live With Regis & Kathie Lee and the Letterman show.

Most recently the number-one song on the modern-rock charts has featured the work of a young band named Lifehouse. Signed to the mainstream Dreamworks label, Lifehouse sings on the song “Everything”: “You are the light that's leading me to the place where I find peace again…the strength that keeps me walking…the hope that keeps me trusting…the life to my soul…you calm the storms you give me rest you hold me in your hands.”

Those in the rock music world who would prefer that faith-based ideas stay off the airways have found an unlikely ally in Pearcy and Colson. For in essence, the authors are telling Creed, Sixpence None The Richer, P.O.D, Lifehouse, and dozens of other artists that whatever they sing about does not matter — it is inexorably overpowered by the “devil's beat.”

The long march of people of faith out of the subculture and into the center of the marketplace of ideas — including popular music and soap operas — will continue with or without the support of these important thinkers. As serious Christian ideas become a staple on cultural outposts like MTV, people of faith will be forced to decide which they prefer: the good old days when their ideas were kept off of the airways and out of circulation, or a new world where their ideas are up for consideration because of the work of courageous young artists who have rejected arguments of cultural isolation.

Nancy R. Pearcey Replies

When I was growing up, my parents made huge sacrifices to provide all six of their children a musical education. My father once got a one-year research position in Germany, giving us the opportunity to buy musical instruments at a fraction of the U.S. price. Yet at the end of the year, my parents did not have enough money to buy instruments for everyone and pay for the trip home as well. They would have to choose one or the other.

Well…we did not go home.

Instead, my father found a new job, and my parents bought violins, violas, cellos, and recorders to outfit the entire family.

This musical heritage remained an important part of my life, with music camps and music scholarships all through college. When I wrote about the arts in How Now Shall We Live?, however, my focus was not primarily on aesthetics. It was on how various artistic styles can be used to express a worldview or philosophy.

Mark Joseph is intensely concerned about encouraging Christians who work in the arts to enter mainstream culture, and I couldn't agree more. The theme of How Now calls us not only to be saved but also to create culture — to “have dominion” over every area of life, cultivating and developing the world God created.

Yet we must obey the “cultural mandate” with the awareness that the existing culture is often a product of forces hostile to God. We need to learn how to identify and critique contrary worldviews, while crafting an alternative Christian worldview — not just in the arts but in every field: psychology, education, medicine, journalism, law, and government.

Artistic styles are influenced largely, of course, by purely aesthetic considerations. But they also develop as a means of expressing certain ideas or worldviews. Even within Christianity, think of the various styles that have emerged in the visual arts to express different understandings of our faith.

In the medieval period, paintings were icons, their purpose symbolic and didactic. The figures were formal and stylized against a flat gold background. In the late middle ages, Thomas Aquinas drew on Aristotelian philosophy to emphasize the goodness of nature as God's creation. The impact was felt immediately in the arts, as artists like Giotto and Cimabue began to transform stiff medieval icons into living forms.

The Reformation elevated all work into a God-given “vocation.” Artists began to paint ordinary people — farmers and housewives — plying their trades against real landscapes.

The counter-Reformation gave birth to Baroque art, which expressed a new emphasis on the Incarnation. This inspired the heavy, solid, fleshy figures from artists like Peter Paul Rubens, who wanted to convey the idea that the physical body carries a weight of spiritual glory.

Today, of course, Christians experiment with a variety of artistic styles. The argument in How Now is that every style expresses, directly or indirectly, a worldview, a way of seeing the world.

What worldview is expressed in today's popular culture, and how can Christians critically engage it? To answer that question, we must trace a thumbnail sketch of Western history starting with the Enlightenment, a revolution sparked by the astonishing success of Isaac Newton in describing all motion in mathematical formulas. This led to a metaphor of nature as a huge mechanism, functioning by inexorable mathematical laws. The art of the period expressed this image in themes of order, control, precision, and balance.

But the Romantic movement revolted against this mechanistic image of the universe, regarding it as dull and deadening. The Romantics revived an organic image of nature, stressing life, movement, and passion. Their art was poetic and mythological, celebrating the grandeur of untamed nature.

Yet Romanticism was more than a new style. It was above all an attempt to salvage the imagination as a valid means of knowing truth. Of the three classical absolutes — Truth, Goodness, and Beauty — the Enlightenment had restricted Truth to scientific knowledge, while reducing Goodness and Beauty to merely subjective experience. As historian Jacques Barzun explains in The Use and Abuse of Art, the Enlightenment rationalist relegated Beauty to the realm of private experience alone. The artist might paint a sunset in all its glorious hues, but the scientist knows that it is “really” nothing but the refraction of while light through dust particles of variable density.

The Medium and the Message

When Christians think of the Enlightenment, they tend to peg it as a period when intellectuals began to publicly speak out against God — when God and morality were reduced to subjective beliefs, and Christianity was put on the defensive. But many of us don't realize that it was also a time when artists were put on the defensive. For if art did not express Truth, what did it do?

The strategy most artists adopted was to concede the physical world to science, while seeking to create a separate, autonomous realm for the arts — a world created by the imagination. In this realm, artists would reign supreme and godlike. At the height of Romanticism, art often served as a substitute for religion. The artist's creativity, says literary scholar M.H. Abrams, was modeled on the “absolute fiat of Jehovah in the book of Genesis.” Artists were elevated to prophets, both proclaiming a vision of an ideal world and denouncing the “sins” of the real world.

But of course, creating an ideal world is not within the power of any creature, and eventually the function of artists collapsed into the largely negative stance of denouncing the evils of conventional, bourgeois society. This explains why, in our own day, the public is constantly scandalized by art whose only function seems to be to shock us — to “subvert” and “transgress.” Homoerotic photos, a crucifix in a jar of urine, a performance artist who smears her nude body with chocolate and bean sprouts to represent sperm — these are just some of the most highly publicized examples in recent years.

What does all this have to do with Christians and popular music? The answer is that pop culture has been influenced by the same art theories that shaped “high” art. The philosophy of “art as rebellion” migrated from Europe to America, as Martha Bayles shows in Hole in Our Soul. Taught first in art colleges, the avant-garde art philosophy eventually found its way into recording studios.

In fact, there is a direct historical connection: As Ken Myers writes in All God's Children in Blue Suede Shoes, a number of influential British rock musicians actually started out as art students, among them Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, and John Lennon. The art theory they learned as students shaped the music they later composed. As a result, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream, and many other British bands were deliberately creating music that expressed the philosophy of the artist as a Romantic hero who smashed established culture to create a new culture of moral freedom, emotional release, animal energy, and vivid sensation.

That's why I argue in How Now that popular culture is not philosophically “neutral.” Every medium develops as a means of expressing a particular philosophy, and thus conveys a message of its own — one that can either support or contradict the content the artist injects into it.

A few years ago, I read a startling video review in Time magazine: “Provocative images fill the TV screen. Over a driving syncopated rock beat, a woman's voice — urgent, seductive — tells a story of possession and salvation.” No, this was not a Madonna video; it was a contemporary retelling of the Bible story of Jesus casting out the demons called Legion.

The “message is overwhelmed by the medium,” the Time review said. And when I ordered the video, I had to agree.

Christians working in the arts need to take care that the medium they choose is compatible with their message. Contrary to the impression Mark's review [above] may give, How Now does not rule any particular style or genre out of bounds. (The soap opera example Mark cites is in a footnote and is attributed to Ken Myers.) Instead, the theme of the book is that Christians need to realize that art functions on two levels — as aesthetics and as a reflection of a worldview — and that we must evaluate any work of art on both levels.

When I was a student at L'Abri, Francis Schaeffer told a story about visiting an art museum in Florence with a few friends. Standing before a Renaissance painting, he commented that it was beautiful art, but that he disagreed with the humanistic philosophy it expressed. Like Schaeffer, we need to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the arts, while learning how to be philosophically aware of the message conveyed by the medium.

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