CCM

My friend and colleague Richard Beck, author of the best theology blog around, has been on fire lately with some stimulating reflections on church, ministry, preaching, and what it means to be faithful in the contemporary American context. If you’re not reading his Friday series on Jordan Peterson, get on it forthwith. His post this past Monday was a sort of follow-up to his latest Friday piece on Peterson. Both posts, along with many preceding ones, are about interpreting the state of the culture and what that interpretation tells us about how to respond with the gospel—not in 1950, not on an exotic mission field, but here, now, today, in the United States in 2022.

In particular, he points to three popular phenomena that wise Christian leaders should be learning from but, on the contrary, usually treat with disdain, if they engage them at all. Those three phenomena are (1) men like Peterson; (2) Joel Osteen; and (3) contemporary Christian music, or CCM. Beck isn’t interested in recommending any of these to us as samples of faithful Christian teaching or practice. Rather, he wants to draw the attention of snobby, Master’s degree–holding pastors and academics to persons and practices in which normies (Christian and non-Christian alike) find pleasure, meaning, and inspiration. Having drawn our attention there, he wants us (1) to stop being so condescending and (2) to learn something about where our culture finds itself today, what it might need, and therefore how that might inform the work of evangelism, catechesis, worship, etc.

Here’s how he concludes the second post (my emphases in bold):

I can't tell you how many times I've heard seminary-educated pastors and seminary professors sneer at Christian praise music. The music is castigated for being overly individualistic, therapeutic, and sentimental. We sneer and call it "Jesus is my boyfriend" music. You'll see the point if you listen to the lyrics of a song like Hillsong's "Oceans" (over 129 million YouTube views) or Lauren Daigle's "You Say" (over 242 million YouTube views), lyrics like "You are mine and I am yours" and "In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity."

Instead of sneering at the therapeutic individualism of these songs, their focus upon me and my feelings, take a second to listen to the songs as a missionary, as a cultural anthropologist. Instead of lol lol lol how about we think for a second? To what deep ache in the modern world are these songs appealing to?

This isn't rocket science. The reason praise songs centering therapeutic themes of God's intimate care and love are so popular is simple. As I recount in Hunting Magic Eels, anxiety, depression, suicide, loneliness, and addiction are all sky-rocketing. So the appeal of songs like "Oceans" or "You Say" are no mystery. These songs are hitting us right where we are hurting. Their appeal is blindingly obvious to any decent missionary.

But sadly, we're not very good missionaries. We've been too busy sneering at Hillsong, Osteen, and Peterson.

Now, am I suggesting that churches and pastors should follow their lead? Am I saying that we should ignore the theological content of praise music, preach the prosperity gospel, and hand Bible studies over to Jungian psychologists? No, I'm not saying any of that. What I'm saying is WIPE THE DAMNED SNEER OFF YOUR FACE AND LOOK AT THE CULTURE! If we took a moment to think like a missionary there are some things about Hillsong, Osteen and Peterson staring us in the face. Things we need to address, like any good missionary would, if we want to get a hearing for the gospel in this culture. But we can't see any of this because our seminary degrees have turned us all into elitist snobs. 

The modern would is suffering, staring into a void of meaninglessness where something true, beautiful and good once existed. Families are broken. Depression, anxiety, suicide, loneliness and addiction at high tide. And if you look out upon all that pain, with a compassionate heart and the mind of a missionary, there really is no mystery as to why Jordan Peterson, Joel Osteen or Hillsong are so popular. This, dear pastors, seminary professors, and church leaders, is our mission field. Let's stop sneering and get to work. 

In response to this all one can say is: Preach!

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Well, maybe not all. I think Richard is dead right about Peterson and Osteen both. And he’s got all of us over-educated patronizing highbrow jerks dead to rights on CCM. The class divide both across and within denominations in the U.S. is rarely remarked upon yet staring us in the face. It may be, besides technology, the single greatest threat to the church’s spiritual, social, and moral health today. So preach on, I say.

Having said that, something in Richard’s comments about CCM hasn’t been able to work its way out of my mind, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. I don’t have a settled or confident counter to his claim, only questions I want to wonder about out loud. Perhaps he or you or someone else might provide me some clarity on the matter.

Here’s what I’m circling around.

It isn’t clear to me that the content or style of CCM reveals something important to us about our culture, perceiving that culture the way a missionary would—at least nothing revelatory on a par with Peterson and Osteen. Obviously anything with some level of popularity tells us something about a culture; it doesn’t come from nowhere. Nevertheless I wonder in this area. Part of my wonder has to do with the market, namely, the commercialization of “Christian music.” Pop culture critics often make this mistake. “The market” “has spoken” about this or that “popular” artifact or content, ergo we are entitled to analyze said content to death in search of a meaning that ostensibly reveals something deep about us.

I’m not so sure. Not least because “the market” largely delivers sedatives in the form of forgettable, bite-size entertainment whose primary effect is to numb us. Sure, in the aggregate the fact that we’re all looking to numb ourselves into oblivion is itself a datum that calls for analysis. (Though even then, Christians have a ready-made answer to why it is we do this: it’s called sin.) But often enough X-entertainment will substitute perfectly well for Y-entertainment. In fact, what often seems of world-sharking importance, given its popularity, is forgotten almost the moment it is finished. (Remember Game of Thrones?) Put differently, the species of numbing-fun isn’t especially important. It’s the genus—i.e., what Huxley called “soma” in Brave New World—that matters.

So back to CCM. What I want to suggest as a possibility is that CCM’s popularity as Sunday morning praise music might be an accident of relatively little significance. It might, for example, merely reflect people’s pleasure in singing in church what they sing in the car; and since CCM is what’s on the radio, that’s what we get at church. Perhaps you suppose what’s on the radio (or Spotify) is itself meaningful. For a moment, though, go in for a materialist rather than a market-demand analysis. Perhaps, after the success of CCM in the 1990s, the big corporations that stepped in and made CCM not only Big Business but Global Business were the ones who set the terms for what CCM could sound like and be about going forward. Perhaps they are the ones who are responsible for the sort of lyrics most CCM songs contain: minimal biblical allusion, imagery, and terms, few polysyllabic words, plenty of you-and-me generic love affairs, oodles of spare repetition. Call it the Hallmark-ification of CCM. Hallmark sells. But that doesn’t tell us much. It’s just a known quantity built to sell in a continuous, self-replacing fashion—i.e., in such a way that we forget the best songs from last year so that we stream the best songs from this year, so on and so forth, into capitalist eternity.

Is that an entirely implausible interpretation of CCM these last 30 years? If not, it suggests to me that the popularity, such as it is, of CCM in the worship assemblies of low-church traditions (i.e., non-denom, baptist, evangelical) may not mean that much. In other words, we don’t need to put on our missionary hats in order to learn from this particular phenomenon. We need only put on our economic—perhaps our Marxist—hats to do so.

In short, it is all too believable, in my view, that if other music were on the radio, that’s just what our churches would be playing. Or suppose we had replacement songs—songs quite different in content but that were equally singable, equally catchy, equally popular, even equally kitschy. Suppose that, without anyone’s knowing it, these songs were more or less seamlessly substituted for our current CCM worship. I submit that they would do the job, and people would enjoy them well enough.

I admit that these are hypothetical conjectures. Remember, I didn’t promise much by way of compelling argument, much less a confident thesis. Anyway, this is what Richard provoked in my thinking, for what it’s worth.

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Two final thoughts, while I’m at it.

1. None of what I’ve said above should imply that, because CCM mostly comprises kitsch, it should be rejected. Though it is true that plenty of CCM isn’t very good, musically or theologically, such a judgment is not per se a judgment about its kitschiness, which in turn is not a judgment on its worthiness either to be used in worship or to be enjoyed by Christians. As Paul Griffiths has rightly written, kitsch is very near to the heart of the church. It is not the church’s primary business to make aesthetes of the baptized. It is to make them little Christs. It is, that is to say, to make them disciples, conformed over time to the holiness of the image of Christ. That may or may not involve aesthetic formation in genuine appreciation of the truly beautiful. (This is where Hans Boersma, in my view, went wrong in his reflection last summer on the role of beauty in the liturgy.) Some of the most faithful saints in church history wouldn’t know the difference between a Rembrandt and a Warner Sallman, or which is to be preferred, Bach or Michael W. Smith. Who cares? The beauty they know is the one that matters: Christ himself. He contains all the beauty they need. And if Christ, in his wisdom and mercy, uses kitsch as means of his grace—and he certainly does, every day of the week and twice on Sunday—then glory to God for one more illustration of his great love for us. In fact, the real miracle is that he loves us snobs.

2. Perhaps this is burying the lede, but the real liturgical phenomenon I want to subject to missionary analysis in modern low-church worship is not the style or content of the songs on offer. It’s the very fact that the songs are the star of the show. By which I mean that, outside of high liturgical traditions, in (very broadly speaking) evangelical Protestant churches, there are two and only two options for why one is there in the assembly on Sunday morning—what I have elsewhere called the inner rationale of worship. It’s either the sermon or the concert. Reformed and Baptist churches typically offer a version of the former: preaching that lasts 30, 40, 50 minutes, not in spite of but in service to both what the church and what its members want out of the sermon. Long, rich, deep saturation in the biblical text and the proclamation of the gospel. But if it’s not the sermon—and my anecdotal observation is that previously sermon-centric congregations and ecclesial traditions are in the midst of an enormous shift here—then it’s the concert.

As I tell my students, think of worship as a pie chart; slice it up by time allotment, and you’ll know pretty quickly what a church cares about, that is, what it thinks worship is all about, why people are there or want to be there or should be there. And in many churches today the majority of the liturgical pie chart is a concert performed by a band. The songs performed by that band are the very songs the faithful listened to on the radio or Spotify on the way to church that morning and on the way home afterward. The Lord’s Supper (if it happens, and if it isn’t optional self-serve in the back) takes little more than a few minutes. There are prayers. Some Bible. A modest sermon. But the main event is the stage. This is where “worship”—which is the word young evangelicals typically use to mean “praise and worship music in big church”—is performed by a group of four to ten individuals.

Of even greater theological interest: In such a church the once-normative priestly role of the pastor, whether he be an actual priest, formally ordained, or “just” the pulpit minister, has vanished completely. Even in the lowest of low churches, only a few decades ago, the priestly character of the preacher-minister-pastor was a given. He would call the church to order, open with a prayer, welcome newcomers, etc., and then serve in a continuously public role throughout the service. He would—again, whether he or his congregation thought of it this way—do what a priest does: represent Christ to the people and the people to Christ. For some Protestants this role might include the blessed sacrament, but for all and sundry it culminated in the preaching of the word. Now, for the communities I am thinking of, no longer. I actually can’t emphasize enough how epochal this change is. It is monumental. It is a wholesale shift from every form of liturgical practice in Christian history of which I am aware, outside of the rare Quaker or equally radical departures from the norm.

I said Richard got me thinking. He did. But I’m not thinking of the songs as such, nor their lyrics or style. I’m thinking of their overpowering centrality in worship, their outright displacement of both word and sacrament from the heart of the liturgy. That calls for comment. Let’s don our missionary hats and figure out what’s going on there. I’m all ears.