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.

Artists for friends

Should the artists you love love you back? I confess that this question never occurred to me when I was growing up or , as an adult, when I developed a taste for whatever art I happen to take pleasure in. As this question, or rather assertive expectation, hovers like a gibbering ghoul over all our aesthetic and pop-cultural conversations these days, and has done so in increasing emotional intensity with each passing year (or at least it seems so to me), I have found myself asking why it would never occur to me—apart from what I take to be later, more informed and reflective conviction.

I suppose much of the reason comes down to this: Growing up as a Christian in the U.S. means that if you like anything outside the sub-cultural bubble of kitsch and in-house “Christian” entertainment, you are forced to reckon pretty quickly with the fact that not only are the artists whose work you enjoy neither religious nor Christian; they are often actively hostile to the sort of Christian you are. More to the point, their words or images or themes make your faith and/or your community (i.e., your family) an object of critique, ridicule, or dismissal. Which means that, pretty quickly, you either accept this state of affairs and go on enjoying their work, or reject it in toto and return to the warm confines of the bubble. I opted for the former.

I think of Tool and Rage Against the Machine, two bands I adored in high school. I saw them live. I owned all their albums, including the Napster-sourced live and hard-to-find stuff. I learned their songs on guitar and bass. I was willy-nilly radicalized politically. (RATM was my first real introduction to leftist thought. They were the reason I was skeptical, as a self-involved suburban high schooler, of the Iraq war.) And guess what? I knew they hated my guts. They hated where I lived, where I went to church, my house, my friends, my parents, my beliefs—all of it. They told me so, in no uncertain terms. And what did I do? I kept on listening. Not only did I not let their contempt for much of what made me me determine whether or not I could enjoy their art. It actually proved a significant moment, or development, in my intellectual and theological formation. It snatched me out of the bubble and put me face to face with the voices of people who’d been harmed by religion, or who found it repulsive, or who thought it an emotional and political sedative, or who saw through the lies of hucksters and frauds. That was (and remains) an important education. For much of what they had to say was true; and even when it wasn’t, it was worth listening to.

I think also of Christopher Hitchens, whose writing I found myself falling in love with in my twenties. Not his politics—though the fact that I feel compelled to say that is itself an indictment of those readers who loved Hitch right up to the point when he crossed an invisible line, whereupon his writing somehow proved no longer good—but his prose. I still marvel at the man’s ability to write interesting sentences, combined with or underwritten by masterly knowledge of Anglophone literature and global politics and history. Seeing his nearly-posthumous bullet-stopper Arguably show up in the mail was Christmas come early: every essay a feast.

As you well know, Hitchens, too, hated my guts. He thought religion poisoned everything, specifically my religion: Israel and Jesus and Paul and Rome and all that. To which I thought: So be it. Who cares? I returned his hate with affection. I thought he was wrong, naturally, and that he ought to turn down the volume every once in a while. But if his hatred was earned—if he truly believed that what I believe is toxic to human flourishing—then he ought to have said so, and with all the passion he could muster. It would never occur to me to be angry at him, certainly not for saying what he judged to be true in the most compelling manner possible. I would, and still do, keep on reading and loving him back.

To be clear, I don’t mean to universalize my own experience. I would never prescribe reading or viewing or listening to artistic content filled with genuine hatred for oneself or one’s community. Nor would I suggest that one ought to do so on principle.

But the general point stands. Artists aren’t our friends. Good art is not art that affirms me or who I am; good art is not art that is made by people who affirm me or who I am. The art stands on its own. It is good or bad in itself, on its own terms. And if you, or I, find joy in it, see the truth in it, delight in its beauty or wit or pleasure, then each of us is free to ignore whatever wise or foolish beliefs its creators hold. The joke’s on them if they would withhold their work for only the “right” sort of people. But if we withhold it from ourselves, for no other reason than an arbitrary (and, given the implications, ultimately indefensible and self-defeating) sense that artists ought both to like us and to say so, then the joke’s on us.

Covid, church closures, and three rationales for worship

Why do people go to church? Why do churches gather for worship on Sunday morning?

I've been asking myself this question in light of the lockdown and subsequent church closures and shifts to online streaming. And the question isn't theological so much as sociological.

After all, ordinary Christians don't go to church according to highly technical doctrinal articulations of the sort offered by systematic theologians. They have much more banal or quotidian or subjective reasons.

That's not to say those reasons aren't theological. Only that we shouldn't resort to high-level dogmatic language to explain lay folks' behavior or reasoning—or even local congregations' or parishes'. (In the case of the latter, the question isn't so much what they say explicitly but what their organization and enactment of worship "says"; what unspoken logic is embedded, implicit, in their actual liturgical practices.)

Part of the motive for thinking about this concerns the other side of society-wide lockdowns: Why would or should churches reopen? How urgent is the need or desire to do so, at the objective or subjective level? What motivates individual members of churches to delay or hasten reopening?

Here's my answer. I think, broadly speaking, there are three inner rationales for American churches' gathering for worship: sacrament, fellowship, and experience. Let me unpack these briefly.

First is sacrament. This group comprises catholic and liturgical churches ordinarily led by priests: Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, perhaps Lutheran or even sometimes Methodist traditions. Why does one go to church? Why does the church gather? Among other reasons, to receive the holy sacrament. That is the thing, the sine qua non, of Christian worship. Moreover, one cannot partake of it anywhere else. To quarantine under lockdown is one and the same as to fast from the body and blood of Christ.

Second is fellowship. This group would likely cover every manner of church across nearly all denominations. I leave "fellowship" unqualified, since it can refer simultaneously to communion with God and with fellow believers. But the emphasis is on the fellow-feeling of being gathered together with sisters and brothers in the unity of the corporate body of Christ. Such fellow-feeling is far from a natural property or a mere subjective experience; it is a spiritual and communal fact: this body of believers, right here, assembled in this space, are the sign and site of God's presence in the world. Why gather, then? Among other reasons, to enact and participate in the fellowship that Christ's Spirit makes possible when disciples congregate to worship God and hear from his word.

Third is experience. This group includes those other Protestant and especially "low church" traditions that emphasize the subjective aspect of worship. Certainly these churches are going to trend charismatic and Pentecostal, but they also include decidedly non-charismatic evangelical and non-denominational churches that place a premium on the concert-level quality of the praise band's leading of Sunday morning worship. In many ways these churches put on a weekly performance, and what attendees come for is to experience that performance. (NB: The highest of high-church liturgy is also a kind of performance, indeed a kind of extended drama; so the term itself is neutral, not pejorative.) Believers in these traditions and congregations wake up on Sundays and gather with others in order to experience what can only be had then and there: the communal, emotional, and (sometimes) charismatic energy and power of the Holy Spirit at work in mighty ways to make known the promeity—the for-me-ness—of God's love in Christ.

Suppose this typology is near the mark. What then does it say about church closings and reopenings under Covid?

First, fellowship-churches have the least intrinsic urgency to reopen. Why? On the one hand, because however attenuated, worship from home is a possibility for such communities. On the other hand, because the very thing sought in assembled worship is supremely difficult to achieve in a pandemic; mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing, no hugging or coffee hour or any of the other common ways the body is built up—these all mitigate the possibility of fellowship, both horizontal and vertical, in the extreme.

Second, sacrament-churches have the strongest inner rationale to reopen, indeed never to have fully closed in the first place. Many priests have continued unceasingly to say Mass or lead the Divine Liturgy since March, sometimes alone, sometimes with deacons or assistants, sometimes with half a dozen or so parishioners. Why? Because God ought still to be worshiped in the appointed manner by his ordained servants who stand in for, which is to say represent, the people as a whole. And because there is no digital Eucharist, no streaming sacrament, no self-feeding or solo consecration available to believers at home. (Perhaps, in fact, they view from afar and receive the sanctified elements later that day, distributed by the priest to congregants in their homes.)

Third, experience-churches are in something of a bind. On the one hand, there is a sense in which church members can participate from home: if worship is akin to a musical (or didactic!) performance, then YouTube was made for such things. On the other hand, streaming a concert and attending one are two distinct experiences. So the longer the lockdown lasts, the stronger the desire to return to in-person worship. The question for leaders at such churches is fourfold, however. First, if you build it, will they come? That is, what if your people's cautions about Covid are greater than their subjective desire to have the experience? Second, what of health precautions in worship? It's difficult to have unfettered communal experience of the Spirit in accordance with CDC guidelines (a la fellowship-churches above). Should such precautions go to the wind, given the importance of worship, or no? Third, if a church's particular appeal is the quality of the experience it has to offer, what happens when (a) the experience is no longer there to be had and/or (b) onetime attendees do some digital church shopping and find superior experiences elsewhere? Relatedly, and last, what if such church-shoppers realize the experience isn't appreciably different at home, and that streaming worship from the comfort of one's home—at a time one chooses, in a medium one prefers, while eating a snack or wearing pajamas—is preferable to the analog rigors of actually getting up and going to a physical building with other people?

I know pastors, ministers, elders, and other church leaders are asking themselves these and many other questions. I don't envy them. But it's useful to realize that not all churches are the same; not every Christian or parish has the same inner rationale for gathering or regathering under ordinary, much less extraordinary, conditions. At the very least, it's going to be illuminating to see what the American church looks like on the other side of the pandemic.

From "Sent Mail": on contemporary praise and worship music

I am exactly one step away from entering full-on Amos prophetic mode with contemporary praise and worship songs. It's not that it's bad. Church music has, parish to parish, congregation to congregation, been bad since time immemorial. It's something else entirely.

The content is so spectacularly, even impressively, vacuous that it it nigh un-Christian. The words are so consistently monosyllabic that one would think the phrases are meant to be understood by kindergartners. The only characters in the songs are the otherwise unnamed pronouns "You" and "I." "You" is, so far as I can tell, generally benign, and makes "I" feel good, but I've yet to figure anything else about him/her/it, or even about "I," except that "I" thinks about "I" a whole lot, especially "I's" emotional well-being.

I am persuaded that the songwriters have together signed a blood-pact never, on principle, to use language that is from, or could be taken by a seeker to be from, the Bible—which is the only possible explanation for the lack of any scriptural terminology, stories, echoes, allusions, personal names, or titles for God. Protestants used to think the pope had a special meeting place in the Vatican for consultations with Satan; I'm convinced some similar bargain has been reached by the lords of CCM. Nothing else except a diabolical conspiracy can make sense of it.