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Why are Christians so easy to please?

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grant
Apr 05 2006
05:06 pm

My frustration with fellow Christians continues.

Frustration #1

Giving God credit for shitty music. I’m sure you’ve heard the sentimentalizing talk that goes on at Christian concerts: "Hey guys, I just wanted you to know that we do this for God. He writes our songs. He is the reason that we’re up here" (stage directions: assume humble-face then apologetically go into rock star stance; launch into the WORST rock song anyone has ever heard, leaving audience with the impression that God is a really crappy songwriter). The band might really suck, but man are those guys humble! And Christians eat it up.

Frustration #2

Then there’s those who are so starved for good Christian music that they’ll praise anything that’s anywhere near talking about God and lift it up as the closest to heaven that music can get without using the name of Christ. Sure Bjork is a pagan and her music is increasingly more and more self-indulgent, but it’s a good reflection on what sin is like. Ptah! (that’s the sound of me spitting the word "Ptah!" out of my mouth). Now I like Bjork too and NIN and Snoop Dog etc. but there’s no need to try to fit them into Christian theology if they just don’t fit. If the Flaming Lips care about human beings, that doesn’t mean they’re Christians. Humanists care about human beings too. Let’s just say what’s good about good music and what isn’t. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves for being so easy to please with shoddy ‘Christian’ fare and Spiritually antithetical ‘secular’ stuff. But…

But, but, but…we are free, really truly FREE, to eat from the table of popular music whether it’s been baptized in our Christian minds or not, because it all belongs to God!

That’s what I think, anyway, and you should too!

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laryn
Apr 12 2006
08:46 am

]
I don’t have any answers for you, but your post pleases me.

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dunadan
Apr 15 2006
04:28 pm

Re: Frustration #1

It’s a question of benchmarks. You referred to "Christian concerts", at term that, if you were to take at face value, would simply mean concerts with Christian content. But that adjective "Christian" is more slippery than that. It actually signals a shift in criteria by which the music is measured. The emphasis changes from "music" to "Christian", and the standard changes from degree of quality to degree of piety.

The same thing happens here in Canada with "Canadian content" regulations — radio producers have to seek out music that is sufficiently Canadian, and its musical quality gets overlooked (or there is simply not enough quality Canadian music to fill out a rotation).

Really, you shouldn’t be frustrated by it. People have tunnel vision, and have a hard time thinking on two planes. Given your comments on Frustration #2, it sounds like you value musical quality over piety. That’s great — just recognize you can’t expect satisfaction from Christian concert producers who have a different measuring stick.

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dan
Apr 16 2006
05:53 pm

I know it’s off topic but I disagree with your comment about Canadian music. Since they were put into law in 1970, Canadian content rules have simply created a market for Canadian music that didn’t exist before. The rules encouraged the emergence of what is today a vibrant musical landscape (since it returned profits to Canadian artists). This an example where government intervention and discrimination fostered and improved the music created in Canada (or by Canadians outside of Canada). By contrast, the kind of discrimination that goes on in the Christian music industry consistently fosters mediocrity.

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dunadan
Apr 16 2006
07:39 pm

A fair point — but I’m not sure I would attribute the flourishing within Canadian music to content regulation. The growth in quality indie music (I assume you’re referring to bands like Metric more than the Juno dominators like Nickelback) has occurred on both sides of the Canadian/American border. I take no issue with regulation [i:c0935b5c79]per se[/i:c0935b5c79], but I suspect the rise of niche taste is a better explanation…

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grant
Apr 17 2006
04:55 pm

Yes, the problem is definitely more than just a matter of industry standards or governmental regulations. It’s about taste. The Christians of which I speak are not able to hear the inadequacies of the music they’re making. This certainly is a theological problem and perhaps also the social structure and practices of radio in America could be blamed. But one could also argue that these folks are drawn to bad theology and have devised wrong-headed industry standards because they have been raised on bad music.

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dan
Apr 18 2006
04:50 pm

Don’t you think that the roots of this problem can be traced back to the anti-art, image-breaking tradition of the Reformation? Evangelicals have had, at best, an ambivalent disposition toward music, but usually it’s been downright utilitarian (music as vehicle to move theology to the brain of the singer). So if good taste is learned, and if good artistic taste was killed off during the Reformation and subsequent anti-art revolts, where are evangelicals supposed to have learned it? Evangelicals are like sheep without a shepherd when it comes to art.

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dunadan
Apr 23 2006
12:52 pm

I think it’d be hard to argue that "good artistic taste was killed off during the Reformation". Remember that medieval art had a strong strain of didacticism that has, to some extent, reappeared in the evangelical requirement that music serve as a transport capsule for theology. And post-Reformation literature, music and art exploded onto the European cultural "scene" in the Renaissance. Sure — the Reformation created a separation of church and art (though not religion and art) even broader than that between church and state. But the roots of evangelical bad taste (as well as evangelicalism itself) are found closer to our time in the pietism of the late-19th and early-20th century. In reaction to a world despiritualized by science and higher criticism, early evangelicals emphasized a heavenly mindedness to the point where it became earthly mindlessness.

But I agree with your conclusion that evangelicals could really use an artistic compass.

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grant
Apr 28 2006
03:47 pm

Your criticicism of the Reformation is a bit broad, dan, but I don’t disagree with the main point. To be more specific, among the reformers Zwingli was certainly more anti-art than Luther or Calvin. The thinking of Calvin and Calvinians (like Kuyper and Seerveld) lends to a much more positive role of the arts than other Protestant theology. I think Calvin’s thought on creational revelation really goes against the kind of written word idolatry that dan is referring to.

The problem of "Christian" music in America is both more recent and more ancient than the Reformation. The reason many Evangelicals are afraid of straying too far from the text, I think, is because they are reacting against the Liberal Christianity of the 19th and 20th Century. Because Liberal Christianity undercuts the authority of the written word, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism seem to hold onto hard and fast moralisms and textual "fundamentals" for safety’s sake. But If you really want to blame someone, you could go back as far as Plato and his followers who spread the idea that "irrational" (without words) music is potentially destructive to the "moral fabric" of society. This seemed to have an effect on Augustine and the entire Platonic tradition that continues to guide Christian thinking.

What Christians take out of this is that words make a song good or bad. Music is just a tool (American Pragmatism, while we’re blaming people) for evangelism. And then there’s the problem of people who believe Christian music can only promote certain kinds of emotions, preferably meekness, faux humility, sentimentality and cheerfulness. Nietzsche’s "On the Birth of Tragedy" really unmasks this prejudice for what it is—a favoring of the Greek god Apollo (the ordering, harmonizing god) over the Dionysian (god of noisy partying and drunken orgies).

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lrmydvrs
May 09 2006
08:20 am

Can we criticize the recent "Christian" take on music without criticizing the general modern American take on pop music? How much, by percentage, excellent music is produced by the general crowd of "musicians" in 21st century America? Added to that is the problem that Christians seem to generally be all about imitating what is popular (or perhaps what was popular 7 years ago) in popular music. It seems that we don’t like to generally think of our own formulas for things, so having seen that taking three pretty 21-year-old girls who may or may not be able to sing, throwing some words in front of them that speak in general and bad metaphors, and overproducing them in a studio has sold a ton of records in the secular world, Christians try to mimic it.

To me a lot of the poor quality of Christian music comes about because of degrees of separation. If current American pop music is a sythetic attempt at some sort of real music, and Christian pop music is a synthetic attempt at some sort of American pop music, then that makes it three steps away from real music.

For my part, I would rather listen to Gillian Welch sing an old bluegrass song with questionible "this world is not my home" sorts of lyrics or Connor Oberst struggle through his religious upbringing and whether or not he can accept the truths that were taught him than to listen to some "Christian" "artist" sing in a raspy voice about how great it is to spend time with God because Gillian and Connor make real music. I can actually believe what they’re saying.

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grant
May 17 2006
12:53 pm

This is something I’ve been realizing lately too. It’s not the lyrics, really, but the way it’s sung. It’s the music. I find myself making fun of the "Jesus is my girlfriend" strategy of Christian "cross-over" bands, you know the songs that could go either way—as praise songs to God or to a girl? But then I realize that many of my favorite artists do the same thing: Prince’s relationship with God is sexual. U2 sings of God as a she (whenever Bono says love, subsitute "God"). The Bible itself follows the man and wife relationship when talking about God so what am I making fun of in CCM? It’s the quality of the music, plain and simple. Which is why, if anything, Christians ought to be learning good taste in church just as much as good theology.