The C.S. Lewis Song

I confess, for something called "The C.S. Lewis Song", I was expecting this to be a little more, I don't know... jaunty? Something one could sing at the pub. But I do likes it. Quite a voice, this girl has.

Back when I was still a fairly new Christian Evangelical revert (after being raised Baptist, and then college educated into a mushy kind of Christian Agnosticism) I was for a while a great fan of Christian Rock/Pop. We have had a popular evangelical Christian radio station in the area for decades (out of John Brown University) and my radio dial was permanently welded there in the late 80s and early 90s.

I'm pretty finicky, musically, but I overlooked what I considered to be a lot of Christian Drek because I found it worthwhile to get to the Good Stuff. I was a big fan of Out of the Grey, I remember. and Brent Bourgeois. The link is to one of my favorites of his. Though I think this was before he declared as a Christian, the lyrics show he was thinking deeply about things.

It's the question of the hour,

How can I be sure of what I don't know?

She comes to me with poison in her flower,

And steals the miracle of life right out of my hand

After I became a Catholic, though (or perhaps I was just growing up), slowly, imperceptibly, Christian Pop - or Pop of almost any kind - failed to satisfy. I began to notice the extent to which Christian Pop Radio was increasingly a reflection of ordinary pop radio, and that mainly for the worse (though not totally). I also came to resent the extent to which Pop Culture had insinuated itself into the liturgy. Even the Sacrament of the Altar is not immune from the din of drum kits and electric guitars, and I say this as a great fan  - a sucker - for great guitar work. I loves me some Stevie Ray Vaughan... only not in church, please.

In the words of Hank Hill, "Can't you see? You're not making Christianity better... you're making rock and roll worse!".

I'm all for honesty and sincerity, but it seemed more and more of Christian Pop songwriting was becoming a festival of breast-beating, cathartic, sentimental introspection to the point of narcissism. Okay, we all struggle, but if I want to be depressed I'd rather listen to Pink Floyd... or Tool.

There seemed also to be an element of Christian Guilt bubbling up, not unlike the White Guilt so prevalent among hip progressives. Yes, Christians are often hypocritical. So is everyone. It's a remnant of The Fall that is part of the human condition. Yes, Christendom has had it's share of moral missteps throughout history. We should be aware of our hypocrisy, aware of our past mistakes and constant shortcomings... but can we leave off apologizing at some point and please get on with things?

I've always admired celebrities who have had the good sense not to believe their own press clippings. We ought to do likewise. We don't measure our success - or failure - by worldy standards. We are, in fact warned about conformity to the world. Why, then, do we now seem so all-fired concerned that the world "like us... really like us"?

This is part of the problem I have with what is called the Emergent Church. This movement seems to me very much in danger of being the Tragically Hip church, the Church as Fashion Victim. Clothes? Check (Hot Topic). Music? Check. Hi-Def Multimedia Worship? Check. Pop-culture references? Check. Hair gel? Check.

I understand the impulse. Shoot, I'm as embarrassed as anyone to be lumped in with Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts and the old polyester suit crowd. But to bastardize C.S. Lewis, "Because our grandparents erred in one direction, does it follow that there is no error in the opposite direction?"

It's not good to try and freeze any moment in history (say, the 1950s) and set that up as The Good Old Days... to become stodgy and grumpy and interact with our unbelieving neighbors mainly by wagging our fingers and complaining of their godless music and their dungarees. But the opposite error isn't pretty, either. To court the approval of half-interested cultural agnostics (called "seekers") or to ape the fashions and attitudes (Watch me! I'm being ironic!) of a perenially bored and fickle generation is just as bad.

As irksome as it may seem, I think I might rather stand with Brother Falwell.

So, okay, let's admit our shortcomings and mistakes, our struggles, fears and doubts, but after that... well, do we have any Good News for these people, or don't we?

All that said, the song/video linked above - by New Zealander Brooke Fraser - does flirt a bit with depressing introspection, but she pulls it together into something very lovely and even powerful. She begins with what feels like an achingly agnostic perspective, but shows that there is hope for us all to "know as we are known" in the end. Behind everything, there really is Someone there.

Comments

[M. B.]

I think that's the Chestertonian in you coming out, Tim. I've known critics who've disliked Chesterton because of his joy. They somehow think his joy is superficial and that only mopey melancholy is "authentic." I get where they are coming from -- superficial chipperness is of course shallow. But I think that in the end, joy is in fact deeper than sadness. Its unfortunate that some don't see that.

Anyway, as to the rest of this post, I started writing and then realized my points seemed to be contradictory, but I don't think they in fact are...

That is, the problem with Christian pop music is that it thinks that content trumps form. Just because your art is Christian doesn't mean it is good if the art involved is bad. Bad music is bad music, Christian or not. In other words, the content doesn't make up for the poor technique and execution, or form.

The trendy, hip church makes, at heart, the same mistake, I think, in believing that form doesn't matter. Trendy hip clothes and music and whatnot can totally obscure the Christian content you claim is underneath. You claim to be reverential, but do you express it in your dress? You claim to be intellectual, but is your music intellectual or pelvic at its core?

Now I know that to advocate dressing "conventionally", for example, might seem to contradict Chesterton's haphazard style, but actually it doesn't. He himself put it rightly: "We were careless in wearing careful clothes. The aesthetes were careful in wearing careless clothes."

Chesterton took care to buy a nice coat and tie; it just got rumpled in his fully-lived life. The modern hipsters on the other hand carefully select and buy pre-stained and pre-torn, trendily weathered and formally casual clothes -- all because they have a preening appearance to keep up. "The Bohemian wore a slouch-hat, but he did not slouch in it," Chesterton observed. "I slouched in a top hat; a shocking bad habit, but not one designed to shock the bourgeois."

The true Christian, I think, seeks to live well and in the process gets scrapes and bruises and bumps. The trendy Christian seeks to live aesthetically and in the process eviscerates the true Christian core of his life.

Just some random responses...

[M. B.]

Oh, and if it wasn't clear by "you" I am speaking abstractly in the previous post, not aimed at you, Tim.

And I'll admit that I too have a fondness for what I consider good "pop" music and even some Christian music, notably U2 and the later music of the late Rich Mullins. I mean, an epic praise song about the color green? That's good stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhGOosxTLrY

[Beadgirl]

It's not just that content trumps form in Christian pop, but that the content is all the same. I may like one song about "breast-beating, cathartic, sentimental introspection," but a whole album is tedious. Of course, this is a problem many other musicians have too -- I don't have much interest in any musician who only sings about crushes on boys, or broken hearts, or guns and money.

There was a South Park episode where Cartman decided to become a Christian pop star, and he simply took a bunch of conventional pop songs and replaced every "baby" or "girl" with "Jesus." That episode was an awfully funny satire of the worst of the Christian pop/rock scene.

[GORBODUC]

I won't criticize the music on the video, beyond saying that the breathy sobby "little-girl-lost" vocal timbre that appears at the opening evokes an atmosphere of insincerity and sentimentality.
I'm not sure that we're actually hearing what the performers appear to be doing.
AND I'm not sure that the category of Christian rock music actually exists any more than does the category of Christian pole-dancing.
As regards the video, I will only say that the rapid chop-and-change style and the cascade of contrasting visual images are confusing and distracting and seem intended to prevent contemplation and understanding. If CS Lewis had witnessed the modernistic technique of deliberately-contrived confusion he might have added it into the disorientating attacks on Mark Studdock's sanity ["objectivity"] in "That Hideous Strength".
This isn't being fuddy-duddy: A.W.Pugin famously took back the vestments he and his patron had donated for a church's consecration when he realise that the choiur was going to perform a Mozart mass, rather than the expected plainsong setting.
Mozart's style was just too secular: it drew attention to itself rather than to the words, and reminded him of the opera house. Humble worshippers could join in with simple chants, but a Mozart mass in a parochial context would, he thought, require hired professional performers, who - and I hope I've got this quote right - might be "reeking from the previous night's debauch."
Many years ago my return to the Catholic church was postponed for years because the Easter vigil ceremonies were absolutely ruined by the embarrassing antics of a line-up of check-shirted and be-jeaned hip-swinging girls and boys, a "folk-group" who bounced up and intervened at every opportunity with a selection of unmusical pap. Not just the music was rubbish, so were the illiterate and pretentious texts: I felt that Nietzsche's transvaluation of values had been performed with a vengeance, and the church was now promoting a wicked secular commercialism.
Dammit, we silent ones were the "folk", not that parcel of preposterous ninnies!