A Discussion Of Christian Rock In Three Parts

I.

Every South Park fan remembers the “Christian rock” episode in which Cartman—in defiance of Stan, Kenny, and Kyle—claims that he will record a platinum album. For Cartman, the solution is obvious: all he needs to do is take a bunch of love songs and brand them as Christian rock by rewriting them as odes to Jesus. Comic problems, of course, ensue, but I'm more interested in the assumptions about both Christian rock and the role of Christian music in our society that are central to the episode.

The ostensible hilarity of Christian music, according to South Park, is that writing love songs to Jesus is a pretty silly thing. So how different are love songs to God and love songs to people? Do Christian rock songs have an edge on more "mainstream" love songs like…oh, well, I don’t know…how about Big Star’s “Thirteen” or Steve Earle’s “Halo ‘Round The Moon."?

Given as much emphasis as must be placed on lyrics, I think it might be helpful some direct comparisons. How about “Everything About You” by Christian rock band Sanctus Real vs. Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour”?

“Be my light in this darkened room

I'm on my face and I'm calling you.

I can't fathom all you've done for me

every time it finds me on my knees.”

[from “Everything About You”]

“My cherie amour, lovely as a summer day,

my cherie amour, distant as the Milky Way

my cherie amour, pretty little one that I adore,

you're the only girl my heart beats for,

how I wish that you were mine.”

[from “My Cherie Amour”]

As you’ve doubtlessly already guessed, I’m all set to trash the Sanctus Real excerpt: it’s trite, uninspired, artless, and, frankly, sort of unworthy for critical discussion. That last judgment sounds like an awfully lame complaint—do I expect everyone to put on their music critic hats listening to Mercyme and the David Crowder Band? Of course, when you ask people to think critically at something, they’ll more likely back away from me, saying, "I don’t have to “think critically” to just enjoy some song about my spirituality, Taylor! Jeez! Back off of Jesus!"

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But I think they’d be wrong. Despite our best intentions to not be critics, sometimes we can’t help it. My theory is that all art depends on a principle of interesting-ness (a term I appropriate from Professor Peter Rabinowitz). If it’s interesting—if it intrigues us or engages us as an audience—then the odds are that there’s something to it. Generally, I find that that music or what-have-you out there that…well…bores me is something less than good.

What all that has to do with Christian rock is pretty simple. Love songs are interesting because of the people involved, the feelings expressed, and, most importantly, exactly how those feelings are expressed. Faced with the relationship between a believer and his God, the fact is that Christian rock songwriters usually don’t seem to accomplish all that much with such material.

Those well-versed folk out there will readily point out the legions of songwriters and poets from Shakespeare to more contemporary writers who explicitly deal with the relationship between God and man in their writings. Largely (speaking as if I’ve read gobs of religious poetry—unfortunately, I have not), it’s safe to say that these works of poetry are not even in the same league as Sanctus Real.

For instance, Sanctus Real does not strive for poetry in quite the same way as Johne Donne:

“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me,’ and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”

[from “Holy Sonnet 14”; out of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, shorter 5^th ed., pg. 208]

Can at least that much be agreed upon? Donne has a little something more than “Be my light in this darkened room”…

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None of this means to say that God or the discussion of one’s love for God is in any way a bad or terrible thing; I only mean to claim that it’s terribly uninteresting in the world of Christian rock song. These artists don’t want to grapple with religious doubt or what it means to be Christian; they want to play music—as so many YouTube comments pointed out—that is “uplifting and praises the God we believe in.”

So is all Christian rock that boring? And, if so, whose fault is that - Christianity or rock 'n roll?


(Part II arriving in the near future)