No matter how many banishing rituals I do, I still get earworms. An earworm is one of those songs that your brain keeps replaying after you’ve told it to stop. The one I have right now is called My Church. My Church is a Country Pop ditty by Maren Morris. It was released in 2016. The lyrics involve cruising around in a car — ostensibly an older, working class vehicle — and feeling a sense of exhilaration and belonging not to be had in a pew but instead in the plaintive strains of the oldies station. The set-up is for the heavily-harmonized chorus where Maren sings “Well I guess that’s my church.” Not “Well I know that’s my church”, nope, it’s a mere guess. The song begins with a semi-apology about cussing on a Sunday, cheating, and lying. Overall, the tune is a lame nothingburger with a klunky construction and an overly complicated prechorus/hook. The rhythm of the melody is awkward and of course it has the major label problem of too much compression, effects, and autotune sucking the life out of it. How appropriate that it’s a song glorifying the music of a simpler time, and how ironic that the music of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams (both mentioned in the song) was so diametrically opposed to the church music of a former era.
Pianos in Bars: Good Old American Rock n’ Roll
There’s a rich and sadly dying tradition of pianos in restaurants and bars. The barroom piano is how Blues and Jazz (and therefore Rock n’ Roll) were born. As much as certain graduate school-educated militants would like to claim all Blues and Jazz is African American, it is simply not true. People of various colors made Jazz and Blues a thing, from that Appalachian white trash hillbilly who plucked a one string banjo made from a dead turtle to the late, great Ray Charles. Blues and Jazz are waves as well as particles. The amorphous mosaic is comprised of little pieces of itself that are painted in different colors.
Rock n’ Roll, born out of American Blues, was directly at odds with church music during its heyday. Elvis is a prime example: he took the music of southern Baptist churches and made it hip and sexy. Elvis’s ascent was a disaster for the Christian church because the imaginations of an entire generation of young women no longer belonged to Jesus… instead, they belonged to Elvis. No wonder he was seen as evil.
They Don’t Know Good Music
One of the big reasons I believe the Christian church is going the way of the dodo is because of its music. At this point, the Christian church, with all of its factions and denominations, would not know good music if it bit them in the tushie. There are notable exceptions, of course, and I believe these are to be found in Traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy, both of which utilize old and in some cases, ancient music in their services. Chant especially has the ability to sanctify anything it reaches. J.S. Bach’s music has the ability to transcend time and space, but you will not find any of Bach’s remarkably large canon being learned, let alone played, by the average Christian church in the US.
Instead, we have worship bands. The worship band is a trend that refuses to go away but will most likely take most of Christianity to its death bed with it, once that finally happens. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the millions of amateur pop musicians who were cast out of the major label music scene by the big recording labels of the 1980s, look no further than your local suburban McChurch. For almost no pay, worship band musicians are given a set of corporate-produced, focus group-tested, massively copyrighted and monetized songs to perform once or twice a week in front of the congregation. On Sundays and for various promotional purposes, these pieces of lite rock muzak are barfed up for a bored audience.
Zombie Radio
Christian rock music stations dominate the radio around here in Chicagoland. Anything that isn’t Christian rock is either oldies or in Spanish. South Park put itself on the map when it spoofed Christian rock in the episode Christian Rock Hard. In the episode, the character Cartman forms a band called Faith Plus 1, which goes platinum by replacing the lyrics of regular pop songs with references to God and Jesus. The end result, much like the title, is a deluge of hilarious double entendres. The revelation, which isn’t really a revelation, is that Christian popular music is what used to be construed as sexy pop music with the labels peeled off.
Body of Christ
Sleek swimmer's body, all muscled up and toned
Body of Christ
Oh what a body, I wish I could call it my own
Lord almighty, I've never been so enticed
Oh I wish I could have the body of Christ
Body of Christ
Body of Christ
Body of Christ
Lord almighty, I've never been so enticed
Oh I wish I could have the body of Christ
Eric Cartman of Faith + 1
Devastating, isn’t it?
Music as Barometer
The thing Christianity has become is reflected in the state of its music. If public school is designed to churn out compliant, programmable corporate drones, the Christian church is the seal that guarantees that the drone will never again form an original (and therefore dangerous) thought. School does not educate and church does not connect to the spiritual.
When Oswald Spengler talked about the descent into abstraction as a symptom of the onset of a civilization entering the season of Winter, he foresaw the death of Christianity via its abstractions. For Maren Morris and her fans, their church is in a pickup truck because the music, despite not being performed live and being written 60+ years in the past, is more inspiring to them than whatever bilge is being pumped out by the corner worship band. Churches are ostensibly about Jesus but there is no way Jesus would sign off on the ostentation or the sheer size of most churches. The very few churches doing any work at all to help the poor and needy often do it at the price of conversion, which turns a gift into a curse.
The New Religiosity promises to temporarily fluff the numbers of a disintegrating set of Christian religions. This will be promptly followed by schisms and emotional squabbling. The Christian church has alienated itself from its God/god and there is no sincere effort to bring that deity back. Church as coffee klatch makes sense for a time until the very moment all of those nice people who acted warm and accepting realize you are asking them to change.
Stranger things have happened, of course, but I don’t think an influx of newbies can save Christianity or monotheism in general at this point. The God of the Resurrection appears to be well and truly dead this time. Of course I could be wrong.
European-descended men whose not-so-distant ancestors sailed the world, built giant monoliths and detailed forest castles, erecting reverent pagan temples that endure to this day—I see them trying to reconnect with this part of themselves. However, since paganism has been so subverted by the Abrahamic religions, they reach for the pre-packaged, middle eastern Semitic Christianity. I did it, too.
It grieves me to see that exoteric and performative Christianity seems to them to be the only recourse against the Titanic (demonic) spirit of this age. Esotericism, even within the deep teachings of the Christian faith is completely lost to my blood brothers, and they think the world will find redemption in Christ. THEY may indeed find it, for a time, but only for themselves. The liberalism of the core of that faith seems to be hidden to their eyes.
I vacillate between resigning myself to the thought that perhaps it is the best worst thing for European descendants, to conversely being daily reminded that it actually further corrodes all identification with our ancestors and Nature.
Mm. I think you've got it right in the overall picture-- Christianity is sinking into cultural irrelevance, and may never again be a dominant political force in the US. So much the better.
From the inside, there are really interesting things happening in the church, and it looks like... shedding and consolidation.
The women's-club atmosphere that has been "church" for most of my life has ossified, and is slowly dying. The music... well, it's a symptom. American(tm) Christianity repels men, and it has been that way for a long time. The whole "boyfriend Jesus" hymn phenomenon wasn't an accident-- it was publishers and music producers marketing to the people who are the majority of churchgoers... and it has accelerated the decline. We joke about the "pantyhose quotient" (though really, who wears pantyhose anymore?): the larger the ratio of women to men, the closer your church is to death. Obviously most churchgoers don't think of it this way, but... men are the life of the church. The energy, the generative element. Chase them all off and you've got... what? A ladies' breakfast social? Sterility and stagnation. Part of me thinks the rock n' roll churches sprang from a backroom brainstorming session about how to get the men back ("Well, what do men *like*?" "Sex, drugs, and rock n roll" "well, maybe we can do the rock n roll..."). True or not, the move did get *some* of them back into something claiming to be a church. But they don't seem to be staying.
Trad churches, with trad music and trad teachings... those are growing, but it's clear that they're not picking up everybody who's leaving the mainlines. Most of those are simply becoming irreligious. The un-serious are leaving for good, and the serious are condensing into a small subset of churches. I'm excited for what the traditional churches are becoming, actually. I think we do best as a despised minority.