This tracking of Christian contemporary music (CCM) is interesting. The article reminds me of how I used to tag along with my dad, who is a pastor, to a Berean Christian Store. Berean sells books, music, clothing, gifts, cards, windchimes, figurines, jewelry, pretty much every kind of Christian merchandise you can think of, inscribed with inspirational messages and crosses and little doves. Like Borders, Berean stores usually feature a music section with listening stations. I used to put on the display headphones and listen to the newest hits, which is how I became familiar with a fair amount of CCM, especially the kind that O’Gieblyn describes in the article, where the music gets edgier, raucous, radical, Jesus-freaky.
As I got older, there were more and more compilation CDs like the WOW Hits series (not to be confused with the NOW Hits series, though I’m sure the derivation is intentional), more songs where you couldn’t tell if the singer was calling out to God or to a lover, though that was also the point, that you should be totally in love with God to the point of frenzy and obsession. One of Skillet’s songs goes: “I wanna be locked in a cage / I wanna be strapped to a chair” and “I wanna break my legs / In case of thought to escape … Wrapped up inside Your arms / Locked up inside You.”A DC Talk song title: “Consume Me.” I remember thinking how extreme they were, but then, that’s how faith is supposed to be—overwhelming. Overpowering. It’s about how much everything matters, this sometimes huge, rapturous feeling in your chest and lungs, in every single cell of you, visible and invisible.
I agree with O’Gieblyn that the blurry line between Christianity and secularism has gotten blurrier, that the megachurches and the marketing have turned religion into a “paltry product.” The consumer becomes the consumed, but not if the consumption turns stale, dissatisfying. But while the article says Christianity has lost its meaning for the author, I find that isn’t the case for me. Although I’m not totally sure where I stand, I guess I do set faith apart from the Christian machine. The merchandise is supposed to sell the message, and maybe sometimes it is the message—Bibles embossed with your name, Bibles with cartoon illustrations, Bibles in every color and texture—but the merchandise is not the only thing. The meaning is more than what’s encased in plastic or paper. And it’s something I think about regardless of people trying to package it to me. Despite what I just said about faith being overwhelming, it’s also something that is extremely quiet.
In college, I took a class on religion and magic in ancient Israel. I met with my professor to talk about the final paper. I’d decided to look at how Jesus fit into the category of “magician,” of goês and magos. I started to talk about my beliefs, but the professor held up his hand. “Whatever Jesus means to you, that doesn’t matter,” he said. He meant I had to consider the mythology of Jesus Christ outside of my personal relationship or opinion.
Generally, I follow that guideline. I find it difficult to talk about what I believe, because it’s so personal to me, and because I am so conscious of losing creditability, aware of what other people think about Christianity: so frequently steeped in dogma, hypocrisy, and also watered-down, trite, naïve, copied-and-pasted with rosy aphorisms. But I also think that while the article makes excellent points about the failure of marketing and relevance to youth, the article is also curiously absent of what church and God and Jesus really used to mean for the author, how it felt beyond all the sales pitches, or maybe that’s the point.
O’Gieblyn discusses how Jars of Clay went more secular, more “vaguely romantic, vaguely spiritual” with their 2002 album, The Eleventh Hour, but their 2006 album, Good Monsters, is what I remember. “Work” and “Oh My God” are not love songs to God. They are, as Amazon reviewer Susan Prince says, lamentations: “All the wounds that money causes, all the comforts of cathedrals / All the cries of thirsty children, this is our inheritance / All the rage of watching mothers, this is our greatest offense / Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.” They’re about the necessity of empathy, about decentering yourself. And not for a heavenly kudos, but because something is incredibly wrong.
I used to think Christianity felt like two things at once: fear lifted from me, a heavy weight off my shoulders. And also a cage, like that Skillet song, tethering myself to principles I didn’t really believe in, but which I couldn’t let go. It was all or nothing, a series of absolutes. I felt like an outsider at school and at church. In a dorm room party my sophomore year, we played Never Have I Ever, and my fingers were still all up while everyone else’s ticked down. When it was my turn again, I stalled as people fell into impatient silence. My friend whispered a suggestion to me. “Never have I ever not been a preacher’s kid,” I said finally. “Oh, man, sorry!” one boy said. Everyone looked horrified and a little relieved that they didn’t have my life. It was like my trump card, and though I felt a kind of loosening in my chest—my unworldliness was justified—I also felt like I had betrayed a part of myself, like I had disowned that part of me, as if I had spit out my beliefs and squished them into an empty gum wrapper so I was no longer under scrutiny. During Bible study with my small group, I looked around as everyone confessed things that they were worried about, prayer concerns. They asked to be held accountable. I felt extremely detached, restless. I never said what I was really afraid of. I was always turning Bible verses over in my mind, unpacking bits of sermons, ready to argue. Many things no longer made sense to me—the singular way to God, the existence of Hell, the definitions of sin—and yet I always felt guilty, endlessly guilty, while I joined hands with my group and we prayed. Later I stopped going to church because it was too easy to shut off my alarm: too much studying, too much homework. I stopped getting anything out of the services, and I no longer wanted to pretend that I did. I didn’t trust my faith, I didn’t know what it really was, except a quiet thing that I sometimes took out and looked at and put back into a far corner.
But lately, my thinking has shifted, keeps shifting. Lately, that quiet is harder to ignore. In school, you get to the point where you’re asked not to rehash, not to memorize, but to try to articulate problems, to think beyond binaries, to deconstruct the gloss and the packaging. There’s a Jars of Clay song from 1997 that says: “And if you follow me / You’ll see all the black, all the white fade to grey.” Maybe you wouldn’t call that faith. You might call it the credo of writing, of narratives. But I think faith isn’t about shunting people into dark places, about wanting to be a Good Person to be acclaimed for being a Good Person and so that you can classify yourself as a Good Person, but it’s about trying—even if you often fall short—to understand, without condescension or selfishness, the ambiguities, the grey spaces.
