thoughts on christian music

What makes “Christian music” Christian music? It’s not the notes played or the beat you hear. This is the only genre of popular music today that’s defined by the lyrical content. Why is that? Why do we as Christians (generally speaking of course) demand that our music be especially set aside for our enjoyment only? There’s no real reason that a non-Christian would seek out music that only talks about Jesus unless they were specifically looking for music that talks about Jesus. I think that making music specifically christian in nature would alienate those not already in the club. I’m not talking about music written for the specific purpose of congregational worship. I mean the music you’ll hear if you turn on the local church friendly radio station.

So what do you do if you are a Christian who loves creating music but writes about people’s stories whether they experienced God in that moment or not? What happens when you lose hope? Should that not be talked about? Sometimes it doesn’t feel like God is there, and sometimes things happen to you that are out of your power to help. Are we only supposed to write about the aftermath, the moral of the story? Judging from the current atmosphere, that’s what it looks like. This doesn’t make sense to me at all, because that doesn’t sound like the Christian lifestyle we’ve been called to live. Even if your are “eternally minded,” that doesn’t disqualify you from having to experience this life, warts and all. As Christians, Jesus said we would experience hard times. We’re not called to ignore them, but to learn from them. Why wouldn’t a Christian artist want to use that experience as a story to tell through the gift of music? It’s not like we don’t already know the happy resution to the story: God wins. If there are no troubled times or evil to overcome, then there’s no such thing as salvation or redemption, and in between those two points is the search for God’s freedom and healing. We as Christians need to be encouraging to the process of spiritual growth, not the whitewashing of art to appease those who would ignore the world we live in.

So, why do I suddenly want to write such a tirade? Someone in the Chrisitian music world had a problem with some lyrics in a very powerful song that my friend had written and subsequently asked my friend to change them. The reason was because the lyrics as they are reflect the pain of the moment, and had no actual mention of God, Jesus, or the Bible. My friend was told that the changes should be made so that more of the Christian music listeners would more easily connect and mentioned several times about inserting God’s name into the song. This irked me quite a bit. Definitely for the reasons already stated, but for another big one too. I beleive that throwing God’s name in a song (the old “change ‘baby’ to ‘Jesus’ in any pop song” joke) is in a way using God’s name in vain. All art is an act of creation, which is in itself an imitation of the Creator. God made no compromise when he created the universe and everything in it, including you and I. Is it not then sinful if we compromise in our imitation of our Lord? This is a fallen world and we can’t always see God. Not that He wasn’t there, but that while living through the moment overwhelming evil was the only presence sensed. If a piece of art is simply about the hurt when evil occurred and the scar it may have left, isn’t it a compromise of integrity in telling the story of that moment and thrusting the name of God into it? I believe that God’s name would be cheapened in that case. And what would the true purpose be of slapping the name of Jesus into art other than to be able to sell it to Christians?

I’ve written about four different endings to this, and I haven’t been able to write a satisfactory one. I think it may be because I haven’t really come to any sort of conclusion in my mind about this. I guess I could just say that I believe God wants us to us tell our stories, and that we shouldn’t hide our stories under the guise of safety. Tell yours, and do it without compromise.