Going to Church this morning depressed me. It wasn’t a BAD service, and I know that the pastor where I’m going is in agreement with me on a lot of this Bush-mess, but even so, I found it hard to sit and listne to the Top 40 CCM hit chart in the service. NOt that those songs can’t be worshipful, it’s just that I can’t dissasociate those songs from the clueless “Christian Radio” stations which seem to dominate thw airwaves. There are no “progressive”, non- right wing Christian Radio stations that I know i of. It seems to be a vast failure of a very large section of the Church that the media channles are completely dominated by the Christian Right type of thinking.
Where all of this leaves us is that Churches are too afraid of being a witness to peace, and in today’s super-sensitive political climate, to be critical or questioning of the U.S government is asking for such division. But how do you NOT speak up? I certainly would not want to be a pastor of a Church that’s already made up of a majority of Right-leaning or Right-supporting types, and then try to communicate what I know of the Gospel to them. I’ve been talking to this pastor about how to broach this subject (her idea , not my pushing at all. She asked me if we could “offer” a dialogue. It sounds great, but it’s scary. I don;t know how I will handle an aggressive negative reaction, or avoid coming on too strong myself (I tend to be rather uncompromising on some of these things like peace, the evils of war, the tendencies toward the melding of theology and patriotism, and the mess that the media has allowed to become of the public dialogue in the country.
So, I go to get me a Latte and sit and read (and probably stew a bit), and also worry about the ability of the visible Church to pull itslef out of this, and start speaking the truth to power.
You’d be surprised. There’s actually at least one band out there (now retired) who had some great material. Have you ever heard of Five Iron Frenzy? They came out of the late 90’s ska/punk craze in “Christian” music. They were really talented, and if you listen to their first CD, “Upbeats and Beatdowns” (i think), there’s actually a lot of anti-patriotic stuff on there that tries to take the focus off of country and onto God. The first song on the CD is all about how the white man trampled on the Native American Indian. The whole CD is pretty tongue-in-cheek at all the stuff it is criticizing, and I think it has to be, considering it’s super bouncy-fast music with a horn section.
Unfortunately, I don’t think many of their fans really picked up on what they were singing about– as long as they said “God” or “Jesus,” that gave them their empty God experience.
I know, because I was one of them. I just recently re-listened to that CD, and I was like, “Whoa– no way!”
Supplemental:
That CD came out before September 2001, before the rightward delusional shift where many Christians started defining themselves by 9/11 instead of the events of the Cross. I haven’t listened to FIF since their 3rd CD, and they have a few more since then, so I don’t know if they’ve been a part of that shift as well.
Oh yeah, Eric, I certainly know they exist….it’s just that they’re not given air time. I know of alternatives….people like Bruce Cockburn, U2…..but none that I know of that are “allowed” on “Christian” radio. What gets me is the almost purely hedonistic nature of the “praise music” which Ken Medema sand and wrote about when he said “I’m sick of those I am his and He is Mine and Doesn’t It make me Feel Good Love Songs, …..we need a few more he is Lord and calls us to his service work songs” (Medema was an early Christian who wrote songs that were in the Christian Top 40 type playlists, then he began to move into “Kingdom In The Streets” and singing about justice issues, and went on a two-year “Let Justice Roll” tour with Jim Wallis where he sang and Wallis preached, in numeourous cities — I caught their act in Indianapolis and in Cincinnati in the late 80’s.
I really wish U2 would take on the Bush administration — Bono seems like the type who could get a bit of that righteous indigniation going about some of the things Bush is doing to the people of the US and extending that imperialism into the world at large.
Dale