In Defense of Christian Music

and beginning the Culture Recovery Journals on Substack

When I began these Culture Recovery Journals privately in 2016 or so, I was hampered by the thought that others would object to this project as a call to “head for the hills.” Well, the times, they have certainly changed. The creek is rising fast and washing away so much of what we assumed could be counted on. The question before us all, Catholic or not, is not whether to preserve culture but how.

And yet this project feels so grim, and I can’t be grim. If you get grim, you die, as Dr. Regis Martin famously said my freshman year of college. So perhaps to set the tone, I will begin with something light. Something I don’t know much about, except that I like it. I mean music.

Music is an underappreciated part of creating a wholesome home, although in our culture, music is pervasive. It’s important to choose wisely, for there’s a very spiritual aspect to music. These first articles will deal with the importance of Christian music in the life of a Catholic.

Now, I am not a musician. I am a religious person and a writer and although I can sing in a choice and play a few bars of “Für Elise” as a result of years of piano lessons gone to naught, I cannot play music, nor do most people enjoy hearing me sing, particularly my own family, much to my chagrin. But like most of us, I rejoice in belonging to the era of recorded music, with so much musical wealth literally at my fingertips. My parents filled our home with an abundance and variety of music, and I like all sorts of music, especially music I can dance to. But the music I love best is Christian music.

Yes, I mean Gospel music. I mean contemporary Christian music (aka CCM in the music industry). I especially mean the music of the late 70’s and early 80’s, which I am most familiar with and have appreciated over the years. I do mostly mean music written by Protestants. In the circles I run in, it’s common to sneer at this music, and write it off without a listen.

You see, at this stage of my life, most of my friends are traditionalist Catholics or Catholics of exceptional taste, much better than my own: I am related by marriage to several excellent folk and classical musicians, some professional. I should also mention that most of my siblings are semi-professional or amateur musicians, and have informed me through the years that I really have no clue what makes a good song or good music. So I humbly submit to you that my taste in music is nothing but —my taste. I make no claims that this music I recommend is artistically superior or culturally worthy. I also realize that writing about music is much inferior to listening to it.

And yet, I wish to write about this music and why I think it is should be important in the life of the serious Catholic, especially the Catholic family.

There are several reasons that traditionalist Catholics write off contemporary Christian music without a thought. The first is, of course, the liturgy wars.

Take it Outside, Boys

So I must begin by stating that I am not talking about liturgical music. I am delighted and humbled to belong to a parish with incredible organ music and vigorous congregational singing of traditional hymns, with a genius choir director whose singers annually pull off Allegri’s Misere Mei on Good Friday—I am wholly content and grateful to God, so you will not find me agitating in this piece for guitar Masses or praise and worship in the liturgy.

Also, I have no problem with praise and worship or guitars or contemporary music of any sort — OUTSIDE the liturgy. Let me be specific. If Catholics want to come before Our Lord in the Eucharist outside of Mass and praise Him with strings and harps and timbrels and drum, I am perfectly at ease. I recall something of the sort being done in the Scripture, and Our Lord Himself seemed to endorse it. Certainly Catholics, who are commanded to pray always, and who are reminded by saints like Aquinas that singing is praying twice, should praise Our Lord OUTSIDE of the Mass in song as well as within it. The Mass is the highest form of worship, but certainly it should not be our ONLY form of worship.

So outside of the Mass, shouldn’t Catholics praise God in song? Certainly they can go around the home singing hymns from the St. Michael hymnal or listen to Gregorian chant in the car — I know Catholics who do — but most of us need more music in our lives than that. We are not nuns and monks and nor are our children. Nor are our teens, and as our teens represent the transition between the generations, I will keep returning to them in this project. Our children and teens are surrounded by music of every sort, and it’s natural for them to want to listen to more than hymns and chant, as edifying as those are.

I understand that the liturgy wars have left most trads gun-shy when it comes to investigating Christian music. (Side note: CCM’s turn towards praise and worship in the 1990s has made this conversation more difficult since some Catholic CCM is used in guitar liturgies.) But yet I encourage them to give gospel music another chance, OUTSIDE the Catholic Mass.

But it is reverent?

The second argument against CCM is a more nuanced one, concerning muddled ideas regarding reverence.

There are some Catholics who admit that listening to popular music is fine and understandable, but who feel that singing about Jesus in a non-liturgical song is somehow irreverent or blasphemous. I have read scholarly articles arguing about form and content, and I have certainly read many articles and heard discourses about how rock music, or anything that uses certain instruments or timing is a form that is inherently debased and that sacred content is demeaned by contact with such rhythms and timings. (Again, the liturgy wars surface, since many of these same arguments are raised against guitar Masses.)

But is this really true?

It’s worthwhile noting that many of our popular hymns to Mary, such as “Immaculate Mary” are more like folk songs than Gregorian chant. “On This Day, O Beautiful Mother” is clearly a ballad in style. And if you begin looking into Marian hymns composed throughout the ages, you discover delightful compositions like those in the medieval Red Book of Montserrat or the Cantigas de Miragre, which were Marian dances to be performed in churches (!) during all-night vigils during pilgrimages to help the devotees stay awake. These songs are rhythmic, infectious, and fun. Sadly, pretty much the only people who perform and listen to these historical gems today are secular concert performers or medieval re-enactors, not devout Catholics, mainly because these songs exist only in ancient dialects. (I actually took one of those songs and made a hymn to Our Lady Untier of Knots out of it in an attempt to revive it. Our local theater group even choreographed a dance to it.)

So there is good evidence in Western Catholic tradition that Catholics sang and even danced to music about Christ and Our Lady and the saints outside the liturgy. And I note again that even in the Sacred Scripture, David danced before the Lord on his way to the temple. Chant and organ may have pride of place in the liturgy, but there was always room for strings and even dance and drums in music praising God. (And don’t forget the Eastern Rite which has an active tradition of solemn dances in church which might very well be keeping alive the original forms of the music created by David.)

When Catholics gather around the campfire with guitars, what should we sing? Sure, we can sing “good folk music” as some recommend. I enjoy singing about Coming Through the Rye, and the Fields of Athenrey, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and I can even tolerate singing about Whiskey in the Jar, despite being the child of a recovering alcoholic. But we all know that pretty soon we’ll run out of Scythian and then we’ll be singing the Beatles and Leonard Cohen and Cat Stevens and what started out as an instance of Catholic counterculture just kind of ends up as regular ol’ American culture.

And maybe this is fine, but really and truly, what I long to sing about with my heart and soul is my Savior, so badly that it aches at time. And what I long above all is to sing about Him with my fellow Catholics who also love Him.

And I am incredulous that traditional Catholicism has worked itself into the sort of contortion where doing this is impossible.

I use the campfire instance to illustrate that if Catholics are to survive the cultural meltdown, we need good solid recreational music. Music that we can listen to around the house while cleaning, to keep ourselves awake on long car trips, music that we can dance to and sing with friends. We need music that is FUN. It’s great to revive old folk traditions like Celtic or Cajun, but there is also a need to use and baptize the most American of music, popular rock music.

A Debt of Gratitude

And now I have to say a word about the African-American roots of our music tradition. Over the years, I have seen some commentary that throws a sinister cast on rock music because people with dark skins created it. Obviously, this is poisonous racism, and it also ignores a beautiful and amazing part of our American story. I’m indebted to Alan Keys for these insights in his much-overlooked book on Black history, Masters of the Dream: the Strength and Betrayal of Black America. As we all know, Africans were brought to America as slaves, but in the brutality of slavery in the Americas, something astonishing happened: Black slaves converted to Christianity, absorbed it fully and created something new out of it. They softened the Calvinist Protestant leanings of their white masters and found a redemptive role for suffering. They infused their life with an irony that their Christian masters, especially those who slept with their Black slaves, were deeply hypocritical. They embraced and re-imagined Biblical saints like David, Elijah, and Jonah. And in their longsuffering and patient waiting upon the Lord, they even found a supernatural joy in the midst of horrific bondage that manifested itself in profound song.

African-American music is like nothing else in history. It provides pathos, righteous anger, and incredible joy with complexity and depth. We have largely lost the haunting sounds of spirituals, music spontaneous in origin but terribly intricate in composition and performance. My school choir could manage Palestrina but found masterpieces like Elijah Rock (here movingly performed by an overseas choir) incredibly difficult. America gave Africans Christianity. In return they gave us their music, and we have all been enriched by it.

Black music has given ordinary Americans the background music for much of our history. From jazz to honkey-tonk, from blues to Big Band, to rock music to rap, we have been singing and dancing to Black music for decades, and for that I thank them and say, God bless them.

They also gave us their liturgical music for our popular consumption. Rock music came from gospel music, which was essentially the church music of the Black community. To cite just one instance, the vintage party song Shout was improvised by the Isley Brothers at a concert using music from their own church (check out shout, as a form of gospel music: it sounds a lot like the song).

It’s ironic that contemporary Christian music has often been criticized as imitative, while secular rock music is supposed to be the “real thing.” There’s certainly Christian music which is a frank imitation of what ever is trending at the moment, but there’s nothing inherently false about CCM. If anything, it is more faithful to its roots in Gospel music than secular rock!

I feel we Catholics, who have a long history of baptizing whatever is good in the culture, need to take a look at popular Christian music as something to hold onto and preserve. While it doesn’t fit with our liturgy, it certainly can have a place in the recreational life of the Catholic, and I would argue it is far closer to our spirit and our goals than songs like “Rock around the Clock,” “Stairway to Heaven,” or “Fast Car.”

Popular Christian music is true to the gospel roots of rock music and cleanses it of it association with drinking, drugs and illicit sex, the reasons why so many devout Catholics find much of rock music objectionable. It also preserves the fusion of the Scripture with popular music which spurred the creation of African-American music for so much of its history. When well executed, it’s fun to listen to and has the effect of bringing the words of Scripture into your memory and imbuing them with a spirit and story: “Bringing the Bible alive” as they say. It’s fascinating to note how many obscure Bible passages are woven into the riffs and frills of gospel and Christian pop music.

But a large reason I recommend CCM for trads is that it makes a space for Catholics to express the movements of their heart and spirit regarding their faith. Trads are often strong on intellect and notoriously weak on heart. We can have all the right ideas and the best theology, but somehow can miss the fact that our devotion to Christ should move our heart to joy and gratitude, not just to nostalgia and melancholy. True, our religion should not be “mere sentiment” but it would be inhuman if it contained no sentiment at all!

Here’s one illustration of the importance of the heart. Those of us who are married probably remember how it was, when single, to be confronted with a potential mate who had all the correct theology and morality and was even a decent, maybe holy person, but yet, after giving them a chance, you discovered you just couldn’t marry them for the simple reason that you just couldn’t fall in love with them. God has somehow designed the sacrament of Holy Matrimony to involve the heart, as messy and emotional and inconvenient as that is (plus marriage enshrines this phenomenon called sex which is even messier and more emotional and more inconvenient). So the Lord has put a double underline under the necessity of involving our heart in marriage. How odd it would be if He didn’t expect that our heart would also be involved in our devotion to Him!

Music gives spirit to that sentiment, and I want to argue here that the range of emotions — sorrow for sin, joy in restoration, anger at injustice, wonder and awe, gladness and gratitude — which should find their right places in our religion can be guided by popular Christian music. Additionally, the words of Scripture are often enlivened and committed to the memory by hearing them sung with emotion and meaning. Context gives them embodiment.

What about Theology?

It’s true that most of the music in CCM is Protestant. But most of our secular music was written by Protestants too, or those of no faith, and I know many trads who have no problem listening to Top 40 or their favorite niche band. Most of the best of the Christian music was designed to swing between denominations, so there are many songs that have no overtly heretical doctrinal points.

But given that song lyrics are inherently poetic, there’s usually enough fuzziness and vagueness in most lyrics that even those songs with a false doctrinal basis can be interpreted in an orthodox manner. Take the song Amazing Grace. While the author doubtless believed some wrong things about Christianity that are reflected in some of the words (for instance, “a wretch like me” can be seen as reflecting Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity), it’s certainly possible for a Catholic to think about the words differently. I have no problem calling myself a wretch because sometimes I am! And that song has often led me to reflect with gratitude and even tears that despite this, Christ shed His precious blood for me.

The majority of Christian songs speak only to the ordinary life of the Christian: contrition, repentance, pushing through dry times, struggling in suffering, stirring up joy, discovering gratitude, reflecting on the truths of salvation, lifting one’s eyes above the stream of daily life towards heaven. And here is where I have found it most helpful. When my habitual feelings are lukewarm or even morose, turning on Christian music raises my spirits, reminds me of the reality of the Gospel, and turns my blah into dancing. We faithful Catholics could all use a bit more dancing in our steps as we walk forward in the midst of the battle.

The Snob Argument

One argument I hear from critics (as well as from my friends who are far more cultured than I am) is that CCM “just isn’t very good music.” Here, despite my lack of musical credentials, I beg to disagree. For one thing, most CCM musicians grew up as church musicians, and the average Protestant liturgical musician is far more skilled than the average Catholic liturgical musician. This is mainly because music has a more central place in the liturgical life of Protestants than Catholics. You can have a silent Mass, but a Protestant service without any music—not even hymns a capella—is well, not really much of a service. So Protestants sing more in church, so their worship leaders need to work harder. Putting in the hours of practice and performance just produces a higher caliber of musician. This raises the expectations of quality in Protestant congregations, who will pay more for excellent music. (For more on why this is, I refer you to Thomas Day’s classic book, Why Catholics Can’t Sing.)

Gospel and CCM is rooted in a specific strand of Protestantism, the charismatic and evangelical branches. In these services, the entire liturgy can consist of singing, and that centrality overflowed into what we now know as popular Christian music.

Singers and musicians who started their careers singing in church have peopled the field of secular music throughout its history, and the same is true even today. And crossovers from gospel to secular music are common, as are crossovers from secular to Christian music (Leon Patillo and Dion DiMucci are just two examples). This is all to say that a CCM singer or musician isn’t necessarily lacking musical chops, so to speak. I’ll explain this in detail in my next installment.

A related argument would suggest that gospel and rock as a genre are simply inferior music (here insert arguments dating from the time of Plato), and this of course ties into the “how dare you contaminate the sacred by putting it into inferior containers?” argument mentioned above.

This argument has some merit when dealing with the education of small children or music education in general. Maria Montessori would say, give children the best, and that would seem to suggest classical secular and sacred music. The same is true with teaching music. Music educators start their violin students on Mozart and move on to the classical masters, because the student who can play classical pieces finds rock music easy to play since it’s relatively so simple and repetitive.

But this argument has less purchase and can be spiritually harmful if it falls into suggesting that to be a devout Catholic is to be a snob. Bad taste is not a sin, even if our societal elites would like it to be. And Catholic sensibilities throughout history have allowed for popular, even vulgar (in the sense of “being from the common people”) culture to flourish.

Some Catholic teens raised on nothing but the best retain that sensibility, but most of them gravitate to popular music as soon as they leave the classroom. The reason is that rock music is the music of our culture, and the struggle of the teen, even devout ones, is to integrate themselves into their culture as much as possible, while retaining the core of their faith in Christ. If they are inoculated against Christian music by arguments from taste, they often simply go straight to secular music, and end up imbibing music that is musically “superior” (I am thinking of “Bohemian Rhapsody”) but spiritually harmful.

By all means we should promote and cultivate appreciation of the best. But I want to argue here that this does not make us intrinsic enemies of the common, even if the common is glitzier, more pre-packaged, mass-marketed, and dresses in clothing we find gaudy. It is worthwhile to note that the most charismatic congregations are lower-income, poor, and working class churches, and that the music that overflows from them is simpler, more accessible, more repetitive, and yes, more emotional. There is a place for such music in Catholic sensibilities. To be low-class is not to be less Christian: we know how much of the Catholic faith has survived precisely because the poor and the lowly held on and believed. They are God’s particularly favorites, after all.

In the next article, I will examine the work of one historical gospel group and illustrate how their music has helped me in my walk with the Lord throughout my life.