The decline in both the popularity and the credibility of the Christian church can be directly linked, I believe, to its music. Where once songs of praise were unparalleled for wonder and mysterious beauty, today’s music of God - piped this season through the speakers at selected shopping malls - is a banal and spineless jingle from the very worst of commercial radio. Inspiring none but the selectively deaf who are too blissed out to care about judging music on its actual merit, the modern hymn is a song of praise to the self, a gift not to Him but to the God of entertainment and the gutless spirit of community arts. That this could have happened to one of the most majestic artforms in history is a 20th century catastrophe. 

Once upon a time, the very dynamic of Christian iconography was awe-inspiring - the art, architecture and music combined to create a sense of belittlement, to impress upon humankind its insignificance under the might and mystery of the heavens. This presented artists with an irresistable challenge and the results speak for themselves - witness the angelic perfection of Gabriel Faure or Anton Bruckner, the power of Giuseppe Verdi, the sheer terror of György Ligeti, or the serene beatitude of the the monks of the Abbey of Notre Dame. It’s undeniably moving and, even for an atheist like me, it’s possible to be spiritually shifted by such stuff.

But something awful happened in the post-war period. Inspired by the big “hello” to Modernism that was the Second Vatican Council, elements within the Church decided it was time for Catholics to get funky. Church architecture was thus stripped down to what Paul Mees described as a “basketball-court blandness”, in keeping with Vatican II’s apparent edict that the Church participate in “a strong welcome to the art of today”, with a move away from “the monumental and pretentious” in favour of “an honest, functional style” - from this to this, basically.

All wonder having been plucked from our eyes, the attentions of God’s ambassadors on Earth then turned upon our ears. They found useful allies in the Jesus movement, a frightful amalgam of charismatic evangelism and the hippie culture of the 1960s. To the “Jesus freaks”, as they were often called, God was ultimately unknowable, an elitist old square whose wrath was all over the oppressive trappings of the traditional Church, while Jesus was cool because he had long hair, hung out with prostitutes and was basically unemployed. It was their mission to commune with the son, not the father, and to bring Christianity back to barefoot basics - a fine idea if such threadbare Calvinism were so sincere as to have kept itself modestly private. But there’s no point in being born again if nobody’s going to see and hear about it, and so, armed with guitars, tambourines and inoperable cases of tone deafness, a merciless crusade of Jesus music began bulldozing its way through hundreds of years of Christian musical culture. 

So was put in motion the only lamentable forfeiture of the rock and roll revolution: the obliteration of the artform of traditional holy music from the cultural stage. Rock and roll itself didn’t cost the mainstream music world terribly much, Elvis’s rebellion usurping but a chart packed with matinee idols, big-budget Broadway stars and aging Tin Pan Alley leftovers. Christian music, however, by trading tradition for rock, lost everything it had - original grandeur, other-worldliness, orchestral and choral genius - in exchange for the emaciated zombie of rock and roll, a corpse necessarily drained of the very things that had made it interesting in life: sex and drugs.

Anyone who was a church-going kid in the 70s will remember the oncomming plague of the “rock mass”, in which the stirring works of Bach, Henry Lyte, Lowell Mason and Handel were either brushed aside or - worse - mangled by pious hooligans with guitar, bass and drums. It was all very DIY, manufactured to make us all feel a bit closer to the Almighty and more involved in the Church, and it was a novel change, I guess. But it never went away, never died with the hippies that gave birth to it. And now we’re stuck with the likes of Hillsong, an eternal jukebox of limp-wristed, soft-focus, sing-a-long junk authored by children of a movement whose very creed said that monument and ornament didn’t matter. If so, why not shut the $#@& up and leave the music to those who think it does?

Enthuses Kim Jones:

“Up until the late 1960s, Christian music invoked images of church, hymnals and organs. Traditional was the word of the day...but not anymore. The face of Christian music has spent the last 30+ years evolving and growing. Pipe organs have been set aside for electric guitars and drums. Hymnals have been replaced by hard hitting lyrics that speak of today and a God that is fully in control of our times.”

What crap. As if the vain and vengeful God of the Old Testament could possibly be “in control’"of a soundtrack that painted him as a yacht rock enthusiast. As if the God who demanded such elaborate displays of love and praise from his subjects would actually prefer to be entertained by some feral buskers rather than Le Mystere des voix Bulgares. As if the God who insisted on the slaughter of millions, sometimes for the most insignificnt of infractions, would be satisfied abandoning his throne of supreme discrimination for a seat as some sympathetic judge on Australian Idol. God is huge, supernatural, mysterious, powerful, and the Bible is nothing if not a book of demands that we impress Him ceaselessly and humbly. That the music that so perfectly represented his strange omipotence has been bent over and buggered on the stage of celebrity by our weird and childish need to be ‘entertainers’ must make Him hot with fleas. 

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,” was His message.

If I were Him, and someone who claimed to love me gave me a Hillsong CD for Christmas, I’d wonder what I’d done to offend them. 

By Jack Marx

http://blogs.news.com.au/jackmarxlive/index.php/news/comments/the_terrible_music_of_god/