It has been truly said that modern revivals (of the Toronto Blessing sort, rather than the actual quiet revivals apparently going on in the UK or Iran) are not gospel revivals but music revivals. By that is meant that if you removed the loud and prolonged rock music from the proceedings, nothing would happen in the way of people falling on the floor, weeping, laughing hysterically and all the other features that convince people the Holy Spirit has turned up in force. I can well believe it.
Now, I’ve been a musician pretty much all my life, and the genres I’ve played to the public in, let alone listened to for pleasure, include classical, folk contemporary and traditional, ragtime, rock classical and progressive, soul, jazz of all eras and – most significantly for this post – church music.
It is undeniable to any honest observer that the Megachurches quite consciously use the loudness and repetitiveness of their music to induce a state of suggestibility in their congregations. Sometimes this is quite explicit: “Empty your mind and let the Spirit work through the music.” But it is also implicit in the Pentecostal theology of worship, in which the purpose of being together in church is to “encounter God” experientially. As I’ve said in previous posts, this goes back at least to Charles Finney’s “new measures,” but was a feature of Pentecostalism from Azusa Street onwards. Music is used to change the communal mental state to one of receptivity in which, supposedly, God is enabled at last to manifest his presence.
And so even before Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation and the other NAR and Word-Faith giants cornered the Christian music industry in the 1990s, in Pentecostal churches the gospel choirs would meld into the organ playing mood music (repetitive chord sequences usually) over the impassioned preaching.
Now if you watch videos of the megachurches (if you really must!) you will hear that the music is all-encompassing, that it is prolonged and repeated for, sometimes, hours at a time, reinforced by lighting effects, and that it continues during all times of prayer, on-stage “ministry” of healing or whatever, and often behind the “apostle’s” speaking (which can not really be called preaching, given its dissociation from biblical truth). Accounts of the perpetual prayer meetings at, say, the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, show that was is actually perpetual is more the music than the prayer. Following these readily-accessed examples, Charismatic churches across the world emulate the methodology, often unconsciously and, of course, with less dramatic results if their sound systems are low-budget and their musicians less competent.
I’m not the first to point out that the use of loud repetitive music to induce a suggestible mental state is by no means exclusively Christian… far from it. In “heathen lands afar” tribal drummers played through the night, assisted by various medicinal compounds, to induce the spirits to manifest amongst the people, and particularly through the shaman. Emotional catharsis was achieved – at the price of unleashing many demons.
But not only that: a commonplace of old-fashioned dystopic novels was that, when evil governments wanted their people to wage war, constant martial music would begin to pour forth from the radio, and on the streets. Even in these anti-militaristic days, the power of such music to produce conformity is amazing. My sax group once played a Souza march on the promenade at Sidmouth Folk Festival, and it was remarkable to see the free-living folkies all fall into step as they walked past. Imagine that power harnessed at a Nuremberg rally.
A last example came from a slightly younger medical colleague in the days when “Disco music” ruled. Being a prog-rocker I passed some dismissive comment when the Bee Gees appeared on Top of the Pops in the hospital mess, but my colleague pointed out the hypnotic power of disco to bring people together on the dance floor. And that’s true – several hours of 120 b.p.m through giant bass bins, a few tabs of Ecstasy, and the girls and boys were ready for any work the devil might find them to do.
As a musician, I’ve been trying to think through what the fundamental difference is between this misuse of music in order to understand better what music – advocated in Scripture – is intended by God to achieve, and what is off-limits. It can’t simply be that setting doctrinal truth to music makes it easier to remember, for emotion is actually what music is all about. James 5:13 actually urges the cheerful person to sing songs of praise, as opposed to the sick person in the next verse, who isn’t told to sing dirges, but seek prayer.
Listening to Elgar’s cello concerto, we feel the depth of melancholy therein, yet without knowing anything of the causes of the composer’s grief. And, like a weepy movie, that is a positive human experience, tapping into our own unexpressed sorrows, perhaps, but also somehow making us more sympathetic to the human condition. It’s great art, and in some strange way enhances our humanity.
I remember, by way of contrast, the almost uncontrollable urge I had to get up and dance when I first heard the song-segment by Yes, “All Good People:”
It was a primarily musical experience, since the lyrics don’t mean much, but it lifted the spirits with the same joy that, I think, the band felt when they first composed it. It still cheers me up if I’m feeling a little jaded.
In both cases (and of course many others), an emotion was induced by the music, and in a positive way. Remember how in the Bible David was hired to play his lyre in order to keep a spirit away (I’ve never noticed before that he didn’t get the gig as a psalm-singer, but only an instrumentalist). So perhaps the distinction I’m looking for is that the right use of music is to express and so to induce, sympathetically, an emotion. The wrong use is to inculcate an altered mental state, making the emotions susceptible to suggestion. The Holy Spirit does not require enhanced suggestibility.
In a church setting, as I’ve written a few times here, singing in church is intended as a corporate activity for the saints to build up each other’s faith. “Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” Ephesians says, just as James speaks of “songs of praise.” The essential feature of New Testament church music, then, is in the lyrics, not primarily in the music. Yet, as I have already stressed, the whole magic of music is its ability to foster, and to express, emotion. It follows that there ought to be a match between the music and the appropriate emotional content of the words. The old Songs of Fellowship songbooks advocated this with instructions at the top like “reflectively,” “triumphantly” and so on. The older hymns, at their best, followed this rule, the pathos of the tune “Love Unknown” for My Song is Love Unknown contrasting with the stridency of “St Denio” for Immortal Invisible, or the the folk -festivity of In Dulce Jubileo.
Outside the religious setting, a strong dysjunction between the emotional content of the music and the subject matter can work as irony, for example in humour as in Tom Lehrer’s work.
But I suspect that we might be going astray to employ such levity in congregational singing. The modern church band, and newer songs, can indeed achieve an emotional match between word and music, too, but I have to admit that the near-universal back-beat of rock-based music (my home territory) tends to limit the emotional range available. It’s quite hard to envisage a CCM setting of Ezekiel 19 with its instruction, “This is a lament, and is to be used as a lament.”
And it also in rock music that the boundary between expressing emotion and inducing a mental state becomes very blurred. Apparently in the early days Cliff Richard and the Shadows began to realise their power over teenage girls, and would joke onstage, “Shall we start a riot?” They quickly learned the moves that would immediately induce hysterical screaming, as later did the Beatles when they shook their hair to sing “Oooh!” on She Loves You. Subsequently, mass-manipulation became a conscious aim of narcissistic artistes, as the amplifiers got louder, the beat heavier, the sets longer and the lyrics more sexual. And so it’s worth asking ourselves to what extent we have encouraged our churches to become emotionally manipulative by the very genre we have chosen, exclusively, to promote. There’s not a lot of cool-jazz worship, or church music in the style of the popular Classic FM, or even the traditional football anthem, which should surely appeal to men.
Nor do most Christians ever hear stuff like this setting of psalms, so powerful in the original Hebrew, by Steve Reich, which is unearthly and almost hypnotic in its rhythmic repetition, and as lengthy as many Charismatic worship sessions – but which, to me at any rate, lifts my heart to God, even without a translation, without altering my mental state. And look – nobody’s even lifting their arms to heaven with eyes closed, or wearing a trademark hat. You won’t find that at Bethel!
