I’ve dabbled in radio and podcasting from time to time, and of course when I do that I play music. And because my audience has mostly consisted of Christians, from time to time I get outrage. You see, many Christians are of the opinion we should have nothing to do with popular music. We should only listen to Christian music. (And even then, some Christians insist it shouldn’t be rock ’n roll. Because rock music has a backbeat, and the backbeat is an inverted heartbeat, and everything inverted is of the devil. No, seriously. Bill Gothard said so.) So my playing Led Zeppelin, for example, is beyond the pale.
I am not of the opinion that popular music, or “secular music,” is inherently sinful. Every song needs to be judged on an individual basis as to whether or not it encourages sin or vice or negativity or rebellion. Every song. Including, and especially, Christian songs: Since they claim to reflect Christianity, we need to make particularly sure they’re orthodox in what they teach. We need to hold our own to a much higher standard.
And as for that “backbeat is of the devil” stuff… I personally don’t care for country music—which likewise has a backbeat—but I’m not so immature as to assume that just because I don’t like it, it must be of the devil, and then go inventing some bad theology to defend my view. I simply choose not to listen to it. If you’re into country music, go right ahead and listen to it. There are a lot of good Christian country artists. But again: Every song needs to be judged.
Hearing but not listening.
Some years ago my workplace, a Christian ministry, hosted a party. One of the bosses inflicted a karaoke machine on us, and decided it would be fun if we all sang along to the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Everybody knows the song, right?…
…A singer in a smoky room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on…
…but the song didn’t. One of the pastors, outraged at the lyrics which were now flashing on the video screen, realizing his children were in the room, decided “Don’t Stop” had to stop.
This sort of thing happens all the time: People discover, to their surprise and dismay, that their favorite songs have some rather embarrassing lyrics. Their favorite songs. You would think, since these are their favorite songs, they wouldn’t be so blindsided. But that’s because people don’t pay attention to lyrics.
We’re only interested in the music. We care about the melody, the beat, the hooks, the tune. Notice all those people who try to sing their favorite songs, and mangle all the words: They never pay attention to the words. The words could be, for all most people care, just another sound in the song, played by the instrument of the human voice.
But words have meaning. And if we don’t pay any attention to that meaning consciously, we will however pay attention to that meaning unconsciously. It’ll get in you, whether you’re aware of it or not. Again: Notice all those people who hear an old song—one they haven’t thought about for years—and to their great surprise they know all the words to it. They never realized they were listening to it. But those words are in them.
And those words aren’t doing nothing. Whenever we do things without thinking, sometimes we’re acting on instinct, and sometimes we’re acting on programming—we’re doing what we’ve been trained to do, through regular repetition. Like multiplication tables. Or memory verses. Or pop songs. They’re knocking around your subconscious. And every once in a while, they bubble up into your conscious thinking and activities. There are quite a lot of people who base the sloppy moves they make, when they’re dating or trying to be romantic, on romantic songs. There are a lot of bad decisions based on an idea that “just came to mind”—and it’s the lyric from some old tune. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Christians spout some really bad theology that turned out to be based, not on bible, but on some worship song or hymn.
The music we listen to is not unimportant. We need to judge it. All of it. I look at the lyrics of the music I listen to. I choose my music based on those lyrics.
And surprise surprise: I have no trouble with a lot of “secular” popular music. That’s why I still listen to it. As well as stuff by Christian artists.
Bad associations.
I did have a roommate years ago who couldn’t listen to Pink Floyd at all. The first time he heard me play one of their CDs, his response was, “Dude, I can’t listen to this. I used to get stoned to this.” It gave him bad memories.
Well, Christians need to look out for our weaker sisters and brothers in Christ. I can listen to Pink Floyd without the bad memories, but he couldn’t. For his sake, when I listened to them around him, I kept my headphones on. I never got stoned to Pink Floyd, so I don’t have that mental connection.
But some Christians don’t believe it’s solely a mental connection. For example, they insist that because so many people got stoned listening to the Grateful Dead, Christians should never, ever listen to them: Some kind of “marijuana demon” is invoked by their music. Yes, it’s foolish, but they’re not kidding: The lyrics don’t matter; the band, the music, is tainted. Such music belongs to the devil, so every time you play it, the devil is conjured up.
As I recall, Baal wasn’t conjured up very successfully by its priests, despite their raving and dancing. (1Ki 18.25-29) That’s because music doesn’t produce evil spirits. Music invokes people to worship, and worship either draws us to be aware of God’s presence, or draws us to worship our idols. And, in the case of Baal, that god didn’t need to be present for its devotees to act all kinds of evil—cutting themselves and whipping themselves into a frenzy. Nobody needs a “marijuana demon” to convince them to smoke marijuana. They’ll do just fine on their own.
I’m not saying evil spirits never get involved. Sometimes they do. But music is a physical thing—it’s vibrations, produced by a speaker, that travel through air and affect our cochlea and eardrums—and evil spirits are spiritual things, not physical. They don’t respond to physical stimuli. Just spiritual stimuli. Music does nothing for them. Music works on us, and we do something for them. It all comes down to how music affects us. And sometimes it doesn’t.
In the scriptures, God appears to be the only spirit affected by music. (Sometimes I wonder whether God invented time for that reason.) But again, God seems to be more affected by how we’re affected. Joyful noise can be empty praise, and God doesn’t want hypocrisy in our worship. But I’ll get into that another time.
In any event, your associations, good or bad, with music, are yours. If you got stoned listening to the Grateful Dead, or if you got stoned listening to the John Hagee Family Singers, it has nothing to do with the music or the lyrics or the evil spirits that capitalize on those things. It has to do with you.
Making an idol of music.
It may be that the Holy Spirit has ordered you personally to listen to nothing but Christian music. So your objection to popular music is it’s not Christian. Which is fine—so long that you remember the Spirit’s direction was to you, and not to the rest of us. Some Christians tend to forget this, and get legalistic about music.
There are all sorts of reasons why the Spirit would order a Christian to stay away from popular music. The usual one is that people can easily make an idol of music. I’m not talking about musicians or bands; I’m talking about music. They put music before everything else, like relationships: They piss off their neighbors by playing the music too loud, or they prefer to have their headphones on rather than talk to others, or music has to be in the background all the time or their brain won’t function.
If music is more important to you than anything, God may have to sort out your priorities by making you listen only to the stuff that specifically glorifies him. You need regular reminders of who’s the god here: The LORD, not your tunes.
But again: That’s you. That’s not every Christian. Some of us don’t put music before everything else. Some of us don’t make music a priority at all. Some of us are actually message-proof—the messages in lyrics never sink into our subconscious, because we listen so intently to our songs that the lyrics always stay conscious. In such people, the lyrics won’t ever hurt them—but then again, Christian music won’t necessarily improve them either. So God never tells them to dump popular music: They’ll never make a god of it.
Practice discernment.
For everyone else, who hasn’t made an idol of their music, who hasn’t smoked weed to Third Day, who hasn’t bought into the hymnal fans’ fear-based rock-bashing: The thinking Christian knows enough to look at the world, sort out the good from the evil, hold onto the good, and reject the evil.
In exercising your mind about this subject, you become better able to exercise it on every subject. Those who just throw out all popular music as “sinful” are regularly suckered by bad theology because they don’t practice discerning the difference between good and bad, or good and evil. They’ve learned to reject all of one category, and swallow all of another. That’s not wisdom; that’s stupidity. That’s how you get blindsided by bad theology: You assume you can embrace everything you hear from certain corners, and never ask yourself, “Is that really true?” Don’t do that. Discern. Start with something easy and obvious, like music, so you’ll be prepared for something harder and more subtle when it inevitably comes.
So the thinking Christian is choosy. We don’t just blindly accept everything within a narrow range of music: “All hymns are good,” or “Everything they play on K-LOVE is good,” or “Country songs that mention Jesus are good.” People who are too narrow in their tastes are simply practicing a different kind of idolatry, instead of spiritual discernment. They aren’t looking at the lyrics and judging for themselves with the Spirit’s help; they’re trusting the people who feed you this music and tell you it’s okay. They’re trusting fallible humans instead of God. Yeah, the music might be okay. But it might not. Bear in mind that the people who produce this music are not in the music business because they care about your spiritual growth, and wish to disciple you. They’re in the business to make music, and make money.
So don’t just embrace certain categories, like all Christian music. (Much popular Christian music is derivative junk anyway.) Be choosy. Analyze your music. Read the lyric sheets. Does it discourage you? Does it encourage you to act sinfully or selfishly? Does it make you angry for no reason, fearful for no reason, anxious for no reason, enthusiastic for no reason? If God told you to delete this song from your computer, or give away this CD, would you find yourself arguing with him about it?
Does it uplift? Does it make you joyful or peaceful or relaxed? Does it make you want to worship God? How’s its theology—does it describe God accurately, or does he come across all weird and unlike anything the bible describes? Or is it so watered down that it really says nothing about him—or he’s depicted as your boyfriend, and all you’d have to do is replace “Jesus” with “baby” to play it on secular radio stations?
Don’t just apply these questions to Christian songs. Apply them to every song. You’d be surprised at how good the theology is in some “secular” songs. (And how bad.) There’s a lot of decent popular music, as well as a lot of indecent popular music.
You’re like sheep among wolves. So be shrewd. (Mt 10.16) Practice discernment.