Every once in a while I ponder the world of Christian contemporary music [1], and yesterday one of my friends online posted an article of complaint from a member of that community about the double standards he feels hem his band (and others) in while giving praise to very worldly acts who are popular who make any kind of superficial and vague references to God [2]. There are at least a couple elements to Emery’s complaint, and both of them are matters I have had cause to complain about myself, and so I think it worthwhile to examine these complaints and see what they have to say about us, whether we identify with ourselves as Christians or not. I know that I have (at least internally) made the same sorts of complaints myself, so I can definitely identify with their complaint.

I would like to state at the outset that I am not greatly familiar with Emery. Not being a huge fan of Contemporary Christian music myself or a follower of that genre (or subgenre) of music beyond a few acts, I do not know enough of their music to like it or dislike it. I do know that plenty of successful artists have absolutely run from the label of Christian rock or Christian music, even if they themselves are Christians with a clear message in their music (Evanescence, Switchfoot, and Augustana come to mind as fitting at least some of those elements, as does Paramore). Part of this seems to be the fact that Christian music is considered a bit of a ghetto that one would like to escape from rather than a place where one wishes to identify with. Those who want to write songs about personal love (like Amy Grant) have often felt hemmed in and restricted by the narrow boundaries of the Christian Contemporary Music scene, even if they have not abandoned their own religious beliefs or the spiritual themes in their music.

Ironically enough, that narrowness and constricted nature of their genre has not saved Christian contemporary musicians from being insulted by well-meaning Christians for being too worldly. On the contrary, Christian rock musicians get savagely insulted by those who consider themselves the gatekeepers of Christian culture for any sort of concession to what is popular in the world, whether it be an approach or a language or a style. Some people, for example, do not consider rock music or rap music to be viable as genres with Christian conduct or approach. These people would probably have given Paul a hard time on Mars Hill in Athens for quoting Greek philosophers and poets and playwrights like Epimenides and Cleanthes and Menander to a Hellenistic audience because of their pagan worldview. Some musicians consider their work to be musical apologetics, seeking to bridge the cultural gaps between a fairly closed Christian mindset and the larger body of society that wrestles with the same concerns and frustrations without the knowledge of or relationship with God and Jesus Christ. Such people actively seek to reach those who are struggling and broken rather than those who already consider themselves saved, and quite reasonably therefore wish to meet others on their ground and provide a way to Christianity rather than attack those who are hurting with an overtly Christian message.

However, the Christian community has a tendency of eating its own, by savaging those who seek to engage with the outside world in a way that is not Christian enough. Since the earliest centuries of Christianity there have been fierce divisions over rather arcane matters, and these fractious tendencies show so sign of abating. What make these even more troubling is that outsiders who make no pretensions at being Christians are often highly praised for making any sort of vague religious claims for themselves. There seems to be a very harsh and hypocritical double-standard wherein Christians (especially those engaged with the outside world) are harshly condemned if every aspect of their belief and practice does not meet a very narrow standard of technical compliance with orthodoxy and orthopraxy while those who are heathens and openly so are given huge amounts of praise for possessing any sort of moral decency in their words and actions. As a result, Christians will bask in the equivocal approval of a popular worldly entertainer or cultural figure who makes some sort of commonplace boilerplate moral and ethical stand while condemning a professed Christian for any sort of shortcoming.

While this sort of behavior is clearly not fair, there are some reasons why it exists. For one, even worldly people themselves engage in this sort of bogus and hypocritical reasoning, commonly judging professed Christians by much harsher standards than they judge their own conduct. There is a sense in which this is just, in that those who claim to be Christians ought to have their lives reflect the presence of God in them, but at the same time we all have to admit that as Christians our human failings still exist after we have repented and received the love of God, even if we should expect that as we grow in grace and knowledge and application that our lives and character will ever more closely approximate that of our heavenly Father and Elder Brother. This sort of nuanced view, though, does not appear likely either among heathen or Christian critics, who are very quick to pounce upon weaknesses and shortcomings as evidence that someone is not saved, rather than as evidence that we are all still struggling recovering sin addicts, still in need of God’s grace even after we are “saved.”

It appears all too often that not only to the heathen engage in such fallacious argumentation, as might be expected from those who have departed the way of the light, but that even many professed Christians themselves are so starved for some sort of social acceptance in a harsh world that they are vastly more generous on those who clearly are not godly than on those who love God’s ways a great deal and just happen to be imperfect human beings. We are all vastly harsher on those from whom we expect much than on those from whom we are happy to get anything at all, and that divide makes it easy for us to judge with double standards, being far more appreciative of scraps from the table of our corrupt cultural “masters” than we are in feasts from our own fellow pilgrims and brethren on this earth. So long as that is the case, and so long as we try to trap our fellow professed believers in a box, people like Emery will continue to have a just complaint about their hypocritical treatment at the hand of professed Christians.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/the-devils-music-christian-contemporary-music-and-its-critics/

[2] http://www.un-learning.org/wait-people-christian/