Would Jesus Steal Hamilton?

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00:00

I mean you've heard about monkey pox.

00:02

Well, have you heard about the donkey that talks? Yeah, I like that kind of thing.

00:06

Exactly.

00:07

You know the the youth pastor kind of like hey, you know who else was uh, uh, you know, whatever it is and then just Keith needs a minute and I didn't write that ahead of time.

00:19

I just want to let you know that just came Keith needs a minute y'all if I was charismatic I would say the spirit and welcome back to conversations with a Calvinist.

00:28

My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

00:32

Tonight I am joined by two friends Jake Korn and Matthew Henson and we're going to be talking about a church in Texas that decided to put on an unauthorized production of the hit musical Hamilton and as I said I am joined today by two of my great friends in the and wonderful commentators on all things Christian and reformed except for my not yet Calvinist friend Matthew Henson who is here today.

01:02

Matthew, thank you for being here.

01:04

The contractual obligation stands.

01:06

We have to say it at the start of every show.

01:08

One of these shirts is not like the other.

01:11

That's right.

01:12

I'm wearing my five-point Calvinist shirt and so is Jake Korn wearing his Calvinist shirt.

01:17

Now I do want to see the retro ATAT t-shirt there for the for the people that have to take an ibuprofen every morning.

01:26

You know what this logo is parodying.

01:28

That is awesome.

01:30

So let's do this.

01:31

Let's let's dig into the topic at hand.

01:34

Apparently there is a church in Texas that recently did a production of the hit musical Hamilton.

01:44

Now I have never seen Hamilton.

01:46

Have you guys seen it? I'm a huge fan.

01:49

You're a huge Hamilton fan? I have not.

01:52

Matthew, I figured you might just because of your propensity for and love for history.

01:57

I thought you might have seen it just to pick it apart but well I don't know.

02:02

Has it shown? Jake would know.

02:03

Has it shown local to me? No but it is on well you don't have Disney plus but it is on Disney plus.

02:10

Okay fair enough then.

02:11

I will say one I read the biography first and I highly recommend the book by Ron Chernow.

02:17

It's amazing and two Matthew you've heard a lot of Hamilton because I always use a song from Hamilton as my mic check when I was getting ready for worship.

02:29

So I remember those.

02:30

I do remember that.

02:32

That are random 1776 quotations.

02:35

Yeah same.

02:36

Well my daughter absolutely loves the show.

02:39

She has seen it several times in different ways.

02:44

I guess it's all been through video because she's never gone to actually watch it live.

02:48

I don't think.

02:49

Did they do a traveling show? Maybe she did go see it.

02:51

So there was one in Jacksonville.

02:53

I want to say February of this year.

02:56

I think maybe it was pretty recently.

02:59

Yeah I'll have to ask her but I mean she loves it.

03:02

She talks about it all the time.

03:03

Walks around singing.

03:04

My daughter's sort of a musical.

03:07

She likes musicals and I would say she's a musical nerd but I'm a nerd too.

03:11

We all nerd out over our own things and hers just happens to be musicals.

03:16

Shout out to the fact that this week Olivia Newton-John passed away.

03:19

It was obviously played in the movie version of Grease.

03:25

I performed in Grease for those who are interested.

03:28

I was one of Johnny Casino and the Gamblers which were the guys who played the music during the dance-off which was I played the song that Danny is singing to Sandy when they're when they're dancing.

03:43

What's that playing on the radio? Oh yeah.

03:45

That was me.

03:46

That was Big Daddy.

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I was singing live back in high school if you can imagine.

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I was much much younger.

03:54

Anyway not that anybody cares.

03:57

So anyway I'm going to read from cnn.com.

04:02

This is what CNN said and I was talking to Jake about this before we started.

04:09

I said I'm going to read from CNN rather than Fox News or Christianity Today because I want to get sort of the sort of an opinion that would be more maybe not necessarily a Christian opinion on this.

04:21

But what is what is the world saying about this? And it says this a Texas church performed Hamilton this weekend but the team behind the Tony award-winning production says it shouldn't have happened.

04:33

Hamilton does not grant amateur or professional licenses for any stage productions and did not grant one to the Door Church.

04:42

Shane Marshall Brown a spokesman for Hamilton said in a statement to CNN on Monday.

04:47

Officials behind the musical were not aware of the unauthorized staging until the day after the church's first of two scheduled performances and sent a cease and desist letter the spokesman added.

04:59

The Door a church in Mckellen a town in south Texas was allowed to continue with its planned second performance with conditions among them that the show would not be live streamed recorded or shared on social media in photo or video form according to the statement.

05:12

So they did get to go ahead with the production.

05:15

However, now what I'm seeing that that's a bit of an older article.

05:19

I think that one came out on the 9th.

05:23

Now the newer articles are saying that they're very upset because they changed the lyrics to include more gospel related I wouldn't say necessarily good gospel related things but basically they changed out Jesus in some of the songs and they put the the idea of of of Jesus in and sort of tried to to make some changes.

05:48

So right away guys just what's your first thoughts? I'm going to start with Jake you know what are you just right away when you read something like this what are your just immediate thought when you saw this? Yeah so my mind splits into two places so I was a theater major in college a theater kid all through high school so I kind of think you know in that half of my brain you have to pay the rights man like like we we have to pay the workman what he's due you know however you feel about the product there's a copyright involved people work really hard on that and that show is still touring and making money so if you're trying to capitalize on that even if it's for a non-profit that's that's inherently wrong.

06:30

Second half of my mind is the Calvinist half which goes back to our regular principle of worship conversation this does not belong on a Sunday morning if it was Sunday morning I'm fine with churches being involved in the arts as part of being the life of the church but like once you start to conflate it with worship then it becomes an issue and then there's kind of a middle road which is I hate the hokiness of spoofalikes you know where we we change stuff to inject the gospel in it to make it popular either the gospel is popular because the Lord has regenerated your heart to make it popular or the gospel is unbelievably offensive to your flesh and let's keep it that way.

07:09

Amen.