Have You Not Read - S1:E22

The Problem with “Secular Music” and the Myth of Neutrality

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Thank you.

Welcome back to Have You Not Read. I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are.

Michael Derham.

And Jonathan Derham. We are fielding another question about music this time, and this one might go to blows depending upon our stances, but the question reads, should Christians listen to secular music?

Michael, would you like to start us off?

Right, so as we hear this question, we should provide some definitions. I think probably the main word that we need to define is secular, okay? Because the term secular has often been used as a bit of witchcraft, a piece of fiction, to talk about that which exists outside the religious sphere as if there's some kind of arena called neutrality, and that music can be created in this neutral realm, and no matter what your religious commitments are, no matter your philosophical views or whatever, everybody can come around a wonderful bit of pop music, and everybody really enjoys it, and everybody has a fun time and so on.

The idea that something is secular is probably not the best way to identify music. All music has religious commitments. All music is derived from not only the creators of that music, but those who take it and play it for themselves in their own way.

Everybody involved is made in the image of God, so everybody is religious by default. Everybody made in the image of God has the worship switch hardwired on, and you can never turn it off. We are always inhaling worth and exhaling worthship, the old Middle English word.

We're always ascribing worth to things. We're always actively worshiping, so at the very heart of it, I disagree with the idea or the designation of secular music. All music is religious. Everything has some sort of commitment to some kind of belief about God and so on, but I think I understand what the questioner is asking.

Should we listen to music that is not identifiably Christian? Should we listen to music created by and or performed by those who do not have clear Christian commitments in their thinking? Should we listen to and enjoy and partake in art that values and celebrates and condones and encourages thinking and feelings and behaviors that are in opposition to the Bible, opposition to the word of God, that if we were to take the word of God as our standard and apply it to the presuppositions and the lyrics and the content of this art, we would find it to be against our Lord and Savior.

Should we listen to that? What are your all's thoughts?

Discernment, Conscience, and the Limits of Christian Liberty

Well, when you frame it like that, you would say hard no.

If it was obvious.

Yes.

If it was obvious it was against.

If there's an obvious and you're right with the term secular, I mean, is it just, well, we wouldn't sing that in church or I wouldn't listen to that with if another Christian was in the room. And you start betraying some of what your excuses may be according to what you believe.

But then not everything that is created by a Christian may be suitable in a church worship service setting or something like that. We've made mention of Bach before and he wrote a lot of instrumental music.

And while I would be wholeheartedly in favor of hearing some of Bach in church sometimes, maybe it wouldn't be as helpful to our context, but at the end of every piece of music that Bach wrote, he put SDG, soli deo gloria.

He meant every piece of his music to be to the glory of God. Even though today people think, well, that's just classical music. It's neutral.

It's not.

They would call it secular.

They would call it secular. And they said, one of the masters, one of the greats, and they don't wanna talk about the SDG at the end of every piece. So, you know, some things may not work in a church service, but they could still be God honoring.

The difference, like you mentioned, is with, you gotta look at the source. Who is it who's writing this? What is their reason for doing this? We can't get too much in the tall weeds there, but if you can decipher the goal there, is it they want more money, they want more fame, they want to further this cause that's against the Lord, against His word, then yeah, maybe we shouldn't go along with the crowd, maybe, even though it may be popular.

So what you're saying is it lies on a spectrum and it involves what we would call discernment to kind of parse that out to see which ones are just not profitable. Like I would say, like we were talking about before, my ACDC days are over, but I remember a specific song called Highway to Hell.

And I would say, yeah, that's probably something we should not be singing. We should not add worth to that. Whereas on the opposite side, if it's a song about a sad, sad story that either we can relate to or we know specifically something about in our heritage and we sing it and we are almost brought to tears for that reason, that may have more profitability to it than this overt wickedness that we see coming through.

Applying God’s Word to Music and What We Consume

Yeah, I think the main point is to apply the standard of God's word to what you are consuming in terms of your music. There are all kinds of songs out there where the composers and artists themselves may not be always Christian or faithfully thinking about the truths of scripture.

And yet they write things and they sing things that would comport with a Christian worldview that would be in agreement with the scripture. So there's plenty of examples, positive examples of things you could listen to in terms of bluegrass and other kinds of folk music that would be in agreement with the word of God.

And you can say, even give an amen to their view of the depravity of man, or even talk about the longing and hope for paradise and heaven that totally comports with a Christian worldview. And there's plenty of examples within that genre and other genres that does not fit and is clearly not.

And so as you listen, should, I think it's the other term that we need to define and be clear on, should Christians listen to secular or let's just call it obviously non-Christian music? Okay, well, should we listen to it?

Well, I think we should. I think we should. The question is, should we listen to it for enjoyment? Now that's another question. Should we be listening to pagan, God-defying, Christ-blaspheming music for enjoyment?

No, obviously not. That's an easy answer. Should we listen to music that wasn't composed by a Christian or that wasn't played by a Christian and so on? I think that the answer in the broadest sense is yeah.

Yeah, you should listen to it because you need to apply God's word to it. Should you keep on listening to it with an enjoyment if it's counter to the word of God? I don't see the point in that. But you could listen to 10 songs on an album and seven of them could be, hey, that's profitable, that's great.

And then three of them be like, well, that's obviously not in agreement with the word of God. But we should have discernment operating at all times.

Yeah, as we're told to practice our discernment in the scriptures, that's technically what we're doing. And we could use those seven songs and those other three songs to teach our children discernment as well to a certain degree, depending upon how bad those other three are.

But we could definitely kind of parse apart what we're seeing and what we want them to see as well.

Christian Liberty, Genre, and Conscience Before God

Sure.

Then you got the question of, well, should Christians ever perform secular music or should non-Christians ever perform Christian music? I think every artist has sung Amazing Grace at one point or another, whether or not they understand it.

And I still get tickled whenever I get music suggestions of they like a song, wanna do it for church, and they send me the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's version of it. So sometimes there's a blurring of lines.

And while I don't think we have to be too tribalistic or too polar, and when we're discussing this, there is a, like you said at the beginning, Michael, there's a worship war going on. There's a vying for attention one way or another.

And so we have to be discerning, be wise, and realize what it does to us as well. Sometimes we want, for educational purposes, what's going on out there? What are folks listening to? What's driving the culture right now?

And it's good to understand some of those things, but also don't be deceived. We can be sucked in as well. We can be influenced as well. And we need to be careful what we put in our minds as well.

Kind of adjacent, but kind of the same issue. We're not excluding genres, right? We're talking about specific songs within genres. Because I know sometimes it is a tendency for Christians to view a genre that has a lot of worthlessness in it.

But finally when somebody injects a little bit of worth in there, but they've already written off the genre itself, where do we land on that?

Yeah, that's a good point, Dylan. For some folks, it's a matter of conviction. Think about the passage in Romans 14 through chapter 15, verse seven. And similar passages that there are some genres of art and music and so on that for some folks, anything, anything that comes out of that genre is simply tainted by the demonic aspects, the idolatry aspects that have been there in most of their experience and in most of their understanding about it.

And so anything within that genre, they just can't have anything to do with. And I think that we need to recognize that we are to act in love to one another and bear with one another and accept one another in Christ.

And if somebody has an issue and a problem with that, we shouldn't be shoving that in their face or whatever or trying to convince them to act contrary to their conscience, which would be sin. So certainly not to do that.

But on the other hand, someone else is gonna say, I don't really have any strong convictions one way or another about any kind of genre of music. And I'm just always interested in finding people who can do a good job with this genre or that genre and they can even glorify God when they do it.

And I really enjoy that. So we can have examples of that in a variety of genres. I don't know if there's a good example for Screamo. There are some forms of expression that I think in and of themselves are contrary to the truth, goodness and beauty paradigm that we have and the revelation of who God is through the scriptures.

Well, then you also kind of think of cultures not necessarily our own, but those who are coming to faith and other pagan cultures and forever they have used certain instruments in the worship of demons or other false gods and they come to Christ.

And because that's so associated with demonic worship before, they can't bring themselves to make any music with those instruments. It's just too much. It's a case of, well, that's meat sacrifice to idols.

I can't touch that. And it is a conscious issue. And then you have the exact opposite story for some of those cultures. They turn those instead of worshiping idols, they worship their creator with them again.

So it's just, it is a matter of how can you see the gifts God has given and musically in whatever genre it is, how can you see it as used for his glory or is it still so associated with a cultural norm or just something so evil?

I got to pull back from this because I just, I can't get through that.

Right, it's kind of the opposite of the weapons being turned into plowshares type of thing where they don't think that inanimate object can be used for God's glory and they've injected their past worship into that object where we would say that that's not really the case.

Right, so we have to be, we have to bear with one another in love and accept one another in Christ about these issues. And I think that's important to remember. Dick, for example, I forget what the lead singer's name is of Skillet, but

John Cooper. John Cooper, right. So he is working very diligently in trying to understand the word of God and Christianity on an increasingly deeper level and getting discipled and is very grounded with his local church and has a very big view in terms of getting the gospel to the masses.

Now his music, okay, is gonna be reprehensible to all kinds of Christians. And if you never play, but if you never played a note of his music for them and you just said he's a musical artist, you just let him talk to Christians, there'd be all kinds of agreement and rejoicing in his heart to see the unsaved saved and his view of the glory of Christ and the importance of the scriptures and so on.

But this just goes to show how we can have a unity in Christ even though we have different convictions about some of these styles.

Humility, Personal Preference, and Worship Style

I've always been marveled by such strong convictions of styles. I'm more of an advocate for the height of each style that you bring across. Like if you have a style that you wanna have in worship, it better be to the nth degree that you can produce it.

But what do you think causes this really heavy attachment to a certain style? Is it maybe personal upbringing and understanding of this is the music that mom and dad had, grandma and grandpa had. So is there like an ancestral attachment to it?

Cause I can understand that. Or is it something else?

Sometimes it's an ancestral detachment.

Yeah, that's true.

That's what my parents did. I wanna do the exact opposite. Yeah, there's some things, some cultural things, some moral things. There's good attached to this kind of music. Therefore everything else is evil.

And so you can't get away from it. But usually if you really strip it away, it's a personal desire, a personal bend. And we have to do some hard heart searching from Philippians two of looking at not only our interests, but the interests of others.

Being humble as Christ was. There's a little bit too much of I want what I want when I want it in our personal independent kind of worship style or music style. Just the me movement, everything about me.

Because of that and because our voices are heard and we can be as loud as we want and whoever complains the most gets what they want. Sometimes that's what's pushed. So it takes wisdom and a lot of patience to work through that and help folks along.

Rejoicing in Music as Part of God’s Creative Order

Yeah, so I think it's an additional reason to, when we were answering the question, should Christians listen to secular music? And Dylan, your point about, there's all these different genres and styles of music and those aren't the, and the ones that we're familiar with are not the only ones that are out there, right?

But whatever it is, if you enjoy this music, can you enjoy it, can you create it, can you engage in it to the glory of God? Can you rejoice in God as creator who has made this world and made music as a huge part of it, who we can even see in the beauty and the dance that he has made in all of the created order.

Can we just rejoice in the variety of the music that man has engaged with so far? And while recognizing that vast swaths of it were done in vain for pagan glory, for the exaltation of someone's own name rather than for the glory of God.

But there's all kinds of examples within this variety of music, where we can rejoice in and give praise to God for his obvious creativity in making man, and making man to be creative in and of himself for the glory of God.

And so when we take that and we think about how it impacts the church, that we recognize that what we engage in as Christians and bring together, when we gather together, it should also be in excellence and should bring glory to God.

And I know we've already talked about some of those principles in previous episodes, but it's, should we listen to secular music? I think if we understand what the term secular actually means, if we understand the obligation or the intentionality of the word should and so on, I think there's value there, but there certainly should not be a mindless imbibing of it.

A no neutrality.

Right.

We come to that secular music as Christians.

That's right.

Not as some void mind.

Right, exactly.

Closing Thanks and Sign-Off

All right, well, I think that about wraps it up. We'll move on to what are we thankful for, Michael?

I am thankful for my wife. I'm thankful for her diligence and wisdom and preparation, setting things aside from months and years past so that we can enjoy them in the present. And I'm very thankful for all the extra things that she does that I have no consciousness of.

And, but I know that I'm blessed by day in and day out.

Yeah, I'm thankful as we all are for God's word, which continues to prove itself over and over again, which is never wrong and is faithful to us in all ages, in all scenarios, whatever may come our way.

The word of God is sufficient to help us, to help us grow and instruct us in righteousness, help us be fully equipped for his work. The longer I'm alive, the more and more I see it.

Amen. Well, I am very thankful for my kiddos being curious about music. Right now, we're struggling to talk with Killian, but he still has this profound need to play with tone and pitch and use his voice to sing as only he can.

So, you know, it's kind of interesting that he has a knee-jerk reaction to do that. He has a knee-jerk reaction to lift his voice without being able even to speak complete sentences all the time. So I'm thankful for that curiosity.

I hope to push it in the right directions and mold it and enjoy it because I know it's something that if you don't practice it, if you don't mold it, it can go different ways and it goes different ways quickly.

And I'd really like to help him out with it and all the siblings after him, including Cohen.

And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read?