Why enjoy this music? – What is in progressive rock for the mature believer

I grew up in a home where my parents took both my brother and me to church almost every Sunday. The memories I have are of a conservative Bible Church full of good people who loved the Lord and sought to glorify God in word and in deed. My teenage years directly coincided with the explosive growth of contemporary Christian music (CCM). All of the cool kids in our youth group owned cassettes by artists such as Petra, Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, and Whiteheart. A smaller subset of ultra-cool youth group kids owned cassettes by Steve Taylor and Stryper.

Then there were the square peg/round hole kids like myself who, although they enjoyed and owned some contemporary Christian music, also really enjoyed so-called “secular music” by artists such as Genesis, Rush, Van Halen, and Journey. This was a problem. My church youth group promoted the ministries of people like Bob Larson and Al Menconi (remember them?) who proclaimed that “secular rock & roll” was “the devil’s diversion” and that what was needed was a 30 day “Christian music diet” in order to flush out the bad stuff.^[1] Much of this gained little traction with me, even when it was accompanied by a late-night showing of A Thief in the Night at a youth group all-nighter. For the most part I continued to enjoy Judas Priest and Bryan Adams right alongside Rich Mullins and DeGarmo and Key

Fast-forward to 2014. Many Christians freely interact with all sorts of “non-Christian movies,” especially in critiquing a movie’s story and worldview. Students attending Christian academies (especially classical Christian academies) participate in “great books” or Omnibus programs where they are expected to read The Koran, On the Origin of Species, or Mein Kampf alongside City of God, Institutes of the Christian Religion, and Mere Christianity. In the areas of movies and literature Christians are learning more and more to understand the culture and how to bring the Christian worldview to bear in the arena of ideas. We have learned (rightly, I believe) that sifting through a thing thoughtfully in order to keep the wheat and reject the tares pleases God much more than a wholesale, retreatist rejection of the whole shooting match. Realizing that unbelievers are able to tell a story that correctly reflects God’s truth, beauty, and goodness is to realize that God pours out his common grace on believers and unbelievers alike, even if unbelievers remain strangers to God’s redeeming grace.

And yet I fear that, in the area of music, too many thoughtful Christians are stuck in a reactionary Christian ghetto with no desire to strike out and explore other musical aspects of God’s world. A wise partaking of and engagement in rock music–especially progressive rock music–is what I am after in this series of posts. If Christians are mature enough to interact thoughtfully and honestly with Immanuel Kant, Edgar Allen Poe, and The Communist Manifesto then they should be able to interact thoughtfully and honestly with Pink Floyd, Marillion, and the song “BU2B” by the band Rush.

One reading of pop music history claims that punk rock came along in the late 1970s and almost overnight rendered progressive rock obsolete “dinosaur music.” Punk rockers may or may not have “hated” prog rock, but I believe we can say beyond a reasonable doubt that punk rock gloried in the overthrow of tradition, adhered to the ethos of ugly anarchy, and believed in the supremacy of revolution. How else can one explain explain a song that exclaimed, “I am an anti-christ/I am an anarchist/Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it/I wanna destroy the passer by.” If the punkers rejected the proggers because the latter loved truth, beauty, and goodness while the former did not, then so be it.

But I expect better things of Christians, especially Christians that regularly partake in great books, big ideas, and meta-narratives. J. S. Bach’s B Minor Mass is beauty nonpareil, but Yes’s piece “Awaken” is also quite glorious in its way. Handel’s Messiah is a soul-stirring (albeit slightly over-performed) masterwork, but the song “The Underfall Yard” by Big Big Train also excels by celebrating creation–with an undercurrent of Ecclesiastes “all is vapor” melancholy–in ways that are deeply rousing, incarnational, and dare I say it, Christian.

So why partake of progressive rock? Because it is there, because it frequently tells amazing stories with a distinctly Christian worldview (sometimes even intentionally), and because Christians can and should affirm truth, beauty, and goodness wherever they find it.

It is time for mature, thoughtful Christians to expand their music horizons beyond J. S. Bach, Handel’s Messiah, great hymns of the faith played on the pan flute, and the Gaither Homecoming videos.  My hope is that the rest of this series will help you expand those horizons by exploring the glorious mess that is progressive rock music.

1. Never mind that, in retrospect, much of the “Christian music” meant to flush out the bad stuff was, in the words of C. S. Lewis, “fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music.”

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Derek Hale has lived all of his life in Wichita, Kansas and isn’t a bit ashamed about that fact. He and his wife Nicole have only six children–four daughters and two young sons of thunder. Derek is a ruling elder, chief musician, and performs pastoral duties at Trinity Covenant Church (CREC). Derek manages a firmware lab for NetApp and enjoys reading, computers, exercising, craft beer, and playing and listening to music. But not all at the same time. He blogs occasionally at youdidntblogthat.tumblr.com.<>сколько стоит реклама в гугл адвордс

big big train, genesis, pop music, prog, prog rock, rock music, rush, yes