D.M. Dutcher's Blog, page 2

The Fight is Dearer than We Think

I’m falling out with Christian friends.

The reason is hard to say. I guess the best way to describe it is that I’m tired of trivia. Not that what I’m describing is trivia, but the mindset I mean. I see it most on Facebook. We have The Big Christian Issue of the Day. Abortion is a big one, especially when we focus on some clinic five states away and try and expand what happens there to Planned Parenthood as a whole. Or homosexuality. Or how the prosperity gospel is bad, Or something else. To be defined as trivia, there are two things it must have:

1. It must take up an enormous amount of mental energy.

2. It must be something we cannot do a single thing about.

Why yes, Church A is going to court over their gay organist being fired. That’s nice, except they are in Oregon, the case will probably take three years or more if it isn’t quietly settled, and every single one of us can do nothing about it. There’s a term called “virtue signaling,” in which we do things not so much because they are vital to our lives, but because they show to others we possess virtue. This is why we all care about what the latest celebrity pastor who falls from grace does, because by lining up on sides, we establish our own bonafides to our cohort of friends.

I’ve done the same, but recently I’ve grown weary of it.

I’ve had to do a lot of self-examination recently. I don’t talk much about myself here, as not to bore you, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve found I have mild panic attacks while driving. A bump makes me fear I’ve hit someone or run over something. Anything out of the ordinary, like a team cleaning the road, makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong just by passing them slowly like every other motorist. The attacks generally have subsided once I realized that they were not rational, but I was suddenly introduced to the fact that I might suffer from mental illness. And looking back on the past makes me wonder just how much of who I am, and all the mistakes I’ve made, might be due to that. It’s a rather horrifying idea, because you are now are that you are part of a web of actions, and freedom might more of an illusion than I thought. If your own body can work against you, it tends to destroy explanations and ideas.

I think this in part is what makes me weary of virtue signaling. In our lives, the fight is dearer than we think. We don’t have the luxury to care about someone aborting someone somewhere. Those things, the need to signal we are right, are things that take time and strength from us when we fight the battles that do matter. Our energy is a scarce resource, and we cannot spend it wastefully. Our power to change is also scarce, and we must be frugal.

Like homosexuality. I will get eviscerated for this, but I will say this here and now:

If you confess Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, and believe God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

I don’t care any more if you are chaste, practicing, or gay married. If you trust in Him, you are saved: all else after is between you and God, and I cannot butt into your life. I can and will say that practice and gay marriage cannot be affirmed by the church, and that I don’t believe God intends it: it’s a sad part of our fallen world. But I don’t have the energy to try and pray the gay away any more: increasingly my prayers need to be on my own life, and those of my family. That doesn’t mean if a gay couple tries to push into my church or the internet watering holes I frequent I won’t respond, but the days of endless argument are over. If you believe the above, i will try to keep the peace. If you don’t and are mistaken, I will tell you about the above. But no more arguing.

We’ve been conditioned by the media to look at things like Kim Davis as vital issues of the day, but they aren’t! The vital issue of the day is your life in Christ, and the small circle of people you are in contact with. Satan distracts us with that, because its easy to do nothing if you are focused on things you can only do nothing about. As we grow older, I think the difficulties in the fight grow harder. The illusions of who we are and our virtue fade away. We know ourselves too well. And I think our cry becomes more “Father, rescue us!” than a witty defense of doctrine. The change in life hits us all hard.

In the end, that’s all we can say. What’s funny about the Gospels is that if you look at all the apostles, they don’t argue about abortion, or the religious freedom under Herod, or any current issue like philosophers. They most stumble around, follow Jesus, act annoying, mess up, miss what is being said in front of their faces, and, well, are jerks. But what they do is follow Jesus around, do what they can do, act perplexed, but still do it all the same. This is us, now. We follow a Christ we can’t always understand or fathom, and in a life full of absurdity. It’s hard enough to do this: trying to be stand up philosophers arguing over the leading issues of the day may now be beyond us.

The fight really is dearer than we think. It might be a time just to be silent, and focus on ourselves.

Christian Baseball

I’ve been noticing an attitude among some Christian creatives and fans as of late. If I could use an analogy to summarize it, it would be that Christian creatives should be like Christian baseball players, and less like artists. I’m not a fan of this idea, for several reasons.

Let me expand on the analogy first. There is no Christian aspect to baseball. Baseball is a game which has a set rulebook that everyone follows to achieve an end result.Those rules are amoral, although you could easily make comparisons between them and aspects of Christian faith in a general way. You could talk about the discipline of athletes as a model to follow for a disciplined spiritual life, for example. The rules themselves aren’t Christian though, and there is no redemptive or doctrinal aspect to the sport.

The way one shows Christianity in it has little to do with the sport itself though. Sure, they may cross themselves on occasion, or make small visible signs of the faith. Maybe they wear a cross lapel pin. Or to expand it to football, they might kneel in the endzone. But what they do isn’t Christian, in the sport, because the sport has no Christian content. Their witness, if any, is by being a moral Christian pursuing a secular aim.

I think this idea is increasingly being applied to Christian creatives, but it doesn’t fit us at all. Three reasons follow.

1. Sports encourages moral discipline: Art does not.

This is in general. The communal, disciplined, accountable focus of sports to me tends to attract the kind of Christian who can be a moral exemplar. Art however tend to attract outsiders, dreamers, and people who if anything do not or can not fulfill the role of squeaky clean public believer. Dostoyesky was addicted to gambling. Francis Thompson was addicted to opium. Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor were outsiders in the south. I’m not saying that every Christian artist has to be a moral failure, or morally questionable, but to be the kind of person who looks at society critically or views the world in a different way doesn’t make always for nice, moral people. There’s a saying: “Well adjusted people make bad art.” It’s true to a sense among believers, too.

2. It makes art pointless except as a way to show competency and witness.

The point is just that we get one of our own famous, and bask in the glow of their moral witness. What they actually do only matters insofar as they get awards, and get a public spotlight. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are good examples of this.

Tolkien is more famous for being claimed as a Christian than any real Christian aspect to his work. There’s actually a lot to dislike about LOTR in a Christian sense: the utter absence of God or priests from any real action to fight Sauron, the burdening of those least likely to resist it, the horrible predestined fate of Gollum, and the focus on great men and the country verses the proletariat and the urban. But because he was Christian, we wind up not discussing these things over admiring how well one of us wrote and how famous he is. Lewis is a minor example of this too. If he were anyone else, The Great Divorce would never have been published. People would be shocked that even in an allegory, he talks about salvation after death and universalism. Or the neo-pagan aspect in That Hideous Strength, the summoning of the pagan past (sufficiently Christianized, but in a horrible phrase to describe Merlin, “good enough to be used but not too good”). But again, fame blinds us to that.

This isn’t a case of bad art being loved by the Christian market, like Thomas Kinkade. This is a case where all that matters is that we get our man in to receive critical acclaim. What they actually write, well…

3. Creatives can’t do this.

I am a sinner.

You all know me by now. I’m combative, a bit manic-depressive, prone to angry ideologies or retorts about the world, etc. All I like to do is art: I’m not a pastor or priest, and I don’t possess even a shred of holiness. As I grow older, if anything my Christian hope relies on God rescuing me, because really, I can’t do things on my own. You see yourself failing, with no illusions.

The idea that not only do I have to excel at my craft, but be a moral exemplar too, turns me off from writing Christian content. Partly because of the media climate. People, and yes other Christians too, get joy out of finding flaws and  hammering believers with them. I know people here didn’t like Mark Driscoll, but his example really opened my eyes to what public Christianity does to its thought leaders.

We’ve gone from a faith that presupposes us to be broken sinners in needing of rescue to one that demands our every work in public be perfect and beyond reproach. It’s more than the burden of excelling at our art; it becomes about us, our lives, and our ability as a role model. It becomes self-centered, where we must focus on ourselves. And to be honest, it’s not like even Christian baseball players do all that well at it. For football, remember Tim Tebow. As soon as he didn’t deliver, he was discarded, because you can’t be a moral exemplar when no one watches you.

That burden I don’t think creatives can bear. You wind up with art written by the morally perfect people, which is often as bad as you’d expect it to be. You wind up avoiding the Eye of Sauron whenever possible, by not identifying as a Christian creative.

It’s a double whammy. The Christians don’t seem to be okay with creatives making art solely to the Christian market, yet the heap some hard demands on anyone who tries to be more. The Christian artist tries to play Christian baseball, but more often than not fails. Amy Grant gets divorced, DC Talk gets brief radio airplay before returning home to Christians, people try and fail and if the failure is bad, disappear.

I don’t write this to offer solutions. I write this mostly to identify a nagging issue in my mind. I think Christians are starting to be okay with playing a secular game, so long as we have one or two superstars we can point to and cheer for. But for creatives, it’s not good.

Praise of Blessing

I’ve started playing Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny again, this time on PS3. I really recommend it. This is one of the songs in the game, and something struck me about the lyrics:

Spirit of Life, hear my song that I now sing to thee

I sing for you, with my heart and my soul

and my soul

I’m here, waiting for you to answer me!

Open your eyes, feel the air, the earth, and our hearts

Help us to be brave, make us wise, make us strong

Make us strong!

Make us both guardians of this land

Make us both guardians of this land!

This is better praise and worship than most praise and worship.

I mean, when we sing, do we say anything close to this? Do we sing for God with our hearts and our souls? Do we wait for Him to answer us? Do we ask Him to make us brave, wise, and strong? To make us guardians of the world?

It’s funny too, because the first time you meet Odette while she sings this, she says she sings this to help her understand their Guardian Dragon’s thoughts. Her mindset and the song itself has an activity to it that we don’t get in praise and worship. Like praise simply can’t be telling God how wonderful He is, but giving ourselves to His will in song. This song struck me as doing that unintenionally. Giving isn’t only performing, although for some it might be,

Venus Virus Vagueness

…or another rant on why atheism doesn’t work for me.

It’s been a rough day. At times, I suffer from moderate vertigo and nausea upon waking. Usually lying down and time passing lets it cease. However, today I had it after work, and more seriously than I have ever had before. Visiting the walk-in-clinic (and throwing up all over the place) got me a prescription for meds that I thankfully have yet to need, and 6+ hours later, it subsided.

The thing is, this is caused by a virus. It’s not uncommon. You get a virus in your inner ear, and it stays. Every now and then it recurs. Doctors don’t really understand how it works as opposed to the symptoms it causes, and they pretty much can only treat the vertigo. If it gets serious (and mine isn’t) you can adapt via compensation training. But essentially I have this virus in my ear that can choose to flare up, and increasingly incapacitate me for hours in a day. Well, from doing work that is. For some people the symptoms can persist for days or a week.

Linking this to atheism is the fact that for all that belief’s system trust in science and reason, it really never deals with the reality of those things, as opposed to the romantic image of them. A lot of medical conditions are like mine in the sense that science can recognize them, create remedies, but cannot cure or identify causes. Not saying this to diss on the medical profession, but we have a really odd image of it in our mind. We see medical miracles like saving premature babies or transplanting organs, but we don’t often realize how little they know about many other things, or how ill-equipped they are to deal with them. People who suffer from chronic disorders where the symptoms are vague enough to not easily be isolated really understand this, like fibromyalgia. This gives people a romantic view of science and its power to progressively change things where the reality is far more complex.

Let’s take our two nearest planets. Everyone loves what NASA has done with Mars. It’s a stunning achievement in terms of technology and planning. But have you ever wondered why we don’t seem to care about Venus? If you look at the wiki, very little seems to even have been done about it.

It’s mostly because it’s simply too hard to collect data on it because we can’t easily get landers to the surface. Or even stay in orbital distance above it. In the past 20 years there’s been six missions, and most are just orbiters and flybys. For all the talk about human glories in science, the universe tends to throw hard checks at us constantly about the limits of what we can do as human beings. This isn’t to induce fatalism, but instead to point out that the naive science-fiction optimism many of us grew up with was just that. No colonies on Venus, increasingly no manned presence in space due to the absurd cost and lack of real technological innovation possible, etc.

This is why I can’t be an atheist, because there is a huge problem that flows from this.

What if science and reason can’t cure or do anything for you?

A lot of the appeal of atheism is that when everything goes right, it seems awesome. You have all this freedom, elegance, beauty, and appeal in a materialist, rationalist outlook. But when you get a Venus Virus, it literally can offer you nothing and takes away the only consolation you can use to strengthen yourself: God.

Let’s flip it for a moment. If you are atheist, one of the things you really should be thankful for is that Christianity gave you a God to be mad at. Without Him, without Abraham arguing for the salvation for Sodom or Job, you have nothing. You can’t be mad at the world, because a virus doesn’t do what it does morally. I think this is why so many pagan religions that tend to atheism develop philosophies like stoicism or the wheel of rebirth; without a God who cares, you have severely pessimistic and fatalistic ideas about life. Usually when the atheist is prosperous, he is distracted from those ideas, but if he’s not they can crash down on his head like a meteor.

That winds up denying you any consolation. The atheist may say we should face the cold, harsh reality of this world, but nine times out of ten, he says it from a level of prosperity that kings would envy. To say it to someone without that, who carries a burden on his shoulder, is almost cruel. I don’t think I can be an atheist because of that; I’d feel only horror at the way the world is, horror with no relief.

A Time to Build

Obergefell has been weighing on me a lot recently.

Not so much the legalization of SSM, but the way it was done. I feel there is a difference. When they legalized no-fault divorce, I don’t think it was done as a repudiation of Christian morality. More as a sense of reality, as an option for bad marriages to be resolved much easier. We still believed in good marriages, but realized sometimes others needed to dissolve them. However Obergefell to me is saying “we want to create a new, post-Christian form of marriage” and that’s something different entirely.

I think this presages changes we will have to deal with. It feels to me like an invisible line has been crossed, one marking two sides.  The first side is the nominally Christian philosophy the USA had. Rod Dreher calls it Therapeutic Moralistic Deism, and while it has its own issues, it still took many parts of Christianity and made a culture out of it. The other side though rejects even the weak form of Christianity it used, and now is fully Post-Christian. What that means we aren’t sure yet, but something is forming, something that in time will be hostile to religious faith that refuses to be subjugated.

I think this means Christians will have to change.

I feel that the time for complaining about the church is over. There’s no more time just to talk; if the issues you decry are important enough, you must act to change them. If not, accept them and work on what you must change instead. There is no more luxury of sitting back and tearing down. If we are forced to flee to the church, we have to accept it. We cannot flee to something we judge, and I worry we will soon need to flee to it. I don’t mean literally, but the choice may be where we need to make a life around it, or get swallowed up by the world. Like we can’t weaken it when it needs to be strong, or we cut off the limb of the tree we sit on. When the rain is pouring, no time to point out we need a bigger cabin in the ark.

It’s time to build.

Like culture. There’s going to come a time where Christians have to make their own. It will grow harder and harder to like secular culture the more anti-Christian it gets, and it will get that way. When every cartoon has Korra’s lesbian ending, or every show paints us as evil people, there’s no way we’ll be able to enjoy them. And it will get that way, because when people find their new post-Christian society doesn’t work, they’ll look to indoctrinate harder and scapegoat harder. Who better than us?

So for me, it’s going to be about the building.

No point in arguing against homeschooling. While we were a part of society, it was an option, and one i believed to be inferior. But we are now not a part of that society, or are heading that way.
No point talking about Christian culture. We either build it, accept it, or don’t have it.
No more rants about worship music or little cultural tics Christians have. It’s not the time for that any more.
Yes, there are bad Christians. No, we are not allowed the luxury to care about them. We have to worry about ourselves now. You cannot let others be the excuse why you do not act. You can worry about others when you are safe, but now, the winds are hinting that soon, we will not be safe at all.

Yeah, this sounds alarmist. But I’m starting to feel very alarmist indeed.

I mean, what happens when we have a few generations of people whose only idea about Christianity is we are homophobic bigots? What happens when liberals decide the next oppressed group is polyamorists, and put the strength of the culture behind that? What comes next?

I don’t know.

I do know that its time to build. Lord give me the strength to.

How it Begins

Inspired by this article.

1. Have a small population of people do an avant-garde thing(AGT).

2. Have that small population catch the eye of people among the larger avant-garde(LAG) set.

3. That behavior becomes, if not trendy, at least known among the LAG. Maybe not everyone is polyamorous, but that witty and charming woman you know through a friend is. The LAG circle is small enough for a lot of people to come into contact with the AGT, and the more adventurous may even try it.

4.One of two things happen:

The behavior is unsustainable among the LAG. Maybe the AGT person falls out with the social circle, or gets arrested, divorced, sued, etc. Best example is furry culture.
The behavior endures.

5. Media phase. The LAG people, who are in control of the media, begin to report on this new normal thing with them. Never mind that it’s a relatively small amount of LAG compared to a large amount of normals; they’ll do it all the same.

6. Initial saturation phase. Where we are at now for polyamory. Normal people start trying it. Normal people become aware that this thing exists, and naysayers muster arguments and fight viciously to deny it legitimacy.

7. Maximal saturation phase. Where we are at now for gay marriage. Even if you are opposed to it, it is now a fact of life. There is no more world where it isn’t an issue. Even if the articles are clear about the negative effects of it, there is no going back to make it outlawed or socially sanctioned.

8. God judging us, possibly with fire.

***

This is simplified, some. I probably should include this step:

5.5. Defanging the behavior. Focusing on the positives and making it safe, downplaying the negatives. The AGT may even evolve to a safer mode of expression over time.

also this:

6.5. Make sure the behavior is marketed to win over women. Women tend to be the best consumers and persuaders out there.

For the anime fans, monstergirls are this. That genre has a horrible history, one which I will not go into here. But now it’s been softened a bit, and Daily Life With Monstergirls is a NYT best selling manga. Monstergirls are at point 3 on this list.

In general though, this is how cultural ideas transmit. This is probably the vector we’ll see as polyamorous couples become the new homosexuals. i’ve seen it happen too often. The post-Obergefell world will only intensify this.

Step 8 was done only partly tongue-in-cheek. God has a history of judging the people that are His but choose to reject Him. Increasingly I’m feeling less assured that we can claim that aspect of God is no longer in existence. I think God will be patient with us if we are aware we are broken, but when we call evil good, I’d watch out.

The Danger of a Feminized Church…

..is that they spiritualize the simple acts of being a woman.

Christianity Today is rapidly becoming horrible that way. Look, I can get finding Christian meaning in the acts of everyday life. But Her.menuetics especially has a bad habit of taking the various cultural tics of being a knowledge-class Christian white woman and trying to plumb them for spiritual depths, to the point of absurdity. Recent articles cover the writer’s love for Amy Poehler, the American Girls toy line, Hypnobirthing (whatever that is), mean people causing bloggers to quit, and Elizabeth Elliot. You find yourself learning more about the neuroticism of the middle-class SAHM than any real spiritual lesson.

I’m going to catch hell for this, but for women to be effective teachers or spiritual leaders, they need to shed the solipism they have. They need to forget themselves and their experiences, and resist the temptation to spiritually justify them. Perhaps that’s a bit too strong. Let me restate.

A woman can teach us through her own experiences; she cannot teach us through her own lifestyle.

The selfie is unintentionally the best example of this. To a point it’s just normal picture-taking. But it’s also become a symbol of the narcissism of young women. To spiritualize this is unintentionally spiritualize that narcissism, and very few people will call them out on that. If it’s done often enough and by enough people, we wind up making a religion of Eve. Or better fitting, Lilith.

The Vatican Liked Anime

…because they went and commissioned one, a long time ago.

No, seriously. Created by Osamu Tezuka, the God of manga. He died though, after a feature film was made, and Osamu Dezaki did the subsequent series.  You can find some of the series on Youtube, and it’s full of eighties anime goodness:

I’m not generally a fan of Bible adaptations, because I think there’s a good risk of “adding to the words of this book” whenever you seek to adapt it. I have a huge weakness for that kind of early eighties anime though. It tends to age better than the cheap 90’s throwaway animation most Biblical retellings use. Same with the 60’s Hanna-Barbera style-for all its flaws, it isn’t generic, and generic animation gets forgotten quickly.

When you think about it, it’s kind of cool that big Japanese studios actually were willing to make these kinds of stories.Little historical nuggets of time gone by. You have faith, but combined with some level of quality. There’s some sadness too, in a “finding love in the ruins” sense. These are things that probably will never get made again, and are reminders of a time where it was still possible to make them. I don’t think the climate is the same any more. But at least we have the past.

A Fairy Tale

A long time ago, there was a kingdom called Virdania.

Virdania had its flaws, like other kingdoms.But the people were happy, and on the whole the kingdom was far better than its other neighbors across the seas. They may have failed at doing right at times, but they always tried to do so, and their successes outnumbered their failures.

Unfortunately something curious happened.

Virdania always was a rather loose collection of different tribes and peoples. In one sense, that was its strength. People could look at that country, and say that a place existed for everyone there. But that was also its weakness, as tensions rose to the point where the different factions finally had to openly rebel against the ruling class. The cause was a rather expensive jeweled rose, commissioned by the royal family during a time when bribery and extortion ruled the streets. That rose set off The War of the Flower, which really wasn’t a war at all. It was a quiet series of inter-tribal skirmishes and suppression that lasted for a hundred years, until the royal family was weak enough and the citizens of Virdania tired enough that they had enough. “We don’t want any royal families!” was the cry, and the nation moved to a democratic-style government.

To prevent any further warring, they even went so far as to change the name. No longer Virdania, they were called the Verdant States, and at first there was rejoicing. The people in their hearts however still called themselves Virdanians, and there was still the same debate about what a Virdanian meant. What the moral character of one was, and what the identity of a citizen was. Many people in their hearts understood that they needed the Verdant States, because The War of the Flower was a horrible time, and they couldn’t risk the idea of Virdania being corrupted like that again. But many weren’t all right with it, and in their hearts they wanted the Virdanian flag to fly again. But a curious thing began to happen.

Over time, people began being ashamed of Virdania, in a very specific way.

While people loved Virdania, for some reason they hated hearing about it in song or in poetry.

It was difficult to explain. It was not that they hated the ideal of their nation. Ask them that to their face, and they would deny it intensely. But for some reason, they loved the anthems and pamphlets of the Verdant States more. They were stirring, true, and many skilled artists worked on them. But in them, there was no mention of Virdania at all. Rather than the famous phrase “My treasure, my green jewel, my everlast love,” you had the rather weaker idea “I value you, good nation.” Rather than “I bend the knee and honor Tal,” (Tal being the patron deity of the Virdanians,) you saw “I honor freedom and respect for all men.” Things that Virdanians once did, like Belfast dinners, clasping the Sigil and naming Tal in thanks, or bringing children to the Everglade on their twelfth birthday to be devoted to Virdania seemed to disappear overnight from songs and art.

True, if you squinted really hard you might find a weak allusion or a glancing reflection. Some works might still name Tal, but the Lord of the Greenwood had become a rather wispy thing indeed. But even then you had to admit that the songs were about the Verdant States, and that you were hoping to see Virdania in it rather than acknowledge it was there.

What was worse was that over time, anyone mentioning Verdania was soon seen as second-rate, even by those who claimed to love the ideals of their vanished nation.

True, a lot of bad poets made interminable verse about it. And not all the songs were as good as those composed in its glory days. But people started to believe that even talking about Virdania was the sign of a hack, and preferred the smooth, elegant prose of Verdant artists. That Verdant artists were busy creating an entirely new anthem, and one that was opposed to the old ideals of the country, seemed to escape them. But Verdant soon dominated the songs of the people by skill, by power, and by more, and Virdania became the refuge of minor schools of poets, of random singers, and of the occasional great artist who brought up the past nation to all. But slowly, quickly, any sign of Virdania began to vanish.

And the tragedy was that Virdanians wanted that.

How long do you think the memory of Virdania will last?

***

One of the things that annoys me these days is how people don’t seem to want any form of Christian culture. That they don’t realize that you cannot have an entirely secular art culture without it affecting how you think or how you believe. One of the common things I say is that for all the talk about finding God in secular works, it’s incredibly rare to find someone just praying outside of Christian fiction. Or going to church. A lot of our values, habits, and culture are simply invisible when you look at the artistic culture of the day, save for a heavily Southernized, redneck form of it, or ritual retellings of the Bible.

I admit we need the secular culture, and the Verdant States isn’t always evil. But because of our own War of the Flower (the Reformation) we wound up becoming a subculture. We had to reduce the power of the state, but what happened is that we didn’t realize that so many Virdanians were only such because the state kept them in check. So the true Virdanians assumed once Virdania, always Virdania, even if the Verdant States had to exist.

It doesn’t, and a culture can dry up pretty fast.

I think this is part of the reason why my desire to find Jesus in anime has dried up recently. I like anime, and for Verdant culture, it’s pretty good. But at some point, you have to raise the standard of Virdania. Secular culture, though good, will never fully satisfy me, because it makes me invisible. I can understand being Verdant out of necessity, but that’s due to our sinfulness. I can’t be Verdant and all its values at heart.

But a lot of people seem to easily be such, recasting what Virdania was into what Verdant is.

Just be careful, okay? Guy Gavriel Kay wrote a book called Tigania, in which there existed a nation. That nation was cursed by a sorcerer, to the point where not only was it forgotten, no one could even say its name. I think in part that was a parable about how government and culture can work to erase the culture of an existing people. Christianity is not too strong to avoid being erased.

Especially if people like the erasing.

Top Five Most Annoying Worship Songs

Saint Bertha-dances-in-the-aisles approved! In no particular order.

5. Awesome God

Not that Rich Mullins is bad. Far from it, actually. But it’s sad he’s known for this annoying little ditty. The original song is passable, but then you get the Maranatha singers murdering it even for, and you now have a staple of worship designed to torment your ears over and over.

To me, his song “Calling out your name” is far better, even as worship. This is how different he really is, compared to that song:

Well the moon moved past Nebraska

And spilled laughter on them cold Dakota Hills

And angels danced on Jacob’s stairs

Yeah they danced on Jacob’s stairs

There is this silence in the Badlands

And over Kansas the whole universe was stilled

By the whisper of a prayer

The whisper of a prayer

And the single hawk bursts into flight

And in the east the whole horizon is in flames

Chorus:

I feel thunder in the sky

I see the sky about to rain

And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

I can feel the earth tremble

Beneath the rumbling of the buffalo hooves

And the fury in the pheasant’s wings

And there’s fury in a pheasant’s wings

It tells me the Lord is in His temple

And there is still a faith that can make the mountains move

And a love that can make the heavens ring

And I’ve seen love make heaven ring

Where the sacred rivers meet

Beneath the shadow of the Keeper of the plains

Compare this to:

When He rolls up His sleeves

He ain’t just putting on the Ritz

(Our God is an awesome God)

There’s thunder in His footsteps

And lightning in His fists

(Our God is an awesome God)

And the Lord wasn’t joking when He kicked ’em out of Eden

It wasn’t for no reason that He shed His blood

His return is very close and so you better be believing that

Our God is an awesome God

Our God is an awesome God

He reigns from heaven above

With wisdom, power, and love

Our God is an awesome God

Our God is an awesome God

He reigns from heaven above

With wisdom, power, and love

Our God is an awesome God

Sigh.

4. The joy of the Lord is my strength

This in particular is the most annoying version of that song, but there are others to rival it. The version I grew up with was incredibly perky. The joooooy of the Loooooord IS MAH STRENGTH. The worst time was during the laughing revival of the 90’s, when we had an additional chorus of nothing but ha.

Haha haha haha haha ha ha ha!

This probably the number one song Sister Bertha gets down to. Not the indie grrrl “spontaneous worship” version above, but the relentlessly positive one most people hear in their church.

3. Lord I love you

I can’t find the particular version I grew up with on youtube, but that’s probably a good thing. The lyrics are easy to remember.

Lord I loooooooove yooooou

Lord I loooooooove yooooou

Lord I loooooooove you.

Lord I love you.

Lord I neeeeeeed you.

Lord I neeeeeeeeeed you.

Lord I neeeeed you.

Lord I need you!

Repeat times 50.

Every church band has a staple go-to song when the Spirit moves and you need the congregation to stay in the worship high they are in. You can’t play anything too challenging or too discordant, or the Spirit is lost. This one was my church’s go-to song. I’m not sure if it actually exists and was just the bridge to another song, or what.

2. Lord I lift your name on high.

This is the forced smile of Christian worship.

It’s just so overwrought. YOU MUST BE HAPPY WHEN YOU SING THIS. Like the music and the lyrics are designed to make sure you are happy. You have to raise your voice at “you came from heaven to earth.” Even the downbeat parts are sung too fast for the meaning to register.

1. Any country worship song, ever.

The point of good worship is for you to connect with God. You cannot do this if you are reminded of the song itself.

Country worship always, always reminds you that you are listening to country.

At no point will you ever be unaware of this. Every sappy, syrupy twang will remind you, every drawled syllable of the singer will too. Country gets singled out because it’s “mainstream,” but the effect is just as bad as if every song were heavy metal instead. The country part overwhelms the worship part.

This is possible with other styles, but other styles are infrequent enough not to be noticed. It’s not like whole albums are around New Wave or Bossa Nova praise, and neither of those styles are as big of a cultural marker to some people. And pop in general as in worship tends to be bland as a point; it doesn’t want to get in the way of you and God. But country is both too present and too distinctive for me to worship to. I’m reminded of it rather than the song. I think only people who are steeped in it and really like it can “forget” it and just go on to connect with Him. That’s not a good result on a large level, though perfectly fine on a smaller one.

There’s also larger issues, like the annoyance of how Christianity gets defined as a religion of the South. But in general, a worship song isn’t about you, or how well you twang your geetar. Country is the worst offender in this instance. This is a case of where the best objects of art are ones that are there for the user, not as a statement of the artist. I wish more worship songs were like that.