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God Gave Rock 'n Roll To You

By Alun Brookfield.

I do something as part of my ministry which, unless others know differently, is unique. Two and a half years ago, I started a rock and roll singing group in my parish. There are no auditions, so anyone can join, as long as they’re willing to dance as they sing. I started the group for fun, not for any particularly spiritual reason. I didn’t set out with an evangelistic purpose – I just wanted to do something which was fun. Having said that, of the 15 regular members, five are regular churchgoers, and one or two of the others are occasional churchgoers (if churchgoing can be considered as a measure of anything important or useful!).

What do we sing? Well, anything we think we can, and for which we can download a backing track from the internet – pop, country, jazz, motown, Great American Songbook, and good old rock and roll. However, we definitely don’t do classical or stage show music (unless it was pop music first) because lots of other singing groups do that, and we wanted to do something different.

Recently we decided to tackle one of the great rock anthems – Kiss’ powerful and theatrical 1991 version of God Gave Rock and Roll to You (check it out on Youtube), written and first recorded by Argent in 1973, but made famous by Kiss’ version being included as part of the soundtrack to the film, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Learning the song made me wonder about the theology of the title and of the chorus. Did God really give us rock and roll? Did he really give it to everyone, as the song says? Did he really put it in the soul of everyone, as the chorus exults? If so, what do we actually mean when we say that?

Now, gentle reader, before you decide to be deeply offended by what you may be thinking of as a blasphemous suggestion, let me further invite you to consider with me the theological issues involved. And let me defend myself further by saying that these are the questions being asked by the generality of non-churchgoers, although probably not expressed in this form. Their version would be in terms of asking awkward questions about the relationship between God and popular culture, and if we want to re-evangelise our nation and our culture, then we need to get our story clear about the answer to those questions.

1. The God of All Creation

The Old Testament Scriptures clearly portray the Jewish God as the maker and sustainer of everything. I won’t insult your intelligence by giving chapter and verse because that understanding is deeply embedded in the Old Testament Scriptures on just about every page, from Genesis 1 onwards. Paul also picks up the theme in Ephesians and Colossians with his emphasis on the cosmic, all-embracing, transformative nature of Christ’s death and resurrection. If that’s the case, then we must conclude that, in some sense, God did indeed make and give us rock and roll.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. When we affirm that God is the creator of all things, what do we actually mean by that statement? Do we, for example, mean that God actually has a direct influence in all creative enterprise? If so, then we are frighteningly close to saying that he is the creator of evil things as well as of good things, as well as embracing what I regard as a modern heresy that God ‘dictated’ the Scriptures as originally given. After all, it takes a high level of creativity to come up with some forms of murder, torture and other forms of violent activity, such as the manufacture of ever more destructive weaponry. The modern heresy is a clever one because it can blame all errors and contradictions in the Bible on human error, without having to identify the culprit!

This whole question of God’s relationship to his creation is a fiendishly difficult issue and I can’t help thinking that the responsibility for answering it belongs to someone well above my pay grade. However, we can perhaps get a grip on it by particularizing it in an area in which I can claim to have a certain amount of expertise - music. Let me explain.

2. Sacred v. Secular – both created by God?

I was converted to the Christian faith while studying for a music degree, yet one of the first things I was told when I professed conversion was that, although classical music was a good thing, and brass band music was acceptable, popular music – and especially rock music (and possibly most other forms of popular music) – was the invention of the Devil.

The trouble with that point of view is, of course, that the various categories of music have an unfortunate (from the point of view of those who want to keep things tidy) habit of cross-fertilizing each other. Rock music grew out of a fusion of many influences, including the Blues, Afro-American gospel, jazz, musical theatre and what used to be called Country and Western; and its melodic and harmonic structure is rooted in Western European classical music. The result is that it’s quite impossible to separate the child (rock music) from its parents.

I struggled from the beginning. I could not – and still can’t – understand why a Beethoven symphony was ‘good’, as though it had a stamp of divine approval, whereas a Beatles or Rolling Stones song was ‘bad’, apparently because it was rock-related music and therefore lacked a stamp of divine approval. Some Christians seemed to regard Country and Western music as acceptable, but seemed unable to articulate a clear reason why, other than simple, personal preference.

This, of course, was in the late 1960s, the era of Youth Praise, the first (and probably still the best – it’s less anodine than most of the more recent offerings!) of the modern worship song books. It contained a wide variety of musical styles, including some gentle Rock ‘n Roll, and was in extensive use among church youth groups at the time, but, oddly, we weren’t allowed to use it in church, unless it was a “Youth Service”. Apparently, popular music with religious words was acceptable in youth groups, but not in church, whereas popular music with non-religious words was not welcome in either. And why was it OK to play my guitar at the after-church youth meeting on a Sunday evening, but not in church earlier in the day?

The words couldn’t be the problem, I decided, because opera was regarded as ‘good’, if somewhat inaccessible, music by most churchgoers, even though its themes and words were often very coarse. Verdi’s Rigoletto, for example, portrays some appallingly sexist assumptions, and some pretty unpleasant behaviour from several of the characters, almost none of whom have much by way of redeeming features.

Perhaps it was the origin of the music, I thought. Perhaps it needed to have come from a ‘Christian’ source. But no, it couldn’t be that, because Handel’s Messiah was often held up as the greatest of Christian music, even though much of the material was recycled from Handel’s failed Italian operas, many of which portrayed some very debauched behaviour. And Handel’s motivation for writing it was hardly spiritual – he was financially broke and needed a quick money-spinner – and it worked!

The more I reflected about these matters, the more I became concerned about the division between sacred music and secular music. I was particularly perplexed by the Council of Trent’s decision in the 16th century to censure the church composer Palestrina because he chose to weave popular songs into the glorious polyphony of his church music.

The assumption appeared to be that God gave music, but only if it had religious words, not secular ones, and only if it was ‘serious’ music. So God gave music which had the stamp of acceptability by religious leaders, but other sorts of music were, in some way, not the gift of God. I was beginning to feel the dead, cold hand of control freakery on the very thing which I was planning to make my career.

The Intervention of Sin

My conclusion was and remains that, when we say that God is the creator of all things, what we mean is that he is actually the creator of little more than a set of ideas or possibilities: music, art, poetry, dance – and it’s then left to human creativity as to what we do with those ideas. In that sense, we can be comfortable with the idea that God is the giver of all the arts. Fine – I think we can live with that. It leaves creative people free to develop their art in any direction which they choose. It remains God’s gift to us, even if its appearance, sound or presentation are not necessarily either high quality or particularly helpful. In the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s not very good. All creative people get to be very good by producing a fair bit of rubbish along the way.

But where we then run into trouble is when we – or religious control freaks – start trying to use religious content as the touchstone of what constitutes good or bad, good or evil in these concepts.

For example, if I go down to the village pub and there’s one of the local lads with limited guitar skills thrashing out a song which he wrote himself, is that good music or bad? If a brilliant song lyric contains what we describe as swear words, does that make it good or bad? If the lyrics lampoon the Christian faith and even Jesus, is that good or bad? Or, to ask the same question, but in a different way, are those lyrics a gift from God or not? If we’re asking those questions, I would respectfully suggest that they are the wrong questions.

From my perspective as a libertarian and ferocious defender of freedom of speech and expression, I would say that good and bad are purely subjective concepts, and the only question which really matters is whether it is a valid form of artistic expression. For me, and I think for the writers of Scripture, it is all the gift of God, even though it may be (but probably isn’t) a misuse or abuse of that gift. However, if I were a man of power – a Prime Minister or a President or a Christian minister of some kind – I might take a different view, but I think I would be doing so for inappropriate reasons.

My son, Gaz Brookfield (check him out on Facebook), is a professional singer-songwriter. His song, It Doesn’t Matter Who You Vote For, The B*****ds Always Win, tears lumps off the whole political system of the UK – is that good or bad? Actually, it doesn’t matter – what matters is that he is free to sing what he sings. But in other countries, and in many churches, the authorities might take a different view, because, in the end, it’s all about power.

It’s all about power and control!

When we begin to say that this music is good and that music is bad, we are on the fringes of turning God’s gift of music into a power game. That is even more the case when we declare one kind of music to be suitable for religious expression and another kind to be unsuitable.

The truth is that is has ever been so! There was a time in musico-Christian history when the new fangled instrument call an organ was banned (itself an expression of power-play) from churches because they were thought to be a pagan (actually they are Islamic in origin) invention. There was even a time when some free churches banned the singing of hymns because the use of the voice for that purpose was thought to be in some sense sinful, probably because people were enjoying it too much!

For me, this is always about those in power setting the rules so that they remain in power. A fine example of that is Ephesians 5.19 which most translations follow the Authorized Version in describing the music to be used in worship as “Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs”. If ever there was an attempt to preserve the existing structure of worship at the time (early 17th century), it is that translation! I’m no Greek scholar, but I would contend that the correct translation is much more flexible: “Psalms, songs and singing in the Spirit” would be much closer to what I think the author intended. However, in the world of the early 17th century, that would have been far too subversive, calling into question the whole practice of church worship in the Church of England at the time!

God gave rock and roll to you

So did God give rock and roll to us? Yes, he most certainly did, in my view, because rock and roll is one of the most spectacular forms of universal self-expression ever to grace our human race. Rock and roll, with the help of mass media, undermines power structures even more effectively than universal suffrage ever did because any kid with a guitar and the ability to play four chords can use that minimal skill to speak the truth as he or she sees it to any audience who will listen to them. It’s a great shame that rock and roll has been used by powerful people to make financial millions at the expense of the gullible millions (I refer to the whole ghastly ‘X-factor’ phenomenon), but I would defend to the death their right to do so, because, while millions are watching X-factor, in a pub somewhere down the road in every village, town and city in the world, there’s that kid with his battered guitar singing a song which he wrote himself, and he’s singing it to a live audience, and I for one will, in spirit at least, be in the audience listening – and applauding.

I end this provocative little piece with a quotation from Frank Turner, a hard-gigging singer/songwriter with a gift for writing clever and thought-provoking lyrics. In his song, I Still Believe, he sings: “Who’d have thought that after all something as simple as rock ‘n roll would save us all”. Well, if we believe that God gave us rock ‘n roll, we really shouldn’t be surprised, should we?