#I hate any product/sermon/whatever that’s like congrats for not being a sinner you get a gold star :))

[cookie-nom-nom]

Spirituality is supposed to be hard. So often it’s taught as believe xyz and don’t question it, but that’s obviously unhealthy and authoritarian. From my experience spiritually should be this wrestling with ideas, asking questions and staring dead on at the parts that don’t make sense. A lot of the reason why Christian rock sucks is because it’s just playing it safe, which is an insult to both aspects but specifically rock? You took rock and wanted to make it easily palatable? Seriously?

(Don’t mind me, just going to ramble a bit.) Anyway, I think one of my favorite lines in a contemporary Christian song is “God, are you awake at night?” It comes at a quiet part, almost a plea but also a challenge. And it’s such a human thing, staring at the walls for hours trying to fall asleep, wrestling with thoughts and feeling completely alone. And a lot of the song deals with isolation, so it could be read as reaching out spiritually to try and not feel alone. But I hear it a little different. “God, are you awake at night, too?” And suddenly it’s asking not for protection but for connection. It’s asking if God, too, has doubts and anxiety and feels alone sometimes, if God knows what it’s like to be overwhelmed by your own thoughts. It almost feels like the singer is asking if God can actually be a relatable human. And in general churches try to say yes, of course, Jesus was both divinity and man. But they don’t mean God is actually human, they mean he’s ideally human. He’s not human in all the messy, real ways. And that to me erases the point. Because, yes, Jesus did lie awake at night, wrestling with doubt and fear, praying to God and begging for a way out of his upcoming death. God knows what that fundamentally human experience feels like. It’s less a simple answer of ‘God is there silly so stop being stressed’ and more ‘God has been there too.’ Sympathy v empathy, a deeper connection because it’s relatable, it’s actual kinship. Asking questions maybe isn’t evil and can deepen faith?? Who’d have guess actually analyzing something is good for you. There should be questions in faith. Challenges to both you and your god(s). And that’s why fundamentally most Christian contemporary music isn’t good, because it doesn’t want to ask questions or rock the boat out of fear of losing its audience and money. It wants to be as palatable as possible, distilled down for the sake of profit. Which is a problem with a lot of art designed to have broad appeal, but it gets especially bad in Christian media because it has a basically guaranteed large audience no matter how generic. Which, honestly, is disrespectful both to art and God.

Yall ever heard white church music? Christian rock is one of the most gratingly generic and repetitive genres of music out there by a mile. It sucks so fucking bad. I am talking about this now because someone is sitting in front of the hospital and blaring “how great? Is our god?” As loud as the speakers in his truck can handle