#The most aggressive religious preachers would just look at me for a second and walk away like “nah”

[chicago-geniza]

well i intended to go for a nice evening walk, ended up having a panic attack, ordering a couple of cocktails at the bougie bar, joining a jam session with a bunch of old hippies on the logan green (one of them gave me a handpainted wooden medallion which seems to be carved out of tree bark, strung on a length of yarn???), met a crustpunk train-hopping dude in town for the month (& his dog, in a leather-studded harness) who's lived in 45/50 states & a 44 yr old guy everyone called "the wizard" wearing a tattered, patch-covered robe who shares most of my parents' conspiracy theories & considers himself a latter-day prophet, he bought us sorbet & ice cream, wound up hanging out with them & staying up all night at their indescribably eclectic, cluttered, blood-spattered (!!!) apartment, belonging to 44 yr old guy's art curator father & decorated accordingly, smoking m*th & listening to music & talking (or rather listening to them rant/rave/recount stories from their incredibly wild lives), i gave them advice on applying for unemployment & medicaid & how to appear compliant enough w/ carceral psychiatric intervention so they won't section you without actually submitting to forced medication or institutionalization, especially if they assign you a case worker & do regular "wellness checks." also how to pass off certain aspects of behavioral dysregulation as executive dysfunction, get them to pay for an adhd evaluation, get an adderall IR scrip, sell the 30 mg pills (cite body weight, high doses of other psych meds as reason for higher dose; look sincere; play to systemic biases toward cis white men, unfortunately), & use the cash to buy m*th, if they'd prefer to keep doing that. you can also pass positive psychotic symptoms--agitation etc.--off as severe anxiety, especially if you have a history of trauma, & they will give you benzodiazepines. it is in their best interest to keep you docile, i.e. tranquilized, particularly if your past convictions & involuntary institutionalizations revolve around a pattern of aggressive behavior, & that's On The Record/there's a paper trail. (e.g. one dude got arrested trying to keep cars away from an injured bird on the road, some genre of raptor i think (???) by threatening them with a shopping cart, not hitting them, but like, running at them as if to collide then feinting at the last minute so they'd swerve out of the way. not the safest or most effective maneuver, lotta reckless endangerment, but the motivation was admirable. probably put the fear of god into some drivers, though. he doesn't seem to have, like, impulse control.) it's a lot easier & you have fewer run-ins with the cops if you game the system & appear cooperative. they gave me this coat, which "just showed up in their apartment one day," like i did. 44 yr old guy walked me back to apartment, stole a street sign & tore down a real estate sign en route, lori lightfoot did indeed take down the pride flag in front of her house on july 1st & replace it with an appropriately patriotic american flag, i walked past the idling plainclothes cop car & another marked police vehicle with their Mayoral Guarding Detail inside at like 4.30 am smoking a menthol cigarette (not inhaling), high on m*th, draped in a neon anime jacket, in the company of a visibly insane, unshaven & unshorn middle-aged man in a technicolor patchwork trenchcoat, holding a lit cigarette in one hand & an upside-down traffic cone in the other, which he was using as an ad hoc amplifier for a noise track playing on my phone. he was also carrying the stolen real estate banner &, inexplicably, a stack of mail. i gave him my old backup phone (no SIM card & doesn't hold a charge long, ancient, but still works), since neither he nor the other dude have phones (cops took them), also one hybrid edible for each of them, as a thanks for the m*th & the kindness. their hearts are in the right place but they have some fucked-up beliefs about "reverse racism" being real, while also saying in the same breath that you can tell our country is irredeemable by the way it continues to

treat black people. we were discussing medical weed for seizures on medicaid & 44 yr old guy mentioned one of his close friends, a black epileptic woman, whose seizures were frequent & severe enough they prevented her from working. then he added, in apparent bemusement, they she hadn't spoken to him in some time, & he wondered why. a little while later he relayed their last conversation & i was like "my dude, i can say with 100% certainty she is not talking to you because you said some *appallingly*, jaw-droppingly racist shit & did not even realize it was racist." then i, comma, a white person, explained to this man that he literally thought of their exchange as, like, an abstract argument over insignificant ideas, a theoretical exercise, & therefore considered it simply a smug gotcha to "counter" hotep theories about egyptian origin by claiming that "if that's true, american slavery & the oppression of black people in america are divine retribution for the enslavement of the jews in ancient egypt, an eye for an eye & a deserved punishment." like, first of all, what the actual fuck, if i were that woman i would also never speak to you again, second of all there's the collapse of historical time & mythical time, history & exegesis, an assumption that rests on spurious claims of biblical literalism (zionist colonization logic, btw! him: what's exegesis? what's zionism? me: never mind, not the point. exegesis is the interpretation of religious texts in a religious CONtext, in this case what you would likely call the hebrew bible.)--but most importantly it is 100% irrelevant to this discussion whether or not black americans are Actually Factually descendended from ancient egypt! you just told this woman to her face that the ancestry she claims, of which she's proud, is the reason & justification for SLAVERY & BLACK SUFFERING--not only that, but that if it WERE true, than black people would DESRVE to suffer, by DIVINE DECREE. you are trying to force her to abdicate her claim on this heritage by putting her in a position where she'd be forced to concede complicity in her people's historical & present-day persecution, oppression, & essentially the existence of structural racism. & using The Figural Jew as a rhetorical cudgel to bludgeon her into this corner. what a despicable thing to say. like, he hadn't considered it from her perspective at all, & once he groked why the comment itself was, like, unforgivable (idk, maybe she's more forgiving; she has a virtue-name), i started socratic-method-ing him through why it was particularly unforgivable for *him* to say to *her*--the individual is not responsible for the systems from they benefit, but they are imbricated in them, they are implicated when they actively perpetuate & uphold them, even with speech acts. & finally gave the same "there is no such thing as reverse racism because racism is not an individual act, it is an institutional, systemic phenomenon, & it is an ideology, one which individual acts can bear out or be in accordance with, & to which individuals can subscribe (this bearing it out in their behavior, in their institutional roles, in their interpersonal interactions--here i gave & solicited examples of each) or be subject (also gave & solicited examples). m*th makes me very good at Explaining clearly & he was surprisingly receptive--like, it was astonishing that it had not occurred to him??? but it hadn't, the same way it hadn't occurred to my mother, & she interpreted it as "reverse racist" when their next-door neighbor called her the "white devil" for disputing their property line, & i had to be like "ok but if you called in a random third party to mediate in lily-white [city], oregon, where white supremacists openly drive down the street in pickup trucks with swastika armbands, whose side do you think they would take, statistically speaking, in your property dispute. that's why racism is systemic & institutional, & your rude neighbor calling you a name over a disagreement does not constitute 'reverse racism,' because 'reverse racism' by definition cannot

exist." now this dude wants to like, read books, so i gotta get him some entry-level Intro To Racism primers??? how did i end up here, but better me than his black epileptic (ex-)friend, i guess??? jesus christ. both of these guys have the most chaotic, reactionary politics in a potpourri with these deep commitments to abolition & mutual aid & a kind of proto-anarchist consciousness, none of which would be called by those names, but all of which is borne out in practice & in the politics of everyday life. they remind me a LOT of my parents. i'm loath to imagine how they'd internalize my stepdad's rambling, street-preacher-style libertarian lectures. probably go out & buy guns & invest in gold on the stock market & double down on the conviction that free speech is being curtailed & individual rights are in jeopardy because you can no longer unleash a barrage of harassment against some guy on the street because you think he looked at you funny. these claustrophobic convictions, like the space to express oneself is getting smaller & smaller every day, *other people* are taking it away from you, suffocating you on all sides with their offense demanding your silence, they are *making* the walls close in--when in fact it's more like a holodeck. you're a member of the Hegemonic Group, afforded the privilege of the default, so you don't question the vast verdant expanse that is your domain--ah, Free Speech, the sun never sets on the empire of ~uncensored expression, you can say whatever you want whenever you want without facing consequences because you control all the organs that mete out consequences & you have also determined that those groups who might be adversely affected by your words--emotionally OR materially--are not, well...of consequence. but of course the vast verdant domain is an illusion, photons & forcefields, held together by the all-encompassing TOTALITY of the dominant group's hegemony, power, etc. once that power begins to redistribute throughout the system--however unevenly, however incrementally, however slowly--as even the smallest pieces are appropriated by those deemed inconsequential, who have endured years of systemic, material, institutional violence that allowed the dominant group to become dominant & retain its dominant position--once those 'inconsequential' groups speak up & say "actually, these words bear an indelible imprint of the violence enacted upon us, these words are the legacy of that violence, these words are a tacit endorsement of the ideology behind that violence, which classifies us as subhuman, & even if *you* can't hear those echoes, the words broadcast on two historical frequencies, so now that we're able to broadcast on a frequency *you* can hear, we request you find other language, & consider the implications of the words you've been using for years." well--once The Subaltern Speaks, the dominant group loses its 'innocence,' & becomes aware the vast verdant expanse of language is an illusion of infinite space, aware of the four holodeck walls pressing in behind the simulacrum of the horizon, & suddenly "what one can say without negative consequences"--largely social, sometimes, rarely, if social media goes viral, professional--feels much more claustrophobic. so they get angry. & some of them are just bigots, obviously, but some of them--like my parents, &, even, this weirdly well-intentioned m*thhead who said one of the most shockingly racist things i've heard in my life & *honestly didn't understand why it was racist*, is really riled up about free speech & individual rights, hates the government, hates "FANG" (facebook amazon netflix google) & has a bunch of dystopian conspiracy theories about data harvesting & personal information that only miss the mark in that they get too nefariously biopolitical (billionaires want to put microchips in everybody for surveillance to monitor our movements & sell us more stuff; they don't need to, they already use our phone location & browsing habits to generate the algorithm & sell the information to ad companies lol, it's digital& cast a

single illuminati figure in the role of comic book villain, controlling the operation behind the scenes like an evil puppetmaster (classic conspiracy fare; again, we gotta take that energy, that suspicion, the understanding that they are being taken advantage of & tricked, the idea that power & capital & resources are concentrated among a very small number of people, however it's not an individual wealthy villain with a desire for world domination who wants to turn Free Americans into microchipped drones, it's a *class* of people--or rather several classes, but *who those people are as individuals does not matter*. if you guillotined bill gates, another billionaire would take his place. bill gates qua bill gates is not the problem. it is classes of people who control the means of production & own property & profit enormously from exploiting the labor of a desperate, rapidly increasing underclass, i.e. from the system as it is. therefore it is in their interest to maintain the status quo, because it serves them. 'the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.' the middle class gradually ceases to exist. if you want to compound it by race, consider the GI bill as an example - you learn about it as the leg up that enabled thousands of WWII vets to buy houses, enabling them to enter the middle class. hundreds of thousands of third-gen middle class white americans still reap the structural, socioeconomic benefits of their grandparents' initial upward mobility, including,, very tangibly, those selfsame houses, which can be inherited & then rented out as a second property if the children or grandchildren accrue enough money to buy their own properties. but only about 100 black vets got approved for homeownership loans, despite the staggering numbers of black soldiers who enlisted & applied through the GI bill. anyway! the impulses are there, & they're only being funneled into conspiracy thinking because that makes intuitive sense on a narrative level. these guys have a high school education; so does my stepdad. their reading habits are...eclectic, sporadic, pretty much dictated by occasional recommendations & like, little free libraries around the neighborhood. it's both interesting & frustrating to see like - hey, here are these people, we agree on a lot of things, they're earnest & open & want to learn & would give their neighbor the shirt off their backs as a matter of principle. they'd give a *stranger* the shirt off their backs; they'd share whatever they had. even what chores there are in their collective--they live with two other guys--(dumpster diving, walking the dog, tidying up the apartment) are allocated by ability & inclination. they made advance plans to look after the dog & their roommate with War PTSD on the 4th of july if the fireworks upset them, jokingly called the dog an emotional support animal. you give them the tools, the reading, talk to them like normal people with a stake in society--like, imagine a society that would have a stake in people like you instead of criminalizing you & consigning you to the margins! that's already *political imagination* because anyone who occupies a marginalized position will have their existence politicized, whether they want this or not, so better to become a self-aware, self-reflexive political subject, no?--talk *with* them because tbh i am them, i'm just better at situational masking & also i am very very afraid of cops so i only damage property in groups during planned political actions (not spontaneously, because i feel a flash of rage at my neighborhood gentrifying, & simply do not have a superego, so i tear down the real estate sign for the fancy new apartment complex in a fit of pique, because in this house we believe that spontaneity can & should be developed into class consciousness, again, the seeds of which are there in the initial trigger for the spontaneous reaction, i.e. anger at gentrification. not opposed to a little direct action, but they're just gonna put up a new sign tomorrow, it doesn't advance your agenda or hinder the gentrifiers' progress. now, if

you sabotaged the construction site for the new apartment buildings & painted a few potent symbols + graffiti'd a pithy, written statement expressing your opposition to gentrification generally & these apartments specifically? in a prominent place, large font, eye level, visible & legible from oh, a block away? maybe as a member of a collective, your neighbors, perhaps? & you could sign it "[neighborhood] or [block] residents" to pack more of a punch, the power of a crowd speaking in unison to say "not OUR home, you predatory developers"? that's no longer spontaneous, impulsive, affective violence, & it's also no longer an individual--acting alone leaves you vulnerable. again--i didn't just *intuit* that he tore the sign down because he was mad about gentrification, i asked, in a genuinely curious tone, not at all accusatory, no hint of reprimand or censure, just...interested, "why did you do that?" & he was like "it made me fucking mad." & i was like "what about it made you mad? the apartments? how come?" & he thought about it for a minute & explained. i'm not sure *he* necessarily made the conscious connection until prompted. idk, i know people talk a lot about the fact that breitbart & drudge report are free while NYT & "all the news fit to print" is paywalled, & q-pilled covid hoax sites are free while "reputable" pandemic coverage & public health guidelines & explanations of mRNA vaccines for a lay audience are paywalled & that's true but also We Live In A Society & if you talk to the wingnuts who AREN'T that way because of any far-right ideology, a lot of them are just...autodidacts without much formal education but a lot of raw intelligence that leads to analyzing The Big Picture & trying to deduce a pattern, find a framework that explains why the world is the way it is, profoundly frustrated, deeply aware of American society's, universalized & figured as the world's, exceptional unfairness & cruelty, & *that can be redirected* with reading, discussion, prompting critical thought, introducing community connections, & perhaps most importantly for this genre of person, getting them to see patterns at work in terms of systems & structures rather than individuals, letting go of American individualism's explanatory power & belief in its liberatory potential (see: the sort of ad hoc libertarianism that goes hand-in-glove with much conspiracy thinking, both stemming from 1) mistrusting the government, & 2) ultimate freedom of the individual as the most sacred value, therefore it is what all enemies want to take away), outlining positive, actionable goals rather than just ambient suspicion & anger at authority, & figuring out how those goals can be accomplished more effectively by an organized collective (but this will ultimately benefit the individual). If the world isn't run by a shadowy cabal, if you begin to understand the structures responsible & how they manifest even on the scale of your block (e.g.!!! predatory developers buying up properties during a pandemic, tearing down affordable housing to build expensive condos on the lot, or giving old buildings a "spit and polish" so they can double the rent, pricing all the current residents out, not to mention all the little local businesses, almost all mexican & run by the mexican families who live here, that give our block its culture & will get pushed out by boutique coffee shops & the like, catering to a more affluent & almost certainly whiter clientele)--you can, in fact, change the world, something both of them repeatedly referred to as their purpose on earth. it may not be as a maverick figure, one against an army, but strength in numbers is an aphorism for a reason.

anyway! thse guys were also really weird about jews, in the philosemitic way conspiracy theorists of a certain stripe often are. the itinerant vagabond guy gave me one of his drawings; it's really lovely. i'm going to give them "are prisons obsolete?" & "the wretched of the earth" & some david graeber. 44 yr old guy has this idea that society is atomized & people aren't connected to each other & have lost the willingness or the ability to communicate with each other, also that the overreach of authority has driven some people to violence, & that makes the world feel unsafe to everyone else. he feels guilty because he is acutely aware that language, when wielded adroitly & intentionally, always has the capacity to manipulate; he is afraid of succumbing to the temptation, because he senses the coercive power of language within himself. the other guy was mostly quiet but said 44 yr old guy is one of the best friends he's ever had. he thinks animals are able to sense emotions and to heal, & he thinks they can mediate between people who have become too isolated, who have forgotten humans' innate ability to forge connections, approach others as social creatures seeking to bond instead of mistrustful, apprehensive, rejecting overtures of friendship because they expect subterfuge, or propriety has evolved to deem such overtures inappropriate outside of strictly delineated, artificially orchestrated contexts. deviation from the norm is not permitted. & back again to policing. they have an idea called "the omega family," omega for the end, a group of like-minded people who come together, who encounter each other serendipitously (predicted through auspicious auguries & recognized on sight through a constellation of signs & wonders, because of course we are all psychotic here, it was nice to just be psychotic & discuss these things like they were normal lol), & serve as catalysts to each other's "personal truth." anyway this is why i don't go out when i'm crazy, i always end up in situations like this, see also: the last time i did m*th, in a pizza hut bathroom in tallinn with an art student from glascow named muhammad ali (he went by ali), the son of white muslim converts--we thought it was c*ke but it got lost in translation & that's how i figured out i had adhd. later i got [redacted] by a filmmaker from kazan & he gave me his business card afterward for some reason, which was extremely funny. thankfully these dudes were better behaved. one of them even gave a speech about how men shouldn't rape people??? & also how our society shouldn't construct women as universal victims because in doing so it makes victimhood almost compulsory & shoehorns women into a victim role as part & parcel of womanhood? i was like yes my dude you are almost there, read the essay "abject feminism." (i did not tell them i was trans bc i wasn't sure how that would shake down, to be honest; couldn't get a read on it. did tell them i was gay & they respected it, though one did say he dated a lesbian once, & i explained that many men feel compelled to interject with an anecdote relating an exception to the rule or insist that they will he the exception to the rule, & it's really just bad manners, not even getting into the bad politics. he took it on the chin & talked about how the girl in question came home to find her partner dead of an overdose & his wife had just died of MS, so their relationship was more about grief & comfort than sexual attraction. i was like that's really, really sad, & it's wonderful that you were able to be there for each other at a time of such staggering loss, & i am a person who totally understands what you mean to communicate, but if a lesbian tells you they're a lesbian & you reply that you once dated a lesbian & they get offended & instead of responding with contrition or correction you elaborate on the tragic backstory of the relationship as though that explains the circumstances in which a self-proclaimed lesbian would date a cis man, other lesbians *will* deck you, or at the very least not take you, an unwashed white guy in

his 40s who isn't neurotypical & sits way too close for social convention in a way that could easily be construed as a come-on, in good faith.) tl;dr made some new friends, did some good drügs (i much prefer smoking m*th to snorting it, basically like purer, more potent adderall, & as such will not be doing it again for a LONG time, because i enjoy it FAR too much; slices through the brain fog & the chronic fatigue & the joint/bone pain, makes me able to pay attention, follow the thread of a conversation, actually be *interested* & want to ask *questions* & expand, build, encourage my interlocutor to elaborate, place more kal-toh pieces until the conversation shimmers into a three-dimensional shape, instead of being listless & exhausted & disengaged & *bored* all the time, so obviously i would get addicted immediately if given the opportunity, & i've known this forever lol)--now going to hydrate, refill pill case, write some emails, & meet C at the beach! not how i expected to reboot my brain, but it works! also putting them on limited facebook view because i try to keep some groups of people in my life quarantined from each other & that includes 1) my relatives & my academic ~colleagues (ne'er the twain shall meet), 2) my exes & my family, 3) my relatives, colleagues, & uh. a couple of lovely, but extremely psychotic dudes with very long criminal records i met while doing hard drugs

[extroversive-introvert]

Addressing (and Aggressively Assaulting) Sacred vs Secular Again

PREFACE

Last month my youth ministry hosted its annual conference (my final one, perhaps ever, thanks to my migration) and on the second night had the supposedly “controversial” decision to host an afterparty with a DJ, playing EDM tunes you’d typically expect to hear at a nightclub. A lot of people have come up to me on separate occasions over the course of December and January asking for my thoughts on it. I decided to pen a 3,500+ word collegiate essay so I can redirect future enquirers to one place.

The Radio Game

I once played a “Christian or secular” game among friends in my religious circles, where a short excerpt of music is played and someone has to guess whether it’s secular or Christian music. The most accurate guesser wins. This is surprisingly easy for me. Especially radio stations. It’s easy to spot a Christian station far before any Christianese is said to confirm it.

At gut level, I find something very disingenuous about so-called Christian music. Country, pop, rock all have distinguishable sheens; the Christian variation is blander. The vocals are hot in the mix because the words are important. Much like country music, the compression style and Nashville tones are there but the delivery lacks the humanness and soul country has. You might get what I mean by fake emotion. There’s something more believable about a whispery promiscuous voice promoting drugs and sex on CHR top 40 stations over the voice that copies the style while putting Jesus lyrics to it. It’s not even the style of lyric that bothers me, but that I  don’t believe the singer is feeling the emotions that would lead to that kind of singing. It’s the same weird uncomfortable feeling when somebody belts a really loud, obviously fake laugh.

Marketing Zombies

Example, I grew up with pop punk bands like blink-182, Green Day, Linkin Park, and My Chemical Romance. The problem with Christianising is that emo music isn’t simply reducible to certain grunge tones and heavy power chords. There are emotions intrinsic to the genre that make the soul of the music. You can’t remove anger from the screaming and have it still be screamo. You can’t remove the bass-heavy pulsing and alternating tremolo tones from EDM trance music. You can’t take away the mixolydian chords and spontaneous comps and  raw organic atonalism from jazz. It’s the soul of that music, good or evil is immaterial; it’s simply the soul. So when you remove the soul from music and transplant the body parts (chord progression, instrumentation, dress, lights, look, basically everything but the soul) and parade it with more “positive, edifying” lyrics masquerading as Christian music, what you get is a musical zombie. It looks human, walks, talks, resembles humans, but isn’t. It’s a zombie without a soul, using a human body for its purposes.

This is my primary indicator every time I play the “Christian or secular” music game. I gaze into its eyes to see if it has a soul or not. It takes me no more than a few seconds. The industry is and has been broken for a long time. We call it “Christian contemporary”, but it’s not based on Christianity, but more so in marketing. Which I’ve also studied in depth.

When the foundation of the market and music you are trying to make is pretense, it’s very hard to be honest and successful. There is an unspoken assumption from most of us that we really want the people on the stage or on the book or album cover or on the radio need to have it together more than we do. Because we are messed up, we need them to be a sort of saviour and hope for us. The result of this is that it’s often the people who are really good at pretending that they have it all together that make it to the stage and the book or album cover and the radio stations. The interesting thing about massive Christian music tours is that most stages are in mainstream venues: clubs, theatres, etc...

But to me, the sad part is the empty bar each night. Even though these shows were all sold out, I would imagine that the bartenders at all those clubs were like “oh man, Christian night… that means no tips for me.” I know some promoters would buy out the bar so there wouldn’t be any liquor sales at all. I’m not saying that I wished that everybody was getting hammered at the show… but for crying out loud, buy a beer. Or heck, if you don’t drink alcohol, buy a Coke.

But here’s what’s weird about this situation. I bet you if you took all of those Christians that came to the shows and split them up and had them go to “secular” shows, A LOT of them would have bought a drink or two. It’s the fact that there is this assumption among all of the Christians there that having a drink at a Christian event is sort of a taboo thing to do. Why is this?

It’s certainly not because of the Bible. Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding. And not just any wine. The kind of wine that made people think they saved the very best wine until the end. And you preachers who pervert the holy writ of Scripture with your own extremely biased interpretations, here’s a newsflash, people at parties don’t think the best wine is  your Sunday morning “non-alcoholic Ribena/grape juice”. Religious people didn’t call Jesus “a glutton and a drunkard” because He ate communion loafers and grape juice all the time.

And here’s the thing. I drink socially. Shocker. I don’t even drink very much. I’ve never been drunk in my life, and I’m not advocating that people should just be foolish with their drinking or eating habits. But for the love of my sanity, this whole spiritualising of alcohol being an inherently bad thing is bloody annoying. If I didn’t know Jesus, I’d have probably dropped an f-bomb where “bloody” would be. It’s mostly just a Western thing, by the way (as well as places where America has exported these ideas with our missionaries). If you go most other places in the world, or anywhere else in history for that matter, Christians drink alcohol. Ever heard of this thing called Communion? You know, the bread and the wine? That’s a pretty big deal in Christianity. Jesus didn’t pour out a cup of grape juice.

So Christians that would normally buy a beer don’t because they are in the Christian concert. Christian bands that smoke (more than you think, if not most, do) have to duck into back alleys as to not offend anybody. I personally think smoking is stupid. But I think it’s stupid because it smells bad and it kills you. But I don’t use my religion as a moral high horse self-righteously judge other people about it.

Rather than just being honest about where we are at and what we all struggle with though, we look to our gatekeepers to believe and live morally vicariously for us. That way we feel better about being part of the system of good, and the moral brokenness in our own lives is repressed like the fear of a child with her security blanket that is never faced down and eviscerated, which eventually develops unchecked into a more demonic stronghold in later years of adulthood. This sort of two-faced dishonesty is at the heart of much of what I and so many others find so repulsive about much of modern Christendom.

Actually, you know what the alcohol nonsense is based on? MONEY.

The traditionalists in the Baby Boomer pioneer generation are the people that give the most money to Christian organisations like religious media outlets. And these people grew up in a time where alcohol was seen as a taboo social reality. Just like dancing or playing cards or what they used to call “mixed bathing” (swimming). It’s based in an era of post-World War II prohibition. These are old American values we’re dealing with, not Christian values. It’s the old American people that have money that the Christian organisations are paranoid of offending. So they create an environment where drinking is seen as pure malice and wickedness. If you want to start a televangelist ministry or apostolic network, you can’t have it known to your donours that your staff likes to go out for drinks at the bar after work. So you implement rules for them. Do you know how common this is? Do you see the irony of this? If you had been a disciple of Jesus and drank some of the wine of His first recorded miracle with him, you would be fired from a lot of the churches in the country. Shame on us.

The point is, the way the industry labels things as Christian and sells them to you is more to do with marketing than Christianity. They market the cornucopia of historically religious, western values, and cultural boundary markers that created the sectarianism of Evangelical subculture, setting “us” apart from “them”, which makes us feel safe and righteous, while making the gatekeepers rich.

It’s also strange to me when people call those who deviate from the mainstream to stay true to their artistic integrity as “creative”. Artists like Gungor, David Crowder, or John Mark McMillan. Why do we feel it necessary to say that? Notice no one really says that about other types of music. In reviews of certainly authentically creative bands like Radiohead, Bon Iver, Sigur Ros, Bob Dylan, Owl City, Sufjan Stevens, Explosions in the Sky, Jamiroquai, rarely do you see the word “creative” pop up. No one goes to an art gallery and says, “wow that painting is so creative”. Why? Because art is intrinsically creative. Why else would it be there? Its very nature is creativity. It’s like telling me “I love your house because it’s so architectural.”

But when someone in the Christian industry takes their art seriously, everyone loses their collective shit over “how creative it is”. It’s almost like a person living among zombies for years sees an actual human being and exclaims, “look how clean his face is, there’s life for once”. It’s sad that the idea of creativity is so foreign to the Christian music industry that we have to actually point out when someone sees art as art and not zombie propaganda.

Does “Christian” music really exist?

Furthermore, one of my biggest pet peeves is the existence of so-called “Christian music”. Why do we call it that? Music can’t be “saved”. When I hear those songs, it’s not like I can give an altar call for the songs to walk to the front and receive Christ, then baptise them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and partake of communion together with them before I listened to them. Why is Christianity the only religion that has their music segregated by faith rather than genre? Why is it that every time I go to the iTunes store, I don’t see a Muslim section, a Buddhist section, an atheist section, an agnostic section? I can’t be the only one who finds it weird that all music is genre-divided, except for Christian music, which is separated by religious worldview.

I formally indict both Christian and non-Christians: on Christians because we like to retreat into our own subculture, and non-Christians because Jesus followers don’t have a voice in the industry at large.

The whole secular-sacred bullshit (yes, I said bullshit and I’ll say it again. Bullshit. Fight me.)  came from Greek philosophy, which distinguishes things of the body as evil and things of the spirit as important. God never made things to be inherently evil. He didn’t create everything so they’d be “Christian or not”. He created molecules and said they were “good”. It’s only when sin corrupted humanity’s genome, that the violation of our design spawned evil in this world from the tainting of our nature.

People talk about “sinning against God” by listening to and endorsing secular music. But as His image-bearers, we should reflect a proper image of the creativity of God. When we make bad things, we are reflecting a false image of God’s nature. If the Creator Himself is your dad and you have His DNA and you suck at creating, I would consider that a greater sin against God.

You are saying God’s a copycat, when He isn’t. You are saying God is cheesy, when He isn’t. You are saying God doesn’t believe in the excellence of all things, when He does. You deceive yourself.

Yeah, I went there. Fight me.

Jesus in your average Bangla worker

Why is it that art in the church traditionally is only a stained-glass portrayal of Jesus’ crucifixion? Is there no such thing as art in the Christian world outside of salvation? Can art just speak for itself as something beautiful and true and still reflect Jesus? 1 Timothy 4:4 states “For everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” That means God should get a lot more glory for things than we are willing to give Him credit for. If we only acknowledge Him for overtly Christian things, we are glory thieves. He wants EVERYTHING. When we bite into food, it’s an opportunity to praise God for taste buds and the pleasure of the ability to eat. When we listen to good music, it’s the same for the sheer creativity of forming something from nothing, similar to the story of Creation itself. When we see His handiwork in the sky or in nature or in general, it’s the same.

Another noteworthy thing: Peter was a fisherman. Paul was a tent-maker. Jesus was a carpenter.

How strange is that? Jesus literally made things out of wood all day. He wasn’t a temple rabbi, but a wood craftsman. An average, blue-collared, 9-to-5 layman. Your average Bangla worker. How sobering the thought is of how quickly we would pass Him today if we saw Him on the street. Excepting vocations that violate Scripture (like prostitution or sorcery), most Bible-time followers of Christ retained their jobs. If a blacksmith became a Christian, he stayed a blacksmith, just a blacksmith to the glory of God.

Paul repeats it numerous times in Ephesians and Colossians, but for example’s sake in 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it for the glory of God.” Note that there’s no codicil that states “only if that eating or drinking is done in an outrightly Christian way like communion or after-church potlucks”. We should not consolidate God’s glory to explicitly “Christian” things, because we owe Him more praise than He is due. God gets glory for everything, and every tongue will eventually glorify God, be it through His grace or His justice.

When non-Christians speak the truth

In Acts 17 before the Areopagus council, Paul quotes pagan poets Epimenides and Aratus: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being: as certain also of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’” to prove his point. 

How many of you today would rebuke Paul for quoting secular philosophers instead of the Torah? Truth is truth no matter if it comes out of the mouth of a donkey, a philosopher, a newscaster, a sinner, the president, or a prophet of God. In fact, if we are being transparent, a lot of times when we reject truth coming from non-Christian sources, we’re trying to vindicate ourselves by justifying our disobedience in spiritualising our dysfunction.

If we are so picky about secular-sacred over music, why don’t we apply it everything else to maintain our consistency? Imagine you’re in the ICU at the hospital. How awkward would it be if you told your doctoral team that’s about to operate on you and save your life: “are you all Christians? If not, you can’t perform surgery on me!” That’s stupidity. We judge doctors based on their field of expertise. Either the doctor is good at medicine or not. And you can give God glory and praise when you walk out of the operating room healed because He has uniquely anointed the doctor with a gift in order to bring Him praise, whether the doctor is Christian or not.

The same goes for art and music. It’s not about a piece of work being “Christian” or not, but about being authentic, beautiful and excellent. Paul states in Romans 11:36 that “from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever.” This means God is glorified in everything He creates. Does this mean everything has to be received and accepted? No! That’s why Scripture is the litmus test - does it hold up? Does it line up? Does it reflect God’s character in Jesus?

Creation Mandate or Salvation Mandate?

God cares about every domain of life - science, arts, government, culture - it’s all His. He wants redemption in those fields, and He redeemed us that we might redeem them in His name. We are created to cultivate, not just talk about religious things all day. Jesus makes it very clear He came to build His Kingdom. This isn’t just a consecrated clique, but a lifestyle entirely encompassing every realm of society. If we don’t realise it’s about the redemption of not just people but the entirety of creation, we’ll reduce church doctrine to escapism rather than restoration. Music is God’s. Sex is God’s. God invented them and called them good. Creativity is the wisdom of God manifest.

The issue with our subculture is that our art and glorification of Jesus weakens when we lose our sense of comparison. This happens when Christian musicians aren’t shooting to be the best musicians, but the best Christian musicians. The standards are lowered. Art can speak for itself. It’s a reflection of the creation mandate, not the salvation mandate. Rather than making Christian music, we should make music with a Christian worldview, much like how atheists, Budhist, and others do when they make music. There is nothing about music that is inherently Christian; it’s the worldview in the music that has the potential to be.

When we privatise our art to a nonexistent “Christian” sector, we see churches feeling the need to be relevant rather than just using their gifts to reflect who God is and what He is like. That’s the root of the seeker-sensitivity issue everyone seems to be losing their collective religious marbles about. And the problem with that is that it makes us cheap copycats of what our culture already does. This puts us decades behind “secular culture” because rather than setting precedent, we’re riding their coattails hoping to recycle intact scraps for ourselves. That’s not redeeming. That’s stealing. And if you want to have a taste of your own religious medicine, what does the Ten Commandments say about stealing?

The Laziness of Escapism

The problem with counterfeit art and Christian subcultures is that it tells a sinful lie about God. When we become lazy and only copy other art to make it Christian, we are essentially saying God is a cheap copycat and a fake who requires culture’s creativity. If God is Creator, aren’t His people supposed to be the most creative? When we make art and engage culture, what kind of picture and message are we giving the world about God? How would that convince them that God is better?

The truth is, God is a God of excellence. He accomplishes things above and beyond, lavishing excessively and adding subtle nuances to bring His name glory. When Jesus spoke to Peter about starting the church, He said “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The crazy thing about that statement is that gates don’t move on their own. For them to “not prevail”, something has to be charging them, because in the militaristic sense of the word, they are a defensive structure. Jesus is implying that the Church will storm the gates of hell, not fleeing in the opposite direction. We should be engaging and infiltrating and repelling the realms of darkness as a powerful offensive. He doesn’t commission us to retreat, escape, and cling to each other because the powers of hell chase us in the domain of secular music and evil movies. No, He says infect every domain in life with His grace as radioactive contagions.

There is no divide between secular and sacred, and we completely miss the point of worship when we insist on it. God created everything, so something doesn’t have to be explicitly Christian. We judge things based on beauty and truth. God owns truth. He has a monopoly on truth. As Christians, we should be setting the bar for good art and culture, not sequestering ourselves away into our pathetic little sectarian subculture and copying the art we call is "the devil's work" in order to "Christianise" it and make it palatable for an audience who won’t see art for art, as art regardless.