The purposelessness of "praise" music.

What is the real purpose of most church music these days? If it's to worship Yahweh, the eternal and perfect embodiment of intellect, power, beauty, and love, why do so many of the songs lifted to Him betoken and represent none of those things? Why do congregations split over which songs to sing, which instruments whereby to accompany those songs, and any number of similar concerns? I'd venture to say it's because the real reason most contemporary praise music exists is to emotionally manipulate congregations into feeling as though they're worshipping God, whether this is actually what they're doing or not.

In some ways, I wouldn't try to put church music on the same plane as other types of art. Hymns and psalms are specifically designed to help Christians praise and worship God, and to reflect on Him, whereas most art is of a much more universal and less sacramental nature. However, I would urge that church music be held to the same high standard as any other art form, and probably an even higher standard given its purpose.

Contemporary Christians have become obssessed with the suppossedly laudable goal of getting their emotions in the right place about worship. Most of the ancient Church fathers would have agreed that this is largely impossible, at least until essential truths about God had first been grasped and internalized. For instance, it isn't possible to feel the freedom Christ offers through His Gospel until one first understands rationally the claims of Jesus, the nature of atonement, and the existential necessity of conversion, repentance, and sanctification.

The kind of music many (yes, even most) churches favor these days is seemingly designed to bypass the intellect and directly affect "the heart," whatever that nebulous entity might be in today's linguistically challenged culture. To feel God is seen as superior to knowing God, primarily because the intellectual community is seen as merely intellectualizing the faith, and thus separating it from its real-world essence and application. Nothing could be further from the truth, but that's another post altogether.

What's important for this post is that church people could make the fallacy that the life of the mind is somehow unimportant for "real life" and day-to-day experience. It's only by contemplation and study that we can hope to know how God wants us to live. As sinful people, if we let gut-feeling indicate our ethical and behavioral path, nine times out of ten we'll end up doing the wrong thing, and the tenth time when we get it right will be an accident. Studying God's Word, contemplating it, and comparing to it the ideas of other Christians past and present is a vital and essential activity that will trump mere feeling in any circumstance.

Yet the Church has become increasingly anti-intellectual, and this bias has entered the very church service itself. Hymns that teach and illuminate are eschewed in favor of "catchy" songs that evoke emotions, and usually pretty paltry ones at that. God wants us to know that we know who He is and what He's done for us, not simply that we feel good about Him in a vague kind of way.

Obviously, if your Christian life is devoid of emotion, something is wrong. But how can you be sad about Christ's sufferings on your behalf, elated that He has saved you, or anxious to spread this good news, if you don't understand those things at a rational pre-emotional level? Notice that typical praise music avoids negative emotions at all costs in favor of those that will make the singer feel good about himself and about his relation to Christ. So not only does praise music entrench itself firmly in anti-intellectualism, it also denies the negative feelings all Christian ought to feel concerning their sin and their own unworthiness.

The purpose of praise choruses, then, is no purpose at all. If the purpose of praise music is (as I would argue) to make people feel a certain way, it inherently fails because it does not first orient them toward a rationally affirmable truth. People no doubt feel a certain way while singing praise choruses, but it's an inherently empty feeling because it has no foundation. How can we countenance this as God's people? How can we allow our worship of Him to be reduced to a subjective, vapid experience? If we have any sense of who He is, gathered from careful study of His Word, we cannot.