Christian 'metal' does not exist - part 1
posted on 06 Mar 2007 under category Meta
As I’ve stated before, christian ‘metal’ does not exist. It’s as oxymoronic (and just plain moronic) as ‘jumbo shrimp’ or ‘military intelligence’ or whatever other canard you can throw out. Of course, the devout types never let facts get in the way of their misconceptions, so you have idiots always arguing to the contrary. Not that that’s a problem in itself - their arguments are easy enough to eviscerate. The problem is the mud they stir up to do so, clouding the judgement of even moderate and sensible people to make everyone, erroneously, think that they might have some small point of contention. A recent discussion on a message board I frequent brought that up. Fortunately for my brain cells, I missed the bulk of the discussion, and the thread was basically dead by the time I got to it. It centered on the apparent consistency of christian ideas and doom metal. In the course of the discussion several meta-themes came up that all have areas of misconceptions attached to them, so I will tackle each main area in turn. “What is a christian metal band?”
This is the main area where ‘fudging room’ comes in. As always, a clear definition of terms is required before any serious discussion can begin. And, as always, when christians try to gain any sort of intellectual traction they begin by using as many ‘weasel words’ as possible, hoping for blanket acceptance of the words, unquestioned, so they can sneak in whatever examples support their cause and ignore and/or exclude examples which hurt their cause.
The very idea of a ‘christian metal band’ is one such term. What the obviously mean in every respect are the weak, fake poseurs they are arguing on behalf of - whether Petra, Bloodgood, Deliverance, or other blatantly evangelical bands to those who have made the biggest secular impact, bands like Mortification or Stryper. But what is it about them that MAKES them a ‘christian’ band as opposed to a secular band?
Some try to claim that it’s just because the band members are christians. So what? If the Hoffman brothers are to be believed, Glen Benton was a believer enough to get married in a church - that’s close enough to be nominally ‘christian’, at least as far as society goes. Yet NOBODY would confuse Deicide with a ‘christian’ band. This angle is among the most simplistic, and least used, because it’s the easiest to refute - yet it still gains some traction among the more brain-dead of the koolaid drinkers because of the appeal: see, if “Black Sabbath” are in pictures wearing crosses, that means they were christians, so heavy metal is christian. Now, isn’t that an appealingly easy argument, especially if your brain is incapable of anything more sophisticated?
Obviously, members’ beliefs may inform what a band chooses to write about, but that’s far from the whole story. A band is the music it makes, so a ‘christian’ band is one that make ‘christian’ music. So, let’s look at other areas where there’s less disagreement - pop music. Pop music admittedly often doesn’t seem like it’s about much, but it is about a wide variety of things - often stemming from real life: struggling for identity, dealing with loss, expressing love, sorrow… you find pop songs doing all of these kinds of things. So, what about christian pop artists? They may or may not sing about the full range of topics, but it’s not WHAT they sing about as much as it is HOW they sing about it. Specifically, christian pop music is about EXPRESSING CHRISTIAN VALUES. Therefore, for their argument to work, christian ‘metal’ must be “metal music that expresses christian values”.
“Christian values” is another weasel term, but I’ll deal with that later. For now, let’s grant that there is such a thing as ‘christian values’ and that this thing is ‘a set of moral/epistemological values that a christian accepts by virtue of being christian.’ Whatever those values are, there are some christian values, and some that we can explicitly identify - worshipping god, obeying god, letting god (and his stewards on earth) determine how you will live your life, what moral principles you will hold to, and so forth. Now, the compatibility of this and metal is (or should be) just as obviously fallacious as the former example, as I’ve described in-depth in my essay series on Black Sabbath. In short: the sonic characteristics of metal (melodic choices, song structures, riff stylings, the penchant for power chords, heavy distortion, pounding beats, etc.) are driven not just from a desire for sonic heaviness, but because that heaviness helps drive home the points of the songs - and those songs, upon examination, turn upon themes that are fiercely individualist; constantly decried and rejected are societal structures, pat answers, convention and the herd mentality, and attempts by others to control one’s life or determine one’s fate. What is embraced is questioning authority, rejecting external control, and the power and freedom of the self. An examination of Black Sabbath’s seminal six albums shows this quite clearly, and by that point you start getting into other metal bands (Priest, Venom, et al.) who took it even farther. The corollary of the above is that, of course, a music that praises the individual, embraces freedom, and rejects external control is BY DEFINITION incompatible with christian ideals, which are anti-individualist, freedom-loathing, and all about submission to external control. COMPLETELY INCOMPATIBLE, to say the least.
Now, at this point, you get two diverging arguments. In part 2, I’ll deal with each of these in turn.
(Back when I started writing for Metal-Archives, copying most of my reviews that I’d done for Eternal Frost and LARM, the issue of how many points to give to the pointwhores came up, and the administration there came up with the cockamamie idea to award points based on length of reviews. One of the only smart people on the opposite side of that tried to argue the same thing I did, that ‘length’ didn’t matter anywhere near as much as whether or not you actually managed to convey the essence of what the album is and whether it’s good or not, and that could be done succinctly. As an example, that other person on my side of it pointed to Aerik’s reviews there, saying that Aerik’s reviews were rarely more than five or six sentences, but they always managed to cut right through to the heart of an album, and were much more informative than reviews ten times longer.
I say that as preface to copying here the only comment from the original posting of this essay. Aerik replied with what is essentially the entire thesis of my whole essay series, condensing to one sentence in a way that would make Hemingway green with envy: “Sex, drugs and rock & roll have no place in a Christian world…”)