I was a teenager in the 1980s and remember well the popular Christian perceptions of rock music and culture as a hotbed of decadence and sin. This was the era of the discovery of “backward masking” on records, of the hermeneutics of hidden satanic symbols in album art, and of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center. Those who did not live through that time, such as my undergraduate students, can have difficulty imagining what the public discourse was like. (And that there were congressional hearings on the matter!)

A while back, someone sent me a clip of a more “recent” (as in last decade) commercial that purports to give information about how rock music threatens the salvation of generations of fans:

Is it a hoax? The interpretations of the songs are so wooden, the song quotations so fundamentalistic, and the use of language and graphics so potentially arch (they actually use the word “rockumentary” a few seconds in), that it is difficult to tell how green are the valleys of irony at work here.

But as a child of the 80s, and as someone who has a reckless passion for theology, and also as someone who has seen many sides of rock and roll, I find such anti-rock Christian interventions engaging to watch.

Not because I think the theologies (of salvation, sin, grace, culture, music) that they are advocating are defensible, but because they so richly symbolize many aspects of rock and theology at once, for example: reminding us how hard it is to find serious theological engagements with popular culture in general and popular music in particular; showing us how complex is the location of theological material in popular music (lyrics? interviews? fan behavior?); and, if we have the patience for it, helping us remember that there are some rock personae and some parts of rock culture that are way out there in a bad or dangerous way. (Not that this video has necessarily identified any of them.)

But no Christian critic has the right to a realistic hope that their criticisms will be taken seriously over the long haul unless and until they also acknowledge and integrate the criticisms and insights that there are parts of Christian theological culture that are way out there in a bad or dangerous way. No inquiry comes with clean hands to make theological sense of culture. (Including, if it needs to be said, the very inquiry of this blog posting.) This provides a much different space for inquiry than that usually presumed in Satan-sensitive commercials — or in academic theological engagement with pop culture. And this is why all the basic terms must be revisited — not only Christian colonialism but christology itself, for example — each time one begins a new inquiry in theology of culture, especially from the advantaged theological position that I and others take in this research.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York