Why try to engage theology with rock and roll here and now with the USA at war, with a financial crisis rearranging lives and livelihoods, with so many serious moral questions impossibly demanding the attention of every thinking adult? Are we not at risk of too casual an approach to a discipline with as weighty a set of concerns as theology? Or, as one of my colleagues said to me, “I sure wish I had time to write about fun topics.” Ought theology only deal with topics of the deepest sobriety? Or indeed, are rock musics and their cultures only “fun” matters? What right, then, have we to devote theological resources to rock?

First, as seemingly all research in cultural studies seems to agree, rock and its cognate musics figure significantly in the practice of everyday life. For North America and the Western-influenced globe, secular music comprises an influential environment; certainly one with which a great many of our students live, with which many in theological cultures live. Robert Wuthnow’s research on generational differences in American religion has found that with regard to the arts, “the most notable generation gap is in preference for contemporary pop/rock music. Nearly four-fifths of young adults in their twenties say they especially like it; fewer than one-fifth of adults age 65 and older do. Other kinds of music, such as classical and country, are generally favored more by older adults than by younger adults. This includes those who especially like Christian music and gospel music.” (After the Baby Boomers, Princeton, 2007, p. 130) As Journalist John Allen wryly observes, today’s students of theology are “usually far more catechized by pop culture than by the church” ( John Allen, “Navigating the Future of Theology,” National Catholic Reporter, 14 November 2008, p. 2a), and according to historian Tim Blanning, the form of pop culture that seems to be most widespread and influential in everyday Western life is secular music (The Triumph of Music, Belknap/Harvard, 2008).

This environment gets registered quantitatively in the significant amount of time that people spend “consuming” rock in its many media and “products”; and qualitatively in the defining emotional and spiritual significance attached for individuals and groups to certain pop culture experiences. In most teaching situations, if I ask people of almost any age to reflect on a “secular” pop culture event or process that has been important for their sense of who they are or what they are about, or ask what scene, lyric, sound or reference they call upon to get through questions or crises, or to remember or incite joy or vision, almost everyone has an example of a favored movie, television show, and especially a song. Considerable research in various disciplines bears out how importantly these musics register what the Second Vatican Council famously called the joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties of people today, and, this research shows, thus are for the maintenance of ongoing identity today. We are still learning what it means for us in this culture of secular musics for Karl Rahner to have told us, “We are not like a street, on which the endless stream of moments passes and then is just as empty as it ever was, once the moments have passed. We are much more like a storehouse, in which every moment leaves something behind as it passes, namely that part of it which is eternal.” (Karl Rahner, Prayers for a Lifetime, Crossroad, 1995, p. 62) That Rahner prayed this, as well as that “It is both terrible and comforting to dwell in the inconceivable nearness of God, and so to be loved by God [such] that the first and last gift is infinity and inconceivability itself” (Prayers for a Lifetime, p. 3), these will give me some coordinates for a theological allowance of rock.

Second, I am presented with an investment in the relation between rock and theology because I am called as a theologian and a rock musician. I have been active in rock cultures as a musician for 23 years, and as a fan for almost 30 years, twice as long as I’ve been in academic theology. I have not been able to bracket or unlearn rock and roll, nor at the level of my everyday life have I wanted do. And it has become increasingly evident for my academic theological life that I must not. And I see now how intertwined these have been: My discovery of the potential power of secular musical life in adolescence and young adulthood coincided with my discovery of the potential power of Catholic life. I mention these bits of personal history because I think that how we constellate the relationship between rock and theology has a lot to do with what we make consciously and unconsciously, conceptually and emotionally, of our autobiography, in relation to how we experience secular and spiritual practices. For myself, I am aware that I have been someone who has been made to coinhabit “secular practices” and “spiritual practices”, the relations of which to each other constitute the central problem of my theological work—and of my musical life. In other words, my felt sense for a multiplicity of habitation bears some irreducibility… at least so far.

Third, theology and rock already have each other. This having is “actual” in the sense of theology being involved in the history of rock (its gospel foundations, its black historical foundations, its gestures of transcendence, its racial abasements). It is “potential” in the sense of theology’s needfulness in face of models of divine experience allowed in rock cultures; and rock’s needfulness in face of models of theological experience allowed in theological traditions. In other words, a comparative analysis of practices that work up subjects of theology and subjects of rock.

Why can’t we ignore such prolegomena and go right to what God has to do with guitars? Because political and postcolonial theologies charge us with the questions of to whom our back is turned in the doing of theology, and by what right we claim to speak, and especially to represent others, on this topic, ask these questions, and presume to conduct such research. In short, my opening suggestion is that we can be with rock theologically because of the importance of the contestations over identity and practices of the self – in secular music generally, in rock particularly, and even in theology reflexively.

[more to come...]

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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