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HONKY-TONK GOSPEL:
The Story of Sin & Salvation in Country Music
Honky-Tonk
Gospel: The Story of Sin & Salvation in Country Music,
by Gene Edward Veith and Thomas L. Wilmeth. Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker Books, 2001. ISBN 0-8010-6355-8. 188 pages with
end notes. $17.99
After reading Modern
Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview and
Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought &
Culture I would read the label on a potato chip bag if I knew Ed
Veith had written it. Although (or perhaps because) he specialises
in art criticism, Ed Veith has a superb gift for critiquing modern
culture from a Christian standpoint. If any Christian writer on the
scene today can help you discern our times, what they mean and where
they’re headed, it’s Ed Veith. When I found out that he and Thomas
Wilmeth had written Honky-Tonk Gospel I made a bee line for
it. I was both pleased and disappointed.
DISAPPOINTED
Disappointed
because on page 26 I read, “Just as the town
of Bristol is partly in Tennessee and partly in Kentucky, the
Bristol [recording] Sessions themselves would come to be a dividing
line and crossroads in its own right.” Somebody should have checked
a map. Bristol straddles the Tennessee-Virginia line, a long
ways from Kentucky.
Yet another bone needs
picking. Veith and Wilmeth begin with the Bristol Sessions in July
& August, 1927 as their starting point for country music. I
understand that some point must serve as a beginning, arbitrary as
the choice may be may be. However, any discussion of country music
or Southern gospel music is hardly complete without mentioning James
D. Vaughn, “founder and father of Southern gospel music.” In 1903
Vaughn founded the J.D. Vaughn Publishing Company on the square in
Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. (I know because it’s about 25 minutes from
my front door.) Vaughn was a great promoter of gospel music,
printing books and sheet music, organising singing schools and
quartets, and publishing the first tabloid about gospel music. He
was also a visionary. In 1923 he secured the license for a radio
station, and on January 1, 1925 WOAN went on the air as the first
radio station in Tennessee. Vaughn had to sell in 1929, and
Nashville’s WSM bought the frequency – yes, WSM, as in the “Home of
the Grand Old Opry.”
PLEASED
But let’s step past
these two oversights to more important questions. Surveying
three-quarters of a century of music, there’s always a danger that
the authors will lose the reader in a forest of lists. Veith and
Wilmeth avoid this trap by unfolding various separate threads of the
Christian tradition in country music one by one. Looking at the
songs they picked as examples, over and over I caught myself
dreaming, “If only their book came with a CD containing all
the music they reference!” No expert in either gospel or country
music, I kept on wishing I could hear the songs they cited.
The authors’ sympathies
plainly lie with country music as a deeply rooted art form that
faithfully reflects the whole spectrum of human experience. Unlike
the artificial and synthetic popular culture driven primarily by the
bottom line, country music maintains its organic connection to real
life – however tenuous that connection may have become under the
onslaught of commercialism. And of course, in real life,
Christianity is not yet a dirty word.
“The real world for
country music includes Christianity. In stark contrast to most of
today’s other entertainment venues, people in country songs are
likely to pray, quote the Bible, and talk about Jesus. This is true
not only in country’s most traditional forms, such as bluegrass …
and classic …, it is true also in contemporary country music, which
in many other ways has drifted far from its roots.” (p. 12, 13).
Whoa!
What about country music’s “dark side”? What
about all those songs about drugs, dives, and drinking – not to
mention adultery? “Country music, though sometimes vulgar and
rowdy, remains a forum for traditional values.” (p. 14) “The
worldview of country music embraces both sin and grace.
Historically, country music grew out of both little country
churches and honky-tonks, family sing-alongs and drunken Saturday
nights. Expressions of both sides of life – and the conflict
between them – can still be found in country music.”
Frankly, it is this
no-holds-barred honesty that most strongly attracts me to country
music, the soul torn between sin and grace, the drunken Hank
Williams with his other persona, Luke the Drifter who sings
only religious songs. Life in country music has not yet been
sanitised and Bowdlerised (as too many Christians would prefer).
The warfare in our souls is real, bloody, and not always
victorious. Country music has the courage (sometimes, yes, the
lack of shame) to reflect that faithfully, and Veith and Wilmeth
steadily guide us through that effort.
WHUPPIN’ POP CULTURE &
POSTMODERNISM
In the final chapter
“Contemporary Country Music,” the authors kick their cultural
critique up into high gear, dissecting commercialism, pop culture,
and postmodernism out of contemporary country music. At stake is
the survival of authentic culture and authentic Christianity.
“[I]n the late 20th
century, pop culture has been pushing out and taking the place of [high
culture and folk culture]. Just as high culture institutions
such as schools and universities are having problems teaching young
people who can pay attention only if they are being entertained,
folk cultures around the world are disappearing under the onslaught
of American TV, movies, consumer goods, and fast-food restaurants.
In religion, many people today have no interest in the high culture
of theological reflection, nor in the folk culture of ancient
practices and old hymns; rather, they are cultivating a pop
Christianity void of doctrine and unpleasant moral demands, centered
instead on individualistic emotional gratification. Instead of
achieving conversions through conviction of sin and proclaiming the
blood of the Lamb, evangelism is sometimes reduced to what is, in
effect, a commercial appeal.” (p. 164)
“The end of the
millennium was the postmodern age. [All that had been “modern”]
became passé. On a deeper level, the assumptions that drove the
20th century – that scientific rationalism is the only acceptable
form of truth; that social engineering can solve all of our
problems; that progress, reason, and realism will stamp out
religious faith – came unglued. …
“Postmodernism took
different forms and manifested itself in different ways. If what is
modern is no longer seen as great, one response is to recover what
is old and bring it into the contemporary times. … In the meantime,
confessional, orthodox, historic Christianity came back in force, as
the modernist theology of mainline liberals grew increasingly anemic
and irrelevant. This cultural mood was doubtless one of the reasons
country music – with what Bill Monroe called its `ancient tones’ –
came back into fashion …
“But there were other
ways to be postmodern, which in many ways overwhelmed the
neoconservatism. If scientific rationalism can never give us the
certainty of truth, as many scholars in the universities were
arguing, then maybe we can never apprehend truth. Maybe we can do
without it. For many postmodernist scholars, truth is a
construction – a provisional paradigm, manufactured by our culture
or by ourselves. The pre-modernists believed in moral and
intellectual absolutes, grounded in a transcendent God; modernists
believed that truth is only what we can perceive empirically; the
postmodernists believed that we make our own truths.
“This sort of academic
speculation might seem esoteric, with little to offer ordinary
people living … `here in the real world.’ But cultural,
intellectual, moral, and religious relativism soon permeated every
level of American culture. In 1991, 66% of Americans – two out of
three—agreed that `there is no such thing as absolute truth.’
Statements such as `That may be true for you, but it isn’t true for
me’ became commonplace. Moral issues – from sex to abortion to
euthanasia – began to be seen solely in terms of choice, a matter
not of ethical principles but of choosing `what’s right for you.’
“Postmodernist
relativism was carried by the pop culture, not only in its
impermanence but in its way of reducing everything – including
serious matters such as politics – to a consumer choice. Even
Christianity, despite the new confessionalism, found new expression
as a pop religion, its doctrinal and moral truths and ancient
traditions often toned down to fit the demands of the religious
marketplace. New megachurches sprang up, featuring pop music
instead of hymns, self-help tips instead of sermons, and
entertainment instead of worship.” (P. 196-171.) “Contrary to the
power-of-positive-thinking theology of pop Christianity – which
views faith as the capacity to change reality by mind-power, rather
than faith as trust in Christ – in this song (“Daddy took up a
snake”) objective reality broke in, and the snake killed him.
Postmodernist solipsism has a way of running up against hard, cold,
objective reality. Rattlesnake bite. Interpret that.” (p. 172.)
In the end Veith and
Wilmeth hold out hope for country music – and for us. “Country
music may keep getting murdered, but then – even in the new
millennium – it keeps getting born again. In the best of all this
music and the traditions it keeps alive, the despair and the hope,
the suffering and the ordinary pleasures, all ring true. It can
sometimes be tacky and vulgar and sentimental, but somehow that is
part of its charm, too. The music has a way of applying, no matter
how often the culture changes. And the faith seems as authentic as
the sinning.”
The Long Truce:
How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power & Profit,
by A. J. Conyers. Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2001. ISBN
1-890626-36-8. 266 pages with end notes and index. $27.95
Pairing a review of A.J.
Conyers’ scholarly The Long Truce with Honky-Tonk Gospel
may cause some of you to scratch your heads and say, “Well, Sanders
has finally and completely lost whatever mind he may have once
had.” How in the world could those two books fit together? One
examines pop and folk culture, the other investigates the history of
toleration in the West. What could they possibly have to do with
each other?
Much in every way.
Between Vieth & Wilmeth’s postmodern country singers who can’t find
truth or objective reality and Conyers’ modern state where all is
tolerated except intolerance, there is close kinship. It
begs for identification. What is its genealogy? Who gave it
birth? How did it grow to overshadow every other virtue and all
morality? Beneath these two streams lies some common fountain, but
what?
THE LONG TRUCE
Ever wonder why the
official defender of diversity, multiculturalism, serves only to
destroy all genuine diversity – why cultural differences are all
reduced to nothing more threatening than an exchange of recipes? A.
J. Conyers, a professor at the Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor
University, has an answer for you. As it has developed for 400 years
in the West, “toleration,” has banished questions of ultimate
meaning from public life and contributed to consolidating all power
in the state. The “toleration” that has emerged contributes nothing
to identifying truth among many competitors. Rather, it levels all
competitors by proclaiming that no transcendental truth is possible
– or worth fighting for. All competing social groups are crowded
out in favour of the state.
“[T]he political aim of
the state can easily encroach upon the aims of the family, the
collegium (such as the artistic community), the profession, the
church, the local village, the province. Yet, first the telos
[transcendent goal] of these entities must be called into
question. That is where tolerance comes in -- not the practice of
tolerance which is entirely productive of lively community life but
the kind of tolerance that essentially demeans the status of groups
along with their provincial, familial, or ecclesiastical sense of
authority.” (p. 194)
TOLERANCE BUILDS THE
STATE,
AT THE EXPENSE OF TRUTH
Conyers is not advancing
some subtle conspiracy theory. Rather he portrays modern toleration
as a mechanism, which naturally increases state power. “[I]f the
telos or the multiple goals that govern our actions are
fundamentally artifacts of our imagination and will, rather than
disclosures to us of what is authoritative, then natural, timeless,
and informal [non-state] associations have no necessary
authority in human lives. The artifice of human `values’ is well
matched by the artifice of the national state. As the inevitability
of these associations … is diminished in people’s consciousness,
then the state proves to be the benefactor. And we can think of the
state as the benefactor without the least conspiratorial
implications as long as we keep in mind Bertrand de Jouvenel’s
insight that power necessarily and inevitably seeks to increase
itself.” (p. 190)
When thought depreciates
ultimate values, it simultaneously erodes the authority of social
institutions – the church, local communities, family – that guard
those values. What’s the outcome? A “bipolar state” where the only
two institutions left standing are the all-powerful state and the
individual. You don’t need an IQ of 200 to figure out which of
those two holds the most cards.
THE GENEALOGY OF
TOLERATION
But I’ve raced ahead of
myself. In the course of explaining the evolution of toleration in
the West, The Long Truce becomes an intellectual tour de
force. That should not, however, frighten off the general
reader. Dr. Conyers’ helps us understand how the doctrine of
toleration has developed. (He writes a sound, clear English
sentence that makes sense and for the most part avoids that
perversely impenetrable jargon of the academic. However, I caught
myself wishing he would not replace quite so many verbs with
noun-preposition substitutes. Occasionally he chained up
prepositional phrases so that I had to chase tails through the
sentence, but these are very small flaws in an otherwise successful
and readable style.) He teases out the strands of thought that have
justified centralising power in the state and then weaves them
together again into a picture we can comprehend.
From Hobbes to Locke and
thence to Dewey (with stops at names less well-known) he follows the
thread of “tolerance.” We see how Western thinkers, terrified by
religious wars which for over 100 years had bled Europe dry, grope
for some political philosophy to tame this fearful monster. Their
efforts recall Luther’s famous analogy. Humanity, he said,
resembles a drunk on a horse. He falls off on the left side and
laboriously remounts. Then, trying to correct his previous mistake,
he falls off on the right! So how can society avoid bloody wars of
religion? Let an all-powerful state impose order on all parties,
and never mind truth. The idea of ‘tolerance” unfolds as a
practical rejection of ultimate truth, avoiding the issue of final
causes.
When you err in plotting
your course, a tiny error when you leave port eventually becomes
very large. In the 20th century the doctrine of
tolerance has brought forth its ultimate triumph: the secular state
where ends yield all place to means. Power becomes an end in
itself. True, tolerance prevents religious wars, but it also
banishes ultimate meaning and breeds all modernism’s malaise:
depression, alienation, despair.
“When power becomes …
the object of pursuit, as it has increasingly in modern times, we
are therefore engaging in an illusion … rather like the proverbial
dog chasing its tail. Much effort is being expended, and a chase of
sorts is taking place, but the pursuit is taking the dog nowhere.
The illusion of a grand pursuit allows us to imagine we are in
control of life and of our destiny. And control is very much the
issue, when at a deep level we suspect that things are not under
control, at least not under our control. This anxiety for
control is a form of despair: having found nothing to “rest” our
hopes in, we grasp for the lesser things of the created order, just
as a drowning man grasps for straws, or a dying man grasps for the
most unlikely occult cure. In its outward expression, this despair
might take many forms, forms we will recognise in contemporary
social problems. It may take the conventional form of depression,
resignation, and lethargy.” (P. 219). “[I]n our culture despair
may often take the form of [a] pretense of action. It can take the
form of rage, violence, and attempts to dominate.” (p. 220 – 221).
As Mick Jagger used to
lament, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” In this modern world,
things abound, but without any why. Or we might express
the same idea from Psalm 106: “[H]e gave them their desire, and
sent leanness withal into their soul.”
A BIPOLAR DISORDER
But if the individual is
not in control, then who is? The “modern doctrine of toleration”
has helped establish the `bipolarisation of society.’” “The society
that exists easily between the poles of state and individual is a
society that has become featureless. It is a society in which
`voluntary’ organisations decline, as many sociologists have lately
observed in the United States. It has become a `mass’ society. Its
mode of existence is a secular one. And the individual in such a
society stands more or less defenseless against the demands of a
powerful state.” (p. 223)
“The idea of toleration,
in the modern sense, calls into question the validity and even the
ethical appropriateness of attaching oneself too strongly to the
kinds of loyalties and the kinds of transcendent convictions that
are the very soul of [socially spontaneous] association[s].
It targets the intractable loyalties, along with the intrinsic
disciplines and moral commitments, of the family and the church … It
does so not out of a commitment to a certain conspiracy to undo
these institutions but out of the tacit and almost intuitive
recognition that here are the most formidable barriers to the
spreading efficiency of central administration and the
centralisation of authority. The passions must be harnessed to the
larger agenda and not be distributed and made disorderly in the
untidy natural associations that spring up so freely in a society
not well organised, nor rational, nor subservient to the goals of
commerce and power.” (p. 224).
In the end, nothing is
left standing but the state and the individual, stripped of all
group help. The result, predictably enough, is a state that
recognises all insignificant claims to toleration and ruthlessly
crushes all significant claims. In a word, you can eat kimchee
or collards, whichever you prefer, but you’d better not try to pray
in public.
IF THAT’S THE
COUNTERFEIT,
WHAT DOES THE REAL THING
LOOK LIKE?
Through most of The
Long Truce Dr. Conyers examines the perversion of Christian
tolerance which he calls “the modern doctrine of toleration.” This
leads, however, only to grotesquely Orwellian multiculturalism and
political correctness -- militantly intolerant tolerance hand
in hand with the all-powerful state. But how should genuine
tolerance look? In the final chapter Dr. Conyers sketches out for us
“the practice of authentic tolerance,” grounded in the Incarnation,
humble, catholic, and peaceful.
First (he argues) any
genuine tolerance must be founded upon religion, i.e., the
struggle for ultimate meaning. Here modern pseudo-toleration has
transformed morality from a matter of eternal importance grounded
outside space and time to a matter of opinion grounded on personal
tastes.
Dr. Conyers founds
authentic tolerance on the Incarnation as a fact. If the
Incarnation “is real, it means that the highest spiritual
aspirations of the human being and the most particular elements of
existence are bound together eternally in a community of meaning and
purpose. If such a thing is true, then the implications are for all
men and women everywhere and for all time. … Toleration in this case
does not mean that we all grasp this reality, or even that any of us
do so adequately. It means simply that the reality grasps us,
comprehending what it means for any of us to be human beings. While
we cannot comprehend that which comprehends us, we nonetheless owe a
certain loyalty to it. That loyalty includes the humility to listen
to others, even those whose honest seeking of the truth takes a
different shape than our own … [T]o listen in expectation of hearing
truth from others whose doctrine differs from our own is the highest
form of loyalty to the insight that we all rely on a common reality,
created by the one God who makes himself known in human flesh …(p.
232, 233)
“Here, then we find a
practice that recognises the very complicated way God has of making
himself known to us in the partiality of human experience, yet
always with the aim of leading us to wholeness.
“To enter into such a
practice is to enter into the mystery of the incarnation. It is to
acknowledge the God-ordained end of human existence – an end
not imagined or willed, an end that serves no evasion of the human
vocation, but a true end: an end in which we might rest. Which is
to say, it is an end that embodies our highest activity and our
deepest motivation as human beings.” (p. 234)
The practice of
authentic tolerance demands also restoring purpose. “Man
finds his telos in God, God finds his telos in man.
The twin sense of disparity and unity in the world is found
satisfied in community; in the incarnation of God in man.
“The incarnation,
therefore, means not only that man finds his chief end in God but
God finds his chief end in man. Revelation tells us not only who
God is but who we are. At one and the same time it reveals true God
and true man . . .The humiliation of God in man is at the
same time the exaltation of man in God.” (p. 237-8).”The picture is
clearly not simply one of power distributed from on high but power
exercised as a cosmic exchange. It is not the love of power but the
power of love: God is become man, and that man, the representative
of the race of men, is indeed God, so that human beings can
participate in all that God is.”
“Therefore, power is
never understood unambiguously and directly as some kind of
achievement or possession, but always paradoxically: “:Whoever
wishes to be great among you shall be your servant, and whoever
wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.” Power is truly
exercised as it is given up. Humiliation and exaltation go
together.” (p. 238 – 9)
To recover authentic
toleration we must escape and discard modernism’s “doubt, fear, and
mistrust,” i.e., its profound and pervasive pessimism. We
admit that a fallen world often should be feared and
mistrusted, but the Incarnation gives us reason to hope and to trust
in the “good God who created men and women for good things.” (p.
241)
“The Incarnation
announces the accomplishment of reconciliation between God and man.
It therefore announces the essential goodness of the creation. It
is not something to be feared. One’s efforts to know the world are
in the end fruitful, even if not in the present. And human beings
are not intended to live in deadly conflict, but in the bonds of
love and friendship.” (p. 241)
A TOUR DE FORCE
The Long Truce
is not just “food for thought”, it’s a veritable banquet. Although
it sounds like a subject that would challenge any one’s ability to
pay attention (not to mention concentrate), I found myself
enthralled in The Long Truce. I had to ration my reading
sessions, or I would have neglected everything else until either I
starved or stank.
What captivated me so?
Dr. Conyers has assembled here a tour de force of the last
300 years’ intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte, the
Germans call it.) I kept thinking of the Chinese proverb, “When the
pupil is ready, the teacher appears.” How many connections he made
for me! I cheerfully confess I have until now resisted the
temptation to dip into Hobbes or Locke, having tried to read John
Owen and other contemporaries. Let us graciously say that my
enthusiasm for that period was somewhat wan, important though
it be. But Dr. Conyers renders them both fascinating and relevant.
When you understand Hobbes, you can understand Brittany Spears or
Punk Rock or even the American empire. They begin to make sense, if
not aesthetically or morally (perish the thought!) at least
developmentally, in the necessary logic that leads from bad
beginning to disgusting end. There remains a multitude of other
ideas that Dr. Conyers’ treats, but somewhere I have to end this
review.
HOW DO YOU LIVE WITH
HERETICS?
What Dr. Conyers does
not treat, but where his subject inevitably leads, is How do you
live with heretics? After all, if you genuinely do believe in
certain transcendent, absolute truths, then logically you must
defend them. If truth is indeed true, then logically the community
of just men has a right to defend themselves singly and severally
against error. How far does that extend? To exile? Execution?
This intrigues me for
two reasons. The most difficult dissension does not arise between
pagans and Christians, because, frankly, most pagans just believe
silly things, easily shown to be silly. No, the sharpest and
most dangerous dissension exists among Christians in their three
great divisions, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox.
The theological gulfs between them cannot be breached. Protestants
are forever trying to convert Roman Catholics, and vice versa, and
the Orthodox won’t commune with either of them. How can these three
competing visions peacefully live together in a single civil state
that remains Christian without persecuting one group or another?
Both Hobbes and Locke reflect the exhaustion that had
overtaken Western society after the wars of religion. The history
of those times, as if still a living memory, continue to incite
Christian people to distrust and hatred. Without giving up the
truths we believe, how do we live together?
Nor is this a merely
theoretical question, if we aim at a Christian civil government. If
the purpose of civil government is to punish the wicked and reward
the just, we have to know how and where to draw the line between the
two?
Another face of
toleration intrigues me. What does society do with the
irreconcilable individualistic heretic? Here I don’t mean someone
who adheres to any recognised group of Christians, but the
ultra-individualist who, perversely enough, is the stepchild of the
modern doctrine of toleration.
You might ask, How does
a religionist descend from a doctrine of anti-religion? We
can trace that back to a perversion of Luther’s insistence on the
importance of individual conscience. Luther certainly did not
understand his reliance on conscience as a rejection of all
authority and a solipsistic exaltation of personal judgement.
Although he thought the Church needed reforming, he never thought we
no longer needed the Church. However, that’s where these people end
up today, setting themselves up as judge and jury over every
doctrine of Christianity, every institution, and everything
else, including the Scriptures themselves.
It appears
self-contradictory at first, but on closer examination you will find
that these ultra-individualists are indeed kin to the
postmodernists. After all, if we merely construct for our own
personal use everything we call “truth,” as postmodernism does, then
isn’t their truth as good as anybody else’s? This is the
ultimate democracy of opinion – my opinion is as good as your
opinion any old day, an all authorities (past and present) be
damned.
These people are
contentious and stubborn in inverse proportion to their
correctness. The wronger they are, the louder they scream, the
harder they scratch. Ignorance casts not the least shadow of shame
upon them; upon no subject do they lack an instant, definitive, and
dogmatic opinion. And stubbornness in a bad belief, I have
to say, is not perseverance but perverseness.
Now I understand that in
this Revolutionary age nobody thinks he needs to submit to
authority – at least, until the authority sends a thug with
truncheon to trounce his head. At some point, however, we must
submit of our own free will and cheerfully. Not
everything is worth going to the stake for, and if we are not
willing to throttle back our own hobby horses, human society
literally becomes untenable. Then too, some controversies are in
the end merely questions of expediency. Often the chief test of our
loyalty to our principles and to the group that defends them is how
far wrong the group can go before we abandon it. Lee and
Jackson, for instance, were Union men, but both fought for
Virginia. Blood is thicker than water.
But I’ve wandered off
point. At issue is, what does a community do with the obnoxious,
stubborn, and thoroughly heretical fanatic? This is not a merely
theoretical question. I promise you, either these people are
very common, or my path has crossed an extraordinary number of
them randomly.
But then Dr. Conyers
didn’t promise to resolve every question of toleration, only to show
us its history and modern outcome. In that he has succeeded
remarkably well.
-- F. Sanders
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