OK, this is one of those “critical mass” posts I do — I’ve got a bunch of stuff in my notes and suddenly something brings it all together.

This time the “something” is a great Religious News Service article “40 Years Later, Woodstock’s Spiritual Vibes Still Resonate” by Steve Rabey. (H/T GetReligion)  In the article, the symbolism of Woodstock can be best presented with these paragraphs:

[Rock historian Pete] Fornatale sees the festival as a massive communion ceremony featuring drugs as sacramental substances, hymns like “Amazing Grace” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” performed by Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez, sermons by musical prophets like Sylvester Stewart of Sly and the Family Stone, and a modern-day re-enactment of Jesus’ miracle of the loaves and fishes exhibited in the communal ethos of festival-goers who shared food with “brothers and sisters” who were hungry.

And the conclusion of the article, that Woodstock marked a shift from “religion to spirituality,” would be summed up in this quote:

“There was a pervasive shift from the theological to the therapeutic,” said [Don] Lattin, author of “Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today.” “It was all about feeling good rather than being good. It was about stress reduction, not salvation.”

Today, the legacy of Esalen can be found at “seeker-sensitive” churches that market to congregants based on their felt needs and Catholic retreat centers that offer sessions on yoga, meditation and the Enneagram.

And don’t miss the interesting twist that Woodstock was held near the town of Bethel, N.Y., a Hebrew word meaning “House of God.”

It has struck me, and the article mentions, how certain religious songs have been incorporated by the culture and in the process losing their strong religious meaning.  Amazing Grace may be the hymn most integrated into American culture. Over 20 years ago at an international meeting in Europe I got into a group discussion about the song (no relation to the meeting subject of European and Mediterranean earthquakes) and one of my European colleagues called Amazing Grace “America’s unofficial national anthem.”  So even though it was written by an English minister, it has come to be associated with American culture.

While I have not read the book Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song by Steve Turner, a review of the book does talk about the song’s dissemination into American culture first in the Second Great Awakening, then with the early 20th Century revivals by preachers such as Dwight Moody, and finally it pin-points the transition to pop-folk popularity a bit before Woodstock.

Note the characteristics that make the song so accessible, even by the non-religious:  It has a great “back story” about John Newton’s conversion from slave trader to minister.  I have heard that story many times, not just in sermons but at folk concerts and social justice meetings and rallies.  But in secular settings they do seem to leave off the fact that it was a religious conversion experience and he became a minister.  Note also the lack of references to God in the song.  You can sing four verses without referencing one of the members of the Trinity.  As people of faith we inherently read God into the Grace that the song is about.  Consider how differently a non-religious person would still sing about grace, but with a completely different perception of the grace it talks about.  (I once saw a promotional item put out by a major soap company — It was a waterproof songbook for use in the shower that included Amazing Grace, but did not include verses that mentioned God.)  And the simplicity and sing-ability of the common tune certainly help as well.

However, I would comment that Amazing Grace is not the first religious song to find a mostly secular following or application.  A century earlier the Battle Hymn of the Republic became a Civil War rallying song and it continues today to appear in non-religious settings.  While packed with sacred imagery, imagery regularly used by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his sermons, in the song the references to God are mostly minimized by the use of the pronouns “He” or “His.”  And there is no question that the tune is catchy — Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics after hearing the popular tune.  (Although it can be legitimately argued that Howe never intended it’s primary use to be in religious services despite the imagery.)

Regarding music in the sixties it is also interesting to note the rise of CCM (contemporary Christian music) at about this time as well.  As much as revivals had previously made use of popular and catchy words and music, there was now the shift in instrumentation to guitars and drums.  In fact, in the spirit of the “religion to spirituality” shift, CCM artist Scott Wesley Brown even has a 1976 song “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord.”

I find it hard to separate societal events like Woodstock from religious “Sixties Things” like the writing and adoption of the Confession of 1967 by the UPCUSA.  By itself, this confession was viewed by many as a step towards liberalism.  As Hart and Muether say in one of their Presbyterian history articles:

…Cornelius Van Til, took the Confession of 1967 as proof of his charge (made in a 1946 book) that the theology of Karl Barth had infiltrated the PCUSA as the “new modernism.” Indeed, neo-orthodoxy had proved to be more triumphant in the Presbyterian Church than liberalism. Liberalism undermined the church’s confidence in the Westminster standards, but never to the point of crafting a new confession. However, the largely Barthian Confession of 1967 entailed the rejection of the Westminster standards-and indeed of all that the historic Christian creeds affirmed.

Evangelical Barthians disagreed with this assessment. They charged that Van Til exaggerated the new confession’s Barthian roots. Geoffrey Bromiley of Fuller Seminary conceded that there were parallels to Barth’s theology. But upon closer inspection, he claimed, Barth’s teaching on Scripture and the Trinity was far more orthodox. Bromiley went on to argue that the Confession of 1967 accommodated itself to liberalism and Romanism in ways that Barth never did.

On the other side, Arnold B. Come writes this about the state of confessional standards in the Journal of Presbyterian History:

James H. Nichols has said that C-67 is necessary because “the Westminster Standards are obsolescent.” Hardly anyone could subscribe to them as “containing the system of doctrine taught in Scripture” (Christianity and Crisis, 17 May 1965, p. 108). For this reason, Brian Gerrish has noted, “retention of the Westminster Confession has encouraged—not hindered—doctrinal laxity. If the Presbyterian Church should persist in retaining the Confession…as the sole confessional norm, it will cease altogether to be a confessional church” (Christian Century, 4 May 1966, pp. 583f.). The adoption of the Book of Confessions reminds us that in contrast to the Lutherans, “the Reformed have never had a single pre-eminent statement of belief…nor a
closed symbolic collection…[but] has always been ‘open’—subject…to a policy of continuous revision and addition” (Gerrish, op. cit., p. 582). The Book also helps us to “break out of the provincialism of British Reformed tradition to the wider Reformed church…[and to] define common ground with Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches” (Nichols, op. cit., p. 109).

As the last quote points out, along with this one contemporary statement was the adoption of a Book of Confessions with multiple statements from across church history that now provided “guidance” and not “standards.”  While there is discussion over the value and effect of this move (some previous comments) it strikes me that parallels could be drawn to the RNS article’s comments concerning the shift from “religion to spirituality” and “the theological to the therapeutic.”  If nothing else, the UPCUSA traded a theological exactness for an historical perspective and diversity.

Let me finish with another transition — that of the “message to the medium.”  To put it bluntly there was the recognition that we wanted to be entertained.

Consider this comment in a New York Times op-ed piece by Paul Krugman:

In 1994 [technology guru] Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.” (emphasis added)

In other words, what the Grateful Dead knew back in the 60’s was that if given the content people would still pay to be entertained — the experience was more profitable than the material.  Whatever you might think of the Grateful Dead as a band, their business model was far ahead of its time.  Fast forward to today and the current situation.  On the secular side, you can purchase a song for download for 99 cents or look for it for free on a (probably illegal) peer-to-peer file sharing site.  On the sacred side churches provide their sermons as free podcasts and worship services at megachurches look like rock concerts with well-practiced musical groups and preachers as celebrities.  In fact, one of the characteristics of some seeker-sensitive worship services is that there is no audience participation.  It is expected that attendees will just show up and watch, not be participants in worship.  Throughout American history there have been revival meetings with great numbers of people.  But I’m not aware that the present trend of 10,000+ member individual churches has any parallel.

My discussion here is clearly not exhaustive, but in this year of looking back at the events of 1969, it is interesting to see how the secular culture and the religious culture moved in parallel ways with the change in American mind set.  The question of whether the culture is driving the church, or the church is changing so that it can faithfully minister in a new age is important, but a topic for another time.  But it is the Church’s job to be faithful to Jesus Christ while still speaking to the changing world around us.