No one takes Christian rock music seriously, not even most Christians. It’s not a lack of ability among the musicians performing it that negates its popularity. Rather, it is the repetitiveness of its subject matter.
Christian rock ended up this way because the starting point for writing any Christian rock song is, and must be, that we’re going to write Christian music. You’ve already eliminated 99% of all possible topics from your art before creating it. The result is a song that accomplishes the goal of being Christian, but not much else.
Now Hollywood, and for that matter, nearly the entire world, has the same problem.
Living In A Messaging First World
My daughter started college for the first time this week. She’s a high school senior, but also a genius, so she’s getting a jump on credits at the local county community college. Or she will, if she ever gets past the part in her math classes where she wastes time writing essays apologizing for her whiteness and lamenting the existence of men.
If this were only something she was being subjected to in college, I’d be mostly concerned about how the school is wasting her time by not teaching any academics. But it’s not just at school. This messaging is everywhere and in everything, and it’s been that way for a while.
boring (adj.) — marked by excessive repetition or predictable sameness that results in mental fatigue and diminished engagement.
What’s more, it’s not just in everything; it’s the first thing in everything. Architecture courses start out by making statements about equity and cop violence, and then later get around to bridge geometry. It’s no different than those Christian rock songs that start out being about Jesus, before they’re allowed to become music.
It doesn’t make music better, and it’s probably not good for bridges. Maybe that’s why so many have collapsed in recent years.
How Ideology Makes Your Entertainment Boring
Because it’s everywhere all the time, it’s boring. It’s in our entertainment too, which should be the one place we can go not to be bored.
Case in point: Apple is planning to release a hot new show called The Savant. Guess what it’s about? A brave lady investigating how terrible white people are.
The villains of Apple TV’s The Savant.
Even programming that isn’t explicitly about this subject or some other left-wing coded ideology invariably connects to it in some way. Pushing ideology has become the entire point of recent shows like The Boys, The Rings of Power, For All Mankind, Foundation, and The Last of Us, as they’ve all chased formerly enthusiastic audiences away, not with disgust but abject boredom.
There are thousands of examples like these and I don’t need to go further into them because unless you’re suffering from severe cognitive dissonance you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you don’t, you’re so lost in your bias nothing I say will matter. It’d be like trying to convince an evangelical revivalist that Metallica is better than Switchfoot.
For the rest of us, it’s all Christian rock.
If Everything Were Seinfeld
I am so incredibly bored by you and your ideology. It’s not about whether these messages are good or bad; it’s that they’re all the same ones.
I love Seinfeld. Everyone loves Seinfeld. Now imagine if every movie and television show eventually turned into an episode of Seinfeld.
CSI would have an episode investigating the theft of a marble rye. The Avengers would have an adventure waiting for a table at a Shawarma restaurant. All of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night monologue jokes would start with “Did you ever notice…”
The Avengers wait for a table.
It’d be fun at first, but eventually you’d get tired of seeing every character on every episode of Stranger Things fling open the door and slide into rooms like Kramer. Worse, eventually you’d start to hate Kramer for having existed in the first place.
That’s where we’re at in the modern world and in modern entertainment. Everything is Seinfeld. Everything is Christian rock.
How The Entertainment Press Battles To Keep Hollywood From Noticing The Problem
There are early signs that some in Hollywood have begun noticing the problem.
Apple is delaying release of The Savant, perhaps because they heard the collective groan from the entire internet when they released the trailer. This summer we got some more back to basics movies like F1 and Superman, neither of which contained any significant Seinfeld, er, activist elements.
The Savant’s keyboard warrior goes to work, fighting all the usual things.
Hollywood may be slowly catching on, but the entertainment press is doing everything they can to stop it. In their review of The Savant, Variety says, “The Savant is precisely the type of show America needs right now. It looks at a sector of mostly white male individuals who believe that America belongs to them. Fueled by hate, bigotry, xenophobia and misogyny.”
Their review reads like one of my daughter’s college essay assignments. Boring.
So, we’re left to assume either Variety’s critic has somehow missed every TV show and movie made in the past ten years, or they simply hate art and want to see it ground down into the irrelevance of Christian rock. Because critics are supposed to be the guardians of art, not the protectors of repetitive orthodoxy. Doing otherwise makes you a propagandist, not a legitimate commentator.
Repetitive Messaging Isn’t Art
In the early 2000s, I saw and reviewed the Bill Maher documentary Religulous. It features Maher, an avowed atheist, wandering the country and putting believers on the spot. I loved it and gave it four and a half stars. It earned that high score because it was funny and also because it was fresh and unique in an era when criticizing religion wasn’t all that common.
Bill Maher in Religulous (2008)
If Religulous were released today, I’d fall asleep in the first ten minutes. Good art and good entertainment doesn’t happen when you’re saying the same things over and over again. Since its release, the message of Religulous has been said a hundred times over by hundreds of different people. Saying it again is not entertainment or enlightenment.
Repetitive messaging is also not art; it’s propaganda. Maybe it’s also evil, often even the most well-meaning propaganda is, though perhaps I’m not qualified to judge such morality.
However, I am qualified to be bored. And oh god, am I bored.
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