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Jonathan Storment

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Worshipping Aphrodite: Only God is Holy

Worshipping Aphrodite: Only God is Holy

Last updated on: June 29, 2016 at 1:57 pm by Jonathan Storment

Worshipping Aphrodite: Only God is Holy 2016-06-29T13:57:12-05:00 Jonathan Storment

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pablo-8 Recently I was back in my hometown of Benton, Arkansas. There’s something about being back home that always makes me nostalgic about my childhood and growing up in the South.

It gets me out of my element and back to my roots, and that includes what kind of music I listen to.

So when I’m back in Arkansas, I turn on the Country Music radio station that I listened to growing up (KSSN 96 if you’re wondering), and on my recent trip home, I found myself crooning along to the songs I knew and just taking in the ones I didn’t. And that’s when something came on that wasn’t expecting.

It’s a song called HOLY by Florida/Georgia Line. Maybe you’ve heard of it, my country music friends tell me it’s climbing the charts pretty quickly. It’s a man singing to the woman he loves about the ways she’s changed his life.

Here are just some of the words:

You made the brightest days from the darkest nights
You’re the river bank where I was baptized
Cleanse all the demons
That were killing my freedom
Let me lay you down, give me to ya
Get you singing babe, hallelujah
We’ll be touching, we’ll be touching heaven

You’re an angel, tell me you’re never leaving
‘Cause you’re the first thing I know I can believe in

You’re holy, holy, holy, holyI’m high on loving you, high on loving youYou’re holy, holy, holy, holy

I’m high on loving you, high on loving you

You’re the healing hands where it used to hurt

You’re my saving grace, you’re my kind of church

You’re holy

Now here’s what I want you to consider. This is s song that is blaring through the South…the Bible Belt, and not without great irony.

Because people are singing this song who probably have more than a passing familiarity with the Bible, and church hymns.

That tri-fold repetition of Holy,Holy,Holy comes straight from the book of Isaiah, where the prophet is given a vision of God that immediately makes him aware of his sinfulness and the sinfulness of the world. He is undone by the presence of God and filled with awe and wonder.

The beautiful hymn that captures this story is one that we’ve been singing in churches for generations. The hymn has the people of God singing things like:

“Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God, Almighty

All Thy works shall praise Thy name in earth, sky and sea

Holy, Holy, Holy, merciful and mighty

God in three persons, blessed Trinity

Holy Holy Holy, Though the darkness hide Thee,

Though the eye of sinful man, thy glory may not see

Only Thou art holy, there is none beside Thee

Perfect in power, in love and purity.

The Danger of Civil Religion

Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist at the New York Times, recently wrote that one of the greatest problems places like the Bible Belt is facing is not a lack of religion, but a kind of quasi-religion, a civil, lukewarm version of following Jesus. One that has in the past sometimes been exemplified in country music*

Here’s how Douthat says it:

Here is a seeming paradox of American life. One the one hand, there is a broad social-science correlation between religious faith and various social goods — health and happiness, upward mobility, social trust, charitable work and civic participation. Yet at the same time, some of the most religious areas of the country — the Bible Belt, the deepest South — struggle mightily with poverty, poor health, political corruption and social disarray….Protestants have much lower divorce rates, and practicing believers generally divorce less frequently than the secular and unaffiliated.

But the lukewarmly religious are a different matter. What Stokes calls “nominal” conservative Protestants, who attend church less than twice a month, have higher divorce rates even than the nonreligious. And you can find similar patterns with other indicators — out-of-wedlock births, for instance, are rarer among religious-engaged evangelical Christians, but nominal evangelicals are a very different story

Douthat’s point is that what is hurting the South isn’t a lack of religion, but just the Christian faith in nominal doses. The entire article is great, but this “H.O.L.Y.” song is, I think a great example of what he’s talking about. It’s a sacrilegious appropriation of the worship for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…to the person you happen to be dating.

I like some of the songs this band sings (especially Dirt), apparently they grew up leading worship in church, and were inspired to write music by Casting Crowns, but if this band still retains any of it’s Christian roots, than I’d like to ask them to reconsider the implications of the songs that you are producing.

The irony is that this song would fit nicely in a worship song to Aphrodite, the ancient goddess of love.

Jesus is My Boyfriend

I’ve written before about the tragedy of the past couple of generations in church making idols out of the family and romantic love, it’s a real struggle to make the Gospel not for families, but to allow the Gospel to create a new kind of family.

There’s a reason that the people who were most drawn to the early church were single, widows, and the disenfranchised.

This is another example of the danger of the idolatry of romantic love that has crept into our faith, our churches, and now our country music songs. To be fair, this kind of idolatry has been there for years, but it’s always been much more subtle.

I think the fact that this kind of subversion of Christian language for the purposes of romantic love leads to great disillusionment with our relationships after the “fire in my veins begins to cool, and the ecstasy that he/she is begins to fade” You are going to need a glory that is more substantial than the one your currently putting the weight of worship on.

The great tragedy is that if you make this kind of love your “church” and this kind of liturgy (because that’s what it is) your worship, you will be horrible at an actual relationship with an actual person. You will bounce from infatuation to infatuation hungry for something only the God Isaiah saw.

So sometimes we complain in church that we sing too many worship songs that sound like “Jesus is my boyfriend” I’d like to weigh in my complaint about our other music. From “Take Me to Church” to “My Church” to “H.O.L.Y” we are re-appropriating language of the transcendent for relationships that can’t bear the weight of it.

I’m all for substantial Christian worship songs that tap into the Christian tradition, but maybe it’s time to revisit what we mean by that complaint.

Maybe it’s time to start paying attention to the songs that are written and sung about your actual boyfriend/girlfriend.

Because only God is Holy.

*obviously not Johnny Cash, he’s freaking amazing.

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