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Works of culture from age to age

Works of culture from age to age

Last updated on: July 28, 2026 at 5:04 pm by Fred Clark

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Works of culture from age to age 2026-07-28T17:04:57-04:00 Fred Clark

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List articles and “Top 100” ranking articles exist to generate “engagement” by giving everybody something to complain about. The Bezos Post apparently succeeded with its recent 250th anniversary list of “the 25 most influential works of culture in U.S. history.” Michael Sean Winters takes the bait with an indignant column sniffing that any list of the greatest guitarists that doesn’t include Randy Rhoads in the Top 10 is garbage because Randy could shred.

Or, rather, he writes the religion-beat equivalent of that, complaining about the lack of explicitly religious cultural works. Winters writes: “Perusing the list, you would have no idea that religion has been a consistently important cultural force in the United States.”

Yeah, well, there are a lot of lists you could peruse that would leave you with no idea that “religion has been a consistently important cultural force in the United States.” At least not that it has been a consistently important positive cultural force.

Peruse any list of international medical bankruptcies, or infant morality statistics, or maternal mortality statistics, or child poverty statistics. Peruse this list. Or peruse this one. Or this one.

Just sayin.’

To his credit, Winters does suggest a handful of religious “cultural works” as alternatives to the one-per-decade offerings from the Post’s list. But this mostly just makes the stronger case for the works their list includes, weakening the case for his new whine in old whine-skins that seems determined to pose as the beleaguered victim of some imagined cultured despisers of religion.

It’s self-defeating to try to build a case against sneering secularism by championing “religious” cultural contributions like George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport or John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Those are both vital cultural contributions in defense of religious pluralism guarded by non-sectarian — i.e., secular — government.

No Establishment, baby. Wall of separation. That’s the only thing that makes religious “cultural works” possible. Without that, all you’ll get are court prophets and court jesters. You want “to bigotry, no sanction” and something more than “mere toleration”? Then you need non-sectarian government, which is to say you need secular government.

“Secular” is not the opposite of religious. “Secular” is the opposite of sectarian — the opposite of Officially Sectarian and the opposite of Mandatory Sectarianism and the opposite of We’re All Faking It Because We’re Forced To (Even Those Of Us Who Are Trying Not To Fake It) Sectarianism.

Anyway, Winters’ engagement-bait response to the Post’s engagement-bait got me thinking about the stand-out religious cultural works of more recent decades that might make such a list and that led me to do something I had not done in many years. I sat and listened to one of the landmark religious cultural works of the 1980s: Amy Grant’s break-out album Age to Age.

I didn’t have to look up the lyrics because, as it turns out, I still remembered almost all of them. That includes all the words to that album’s biggest hit, written by Michael Card, the song “El Shaddai.”

To the outcast on her knees
You were the God who really sees
And by Your might
You set Your children free …

We talked here recently about the way that the current wave of “worship music” tends to clarify which “God” it is praising by using possessive pronouns — extremely possessive pronouns.

“Praise God.” OK, but which God? Praise Our God. Our [white, American, Republican, capitalist] God.

The chorus of Card’s song answers the question “which God?” instead by reciting various names given to or given by God in the Bible.

But in his verses, Card takes another approach to this question, referencing the deeds that gave rise to those names. “You set Your Children free” refers to what some of us regard as the first of the Ten Commandments, where God directly addresses the question of which “God” by saying “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

Which God is it that we praise and worship and obey? The God of liberation from slavery. That in itself seems like an affront to the 21st-century white evangelicalism that exists a generation after this album exploded in 1982.

But the other thing Card does here also seems utterly alien to contemporary MAGA worship and MAGA religion: He identifies God through the eyes of Hagar, the abused and discarded concubine, the refugee.

Which God? The God who sees and who centers “the outcast on her knees.”

Thou shalt have no other Gods. But that is not the God worshipped by white evangelicals in 2026.

Age to Age is an important cultural work in that its unprecedented success helped to create what is now a billion-dollar Christian music industry.

And but also, Age to Age is an ephemeral relic that apparently had no lasting influence on the millions of Christians who adored it back in 1982 and who have long since turned completely away from “El Shaddai” to worship some other God who, like them, refuses to see to or care about “the outcast on her knees.”

Anyway, I loved that song back in 1982 and I just realized I still do.

So here’s another now-old song in a similar vein. This is Vampire Weekend’s “Ya Hey” as covered by Phosphorescent.

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