Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal

By: T. David Gordon

As I wrote concerning the predecessor of this book, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers (reviewed above), the same goes for this one: I cannot recommend it highly enough (P&R Publishing). I have read several books addressing this issue, but this one is especially good. Gordon makes some observations that others overlook, which we’ll come back to in a moment.

Gordon again knows what he is talking about, since in addition to being currently professor of religion and Greek at Grove City College, he has also taught in the humanities and media culture. So, he doesn't make flippant remarks after a quick glance, rather observations based on careful scrutiny.

The observation that struck me the most profoundly was when Gordon pointed out today’s “insistence that many, most, or all forms of worship,” especially music, must “be contemporary.” This attitude is, in fact, unique to our day. Gordon goes on to make his point, a point I've not heard anyone else make:

My father’s generation did not demand that all hymns be written in big band idiom, and mine did not demand that they be written to sound like Eric Clapton or The Who. So why do we now find something unique in the history of the church: a considerable number of people who appear to believe sincerely that it is not merely permissible, but in some sense necessary or preferable to jettison hymns that previous generations employed? Why? (pp. 42-43).

Now, taking that to its next logical step, Gordon submits, in thirty years, when “the prevailing popular musical idiom of our culture” might very well be “gangsta rap,” will we then “be required to worship exclusively in this idiom” (p. 43)?

In the same vein, Gordon makes another observation I've not read elsewhere, namely, “the criterion of contemporaneity trumps all the criteria of all the hymnal-revision committees that ever labored.” With very few exceptions, such committees throughout history have weighed several factors in considering the merits of hymns, including:

theologically orthodox lyrics; theologically significant lyrics; literarily apt and thoughtful lyrics; lyrics and music appropriate to a meeting between God and his visible people; well-written music with regard to melody, harmony, rhythm, and form; and musical setting appropriate to the lyrical content (p. 47).

Most, if not all those, however, are thrown to the wind in today’s obsession with contemporaneity. “Only the most artistically gifted (or arrogant) of generations could possibly imagine that it could, in a single generation, be expected to produce a body of hymns that surpassed all previous hymns and rendered them obsolete” (p. 47). As Gordon observes elsewhere, “Ours is a contemporaneous culture—hook, line, and sinker. Nearly all the mediating institutions of our culture regard the past with contempt; the past is passé. We don't disagree with the past; we just pay it no attention at all. It was primitive, it was pre-electronic, and ‘wouldn't understand us today’” (p. 172). As is also true of historic doctrines, historical truths, and historic texts of Scripture, the common attitude of our day is that history is irrelevant, but we ignore it at our peril.

In an Appendix (pp. 187-88), Gordon also includes an extremely helpful and revealing table, taken from Kenneth A. Myers’ book, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Crossway, 1989). In a two-column comparison, he dramatically demonstrates the many differences between “Popular Culture” and “Traditional and High Culture.” Just a few include: focusing on the new vs. focusing on the timeless; emphasizing information and trivia vs. emphasizing knowledge and wisdom; celebrating fame vs. celebrating ability; appealing to sentimentality vs. appealing to appropriate, proportion emotions; and, most notably, tending toward relativism vs. tending toward submission to standards.

So, why does contemporaneity trump everything else? Even more to the point, however, Gordon submits, “Why does contemporaneity deserve to be included as a criterion at all, much less a criterion more important than all of these?” In fact, he goes on to ask something that is a truly scathing rebuke to the church today:

Why are there no signs outside churches that read: “Theologically Significant Worship,” or “Worship Appropriate to a Meeting between God and His Assembled People,” or “Worship That is Literarily Apt and Thoughtful”? Why do the signs say “Contemporary Worship,” as though that criterion were itself worthy of promoting? (p. 48)

Gordon also addresses the issues of form and content. Can anyone honestly deny that most contemporary music is basically superficial, often even trivial? Is such superficiality, therefore, appropriate to such subjects as: “repentance, sacrifice, obedience, and selflessness” (pp. 60–61)? “Would it make good sense, for instance, to take the lyrics of something like ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ and put it into a contemporary-sounding musical form” (p. 60)?

This is, I am convinced, a crucial point. I once heard Ligon Duncan ask a similar question: “Did you know that metrically you can sing ‘Amazing Grace’ to the tune of the old TV show ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ but would that be appropriate?”

Gordon also makes a powerful point when he reminds us: “The very existence of the expression sacred music once conveyed the notion that some music was different from other music, intentionally different, different precisely because it was devoted to a sacred (not common) cause” (p. 68, emphasis Gordon’s).

Gordon also takes on the popular adage, “This is just a matter of style. We like our kind of music, and older people like their kind of music.” But, as he well states, “traditional sacred music is not older people’s ‘kind of music.’” Such music remained unchanged no matter what the popular music was (such as the aforementioned big bands and The Who). “Such traditional forms are not ‘our’ music; they are the church’s music, and they antedate us by many generations” (pp. 75-76. emphasis Gordon’s).

Now, I have only one major criticism of Gordon’s work. While I most certainly agree that the guitar is the number one instrument of contemporary music, and while I also agree that it is overused (that is, almost exclusively) and misused (as in unskilled rhythmic strumming), I respectfully disagree that it is to be anathema, a point he makes several times. (I would also certainly agree, however, that the kazoo would be inappropriate, p. 50.) I have played the guitar for 40 years and have used it respectfully and reverently in churches. Gordon admits that he is not a musician, so to say that Martin Luther’s great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” cannot be accompanied on a guitar (p. 99) is a bit silly. It most certainly can, and I have done so. It is written in 4/4 time and a soft, smooth pick-pattern is quite reverent.

This reminded me of a situation a preacher friend of mine once faced. Part of his ministry at the time was music, of which his guitar was a part. A certain pastor came to him one day and said, “I couldn't allow you to come to my church because you use a guitar.” My friend asked why and the answer followed, “Oh, because it's a stringed instrument, and we feel that those are worldly.” My friend lovingly asked him, “Well, then, do you have a piano in your church? It, too, is a stringed instrument.” The pastor was noticeably taken off guard and blurted out his answer, “Well . . . yes, but you can't see the strings.”

I would humbly submit here that the problem often is not the instrument itself, but rather the incompetence of the one playing it. I am by no means a great guitarist, but I do know how to play it appropriately. Is the piano a classical instrument? Of course it is, but can it not also be used to play honky-tonk? Likewise, in the right hands a guitar is also a classical instrument, while, granted, in the wrong hands it is worse than inappropriate.

That aside, Gordon’s overall arguments (IMHO) are compelling. He recounts an incident with which I will close this review. His former colleague, author and professor David Wells, encountered a seminary student one day at the photocopier. Wells was copying a draft of the book he was writing: Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern Word (Eerdmans, 2005). The student thought the title interesting so Wells told her it was from Luther’s hymn, to which she replied that she was not familiar with it. “Imagine,” Gordon writes incredulously, “a student at a theological seminary who has never heard ‘A Mighty Fortress is our God!’”

That does, indeed, underscore where the church is headed. If we keep going the way we are now, how long will it be before other great hymns not only vanish from use but even from our memory?