(From NTJ, January 1999)

A recent visit to Yale, complete with watching a Yale-Princeton hockey game, reminded us of the suffocating ubiquity of post-1950s popular culture. Being some twenty years removed from college life it was curious to see Yale undergraduates participating in the rah-rah spirit that college students of our generation studiously avoided in the name of being independently cool. Even more surprising was to see the overwhelming support for the Yale band, an extracurricular activity that certain boomers associated with losers and nerds. But here we were, in 1998, watching kids supposedly indoctrinated in the dogma of political correctness and postmodernism not just playing in but singing along with the band. Perhaps even more remarkable was that these nineteen- and twenty-year olds knew the words to the songs the band played. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Credence Clearwater Revival – it didn’t matter. These students sang along. The scene was almost surreal. These college students were joining in the singing of music that in our generation was supposed to be a pronounced statement against joining anything. Of course, one of the great myths of popular culture is that of the solitary individual who does his own thing, even while two-thirds of the teenage population are doing exactly the same thing.

But aside from revealing the conformist side of pop culture’s individualism, this scene also spoke volumes about the triumph of rock ‘n roll. Who could have imagined college students in the 1960s and 1970s singing with the college band to popular songs three decades old? Would any of us have known the words to the songs of Frank Sinatra or the Andrews Sisters? So why then won’t John, Paul, Ringo and Mick just go away? Perhaps, an even more pressing question is why people are not embarrassed to continue to live like teenagers even when they are in their forties and fifties?

One way of considering this question is to contrast the Rolling Stones’ relatively recent tour (lots of 1970s bands are doing retrospective treks, we understand) with what Frank Sinatra did for almost all of his life and with what Tony Bennett continues to do – that is, sing the songs that made them stars. It was not the least embarrassing for Sinatra to sing his kind of music because it was and is adult (don’t ask for a definition; it’s like pornography). It may not be Mozart or Vaughn Williams, but the way of singing, combined with the ethos such songs create, do not require listeners or adoring fans to act like teenagers. In other words, no one thought Frank silly singing his songs into his eighties. The same cannot be said for Mick Jagger. In fact, one cannot think of a more laughable sight than a man who is a grandfather acting like he is still the high-school deviant whose only care seems to be questioning all forms of authority.

Which raises a further question – why the triumph of rock ‘n roll in most sectors of Christian worship? Why has perpetually adolescent music become appropriate for expressing praise and adoration to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? This is not to suggest that ballads like those made popular by Sinatra would be fitting. Our preference runs to the Psalms of the Old Testament set to tunes that are either singable by all generations or chanted. But the triumph of rock ‘n roll, whether soft or not, seems to run contrary to the apostle Paul’s instructions in Titus where he told older men to be temperate, serious, and sensible, and older women to be sensible, chaste, and domestic. If this is indeed conduct fitting sound doctrine, in fact, if gravity and self-control are virtues that sound doctrine is supposed to produce, then why has Christian worship become the arena where the musical forms of the Stones, Beatles and CCR, already domesticated, are now baptized?

Of course, our culture has many problems, but it does not say good things about our churches that by failing to see any difference between serious and frivolous music they are also in danger of losing the ability to distinguish adolescence from maturity. Of course, churches who follow the lead of pop culture may become as mainstream and as ubiquitous as the Stones, but they are likely to look just as silly when they turn fifty.