“Favorite-Song” Theology

Faith in God is not a question of taste but a matter of fact.

A pastor I know, Stephen Belynskyj, starts each confirmation class with a jar full of beans. He asks his students to guess how many beans are in the jar, and on a big pad of paper writes down their estimates. Then, next to those estimates, he helps them make another list: their favorite songs.

When the lists are complete, he reveals the actual number of beans in the jar. The whole class looks over their guesses, to see which estimate was closest to being right.

Belynskyj then turns to the list of favorite songs. “And which one of these is closest to being right?” he asks. The students protest that there is no “right answer”; a person’s favorite song is purely a matter of taste.

Belynskyj, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Notre Dame, asks, “When you decide what to believe in terms of your faith, is that more like guessing the number of beans, or more like choosing your favorite song?”

Always, Belynskyj says, from old as well as young, he gets the same answer: Choosing one’s faith is more like choosing a favorite song.

When Belynskyj told me this, it took my breath away. “After they say that, do you confirm them?” I asked him.

“Well,” smiled Belynskyj, “first I try to argue them out of it.”

The God Who Is There

I give him credit. Not all pastors would try to argue aspiring church members out of their reasons for making a statement of faith. Yet it is important that they do so. Our creeds may be inadequate in describing the truth, but a God lives who is exactly himself, as precisely as there are only so many beans in a jar. Faith in him is not a question of taste, but a matter of fact. Some statements are closer to being right than others.

Ordinary TV-watching, mall-shopping, church-attending Americans don’t think so. They think there is something quite admirable about religious feeling, any religious feeling. That explains why they consider fundamentalist such a dirty word. Most Americans wouldn’t have a clue about the theological distinctives of genuine fundamentalism; they know a fundamentalist as someone who is “rigid” and “judgmental,” who insists that he is right and others are wrong. You would feel that way about someone who insisted that his favorite song is better than yours—who insisted that yours, in fact, is wrong.

“Favorite-song theology” also explains something about Christians: the puzzling compounding of fervent belief with cultural conformism. Sometimes (especially on religious TV) these two seem almost linked. The more florid people’s expressions of faith, and the more they say “Praise the Lord!” and tell about miraculous events, the more likely they are to pursue fashion, success, health, and wealth just the way their neighbors do. A favorite song can be the object of that kind of allegiance—ardent but limited. It does not necessarily interfere with the rest of your life.

Top-Forty Churches

Churches respond to favorite-song theology in different ways. One possibility—the prevalent one—is to work around it, as an unfortunate but not deadly habit of thought. Church-growth strategies sometimes play into this, by tuning the church to the tastes of the neighborhood, and downplaying distasteful, judgmental aspects of the gospel. If you are looking for a favorite song, they seem to say, we will play only the Top Forty.

Others respond to favorite-song theology in just the opposite way, by making a longer and more elaborate list of doctrines and moral positions. But that does not get to the foundation of the problem. Hard-line Christian rectitude can be just another taste, appealing to some, appalling to others. The problem is not style, hard or soft. The problem is a mode of thought (or the lack of it), arising from a series of modern confusions.

First is a confusion about how God relates to the creation. Americans generally believe in something they call God. They pray when they are in trouble, and they believe that the world’s problems require a “spiritual” answer. They also believe in the reality of creation, which they think of primarily as matter. In fact, they have an almost mystical faith in something called “science,” which deals with the material world, with “real things.”

The trouble is this: Americans do not believe in a God separate from and above his creation, in whom “all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible” (Col. 1:16). Modern people do not see any structure to reality. It is all stirred together, spirit and matter, force and will power, science and spirituality. God is in the middle of it, on the one hand more important than anything else, because more powerful, and on the other hand less important than most things, because intangible. Americans see God as a blank force, mysteriously operating alongside gravity, and more or less at its level. Star Wars captures it well: “May the Force be with you.” Is the Force a personal being, or a physical principle not yet fully understood? For most people, it is an open question.

Faith, then, becomes fundamentally superstitious. People hope that by praying correctly or thinking correctly they may somehow tap spiritual power. Prayer becomes a wish, a hopeful gesture, an experiment, rather than an objective request set before a God who will respond with infinite power according to his principles. And so religion becomes, at best, pragmatism—”I don’t understand how, but prayer works!”—and at worst, a matter of personal preference, like a favorite song.

The antidote is to teach the doctrine of creation: that God is the maker and sustainer of all that is, visible and invisible, and that he is separate from and higher than all else, material and spiritual. Many of us have neglected that biblical theme; it has not seemed terribly relevant, except narrowly to oppose the theory of evolution. But the intellectual confidence you find throughout the Bible—shepherds and nomads and fishermen standing up to pharaohs and wizards and religious scholars—is based on the conviction that you do not have to understand everything under the sun, merely the keystone. Know God, and you know what matters.

Know-Nothings And Fence Sitters

That leads us to a second and related confusion, that modern people lack confidence in their ability to know anything important. Science, people believe, is a reliable source of information, but only about things that don’t matter, like the mass of the Milky Way. (Anyway, you have to be a scientist to know these things. Ordinary people can only take their word for it.) When the subject is human beings, science grows weak and contradictory—you can find a study to support anything. And when the subject is spiritual—the meaning of life, the rights and wrongs of sex, the oppression of addictions—science turns almost mute. Ironically, science, which grew from the confidence that the God-created universe could be studied and understood, has left ordinary people without any confidence in their ability to study and understand. So ordinary people humbly make do with a favorite-song theology. They are not sure it’s right, but they know what they like.

The antidote might begin with Romans 1, which claims that all people everywhere know at least one thing: that they should be grateful. Paul claims (with great confidence) that people have absolutely no excuse for their ungratefulness to God: “Although they knew God [from the readily observable universe] they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.…” (v. 21).

Some would argue that, in fact, scientists who study the universe do not universally reach the conclusion that there is a God. Therefore, Paul was mistaken. But this is taking Paul from the wrong angle—of intellectual proof, rather than of moral certainty. Paul was certain that all who observe the universe know in their hearts that they should be humbly grateful for its astonishing wonders. Awe and gratitude seem inescapably appropriate, whether the study is the mating habits of gibbons or the structure of the atom. Anything less than gratefulness is churlish.

But why gratefulness? Gratefulness and awe are inappropriate responses to a purely impersonal and mechanical universe; they suggest an inner knowledge that there is someone or something to whom gratefulness is due.

Nonscientists as well as scientists know intrinsically that for one million different blessings they ought to be thankful, that thankfulness should fill their hearts. It is objectively wrong to take for granted friends and loved ones, sunsets and rainstorms. Nothing can justify ungratefulness. Yet “grateful” is very far from what we are. Rather, we are irritable and anxious. Knowing we should be one thing before God, we choose another. We go wrong, and to avoid facing that fact, we consciously or unconsciously suppress the truth, which is that there is someone to whom we owe thanks.

Christians need to rebuild confidence that people are capable of recognizing truth—that, in fact, people are responsible for recognizing truth. With that simple confidence, favorite-song theologies begin to die. For these theologies are built on apathy, on shrugs.

The Upbeat Tunes Of God

In sum, when we hold confirmation classes, or teach in Sunday school, or preach on Sunday morning, or talk casually to nonbelievers about our faith, we are often talking to people whose mental world is a chaotic swirl of spirit and matter, without any Creator Lord over it all. We are talking to people who distrust their own ability to discern the truth about anything that really matters. And we are talking to people who disbelieve that they, or anyone they know and care about, can really be held responsible for knowing the truth. To such global agnosticism, a creed—any creed—can only be like a favorite song. It must be judged by how good it makes you feel.

That is what people are looking for, almost craving: a word that will touch their heart, make them feel hopeful, cause them to mist up. We often give it to them—we who are skilled at playing the upbeat tunes of God, family, faith. Do we change our listeners when we do? Not if someone else can play their feelings with equal skill in other directions. Change comes from confronting the truth—as all of Jesus’ ministry displayed. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” He never showed much interest in getting people to mist up.

I doubt that a world view can be changed in the course of a confirmation class. It is, however, worth trying to begin there. In other times, very simple people felt capable of and responsible for knowing at least some of the truth. These only seem to be impossible matters now because they go against the stream of our culture.

Perhaps our task is something like the IRS’s. Every year the men and women of the Internal Revenue Service must induce people to grapple with the tax code, when people plainly would rather not. The tax code seems at times beyond mortal comprehension. Yet the IRS insists it is not beyond comprehension, and because they insist, it is not. Every April, ordinary people manage to file their taxes with a fair degree of accuracy, which they would surely not do if the IRS treated accuracy as optional.

Francis Schaeffer’s life work was exactly this: an insistence that faith was possible, and also necessary. It was, therefore, not allowed to float into a super-rational “upper story,” but had to stick to the realm of “true truth.” Schaeffer is gone, but his influence lives on. For example, more than any other figure, he is responsible for the alignment of the evangelical movement against abortion.

So it goes: A preoccupation with truth will often lead toward unpopular causes, causes that seem more like a formidable etude to be learned and labored through than some simple heart-warming melody to be hummed. God grant us the willingness to be so led, and to so lead others.

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