I was brought up CofE. My dad was the Church organist, by Grandad the Church Warden, and we went to Church every Sunday. We were a bit high church, and I was an altar boy as well as singing in the choir.
This is my local parish Church back in the day when both the BBC and ITV broadcast a live Church service every Sunday. That’s my Grandpa reading the lesson, my Dad playing the organ, and me and my brother and sister in the congregation.
For my parents going to Church was a big part of their lives, even though we never spoke about belief. For them, I think, it was as much about human connection, as it was about any connection to God, a way of being part of something bigger than just yourself or your family.
I went through confirmation without ever feeling any religious feeling or connection. It never occurred to me to do otherwise. I spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling hoping for some kind of inspiration, but all I got was an abiding interest in old buildings. After my parents split up we stopped going to church and that was about it. I am still notionally CofE which means that I sent my kids to a great school and get the use of an amazing historic building for weddings, funerals and christenings all at someone else’s expense.
I’m not really spiritual either.
I meditate most days, which is as near as I get to praying, I’ve visited the stone garden of the Ni Chi Ren in Kyoto, and the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. I’ve walked bare foot to the cave of the sleeping Buddha. But this was about me and meditation and about finding some inner calm, nothing to do with spiritual beings. My son deliberately moved one of the stones in the Ni Chi Ren garden as a prank, which I believe caused so much damage to global karma that it put Donald Trump into power and caused Brexit.
When my yoga teacher asked me if I had considered converting to Buddhism I replied that Buddhism is a reincarnatory religion with no means of converting. One simply follows the way. She made me do head balance for the rest of the class as punishment for upsetting people.
If you had asked me a few years ago about religion in music I would have been with King of The Hill.
But I do like making list of my favourite songs sorted into categories, and I realised a few years ago that I among my favourite and most played records are some with an overtly religious theme.
Predictably a lot of these come from early RnB with it’s roots in Gospel.
I love Curtis Mayfield, and I am always struck by the way he portrays Christianity in his music. The Jesus I was brought up with was a white bloke who lived on a cloud, who could be nice, but also jealous and tetchy at times.
Mayfield’s Jesus is more present, more real. He doesn’t run on hopes and prayers but on diesel. Probably lubricated with WD40. I think if I had been brought up on Mayfield’s version of christianity I might have worked harder to believe.
But the line which sticks with me the most is the exhortation to be ready for those “whose chances grow slimmer, because there’s no hiding place before the Kingdom Throne”.
Now I can hear that line as a religious statement that God will judge you by how much you do for those in need, how you intervene to help those without. An activist almost socialist God starkly at odds with the weird apocalyptic theology that American Conservatives have constructed to justify their own venality.
But I don’t need to believe in god to believe that is right. The statement is correct even if it is me judging myself, not God judging me. The word’s power holds true. Mayfield is a genius.
Country is probably the most derided musical genre. Certainly modern country music has become an awful waste of airwaves, trite, jingoistic, and wholly absorbed reactionary politics.
There was a moment when it could have been different for country music, when Gram Parson’s and a few others tried to create a different kind of cosmic America.
We can argue how much Sin City is a religious song, or whether it uses old testament imagery in it’s condemnation of corporate greed and conformity. The song critiques the materialistic excess of Los Angeles, describing it as a place where wealth (represented by the gold-plated door) becomes an idol, leading to a looming judgment. It is still a brilliant and incredibly powerful record, where “the gold plated door can’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain”.
But the most powerful depictions of religion in popular music in my mind come from reggae, in particular the blend of consciousness and dub that emerged in the 1970s
Armagideon Time by Willie Watson uses the Real Rock riddim, to create an urgent beat, over which Watson lays down his message of justice.
There is no doubt this is a religious message
Remember, to praise Jahovah
And he will guide you
In this Iration
Note the brilliant use of “iration”. Like Mayfield this is a song about standing up for justice, standing up for the poorest:
A lotta people won't get no supper tonight,
A lotta people going to suffer tonight
So a lot of people going to have to stand up and fight
And like Mayfield it doesn’t need a belief to believe in the lyrics.. The other side of religious reggae is the more mystical side, often hazed with dope smoke
Underpinned by some Scratch Perry magic Romeo sets off the confront Satan, armed only the simple truth of his religion, an iron shirt, and a spliff the size of a babies arm.
The reason for this Sunday meditation on religion is Big Freedia.
Big Freedia identifies as a gay, black man, uses female pronouns and is the biggest thing to come out the New Orleans bounce. Sadly I couldn’t name the second biggest thing.
Her new album is full on Gospel. Not secular Gospel, or Gospel soul, but the real thing. Massive Gospel harmonies, full on religious lyrics set over a variety of funk and bounce rhythms. The last two tracks are scorchers; Get Up Out Of Your Pew, and Pushing Onward.
I would be interested if there are other tracks with a religious theme people have close to their hearts?