Country's Jesus-and-partying crew cheapen both the faith and the music

The tension between hard partying and a yearning for piety has remained a common thread in country music for decades – but religious angst has been replaced by bland tokenism

There’s an old adage that’s popular among Christian pastors: “If you’re going to sin, sin boldly.” The saying is, in fact, a shoddy repackaging of a letter Martin Luther wrote to Philipp Melanchthon in the 16th century, but its meaning is nonetheless clear: don’t be lukewarm. As the saying goes, if you want to reject your faith, then you should also feel free to do all sorts of “sinful” things with abandon. It’s a call to conviction more than anything else – and, frankly, it’s something that many of country music’s faith-projecting stars might do well to hear.

Country music’s relationship with Christianity is nothing new, and considering the genre’s roots in the American south, that’s no surprise. Some of country music’s earliest and most famous recordings – most notably the Carter Family’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken – were explicitly religious in nature. And when country artists weren’t singing about reverence, they were singing about their own jadedness. Johnny Cash’s immortal single Sunday Morning Coming Down, which was written by Kris Kristofferson, detailed a hungover and lonely Sunday morning that found the narrator ambling past a church to listen to some singing as he reflected on “the disappearing dreams of yesterday”.

That tension between hard living and a yearning for piety has remained a common thread in country music for decades – right up into the modern era with songs like Randy Travis’s conversion tale Three Wooden Crosses or Kenny Chesney’s humorous take Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, which includes the exchange: “‘Don’t you wanna hear him call your name / When you’re standin’ at the pearly gates?’ / I told the preacher, ‘Yes I do / But I hope he don’t call today.’”

Lately, though, mainstream country music’s treatment of faith ignores any of the interesting tension of religious angst and replaces it with bland, self-assured, vaguely spiritual tokenism. On Michael Ray’s obnoxious single Real Men Love Jesus the chorus goes:

They like Saturday nights out on the town,
Sunday morning coming down,
A pretty girl out on the dance floor spinnin’,
Round and round and round,
Cold beer and a dirty hand,
Calling home every chance they can,
To say, ‘I love you’,
They don’t need a reason,
Real men love Jesus.

In this case, the final conclusion of that chorus reflects literally none of the words before it. Real men love Jesus because they like dancing and beer and calling home? (Never mind the rest of the song, which defines “real men” as those who love fishin’, fast cars and football.) That’s not only nonsensical, it’s an awfully shallow imagination of both manhood and faith. But Ray is walking the same path laid out by artists like Florida Georgia Line and Luke Bryan, who on their collaboration This is How We Roll delivered the dimwitted bridge, “We cuss on them Mondays / And pray on them Sundays / Pass it around and we dream about one day.” Always nice to see prayer references stuffed between lines about cussing and passing a joint. (Maren Morris’s excellent debut single My Church, which skips the Sunday service altogether, is a better bet than either of these.)

The newest example of this religious tokenism arrived last week with Trace Adkins’s new single Jesus and Jones, a song of sonic and lyrical mediocrity. Adkins, who never seems to be able to decide whether he’s interested in being an artist of substance (see The Rest of Mine) or silliness (see Brown Chicken Brown Cow), sings about his simultaneous desire to both party and read the Bible, but in the chorus he clarifies his ultimate goal: “I need to find a little middle ground / Between ‘let ’er rip’ and settlin’ down.”

What could be less inspiring than the pursuit of the middle ground? Are we now in an era in which our artists’ lack of convictions about whether they want to choose solemn faith or reckless pleasure is actually attractive? Don’t get me wrong, that may be the very place on the spectrum of morality that most searchers find themselves, and that may be the place most primed for artistic reflection, but is anyone actually seeking to get comfortable in this state of irresolution? Who aspires to be more indecisive? Who wishes to live with less conviction? Give me sex, drugs and rock n’ roll or give me the road to salvation! And if you aren’t feeling so inspired by either of those prospects, then explore why that’s the case. But don’t settle for the middle ground. The middle ground is beige and boring and completely uncompelling when treated uncritically. What’s the point of faith if you’re only interested in engaging halfway?

Too much modern country geared for radio is now in the business of lifestyle validation. Its purpose is not to challenge or expose listeners to anything interesting, but instead to herald the lives they are already living and reframe those lives as significant, even spiritual paths. But that makes for boring and calculated music that limits the public’s imagination for the extreme places that both faith and the rejection of faith can take people. And bad music is a shame.

I was struck by the conclusion of Jason Isbell’s feature in GQ last week. “I don’t believe all music is good,” he remarked. “I believe some music is bad for people to listen to. I think it makes their taste worse, I think it makes their lives worse, I think it makes them worse people.” I’d argue that this new wave of songs that use Jesus as little more than a cultural bumper sticker are exactly that kind of bad music. They cheapen faith and wildness alike, and they make both seem less attractive. If you’re going to sing, sing boldly.

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