OldSpeak

Rock and Roll or Christianity?

By Jayson Whitehead
March 10, 2005

“Christianity will go—it will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We are more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity.”—John Lennon, March 4, 1966

“We’ve got the Holy Spirit’s wind at our back. What we saw in 2004 is more and more Americans are rejecting the 1960s counterculture.”—Dr. Richard Land, February 18, 2005

When Richard Land, moral issues spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention, uttered his remarks at the Reclaiming America for Christ Conference last month, he echoed a celebratory tone currently held by many conservative Christians. For them, the assault on Judeo-Christian principles initiated by the hippies and their ilk is finally being repealed. And while his slap at the counterculture was issued broadly, it could easily have been aimed at John Lennon’s infamous invective. Middle America and, in particular, those below the Mason-Dixon line—aka the Bible Belt—reacted with fury in 1966, stomping and burning Beatles records with irate zeal. Land is old enough to have lived through Lennon’s evolution from the foremost mop top into a world-class Atheist; from “She loves you” to “Imagine there’s no heaven.”   

That period, taking place roughly from the mid-1960s through the mid-‘70s and commonly referred to as “the Sixties,” was identified by its cultural turbulence. It was preceded and followed by two particularly conservative blocks of time, one marked by Joseph McCarthy, the other by Ronald Reagan. America’s recent past is indicative of this type of oscillation, a swing from more liberal sentiments to conservative and back again. Think the Roarin’ Twenties, the Sixties, or even the Nineties. What some see as a natural ebb and flow is to others an epic struggle for the control of America’s soul. Although they are on different sides of the divide, the same spirit that motivated Lennon’s brash claims spurred Land’s nearly 40 years later. At the time of their respective statements, both men clearly felt they were on the cusp of something momentous.

Cast in the long shadow of history, who is right, Lennon or Land? Current events suggest a conservative surge. There were no Beatles’ songs at the recent presidential inauguration, but John Ashcroft’s retro-hymn “Let the Eagles Soar” was featured. And to punctuate the rollback, it was sung by a former cast member of The Lawrence Welk Show. On a more substantial level, efforts to prevent same sex marriage have largely succeeded, and although a national constitutional amendment has lost its political allure, the threat still exists. The strength of the conservative movement’s influence was clearly demonstrated in the FCC's response to Janet Jackson’s “costume malfunction” at last year’s Super Bowl and in their recent decision to hike their fine for obscenity from $75,000 to as high as $500,000. And supporters of the current president are positively giddy when it comes to the topic of Supreme Court justices. By their estimate, up to four justices could step down over the next few years, all to be replaced by versions of Scalia or Thomas.

Still, if we take rock and roll to be more than music but an overall flouting of convention (as it was in Lennon’s day), then we can also mark its progress. America has always had a seedy underbelly. New Orleans around the turn of the Twentieth Century was a black market of prostitutes, drugs, and just about anything illicit that existed. Or recall the subterranean world presented in the 1950s by Beat writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Whereas instances like these seemed aberrations, today the underbelly has grown so immensely that the traditional moral values so often alluded to are in some ways like the casing covering a cup of crème brulee, a candy coating easy to crack.

Or consider the rise of pornography. Thirty years ago, X-rated films were consigned to rundown theaters. They were a novelty, and certainly not pervasive by any standard. But the advent of the home cinema and the Internet has catapulted their consumption. “In the space of a generation, a product that once was available in the back alleys of big cities has gone corporate, delivered now directly into homes and hotel rooms by some of the biggest companies in the United States,” 60 Minutes reported last year. “It is estimated that Americans now spend somewhere around $10 billion a year on adult entertainment, which is as much as they spend attending professional sporting events, buying music or going out to the movies.”   

Discounting pornography’s extraordinary reach for the present moment, let us take into account MTV. While the channels at the low end of the dial have to tow the FCC-enforced line, those on cable take more substantial liberties. At the far end of this scale is MTV, whose core audience is between 12-34 years old. In this highly prized age group, cable—where MTV reigns supreme— is viewed more often than standard TV. Among those key viewers, the music-based network has the top three rated shows and five in the top eight. Many of the shows are voyeuristic. In particular, The Real World, with its Petri dish of young, raging hormones, seems designed to titillate.

Music videos, though, are far more explicit than any of these shows. Currently, two of the most popular ones are “Sugar (Remix)” by Trick Daddy and “Candy Shop” by Fifty Cent. Both are songs that employ thinly veiled euphemisms to discuss sex, with one ending in “That’s right, jump on it. All night, lick on it” while the chorus of the latter is “I’ll take you to the candy shop/I’ll let you lick the lollipop.” You don’t really have to use your imagination.

Rock and roll music, and the song format period, has always employed sexual imagery. In that sense, lyrics such as these are a mere extension. What sets these songs apart are the accompanying videos in which bodacious women, clothed in the scantiest attire, undulate erotically. In “Candy Shop,” for example, a woman sits in a bathtub, while another pours chocolate syrup over her shoulders.

Is it starting to become clear? The outcasts are not at the gates anymore; they live among us and with us—in some instances, they are us. Lennon said as much in “I Am the Walrus”: “You are me, as I am he, as we are all together.”

Most evangelical leaders, with the wind at their sails, stress that the effort to turn back the counterculture is only in the early stages. Jerry Falwell recently restarted the Moral Majority to aid in this effort, and Land in particular stressed a 10-15 year struggle. Despite their optimism, however, evangelical conservatives are at a particular disadvantage, as they are in the unenviable position of trying to reverse a significant trend. A common cliché involving a shoreline may be apt to describe what they are up against. As the analogy goes, every time a wave rolls in, it carries sand out with it. The coast is constantly being eroded; it is natural and quite irreversible. Seen in this light, evangelicals stand defiantly on the beach, waiting for the water to recede from their ankles, sand in hand.

When John Lennon first spat his theories on Western religion in March 1966 to The London Evening Standard, they were originally dismissed by the English as the musings of an over-privileged pop star. Or perhaps the Brits, increasingly apathetic toward religion, agreed with their countryman. It wasn’t until an American magazine ran the same comments months later on July 31, 1966, that a furor erupted across the United States. In the face of this reaction, a press conference was hastily called, where a shaken Lennon tried to withdraw his earlier remarks, but not too successfully. Lennon’s attempted cover-up was seen for what it was. The cat was out of the bag. The Beatles had shown their hand. The culture wars, as we now know them, had begun. And we are still living in their wake.

DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN OLDSPEAK ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE.