Evangelical Christianity is preoccupied with death but doesn’t seem to know it. As with Eros, Thanatos seems to be repressed in Christian circles.
First of all, there's the cross. Catholic crucifixes have Jesus hanging from his three wounds; obviously, there's a concern with Jesus' death and the pain he suffered while dying.
Protestants, on the other hand, have a blank cross -- as though removing Jesus' body removes the meaning of the cross, or as though the cross itself has meaning outside of its use as an instrument of death. When evangelicals do talk about Jesus and the cross, they tend to focus on the resurrection -- his and their own -- and deny the reality of dying, which becomes just a transitional phase in the ultimate journey to heaven.
Other than the obvious “there’s an afterlife” distraction from mortality, there’s the language of death that Christians employ. Your friend has “gone home to Jesus” or “to be with the Lord.” Compare these to “kicked the bucket,” “turned into worm food,” or “bit the dust” and the care with which Christians talk about death is clear.
Evangelicals aren’t known for their sense of humor, so it’s not entirely unexpected that they would treat death with the same serious, matter-of-fact attitude as they use in attending to other life-level questions. They don’t laugh at death, as though it’s an absurd cosmic joke; they might feel or claim to feel joy, but even joy is solemn in its way. It’s straightforward, un-sarcastic, un-cynical, un-ironic.
There’s something uncanny about death, but evangelical responses to death (and the meaning of life) don’t admit absurdity or uncertainty. Because they can’t laugh, they have to deal with anxieties about death and their own internal death-drives in other ways.
The amount of talking about the afterlife that goes on in evangelical circles – of both the “can’t wait for heaven” and “you’re all going to hell” varieties – makes it seem as though Christians are able to deal with death through straight-talk, without resorting or referring to the depersonalizing sense of mortality that lends itself to sarcasm. But only the most strident or self-deluded faith is absolutely certain of the afterlife (and one’s place in heaven); and push down doubt and Thanatos, and they show up in other places – only stronger – just like Eros.
The sense that life may be futile, repressed, becomes suicidal tendencies.
There are plenty of musical proofs of this. Church of Rhythm’s “Life Is Worth Fighting For” and The Newsboys “Elle G.” are songs about suicide – but they’re not in the same vein as metalhead or Marilyn-Manson-esque songs that may arguably revel in the idea of suicide as a panacea or admit to wanting to die. The thrust of the Christian songs is dedicated to showing what a bad idea suicide is.
“Life Is Worth Fighting For” is written as if to a friend who’s in the hospital following a suicide attempt. It’s a heartfelt plea with the suicidal friend to recognize that – well – “life is worth fighting for.”
That morning you called to talk,
You talked about how life was a merry go round,
And you wanted to get off…
I always thought you’d cry for help,
I always thought you’d understand,
That life is worth fighting for
The fact that the song is written to a friend could mean that it’s autobiographical – someone in the band may have found himself in the position of driving to the hospital to comfort and confront and friend who’d just tried to commit suicide – but whether it’s true-to-life or not, it’s clear that putting the desire to die into the second-person character distances that desire from the narrator. The friend may want to die, but the narrator is in a position of strength (and certainty), insisting that “life is worth fighting for.”
The narrator does admit to feeling death-drive pressure in the last verse:
So you’re living on the razor’s edge,
Well, I’ve been there myself, holding a gun to my head
The song continues with a bridge that emphasizes both the empathetic connection the narrator has with his suicidal friend and the relative strength of the narrator’s current position in comparison to the friend’s:
If you hold my hand, can you hold on for a moment longer?
If you know I love you, does it make it better?
(Don’t give up / Don’t give in)
The empathy makes for a touching, and I would say genuine, song. It’s possible that this song has prevented Christian teens from killing themselves. But it’s also clear that the type of empathy being offered is a theoretically post-Thanatos one, a posthumous one – after the death of death. The narrator may have felt the same tendencies as the friend, but he’s now in a position to aid his friend. Thanatos has been defeated for the narrator, and can be for the friend, too.
There are secular pop songs – Third Eye Blind's "Jumper" comes to mind – that deal with suicide in similar ways, but they don’t seem as prolific, and I don’t think the suicide-themed songs generally popular with secular crowds hit the same chords (so to speak) as some Christian suicide songs.
“Elle G.” by Newsboys doesn’t have the same self-reflection that COR’s suicide-ballad does. More lyrically cryptic in general, “Elle G.” seems to be the ruminations of a less-reliable narrator whose loved one (we’ll call her Elle) has succeeded in an attempt at suicide. Instead of a careful, intimate expression of empathy and hope, “Elle G.” expresses the anger and confusion of the still-living toward the purposely-dead.
Week seven: Did you really assume
I'd find some solace from the letter in your room?
Next life, could you kindly refrain
From throwing yourself at the mercy of a train?
Silence all, nobody breathe
How in the world could you just leave?
You promised you would
Silence that evil with good
There’s no recognition of fellow-feeling on the part of the narrator. Elle’s note gives the narrator no solace, and he seems irritated that she might think it would. The sense of the song is that the narrator has been victimized by the suicide, rather than that Elle has. She "promised" she would replace "evil" with "good" -- presumably, that she would be okay and not kill herself. And then she went and did it anyway.
If Elle is an unwitting victim of wrong thinking (like the friend in “Life Is Worth Fighting For”), there’s no evidence of it. And even if she has committed suicide as a result of misunderstanding, wrong belief receives the same consequences as willful disobedience in conservative evangelical theology. In a note of pity and pique, the final verse says that “grace” is the only hope she has of even making it into heaven where the narrator can see her face again:
Forgive her, please Father
She don't know what she did...
God, I long to see her face
We haven't a hope beyond Your grace
Newsboys have made a whole career out of being “not ashamed” of God’s message. They bill themselves as truth-tellers who aren’t afraid to “let you know” what God has to say about everything God has something to say about (which is everything). There’s an argument to be made for their attitude toward suicide being the general theological attitude (uncluttered by political correctness) – though being the self-proclaimed messengers of “and-proud-of-it!” evangelicals doesn’t make them the actual messengers. (It only means they perceive themselves that way.) The idea is that if Christians were unashamed of their message, this is what they would all be saying.
But the effect is that this is what all Christians would be hearing.
In addition to the self-distancing of the songwriters of these two, and many other, Christian suicide-songs, the songs attend to what must be an actual need in the Christian community. Either other Christians need to experience themselves as relating to the narrators – in distanced positions of relative strength – or they need to hear the messages that COR and Newsboys have to offer, themselves.
Christians need to be reminded that “life is worth fighting for,” and that they may not make it to heaven if they destroy themselves. And they seem to need to be reminded more than most other groups.
Mainstream pop music, geared toward teens, has a few examples of suicide-themed songs – but it’s not something you’d expect to find on a Britney Spears album. Goth music and its “dark” cousins deal with death frequently and explicitly; the closest pop music comes to this is dealing with break-ups (the death of a relationship). Christian music, on the other hand, deals with suicide songs as matter-of-factly as evangelicals deal with all other areas of life: It’s simply part of the playlist, part of the message.
If asked, I’m betting evangelicals would point out that there are a lot of hurting people out there in the world, and they just want to reach out to those people.
I doubt they would admit that they were singing to the choir.
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