In this thread it is basically implied that christian music is right wing. So I started to think about liberal christian music.
Jesus - The Velvet Underground
Turn, Turn, Turn - Pete Seeger
Jesus Christ - Woody Guthrie
I’m sure there are more, but it’s not something I look out for.
Given to Fly - Pearl Jam
Pretty much anything written by the St. Louis Jesuits in the 70s. There are still Catholic sources that consider their songbook almost pagan.
I think Derek Webb, a Christian artist might be liberal.
I know he is not conservative, did not like Bush, and was against the war, but I don’t know the specifics of his beliefs past that.
Derek Webb’s wiki says he endorsed Ron Paul.
guess im wrong then haha. I just knew he was a pacifist (or atleast close too it), and some what emerging, which typically has a liberal political bent.
But apparently I was wrong. Thanks for the info.
You R Loved - Victoria Williams
Not that this is the genre of Christian music you probably had in mind, but when I was in college in the late 1980s, I went to a Christmas party at the home of a very lefty friend of my mom’s, a professor of Latin American history. One of the other guests was a Central American woman who had brought her guitar and was singing Nicaraguan folk songs in Spanish. One of them was about a poor young couple, Maria and Jose, who had a little boy named Jesus. Maria wanted her son to become a carpenter, like his father Jose, but Jesus wanted to become a REVOLUTIONARY!
I wish I could go back in time and get more info about the song, its writer, etc.
Does One of Us - Joan Osborne count as Christian?
[Nitpick] Turn isn’t Christian. It’s based on a passage from Ecclesiastes, but that’s a Jewish book, not a Christian one, and there’s nothing specifically Christian about the song. There really isn’t even anything religious about it. It doesn’t even mention God. [/nitpick]
Althought he wasn’t explicitly political, I think that Johnny Cash tended towards a more liberal brand of Christian messages.
Really? I either sang in the choir or was a choir director from around 1980 until 1997 at two different Catholic churches, and the music used at both churches was frequently stuff from the St. Louis Jesuits. In fact, from about 1985, I would say the music was predominantly St. Louis Jesuit, and that seemed to be the case in nearly every parish in this diocese.
The lyrics are primarily taken directly from scripture verses, so I can’t imagine that would be the problem. Was it the rather folky arrangements that have some people considering them to be pagan? Was this in particularly conservative parishes? (Please note I’m not disagreeing or saying you are in any way incorrect. I’m just surprised that something that was so mainstream in my diocese was controversial in others.)
As to the OP, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” could be considered left-wing, I think. It’s often referred to as the African American National Anthem and was used extensively during the heyday of the civil rights movement. However, although it does mention God in the third stanza, it never specifically refers to Jesus, so it’s not exactly Christian, per se.
Maybe not exactly pagan, but verging on secular humanist. There are a number of songs that seem to celebrate the congregation (“Anthem” and “Gather Us In” in particular) and they seem to object to the congregation singing in the voice of God (“Be Not Afraid”, “I Am The Bread of Life”).
Understand that I don’t hold this view. I grew up with the St. Louis Jesuits’ music and guitar masses (playing guitar at masses, for that matter).
I remember reading an interview with Pete Townshend where he said he felt many of his songs would be appropriate for Christian radio. I think he meant more his solo work than Who songs. He’s said that “Let My Love Open the Door” was not conceived as a romantic love song but rather a song that described God’s love for humans.
You could interpret it that way, but there’s nothing overtly Christian in the lyrics and nothing I’ve read indicates that Eddie Vedder intended it to have a Christian message.
(I got this from Wikipedia, but the full interview is here)
That description could apply to Jesus, but it would also fit the Dalai Lama (Pearl Jam is one of many bands that support Tibetan freedom), Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc.
Steve Taylor - “I blew up the clinic real good”
lyrics
Guy had a whole career in the eighties and nineties recording and touring in the Christian music industry while basically making a career out of calling out hypocrisy and problems in American Christianity and the organized church.
Canadian Bruce Cockburn is both left-liberal and Christian, but the former quality comes across in his music more explicitly than the latter.
For The Love Of It All by Peter, Paul and Mary.
Let me preface this by saying that I hate analyzing songs to death, but here goes:
I hear it as being a Christian song (obscurely so, to be sure) from these lyrics:
*First he was stripped
then he was stabbed
by faceless men, well fuckers
he still stands
And he still gives his love
he just gives it away
The love he receives is the love
that is saved*
That first stanza sounds a lot like a description of the Passion, and Jesus’s side being pierced. The rest certainly seems to be Christian theology set to music. (Jesus loves me and he’s still alive and all that.)
Other clues:
The character in the song is described as a “human being who was given to fly.” Which seems to me like an elliptical reference to John 3:16:
And of course, Jesus literally flew away after the resurrection. Acts 1:9-10:
The song is on an album entitled Yield (to a Higher Power, perhaps?).
The album also features the song Pilate, which tells us Vedder had the Passion on his mind when he was writing the lyrics for this album.
Other tracks from the album: “Faithful” (which includes a meditation on the efficacy of prayer) and “The Brain of J.” (ostensibly about JFK, but is it? Sample lyric: “The Whole world will be different soon; the whole world will be relieved”)
Yeah, it’s all open to interpretation, as all the best lyrics are, but it sure sounds like the album and the song feature some Christian themes.
Except that Eddie Vedder didn’t write “Pilate”, that song is by Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament. I don’t know how devout he is personally, but Ament was brought up Catholic and I’ve seen photographs of him wearing a cross.
On the other hand, everything Vedder has ever said about religion in interviews indicates that he’s either an agnostic or an atheist and that he does not have an especially positive view of Christianity. (See near the end of this interview, from the same year Yield was released.) It seems unlikely to me that someone with Vedder’s stated beliefs set out to write a pro-Christian song. I don’t think it would bother him that “Given to Fly” makes some people think of Jesus, and there are some definitely some parallels, but I’d be very surprised if that was what he had in mind when he wrote the lyrics.
I think you’re stretching a bit. Come on, yield to a higher power? Vedder has stated that Yield was influenced by Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael, so if the title has any deep significance I would suspect it is more to do with not trying to make nature submit to the wishes of man.
Didn’t U2 have a Christian focus in some of their earlier music?