4 December 2015 Chapel Message. Music: How it Influences Us

So how many of you listen to music every day? How many of you listen to at least one hour of music per day?  How many of you would say that music is the dominant form of media in your life? 

Last year I polled you high schoolers on a number of topics. One of those topics was the influence of media. 37% of you said you consume more than 35 hours of media each week. That is a lot! Over a third of you spend more time per week on a phone, listening to music, and in front of a television, than you do in a classroom. Today I am going to talk about the imperceptible way that media influences us and how that influence can make it difficult to maintain a Christian faith. To do that I am going to talk specifically about music.

Now, I want to make one thing clear right off the bat. I do not think it is my position as your teacher to tell you what music you should or shouldn’t listen to. That decision has to be made between you and God and your parents. My goal is to empower you, to give you tools to enable you to wisely make decisions regarding the music you listen to. To do that I’ll first discuss various theories that explain how music influences us. After I’ve established the theoretical basis, I’ll walk you through a few examples where I’ll try to demonstrate how to evaluate the music you listen to.

Ok, now when I first began to read great thinkers, I was surprised to find out how often they wrote about music!

For example, Damon, a wise man of ancient Athens said: let me make the music of a state and I care not who makes the law. 

He believed that music influenced society more than the government and all its laws. 

I have heard stories about a Chinese emperor who was dealing with upheavals and rebellions across his land.  He had limited resources with which to deal with these revolts, so he dressed himself up as a peasant and travelled, listening to the music in every area.  He ignored music that was harmonious in nature, but wherever the music was disharmonious, he would immediately send troops to that region, most of them arriving just in time to quell disorder. 

Similarly, I heard about a Polish professor (I can’t for the life of me remember his name) who wrote a book that claimed that every great political or social upheaval has been preceded by a revolution in that culture’s music.

Likewise, think about the founding of Sparta. Before Lycurgus set about changing the laws and reforming the constitution, what did he do? He sent Thales the poet to sing to the people. He used music to prepare the people for radical social reform.  

When I was your age my parents and people in my church used to warn me to be careful about the music I listened to. I thought that only Christians worried about this and I thought their only concern was with music with swear words. I hope I’ve made it clear so far that music is a topic that has engaged the mind of many non-Christians as well. 

Aristotle, one of the greatest minds of all time, wrote about music—and he wrote something that I think we can all agree with.  He said that music helps us move to different states of character. For example, music can move us to anger or it can calm us; it can inspire courage in us or cowardice.  This seems obvious; why is it significant?  In Aristotle’s words ‘If someone finds delight in looking at the image of some object purely on the ground of its form, he will also be bound to find pleasure in looking at the actual object whose image he now sees.’  That’s perfectly clear, right? No? Ok, let me put it another way: beauty is one.  Aesthetic beauty (the way a thing looks or sounds) and moral beauty are one (as are their opposites). According to Aristotle, if we love aesthetic beauty we will love moral beauty as well. From this it follows that listening to beautiful music will help us to live virtuous lives while ugly, disordered music will move us towards moral depravity (and again, I am not talking about the lyrics, just its aesthetic qualities—the melody, harmony, and rhythm).  

Ok, now many of you may be thinking: who is to judge what is aesthetically beautiful?  For one an opera is beautiful, while for another beauty is found in punk rock. Aren’t standards of beauty ultimately subjective; isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder? 

Plato discussed this.  He said that democratic societies (like the one in which he lived and the one in which we live) generally take this approach.  We are trained to love equality and are told that we are equal to everyone else. From this it follows that we hate others trying to tell us what is better and what is worse. We think people with so-called refined tastes are snobs or stuck up.

But so what? Is it really a problem that we all bring to art our own individual standards and judgments? 

According to Plato, the problem is that when we make aesthetic standards relative we often make morals relative as well.  If there is no objective truth as to what music is the best, maybe there is no objective truth as to what course of action is the best either. 

Ok, now that seems like a leap. How do we get from judging the sound of a song to believing there is no absolute morality?

Let’s think it through. How do we judge whether or not a song is good? We judge it based on whether or not we like it, on whether or not it makes us feel good or happy. If a song is aesthetically good based on how it makes us feel, then maybe an act is morally good based on how it makes us feel. In both cases we take something outside of ourselves, and instead of applying objective, external criteria to the thing, we judge it based on how we experience it. In both cases we reduce what is good to what we like. 

Now, what I have been proposing, the idea that music influences us apart from its words, is a hard case to make. But I think it is interesting and I wanted you to be aware of these arguments. But now I am going to move from that and discuss how the message or words of a song influence us.

But before I go on I should mention that I know a majority of you disagree with the idea that music influences you. I know you feel that way because that is how I used to feel. I remember being very young and at church and seeing a tract about heavy metal. The tract associated heavy metal with hard drugs and suicide warned Christians against listening to heavy metal. One of the bands that the article mentioned by name was Led Zeppelin. And I remember thinking to myself, well, this article can’t be completely true, because my dad listens to Led Zeppelin, that’s actually his favorite band, and he doesn’t do heroin and he hasn’t committed suicide. I remember thinking, this is bogus, this is untrue, music doesn’t influence people like that. Likewise, when warned that if I listened to music with swearing I would swear I used to think—then I am not supposed to spend time with my relatives, because they swear more than any music I am listening to. 

In response to these errors, in response to the way others had misunderstood the influence of music, I made a corresponding error, I assumed that music had no influence.

But the truth is that the content of music, the words, the lyrics, do influence us. How is that Mr. Knetter? Glad you asked.

How many of you, when you are listening to music, have thought to yourself: I am not sure if that is an accurate premise? Does that conclusion logically follow? Is that really a valid syllogism? I am sure that few of us have ever had those thoughts because listening to music is not a rational endeavor. For better or for worse, music bypasses our rational faculties. And that is what makes it so powerful.

That is how music influences us. The music you listen to, whether it is good or bad, assumes things about the world, assumes things about the nature of reality. When you listen to music, you are hearing over and over, and probably repeating to yourself time and again, things about the nature of the world. Those things might be true, or they might be false, but with time you will begin to assume them. The problem is these assumptions are not grounded in reason and their origin is completely hidden from us.

I’ll give you an example of this.

Bright Eyes: I Believe in Symmatry

An argument for consciousness
The instinct of the blind insect
Who makes love to the flowerbed
And dies in the first freeze
Oh, I want to learn such simple things
No politics, no history
So what I want and what I need
Can finally be the same

Ok, now be honest. How many of you when you heard this thought: of course, Schopenhauer! Ok, none of you. But this is straight out of Schopenhauer—a 19^th century German pessimist that brought Buddhist thought to the West. He thought unrequited desire overwhelms us with pain. In response to this we need to mystically join the one world spirit or will and let it act through us. When you go to a CD store you don’t expect to get philosophy and religious theory, but often that is what you get.

As this example shows, songs often assume things about reality and we often unknowingly and uncritically accept those assumptions. Imperceptibly over time these assumptions build things called plausibility structures in your mind. Now what is a plausibility structure? Simply put, plausibility structures are patterns of thought within our minds that dictate whether or not we will believe something is possible. They dictate not only what we do believe, but what we will be able to come to believe.

For example, I don’t believe in aliens, so if someone tells me they saw an alien, am I going to believe them? No. I’ll think they were confused, without their glasses, deceived, or on drugs. Likewise, if I thought I saw a UFO I would think I must have been confused, deceived, or even drugged—I won’t believe my eyes because the possibility that I was confused or saw something unclearly is more plausible to me than the possibility that aliens exist.

This is a funny example, but our plausibility structures can have significant consequences. For example, if I think Christianity is boring and my worst fear is boredom (which is the case for many Americans) I won’t give it a chance. How do I change this plausibility structure? Well, do you think one exciting Christian will change that? No, I’ll explain it away. Likewise, even if I meet a few I’ll think ‘they must not really take their faith seriously’ or something like that. It is going to take a lot of exciting, legitimate Christians for me to question this belief of mine.

Now, in these two examples there are reasons behind my beliefs. They may not be good or true reasons, but there are reasons—when asked why I don’t believe in aliens or why Christianity seems boring, I can explain where those beliefs come from. But what happens when plausibility structures are formed by non-rational things?

When plausibility structures are formed by non-rational things, like music, we come to believe something or we fail to believe in something, and we often accept or reject this thing strongly, but all of this happens without us knowing why or how we came to our decision. Music isn’t the only thing that creates plausibility structures, but when it does, the structures it creates have no rational basis. To put it another way, music doesn’t connect so much with our minds as with our emotions. It forms and shapes our feelings. And because we make decisions primarily based off of our feelings, music has a tremendous impact upon us.

So, for example, I talk to a lot of people, even Christians, who say things like, why is it a big deal if people live together before they are married? When I follow up and ask them what they mean by that, they say, well, they aren’t hurting anybody, so what’s the big deal? To which I respond, where did you get the idea that the basis of morality is whether or not something hurts someone? You see, they have an active philosophy at work, but they don’t know why they believe what they do, and they don’t know where their beliefs came from. They feel strongly, and I say, feel and not think, because they did not rationally come to their opinion—they simply feel strongly that something is right or wrong. If it hurts someone it is immoral and it is moral so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. We can’t get into it right now, but that isn’t a rationally defensible position, the main reason being that it would require omniscience, perfect knowledge, which none of us have, to determine whether or not something will hurt someone.

Now the opinion that something is morally right insofar as it does not hurt someone is part of a larger plausibility structure that they have created. Because of this plausibility structure they cannot understand or accept large chunks of Biblical morality. Think about it. Many things that God prohibits do not seem like they hurt anyone. If harm is the standard of morality and God prohibits things that do not seem to harm us, then God’s commands are arbitrary and unjust. Why would a good and wise God make arbitrary commandments? Either God didn’t really command those things or God isn’t wise and good. From there you have two choices. One, you can throw away biblical morality or, two, throw away God. I think a lot of Christians are in the former position. They claim to believe in God, but they don’t really take his commands seriously. When push comes to shove, they trust themselves and not God, and they do what they want to do. That is why our rates of pornography use, premarital sex, divorce, etc. are very similar to those outside of the church. We believe in God, but we don’t take Him seriously. And we don’t take God seriously because our ‘media influenced’ plausibility structures don’t allow us to. 

Now let me quickly respond to one thing.  I have heard people try to take this idea—that something is only wrong if it hurts someone, and tie it into Christianity. They say, in effect, your sin hurts God so you shouldn’t sin. I remember being told as a kid, don’t do that, you’ll make baby Jesus cry. But this is false. As if the actions of finite creatures have the power to hurt the uncreated, infinite, and eternal God. God is above us and our sins and that is why He can save us from them. God doesn’t need your obedience. God doesn’t need you. It was not from boredom or need that He created humanity; God created us out of love. The pagan gods needed the obedience and sacrifices of their people. Our God does not. We have a God that does not take, but rather gives to us. Because God does not need our obedience, the commands He gives to us are for our sake, not His. They are not arbitrary or unjust. God knows what is best for us. He knows how He made us and understands us better than we understand ourselves. He gives us commands to keep us from pain and harm – from harming ourselves and harming each other. We often do not recognize how our sin will bring about harm at the time we are tempted to commit a sin. That is where faith comes in. We have to believe that God is good and that He knows what is best for us. Trusting in God’s goodness and remembering that he knows what is best for us give us the confidence we need to resist sin and trust Him.

Back to Plato. Plato said the most dangerous type of music is that which implies that a man can be happy while being unjust and that a just man could ever be unhappy. (And by happy he meant something like what we mean by joy.) He was worried about music that glorified what was unjust. In fact, in his most famous dialogue, The Republic, he said that he would do everything except put a person to death for making music that glorified what was unjust or evil. He would exile them, he would put them in prison, he would confiscate their property, all because he believed that this was an incredibly destructive thing to do to. 

Why was he so worried about music that glorified evil? Because, as I mentioned before, music creates plausibility structures. If you think you can be happy while living wickedly you are going to act quite differently than if you think that all wickedness leads ultimately to misery and destruction. If you don’t think you can be happy in living a just live, you won’t be just. Likewise, if you think you can be happy living an evil life, you will be sorely tempted to live an evil life.

Now, are there any songs of the type that Plato worried about? Are there any songs that say you can be happy living in sin? I am sure you can think of more than I can. I want to just look at lyrics from one. I won’t play this song, because it doesn’t deserve that dignity. Katy Perry has a song this Friday night or last Friday night or something like that, that I’m sure many of you are familiar with. I’ll read you just a few lines.

Last Friday night
Yeah we danced on tabletops
And we took too many shots
Think we kissed but I forgot

Last Friday night
Yeah we maxed our credit cards
And got kicked out of the bar
So we hit the boulevard

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a menage a trios

Last Friday night
Yeah I think we broke the law
Always say we're gonna stop-op
ooh-ohh

This Friday night
Do it all again
This Friday night
Do it all again

Think of all the sins that this song glorifies: drunkenness, sexual immorality, rebellion, monetary waste, etc. She makes light of sin and makes it sound pleasurable.

Now will this song ever make you sin? Of course not. Its effect will be much more subtle. Have you ever felt despondent and discontent? Like, you aren’t happy, but you just don’t know why? You feel like there is something out there that you are missing out on and that you would be happy if you could just have it? Perhaps you’ve even thought that Christianity is responsible for your boredom and listlessness. If only God didn’t have all these burdensome and pesky commands, then you could have fun. We all have had these feelings and I think it is music, specifically music that glorifies sin by people like Katy Perry, that creates those feelings. Think about it. How can you hear (and repeat to yourself) time and again that happiness is found in sin without this affecting you? In the back of your mind, somewhere subconsciously, you’ve come to believe that the reason you are unhappy is because you aren’t engaging in activities that you know to be wrong. This is going to create a lot of frustration. You need to be able to identify these places of false belief and change them or you’ll give up your faith for fun and excitement or you will slowly but surely corrupt your faith to the point where you blame God for your life’s sorrow and frustration.   

Ok, let’s move from the theoretical and begin to apply this. How do we decide what type of music we should listen to? As a baseline I would highly advise against listening to music that glorifies sin. From this does it follow that we should not listen to anything that deals with dark or sinful things? I would argue that this does not in fact follow. While I would not listen to music that glorifies evil, there can be value in music that discusses bad things to expose their badness. I’ll give you an example of this.

Arcade Fire: Anti-Christ Television Blues

I don't wanna work in a building downtown,
I don't wanna work in a building downtown,
Parking their cars in the underground,
Their voices when they scream, they make no sound.
I wanna see the cities rust
and the trouble makers riding on the back of the bus

Dear God, I'm a good Christian man,
In your glory, I know you understand,
That you gotta work hard and you gotta get paid,
My girl's 13 but she don't act her age.
She can sing like a bird in a cage,
Oh Lord, if you could see her when she's up on that stage!

You know that I'm a God fearing man,
You know that I'm a God fearing man,
But I just gotta know if its part of your plan
To seat my daughters there by your right hand
I know that you'll do what is right, Lord.
For they are the lanterns, and you are the light.

That was part of a song by Arcade Fire called Antichrist Television Blues. It might not be clear from that selection, but this song deals with some dark things. It is a song written about Joe Simpson, the father of Jessica and Ashlee Simpson. (Do you guys know who they are?) It talks about this man, a self-professed Christian, who is praying to God to help his daughter to become famous so he won’t have to work anymore. The author of the song thinks that Joe Simpson is a hypocrite, a Christian in name only, that was willing to sell out his morals and children for money.

Now as I mentioned this song was written by Arcade Fire, a group with no religious affiliation whatsoever. They don’t have answers, but they do identify a problem: namely the manipulation of religion to justify the exploitation of our children. They are talking about something negative, but they are trying to shed light to it. They, like Katy Perry, are talking about a bad thing—selling out your kids is pretty darn horrible, but unlike Katy Perry, instead of glorifying evil they are condemning it and attempting to bring it to light. 

And I think they’re right about this particular case. I remember years ago watching this reality TV show with Ashlee Simpson on it. I was just flipping through the channels and I saw the last 30 or 40 seconds of the show. On it Ashlee was talking with some of her friends and the conversation was just absolutely revolting.  In fact, I remember thinking to myself, I can’t believe they can talk like this on television, it really surprised me. As I was watching this I also thought, I wonder what her parents think? I knew that her dad was a pastor, I remember thinking that this has just got to break his heart, to see his daughter on television acting like this, how humiliating, how appalling. And as I was thinking about this the credits began to roll. The first credit that popped up said producer: Joe Simpson.

Now again, I don’t think this is the best music to listen to, it is not exactly edifying, but it’s much better to listen to music like this that exposes darkness, rather than music that glorifies it.

Ok, sure, but what about songs without any message? How can you judge a song without a message?

I would argue that most songs have a message, though that message may be subtle and hard to discover. Listen to the following.

Death Cab for Cutie: Title and Registration

There's no blame for how our love did slowly fade
And now that it's gone it's like it wasn't there at all

What metaphysical assumptions does this chorus contain? What is it asserting about the nature of reality? It has some, they are just not clear. Let me explain. 
I remember after I had broken up with this girl, she posted lyrics from this song on her Facebook page. She thought they were just so profound, and that they explained perfectly how we ended up where we did. Now, I should mention that she is an intelligent person. Looking back at that I now realize, this is not profound at all. There was blame as to how our love did slowly fade, namely me. I broke up with her because I was bored with her. I was selfish and I wanted a more exciting relationship. I was insecure, and she was not interesting because she liked me already, which meant I needed a new girlfriend. Our love, and it is a stretch to call it that, was a choice. For love is a choice. That is a fact, but this song claim something completely different, it claims that love is something that just comes to you and leaves you and there is nothing you can do about it. It might hurt, but that’s just the nature of love.

Let’s look at another song.

The Swell Season: Falling Slowly

I don't know you, but I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me and always fool me
And I can't react

And games that never amount
To more than they're meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You've made it now

What does this song claim about love? It claims that it is something immediate and it can save you. Now is that true?

Well, yes and no.  Can a mere warm feeling toward someone change their life? No, it can’t. But aren’t we saved by God’s love? If love is simply an emotion or disposition, then no it did not. It was God acting upon His love that saved us.  Think about John 3:16.  It does not say ‘God so loved the world that everyone that believes in Him will receive enteral life.’  No.  It says that because God so loved the world He sent His son and made a way for us to receive eternal life. 

True love is not passive.  True love impacts everything—most of all our choices.  True love sacrifices itself in order to bring about good in the life of the beloved.  That is what God did.  He loved us, so He made a way, at a great cost to Himself, for us to have life everlasting. 

Love is not a powerful thing in and of itself.  It is not some mystical or spiritual force that has existence or being independent of lover and beloved.  Love is only powerful in what it compels us to do. 

But if we divinize human love, as I think this song does, and if we think romantic feelings alone have the power to change us and give us life, we will blind ourselves to the true nature of love and the True Life that God’s Love has brought us.    

It seems like there is a hidden message in every song! What about Christian music? Can we assume that Christian music is good to go? Let’s take a look at a song.

Pedro the Lion: The Secret of the Easy Yoke

The devoted were wearing bracelets
To remind them why they came
Some concrete motivation
When the abstract could not do the same
But if all that's left is duty
I'm falling on my sword
At least then I would not serve
An unseen distant lord

If this is only a test
I hope that I'm passing
Cause I'm losing steam
And I still want to trust you

Peace be still

Now in this song the singer expresses doubt about God, but ultimately comes back to God. It reads a lot like a Psalm, actually. The problem with it is that he bases his return to faith on experience. He’s falling away from God, but in the end God returns and says to him: peace, be still.  But if that is the basis of faith, then what happens when it seems like God is not there?  What happens when God’s hiddenness is experienced, or perceived, as absence? If a person’s faith is based on experiencing God, then will not that person leave the faith if that experience changes? That is exactly what happened to David Bazan, the author of the song we just listened to.  He thought that God wasn’t there, he seemed to reach out to God, God didn’t reply, and he walked away from the faith.

I would argue that we need to be careful about even what type of Christian music we listen to. If we listen to feeling-centered Christian music, we can be tempted to make our feelings about God, as opposed to God Himself, the center and source of our faith. The basis of our faith needs to be God’s general revelation as it is mediated to us in the Bible, for Christ is the object of our faith and the Bible reveals Christ to us. Our faith cannot be grounded in our feelings. To paraphrase Martin Luther, feelings are the devil’s whore. They will always deceive us, we can never trust them, and we can never remember them accurately. That is why God revealed Himself to us from the outside. That is why He gave us an objective and universal revelation to hold on to when our feelings point us elsewhere. Because they will. Your feelings will always be changing and they won’t always be in line with the truth.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Martin Luther suggested that we attempt to imagine what it was like for the disciples of Jesus on the first Good Friday.  They had given up everything to follow Jesus; their whole reason for living centered on Him.  He seemed to have the answers to all their questions.  Then, in front of their eyes, He was taken from them, humiliated, tortured, and then publicly executed.  At this moment God was experienced as being absent.  There was no way in which anyone experienced God as being present on that occasion.  According to Matthew 27:46 even Jesus himself seems to have had a momentary sense of the absence of God—“My god, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Luther used this example to demonstrate how unreliable experience and feelings can be as guides to the presence of God.  Those around the cross did not experience the presence of God—so they concluded that God was absent from the scene.  The resurrection overturned that judgment: God was present, but in a hidden manner that experience mistook for absence.  God’s revelation as laid out in the Bible must interpret our feelings, even to the point of contradicting them when they are misleading. 

Okay, now I want to try to tie this all together. Music does influence us. It assumes things about the nature of reality. Because music is a non-rational mode of communication we often unknowing accept these assumptions. But when we do, these assumptions create plausibility structures that significantly impact our ability to receive truth and reject falsehood. I am arguing that we cannot remain ignorant to the ways in which music influences us. We have to analyze what we are listening to. Though messages are often subtle, you need to be aware of what your music is assuming about reality, about God, about your human nature. You need to take what you are hearing and compare it with what God has revealed to us in the Bible.

Your music is influencing you. You have to ask yourself the question: just what type of person do I want to be?

One more note before I pray. I covered a lot of ground in this talk. If you want more time to absorb this, I tweeted a link to my talk.  

God, give us wisdom to evaluate our music choices. May all that we do be impacted by the truth of the Gospel. Bless our day. Amen.