In a 2013 interview for the Awaken Generation blog, Michael Gungor (of the band Gungor) talked about  a game he and the rest of the band play called “Christian or Secular.”. In this game, a member of the band plays a few seconds of a song, while the rest of the band votes if the song is part of the Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) genre. 

Gungor described the distinction of the CCM genre as having a “sheen”; the vocals, the EQ, the compression all have a distinct timbre. More than all, however, is the observable “disingenuous” quality these songs emit: 

It looks like a human.. It eats like a human… It still walks and makes noise and resembles a human, but it’s not. It’s a zombie. It has no soul. It just uses its human body for its own purposes. This is what I initially feel when I play the “Christian or secular” game. I look into its eyes, and I perceive whether the thing has a soul or not. And 9 times out of ten, I can do it very quickly and efficiently.

As a musician, I’m inclined to agree that there is a certain sonic quality to most CCM offerings^[1]. But what Gungor highlighted is not just a genre commonality; he exposed a trope. Music theory YouTuber Adam Neely put out a video in February 2020 called Learning to Like CCM breaking down some of the technical aspects of CCM and underscoring many of the same notes as Gungor. At the height of these criticisms of CCM -- and, by extension, Christians, their beliefs, and the Church, I would argue -- is one of the most damning charges of which a 21st-century westerner can be accused: insincerity.

Rich’s claim that “the world hates modern forms of Christian art” is, I think, spot on. This sentiment is communicated by the distaste Rick and Morty (and media like it) shows for the artistic integrity of what it believes to be the core of Christian living and the subsequent motivation behind all Christian art: that more would “call on Jesus for help and accept Him into their heart.” The kicker is that I don’t know that cultural critics are entirely wrong in their diagnosis. For me, however, there exists a more interesting question to consider: is this expression of the Church’s worship consistent with the historical apostolic witness? 

My own answer to that question is a resolute ‘no’. This expression is, in comparison to the catholic tradition, shrunken, individualistic, and truncated. But when did it change? A compelling argument can be made that the counterculture revolution of the 1960s presented a challenge for the Church in America. Tim Keller’s analysis of western Chrisitans up until this point in history claims that “most conservative Christians in Western societies felt basically at home in their own cultures.”^[2] Quoting Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace, Keller points to an enormous cultural shift -- from things like national normative sexual ethics -- for which the American church needed a response.^[3]  

Before the Summer of Love, the church already had a posture by which it related to the larger American/Western culture. Putnam and Campbell argue that the evangelical task before the seismic shift in the 1960s was largely to convict Christianized people of their own moral or sinful failings and to turn to God in Christ through the Spirit for forgiveness: a task called Pietism.^[4] The logic goes that because Americans largely already conceived of the world according to Judeo-Christian categories, they needed not to be converted but reminded of the holiness of God and their own sinfulness.

In rejecting the established ethics, categories, and overlap in worldview, American culture moved away from the Judeo-Christian understanding. In other words, the task began to change. How would the Church relate to a culture which was rapidly becoming distinct? 

Christian Indifference and a Preclusion of the Arts

One such answer was to cultivate the Pietistic roots into full bloom.^[5] This response elevates the personal conversion of the individual above all else. Seen through the Pietist lens, all public participation works towards the end of individual conversion. We can see the reasonableness of such a proposal: as individuals are conformed to the image of Christ, the structures they inhabit will soon follow. 

A significant downside, however, soon appeared. In this view, all things in life now have their utility evaluated through their ability to bear the fruit of conversion. When the predominant teaching on the way(s) in which Christians interact with the culture is largely one of indifference, followed by triumphalism, the fundamental posture then becomes one of critique founded on conquest. This posture sees cultural markers as predominantly neutral in that they can be used to push individuals towards or away from God. If art is inherently neutral, it can only become righteous (or useful) when the subject matter attends to an inherently righteous end. In this case, that end becomes evangelism. 

This is exactly what Rich talks about in the opening paragraphs of his response: “[Rich] grew up listening to bands like the Newsboys (with Peter Furler at the front, thank you very much), Relient K, and Third Day, hoping that when I shared the music with my secular friends on the school bus the catchiness and quality of the music itself would allow them to overlook the clearly Christian message.” Words like ‘secular’ become indicators of in-groups and out-groups in the church (non-Christians are, by definition, secular and Christians are not). There’s not space here to indulge why that premise is woefully lacking in self-awareness, as if Christians today aren’t somehow secularized through hundreds of years of Enlightenment thought and academic influence; or as if to say that it is necessarily an evil, anti-Christ by definition...I digress. 

All of this is a genealogy of sorts that helps us to understand why the Christian ‘message’ -- a unique truncation by a particular strand of Evangelical Christians -- of “asking Jesus into your heart” might be both unpalatable to the postmodern sensibility, but also to the Apostolic one. 

The Worst Story Ever Told

This, however, doesn’t answer the question as to why the creators of Rick & Morty might view the Chrisitan “message” as the ‘worst story ever told.’ Viewed from a post-Christian perspective, this reductionist view of people, the world, and God is simply boring. There’s little to no tension and release, making it lack any kind of compelling development. Retelling the story does nothing but replay traditionalist cliches. It comes across as preachy and judgmental; there are good people and there are bad people. Good people ask Jesus into their hearts. Finally, the narrative arc is deeply unrelatable because it talks in categories that our culture doesn’t share. 

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of our current reading of the situation is that this message, I would argue, actually misses the point of the Apostolic testimony. The New Testament witness univocally proclaims that Jesus of Nazareth is Israel’s Messiah come to announce the arrival of the Kingdom of God anticipated through the Old Testament, and to be fully realized as the Christ’s reign is inaugurated over all the creation. The scope of this story is quite literally cosmic, involving everything created through and for the Word of God. It tells of a generous and sovereign creating God outside everything we can observe who speaks into being beauty, order, and image. The tragedy of this story is that freedom given to the creatures who bear the image of the Almighty use their volition not in the intended service and unfolding of the pregnant potential within the creation, but to magnify and isolate themselves. What a tragedy that the very good-ness of God revealed in people is mangled through their rejection of him in sin. 

In this telling of the story, it would seem that the audience is invited to ask the question, ‘if that is true, what will God do?’ The way this story is framed (biblically) compels the reader forward; a professor of mine says that the story ‘tastes like more.’ 

As we see it unfold, God makes promise after promise in the face of human failure and rebellion. So what is the solution? God becomes man in order to restore that shalom which has been shattered. The God-Man Jesus Christ comes to restore the intended order as the Good King of the Creation. At the end of the evangelists’ narrative, we in the Church are taught to anticipate the fullest realization of the inaugurated reign of King Jesus, and we do so in humble groaning and wanton joy. We long for the day when, to quote the poet Garrett Russell, “all will be made new.” 

As I read the criticism of the Pietistic response to a secularizing culture, I hate to admit that I’m inclined to agree with it. It just might be the worst story ever told. The good news is that the Church has been telling a better one for a long time. It is for precisely this reason why the saints have made a different kind of art in an attempt to capture something of the beautiful, challenging and gripping tale God has given us. It’s been said that the church is a hearing church before it is a speaking church. We might go so far as to say that the church is a hearing church before it is a painting church, a dancing church, a writing church, a singing church.