Put your hands in the ay-uh,
Wave 'em like I just don't kay-uh.

I know some of you have been reading through Roger Scruton's Beauty; I hope you are getting a broad sense of what has been thought on the subject. I suspect the discussion will leave you struck with the disparity between what thoughtful people have said and what religious cranks have said. It turns out that we have been betrayed by our bumpkin clergy, and that old platitude that "the music should match the words" was an excuse to smuggle in some dubious prejudices at the cost of real understanding.

I hope you have learned something about the depth of thought involved in discussing "form and content". We now learn that these matters are a little more nuanced than we've been led to believe. Perhaps orthodoxy and 19^th Century stage and parlor entertainments were not a match made in Heaven after all.

I believe some of you might even be a tad disillusioned with the state of affairs wherein we are being encouraged to abandon "special music", look condescendingly on aesthetics, and blame Charles Grandison Finney for the last six score and fourteen years of dim-witted distractions now sold as worship. It may begin to look like we are being advised by the least informed and most addled teachers ever to scratch a blackboard.

Now what do we do? What can be done if in fact a contemplation of art does order our feelings and frame our enjoyments? Where does that leave us as we look across the living room at our collections of Elvis Presley, Bev Shea, Bill Gaither, Ron Hamilton, and Amy Grant "Christ-honoring" music? Can there be some benefit in pretending our feelings have been ordered and our enjoyments really were framed by kitsch?

Seems unlikely, does it not?

As most of you know, I think the chances of our reforming worship are exactly equal to the chances of a rich man getting into Heaven. Youthful optimism and naïve activism are only salving our discontent and prolonging the scandal.

__________

I spoke briefly with a crackpot pastor who at last came to realize that he has not enjoyed the success he anticipated. Being a post-Christian moralizer he of course interprets this failure not as a repudiation of his insights but as a confirmation of them. His failure is a success of a different sort, he has now learned. It's true his church is not attractive to outsiders, it cannot sustain itself, and it does not draw in the unredeemed. In fact, whatever imaginary virtues he imputes to this clutch of novelty-whores he himself concedes have also been learned in a prison camp. Surely that is the mark of a successful church!

I expect that a larger number of American religious dabblers will come to a similar conclusion. Whether through persecution or sheer fatigue or by the inevitable exasperation with mountebanks, I expect we will be forced to examine first things.

Culture is all about the care of the soul, and it is time that we begin to show an interest. Complaints about "the culture around us" must stop serving as a prelude to the infliction of personal opinions and the sale of inferior products.

Should God grant us a reprieve, will we in a position to recognize it? and will we have the determination to pursue what is good?