Bad Hymns

Once there was a website, now sadly defunct, that I regularly turned to as a kind of guilty pleasure.  It was called “Bad Vestments” and it featured…well, bad vestments, clergy vestments worn during church services that were so bad and outrageous that they provided much hilarity (see inset above for example).  It was a visual echo of the “Green Weenie Award” section of the satirical magazine The Wittenburg Door which focused upon things badly needing to be satirized and abandoned.  In the same spirit of jocularity and critique I would like to focus upon several Bad Hymns, hymns that are so cringe-worthy that they provoke at least a smile.

       They are both from the 1960s, the time when the Christian churches of the west were struggling to become “Relevant” (with a capital ‘R’)— i.e. attractive to the younger generation.  The Jesus People revolution had not yet brought drums and guitars into the church and so it was believed that writing a certain kind of hymn would secure the coveted title of “Relevant” for the institutional church and bring the young people stampeding back into church to fill the emptying pews.

       One such hymn was originally called “A Hymn for 1964” (i.e. “Right up to date! for Today!”, the literary equivalent of comedian Flip Wilson’s “the Church of What’s Happening Now!”).  The hymn was later known as “God of concrete, God of steel” and it was written by Richard Granville Jones (d. 2022), a leading member of the “Renewal Group” of British Methodism. According to the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology the hymn was inspired by “a realization of the way in which all the symbols of the exciting modern world had become unrelated to our normal conception of God”.  This was, of course, just one year after the publication of Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s famous (or infamous) book Honest to God which tried to “update” theology and bring it closer to the secular world’s normal conception of God.

       The hymn attempts to celebrate and glorify the modern world with all its technology (what was earlier denounced as its “dark Satanic mills”) and to show how modern factories, along with modern science and modern art, somehow, like the starry heavens (Psalm 19:1), declare the glory of God.  Thus the hymn begins:

“God of concrete, God of steel,

God of piston and of wheel,

God of pylon, God of steam,

God of girder and of beam,

God of atom, God of mine,

all of the world of power is thine!

Lord of cable, Lord of rail,

Lord of motorway and mail,

Lord of rocket, Lord of flight,

Lord of soaring satellite,

Lord of lightning’s livid line,

all the world of speed is thine!”

       There’s more, but you get the idea. Even apart from the reference to “lightning’s livid line” it makes for pretty grim poetry.  But, more importantly, if its goal was to provoke awe at the sight of such wonders as concrete, steel, pistons, and wheels, it fails utterly.  For who ever opened the hood of a car, peered into the engine and exclaimed, “Glory be to God!  What pistons!”  The sight of mountains can still provoke a sense wonder, as can the experience of a thunderstorm in the desert or the fury of a hurricane or the starry heavens on a clear night far from the lights of the city.  But motorways and mail delivery?  This is not just bad theology; it is execrable writing, utterly detached from all human experience.  God bless Richard, but he was trying too hard.

       Exhibit two: the hymn Sing We a Song of High Revolt, written by Fred Kaan (d. 2009), reworking the Magnificat into a protest song of behalf of the oppressed proletariat. It can be sung (I am told) to the tune of O Tannenbaum.  The whole song is worth quoting (and maybe worth trying to the tune of the Tannenbaum hymn).  Its words are:

“Sing we a song of high revolt;

make great the Lord, his name exalt.

Sing we the song that Mary sang,

of God at war with human wrong.

Sing we of him who deeply cares

and still with us our burden bears.

He, who with strength the proud disowns,

brings down the mighty from their thrones.

By him the poor are lifted up;

he satisfies with bread and cup

the hungry folk of many lands.

The rich are left with empty hands.

He calls us to revolt and fight

with him for what is just and right,

to sing and live Magnificat

in crowded street and walk-up flat.”

       Despite its publication in the late 1960s, the hymn continues to be quoted (though not, I suspect, sung). Thus Mr. Keith Hebden quoted it with enthusiastic approval in his article for “Jesusradicals.com”, a site which describes itself as “undoing oppression from a framework of anarchist politics and liberative Christianity”.  Mr. Hebden himself is described as “an Affirming Catholic Anglican Pioneer minister and Seeking Justice Deanery Adviser in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire where he chairs the Diocesan Greener Churches Group”. He teaches and writes on Dalit theology, Christian anarchism, Green spirituality, and spiritual activism”. Whether Mr. Kaan would approve of all this is, of course, not known.  (And no, I have no clue what “Dalit theology” is.)

       Once again, I suggest that Mr. Kaan was trying too hard.  Rhyming “Magnificat” with “walk-up flat” (in some recensions, “council flat”) is pretty horrific, especially as the song’s climax.  But the horror doesn’t just lie in the failed poetry but in its subversion of what the Magnificat actually meant in its original Biblical context and in the hymnwriter’s high jacking of the text to serve a purpose utterly alien to it. As is apparent from Mr. Hebden’s use of a hymn (which should have been allowed to die a merciful death, fading into deserved oblivion), it is now being referenced in political activism and anarchism.  

We can almost see white liberal women singing it as they attack ICE agents or scream indignantly about how much money Elon Musk has.  The reversals celebrated in the words of the Mother of God have nothing to do with politics, however much the advocates of a Marxist “Liberation Theology” want to claim it for their own.  The fulfillment of the Marian prophecy, like the Kingdom of God it presupposes, is spiritual, not political. 

The fulfilment can be found in the words of St. James: “The brother of humble circumstances is to glory in his high position and the rich man is to glory in his humiliation, because like flowering grass he will pass away. For the sun rises with a scorching wind and withers the grass and its flower falls off and the beauty of its appearance is destroyed; so too the rich man in the midst of his pursuits will fade away… Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?” (James 1:9-11, 2:5).

This is not about being “at war with wrong” through protest (i.e. wrong as the Left perceives wrong) or about the “high revolt” of angry activism.   For read what the Theotokos actually said: it is God who will affect such reversals, not sign-carrying protestors intent on “undoing oppression” through worldly violence.  The spirit of the actual Magnificat is a thousand miles away from the spirit of Mr. Kaan’s old hymn and Mr. Hebden’s modern application of it.

I have focused upon a couple of bad hymns and how they are suffused with the spirit of the age and are instruments for furthering that age’s secular agenda.  But what are the characteristics of good hymns? 

Like the psalms— the Church’s first and best hymnbook— good hymns focus upon the mighty works of God.  They connect our true and timeless human need with the power of God to meet that need.

Let us take two of such timeless hymns, songs that have embedded themselves in our culture: the Battle Hymn of the Republic and Amazing Grace.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic was written in 1861 by Julia Ward Howe and was set within the context of the American Civil War.  But the sentiments enshrined in the hymn have application far beyond the days of that terrible American bloodletting and speak of the spiritual battle all Christians face when warring against the unseen forces of the darkness of this age (Ephesians 6:10f). Like the hymn Onward, Christian Soldiers, the Battle Hymn calls us to courage and perseverance, confident of Christ’s final victory.  Some of its verses run as follows:

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:

      His truth is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat.

Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

      Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea

with a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,

      while God is marching on.”

          Here is a song, even apart from the famous “glory, glory, hallelujah!” chorus, that can serve to inspire service and sacrifice. Here are words to sanctify sacrifice, words that a Christian could sing as he or she enters the martyric arena of death.

          It is the same with the hymn Amazing Grace.  It was written in 1722 by John Newton, an English clergyman and former slave ship captain after he repented of his past life in the slave trade.  The words scarcely need repeating; they are so much a part of our culture that they featured at funerals in movies as diverse as Star Trek II, the Wrath of Khan (at Spock’s funeral), Firefly’s 13th episode “Heart of Gold” (at Nandi’s funeral), and Silkwood (for Karen Silkwood’s death).  Such diversity of use reveals how deeply rooted the hymn is in our spiritual psyche: when one turns to God in grief and sadness, one naturally looks to the words of Amazing Grace.

          In particular, the weary and sorrowing heart instinctively resonates with the words of this verse: 

“Through many dangers, toils, and snares,

I have already come.

‘Tis grace that brought safe thus far,

and grace will lead me home.”

And perhaps the weary heart also finds solace in the hymn’s final verse:

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years

bright shining as the sun,

we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise

than when we’d first begun.”

       This, then, is the difference between bad and good hymns: a good hymn lifts the heart during days of danger and seasons of pain; it provides courage for feet that need to march and solace for the heart that breaks. Given the perennial need for courage and comfort, such songs are timeless.  And that is because they do not serve changing and changeable human agendas but fix their gaze firmly upon the power and the grace of God, rooted in His eternal changelessness. 

       Bad hymns do not just provide material for satire.  At the end of the day, what we sing reveals something about the God whom we really serve and the state of our heart.  Good hymns— which are found in abundance in Orthodoxy— are essential.