YouTube: Black and White At Prayer Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Translation: "you listen to that Satanic Nigra music at the risk of your soul, son."

I listen to a lot of Christian Contemporary music. Not willingly, mind you; my wife plays it in the car and in the kitchen when she is driving or cooking. The genre is, well, just not "my thing." I am all for enjoying religious music on its own terms, but Let me listen to Bach or Gregorian chant or even gospel music would be closer to my own preference. One of the most enjoyable concerts I ever attended was the Princeton University Gospel Ensemble in, I think, 1989.

But the back beat is to be shunned. The upbeat is ungodly. All modes of syncopation are to be shunned. The boogie-woogie must be stopped before the devil gets the children. Basically, if it has any beat less dull than 2/4 military time, it's the devil's music. Christian Contemporary music is condemned not for the reasons that some would condemn it (it being pathologically "whiter" than Ward Cleaver eating Wonder bread wearing a white suit and a bow tie) but because it's got all of the devil's tricks.

Somehow it makes the music of blues legend Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads all the more appealing. This speech is exhibit A for the proof of the cultural connection between modern evangelical Christianity and white racism.



Most Black music - really, most American music - has its roots in the black gospel and spiritual traditions that used rhythms of great variety including various forms of syncopation and do so today. Purging the church hall of syncopation does not make it closer to the historic message of Christianity; what it makes the church hall is more hostile to black worshippers and black culture, and more comfortable to the desirable racist white worshipper. If a church wants to purge its hymnal and repetory of all syncopated music, their business. But purging syncopation in its malicious Boogie-Woogie, Back Beat and Up Beat forms is all about purging black culture out of a white church and maintaining a church that is whiter than Ivory Snow.