ARTS AND THE CHRISTIAN, cont.        

Hard attitudes against art and artists that were once current among European Protestants remained frozen in the European Christian emigrant to America and his descendants, while they were ultimately to soften among the Europeans themselves. 

Early in the formation of the United States, history has it, laws passed by Puritan bodies politic forbade active involvement in art, including music, calling it a sinful waste of time.  This, however, is an oversimplification and, as far as the Puritans prior to the 17th and 18th centuries are concerned, a historical canard.  It is, rather, their descendants to whom we can attribute the imbedding in America of ungodly attitudes towards art and artists.  So that

“. . . . by the end of the eighteenth century Independents, Baptists, and Presbyterians (i.e. the lineal descendants of the old Puritans ) had [emphasis in the original] turned against music.”⁷ 

 “The Methodists [despite Wesley’s own fondness for music and literature, including Shakespeare] owed much to the works of William Law. . . [who] wrote The Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage Entertainments fully demonstrated (1726; six editions), in which he is quoted to have written, ‘The actors and spectators must all be damned; the playhouse is the porch of hell.’  The Dictionary of National Biography says that Law ‘Loved music, and maintained that every one could be taught to sing well enough for devotional purposes.’”⁸ 

Putting me in mind of one of G.B. Shaw’s characters, a devout communist, saying that music was alright for marching.  

But television for its convenience, unlike theater, is an acceptable addiction, appearing as it does at times to serve.  So, with respect to William Law and the generations of Methodists and others after him, I offer the following quote.  Where was written “stage plays” I have inserted “television shows” and for “interludes” I have inserted “films,” (and have also updated for clarity the spelling of the 16th century language):

“These profane & wanton [television plays and films]: what an occasion they are of adultery and uncleanness, by gesture, by speech, by conveyances, and devices to attain to so ungodly desires, the world knows with too much hurt by long experience.  Vanities they are if we make the best of them; and the Prophet prays to have his eyes turned away by the Lord from beholding such matter: Evil words corrupt good manners, and they have abundance.  There is in them ever many dangerous sights, and we must abstain from all appearance of evil.  They corrupt the eyes with alluring gestures: the eyes, the heart: and the heart, the body, till all be horrible before the Lord. . . These players’ behavior pollutes all things.  And of their [television shows]. . . they are the feasts of Satan.” 

Now comes the interesting part: 

“. . .If they be dangerous on the day time, more dangerous on the night, certainly: if on a stage, & in open courts, much more in chambers and private houses.  For there are many rooms beside that where the [television show] is, & peradventure the strangeness of the place and lack of light to guide them, causes error in their way, more than good Christians should in their houses suffer.”⁹ 

Let’s hear it for primetime!  It also evokes a little of what Tocqueville wrote concerning the dangers of “virtuous materialism” in America “which would not corrupt [necessarily], but enervate the soul, and noiselessly unbend its springs of action.” 

As for itinerant evangelists: 

“The sudden decline of the national Minstrelsy, and Customs of Wales, is in a great degree to be attributed to the fanatick imposters, or illiterate plebeian preachers, who have too often been suffered to over-run the country, misleading the greater part of the common people from their lawful Church; and dissuading them from their innocent amusements, such as Singing, Dancing, and other rural Sports, and Games, which heretofore they had been accustomed to delight in, from the earliest time.  In the course of my excursions through the Principality, I have met with several Harpers and Songsters, who actually had been prevailed upon by those erratic strollers to relinquish their profession, from the idea that it was sinful.”¹⁰ 

Even the Young Men’s Christian Association, led by Lord Shaftesbury, 

“objected to ‘oratorios for amusement’ (Musical Times, January 1881).  London choral organizations were thus deprived of their most commodious and convenient place of performance, and the result was disastrous:                

“‘When they [the Y.M.C.A.] entered, the Sacred Harmonic Society was evicted (even though it had paid its rent), and it suffered a slow death from privation and neglect at St. James’s Hall.  Concerts were tabooed, Oratorios, along with political meetings, were prohibited in the trust deed.  Mr. Sankey [see under “TOOLS” AND “EXILE”] was the only soloist allowed to sing in the hall; and walls, which had vibrated to the tones of Sims Reeves and Clara Novello, echoed the musical poverty of the “Sacred Songs and Solos”.  The whole change was due to the remarkable position taken up by the trustees, who, having purchased the building, leased it to the Young Men’s Christian Association.  These gentlemen asserted that the singing of the Scripture at Oratorios, if not bad in essence, was at least bad in practice, because, as they considered, the lives of the singers did not reflect the sentiments they uttered.  Therefore Oratorios must be put down.  What a curious result was thus reached!  Secular music was unobjectionable to these religious men, it was only to sacred music they objected.  And again, they allowed sacred music of a low class, and vetoed that of a high class.  Sankey and Bliss passed muster; Handel and Mendelssohn were pulled up short.  Surely a more inconsistent position was never assumed by public men!’

“Combining these two accounts we see that the objection was twofold: (a) to sacred music taken by the audience as entertainment, and (b) to sacred music sung for hire by artists who were suspected of not feeling what they were singing.  We may see, at any rate, a gleam of common sense in these objections, perhaps, (a) if we think of the contempt we all of us experience if we come across people who run after a popular preacher merely for the emotional thrill of his eloquence, and (b) if we think of the contempt we experience for a preacher whom we suspect of uttering doctrines or making fervid appeals merely to gain a living. Narrow-mindedness is often perfectly logical!”¹¹ 

As for the Church of Christ, what was spoken in 1925 makes clear their position on music: 

“Evangelist G.A. Dunn, Jr., spoke to a capacity audience at the Central Church of Christ on ‘Why Instrumental Music Should Not Be Used in the Worship”.  The speaker essayed to show that. . . because an instrument is proper in the home or heaven [my italics] does not justify its use in the church to-day.  He also declared . . . that Jesus, the apostles and disciples sang, and asserted that he would be converted to the use of man-made instruments if one would show him that Jesus or the apostles ever touched one of these instruments. 

“No fewer than 145,000,000 of his fellow Christians [in 1933] agree with him.  It seems often to be over-looked by people who sneer at the English Puritan attitude towards organs that the whole Eastern branch of Christianity (the ‘Greek Church’) will to this day suffer no musical instrument to be used in worship.”¹² 

Along the same line, the pylon at the other end of a bridge straddling the one-time Roman Empire, we have the following: 

“The history of Scottish music is full of paradoxes.  Most of us are old enough to have caught echoes of the furious opposition to instrumental music in the Kirk.  This was supposed to be a protest against ‘Popish practices‘, and it is only in modern times that Scottish church music has ceased to be exclusively vocal.  As a matter of actual fact, whatever it may have become in practice, the music of ‘the Popish Church‘ is in theory exclusively vocal also.  Instruments are only legislated for by being spoken of as ‘permitted‘.  In the Pope’s own chapel no instrumental music has ever been heard.  So in her Presbyterian protest against the ‘Kist of whustles’ Scotland was really reverting to a distinctly ‘Popish‘ practice [his emphasis].”¹³ 

Then along comes the Camp Meeting: 

“The great ‘Kentucky revival’, or ‘Revival of the West’ (1797-1805), which began amongst the Presbyterians and then spread to the Baptists, Methodists, and others, was the origin of the camp meeting.  The musical influence of the camp meeting movement has yet to be investigated; probably it will be found that in addition to popularizing a debased type of ‘Gospel Hymn’ it had a further bad effect upon musical life by discouraging the practice of secular music.  J. Truslow Adams, in The Epic of America (1931), takes the Camp Meeting seriously as a national influence - ‘The camp meeting is a key to much that we shall find even in present-day life, in a nation even yet emotionally starving’.  But the opposition of piety to art originated earlier than the camp meeting movement.  The precise moment when it began to darken American life must be left to some American inquirer.”¹⁴ 

“When in the early years of the century I was a school music master, I had a promising pupil from a Methodist home who was removed, after several terms’ tuition, from the manifest advantages of my instruction, because, as it turned out, he had been enterprisingly taking my musical lessons unknown to his father who, as he knew, looked on all musical skill as dangerous.  And I recall that at the same period I heard of one or two Methodist families who would not admit a piano to their homes, but only a reed organ or harmonium, on which nothing more flippant than hymn-tunes or the slower passages from oratorios was likely to be attempted.”¹⁵ 

So, it can be seen that throughout American history there has been a continual, and often successful, attempt by tendentious Christian leaders to implant anti-musicism, or to cause music to be a suspicious activity, that inhibits the free flow of artistic ideas innovation thrives on.  And that if there is to be music inside the church then it must be simplistic, and music outside of it is no concern of the church nor should it be for church-goers. 

Discussed further on will be the ironic fact of many Protestant churches going to opposite extremes, succumbing to musical styles originating entirely in the secular music industry. 

Before moving on, we must mention John of Salisbury (1115-80), described as an ancestor of English Protestantism, which, by extension, makes him a forebear of American Protestantism as well. 

“‘Music defiles the services of religion; for the admiring simple souls of the congregation are of necessity depraved - in the very presence of the Lord, in the sacred recesses of the Sanctuary itself - by the riot of the wantoning voice, by its eager ostentation, and by its womanish affectations in the mincing of notes and sentences.’

“It should not escape the reader’s notice that this. . . . comes from an author who was unquestionably an ancestor of English Protestantism. . . . by his concern at the exalted claims which the Papacy had assumed. . . . His defence of the rights of the common man are the political counterpart of his condemnation of musical elaboration which misleads and confuses the ‘simple souls of the congregation’."¹⁶ 

An example of knowing an extremity when its opposite appears - the patronizing condescension of Protestantism in response to the exalted claims of Papacy.  They both agree: man is indeed an inferior being to those who run the shop.