Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
R.E.M.- “Losing My Religion.”
The first time I heard R.E.M.’s famous 1991 hit, “Losing my Religion” I was a freshman in college at Western State University in Gunnison, Colorado. The music video played on a projector screen against the back of a church reception hall. It was 2006 and the song was already fifteen years old, but it felt completely novel to me. I’d been raised in conservative Christian household and spent most of my musical life under a rock—most secular music banned or else encouraged to use as kindling if you had a physical copy. In fact, for many years, I thought the R.E.M. song, “It’s the End of the World as We Know it” was an original song by this Christian band called DC Talk, and not a DC Talk cover of the song originally written and performed by R.E.M.
I’d walked into this church on a Thursday night, invited by a friend to something called “The Foundry.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a sort of Socratic discussion about philosophy and religion. There’s music and coffee. It’s cool,” they assured me.
I walked into the church and was met by tea and coffee in the foyer. A semi-circle of hi-tops and black chairs faced a raised stage in the reception hall to the right. Music videos played and people milled around talking. It looked like a cafe or music venue.
“That’s me in the corner/that’s me in the spotlight/losing my religion,” I heard from the Michael Stipes’ voice on screen, the memorable mandolin picking. Other music videos came on: The White Stripes, Weezer, AFI, and U2 of course.
Growing up, the main music playing around our house was always some type of praise and worship music. Songs with syrupy choruses of electric and acoustic guitars and emotional lyrics rang constantly through the speakers, along with, of course, K-Love. “Positive and Encouraging, K-Love.” It made me want to puke. All the sugary positivity. Why couldn’t someone make art or music that dealt in the complexity and the reality of human nature and belief?
I began to forge my own musical path in middle school. The first cassette tape I ever bought was of the Christian bands Newsboys and DC Talk. The first concert I ever went to was of a Christian Rock band called Audio Adrenaline, where the concert was held at a church in the suburbs of Denver. Then I got into the harder stuff—P.O.D. Project 86. Blindside. My mom didn’t like me listening to P.O.D., even though they were “Christian.” They had tattoos and played rap-rock she just didn’t understand. Literally, she was always asking me, “How do you understand what they’re saying?”
Then came the Solid State and Tooth and Nail Bands—Beloved, Norma Jean, Underoath, Mewithoutyou, Haste the Day. They were all “Christian-ish” but not explicitly Jesusy of course. I even listened to some Christian rap. Although, I must confess, I also listened to some terrible non-Christian nu-metal along with some Dre, Snoop, Eminem, and Outkast songs I secretly recorded from the radio on my boombox.
“Losing my Religion,” is not necessarily a straightforward song about losing your religion. It’s not even about that at all, really, though my younger self seemed to internalize or project it as such. Perhaps the broad appeal of “Losing My Religion” was that it could be about a lot of things. Losing your religion, sure. It could be about general loss, perhaps of a romantic nature. The disillusionment of fame perhaps. Or even coming out. Michael Stipe has said in an interview decades ago that losing your religion was a Southern expression for being at the end of one’s rope.[1]
If that was the case, “Losing Your Religion” would come to describe the process of me leaving my religion perfectly. Still, at this point in my life, I was just excited to be in this new world, free to listen to whatever music I wanted.
Sufjan Stevens- “Casimir Pulaski Day”
It was around this time, i.e., college, that I discovered Indie music. My post-rock journey had led me on an Exodus out of the lands of hardcore and post-hardcore and into the fertile fields and valleys of early 2000’s indie music—Iron and Wine, Sufjan Stevens, Pedro the Lion, and Death Cab, to name a few.
In 2005 Sufjan Steven’s famous album Illinois came out, along with the album’s breakout hit, “Chicago.” It was Sufjan at his most earnest, hopeful, and adventurous. The score was remarkably bigger than previous albums. Sweeping, choral, symphonic. The song that caught my attention however, beyond “Chicago” and “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” was “Casimir Pulaski Day,” a relatively simple song (both instrumentally and lyrically) that peels like an onion with its many layers.
In the song Sufjan Stevens mourns a friend who gets bone cancer and passes. The song tells the story of the narrator dealing with the loss of his friend and the crisis of faith that follows. A relatively simple banjo riff disarmed me for what was to come when Sufjan hit me with the lyric:
“Tuesday night at the bible study/we raise our hands and pray over your body/but nothing ever happens.”
Whoa! The song hit me knocked the breath out of me, left me wheezing, staggering. And yet, finally, after I got over the initial shock, relief. Finally, here was someone who was willing to admit the messiness of life. It was honest, hopeful, and brutal, filled with doubt and searching.
I myself had spent twenty years praying for people for various physical afflictions (and I did it willingly and hopefully), but no one ever admitted what often happened, which was nothing. We prayed and nothing ever ever happened (at least, that’s what it felt like, who knows in the cosmic-religious-sense). And people sometimes did die. And there seemed to be no answer to it. Sufjan was writing about, as C.S. Lewis called it, the problem of pain. But it was refreshing at the time to hear someone in a song say as much. It was the complete opposite of the anxiety I usually prayed with, secretly wondering if my faith was strong enough, my self, righteous enough for God to honor my prayer.
“Casimir Pulaski” day is a song about youth and pain and the crisis of faith that occurs when a sudden and undeserved death enters your life (I am reminded of Pedro the Lion’s “Bad Things to Such Good People”). The song is rich in a way that that requires a trip to Genius lyrics For instance, Sufjan mentions a cardinal hitting the window outside the hospital. Cardinals are both symbols of Christian faith and harbingers of death—and the state bird of Illinois! With one cardinal hitting the window, Sufjan is doing three things at once.
The song then ends lyrically with the chilling reference saying:
“All the glory when he took our place/but he took my shoulders and he took my face/ and he takes and he takes and he takes.”
I mean, what? God as someone who takes and not gives? I’d often felt this way about God, but could never admit it to myself out loud. This is a song about the Lord taking away, rather than giving.
Illinois was before Sufjan got a little darker, a little more personal, a little noisier, a little more experimental. “Casimir Pulaski Day” is not full of such despair, it’s a song of youthful naivety and a coming-of-age story about love and the unfair death that disrupts it.
Sufjan leaves the tight, layered storytelling open-ended, it doesn’t leave you in despair, but it does knock the wind out of you. As life often does, when it throws you one of its many curveballs. Life takes, and often times, for no reason we will ever know on this earth.
Manchester Orchestra “Where Have You Been”
The first time I saw the Manchester Orchestra live I saw them open for Mewithoutyou at The Marquis Theater in Denver, Colorado. I was immediately struck by Andy Hull’s unique voice and quiet, intimate lyrics punctuated by heavy drums and guitars. Manchester Orchestra and Mewithoutyou would also tour with two of my other favorite bands at the time—Thrice and Brand New.
“Where Have You Been” is slow song that builds into this big crescendo with singer Andy Hull singing and then screaming the lyrics: “God, my God, my God, where have you been? God my God, my God, where have you been?” “Where Have You Been” is almost biblical and Psalm-like in its despair and questioning of God. When the drums kick in and the choral voices in the background start to hit, the tears, for me, at certain times, always begin to flow. I’m really not a crier, but music is quite literally the only thing that has the power to induce tears into my normally stoic and possibly toxic male self. What else can capture the despair and questioning but a song asking God in a quiet moment of reflection and then anger, “Where Have You Been?”
Manchester Orchestra has many other songs with this same sort of questioning, longing, and intimate look at life and relationships. Lately, they’ve evolved somewhat. On the song “Let it Storm” from their most recent album titled, “The Million Masks of God,” Hull sings “I don’t want to hold back my faith anymore/I don’t want to fall into that man again/I just wanna keep both my feet on the floor/so let it touch me/and let it storm.” The song could reference the disciples lack of faith when a storm comes upon them in the ship, or when Peter loses his faith and starts sinking while walking on water. They’ve matured some as a band, working on albums that go beyond their early emo work, but that search for an authentic faith and way to live still remains.
Pedro the Lion “Secret of the Easy Yoke
One Sunday morning, long ago, I found myself in church, sitting in the black suede chairs of our newly renovated warehouse, with Pedro the Lion’s “Secret of the Easy Yoke,” screaming through my head. I tried to pay attention to everything the pastor was saying, open myself up to the spirit and not have a “hard” heart. But a million different thoughts and doubts circulated throughout my mind—questions of belief and disbelief, justice and injustice, theological schisms related to my LGBTQ friends, or the power and systems of oppression that had held the church up for generations.
I sat and thought about all these with the lights dim, drinking coffee, my stomach creaking with acid. I could no longer take the Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” or “leap to faith” sitting there. While I used to have doubts, I always managed the leap, however, the chasm I now had to leap felt like it kept getting bigger and bigger.
I sat in the black suede chairs of the church hearing a sermon I’d heard for what seemed like the infinite time, the lyrics on the worship team’s power point reading, “I’m alive! “I’m alive! “I’m alive! “I’m alive!”
And I was not.
All I could hear was Pedro the Lion’s Secret of the Easy Yoke:
“I could hear the church bells ringing/They peeled aloud your praise/The members faces were smiling with their hands outstretched to shake/It’s true they did not move me/My heart was hard and tired/Their perfect fire annoyed me/I could not find You Anywhere
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried listening to “Secret of the Easy Yoke,” wanting to believe in God and serve but feeling like I couldn’t. Trying to muster the faith in a God that often did appear unseen and distant as front man David Bazan sings later in the song.
And this wasn’t just any church I sat in. It was a church I’d helped start or “plant,” uprooting from Portland to Salt Lake City to do so. I was an unpaid intern at the church for two years. Before I started a coffee roasting company and began to work on writing, I was seriously consider going to seminary and becoming a pastor.
Pedro the Lion practically invented the genre of modern Evangelical disillusionment with God. So many people I know listened to the band and felt comfort in lead singer David Bazan’s honest reflections of faith, doubt, uncertainty, and even cynicism. Bazan would go on to record Curse Your Branches, basically a breakup album with God.
“Wait just a minute,” Bazan sings in the song “Hard To Be.” “You expect me to believe/that all this misbehaving/grew from one enchanted tree? And now it’s/hard to be/hard to be/hard to be a decent human being.”
I felt that song deeply as well. I’d been trying so hard to be a good person my entire life, a good Christian, and yet, it was just really fucking hard to be a decent human being. Why couldn’t anyone just admit this?
Bazan’s criticism would grow to include capitalism, toxic masculinity, and the arrogance and ignorance of the United States. I’ve often felt like my spiritual journey has mirrored Bazan—from youthful zeal to despair, anger, and now, a type of acceptance. His spiritual journey has been a soundtrack to my own.
Julien Baker- “Faith Healer”
It took me awhile to get into Julien Baker because between 2016 and 2020—when I basically stopped going to church and wasn’t sure if I believed in God anymore—I couldn’t even listen to anything that even remotely mentioned God or religion or spirituality. It was all too triggering for me, too exhausting. Everyone was telling me to listen to Julien Baker or Lucy Daucus and these Exvangelical podcasts and I just didn’t care. Really. I didn’t care that these people had also left the church and were talking about similar things, trying to reconcile their new sense of faith or connection to God outside the church. I didn’t even want to talk about it. I didn’t want my headspace taken up anymore by all the doubts and frustrations.
But finally, last year, I tuned into Julien. I immediately felt the familiar resonance of grief and longing in her songs of loneliness, pain, uncertainty, and doubt over the albums Sprained Ankle, Turn Out the Lights, and the Little Oblivions.
“The harder I swim, the faster I sink,” she sings on Sour Breath, a song about the burdens people bring to relationships, whether it’s substance abuse or something else. It’s about wanting to be in a relationship but knowing that they/you probably couldn’t handle it.
Like me and others, Baker too had questioned her faith and was looking for a way to make sense of the uncertainty. She also had to reconcile two parts of her identity that seemed to be in opposition—gay and Christian. If possible, Baker’s lyrics are even more personal and intimate than either Bazan’s or Hull’s. They’re gut punches as this song “Faith Healer” from her new album Little Oblivions show:
“Faith Healer, come put your hands on me/A snake oil dealer/I’ll believe you if you make me feel something.”
Oh! The emptiness that comes from leaving a religion, a community, you were a part of for so long. These days I often find myself mourning the zeal I used to have. The emotions and the feelings that have since gone dry. Like Baker, I often just want to feel something, even if I know it to be a scam.
Baker and Daucus (listen to her song “VBS”) now carry the torch for a new spiritually adrift generation. Yet her latest album, Little Oblivions, goes beyond Baker’s previous personal grief and becomes something at once cathartic and liberating. It’s not necessarily easy listening, but exploring questions of faith, doubt, relationships, and the nature of God never have been.
Kendrick Lamar “FEEL”
A theme of faith runs deep throughout all of Kendrick Lamar’s albums: “I am a sinner who’s probably gonna sin again,” he sings on the song, “Bitch Don’t Kill my Vibe:” “Lord forgive me/for things I don’t understand/sometimes I need to be alone/Bitch don’t kill my vibe.” The song shows the seemingly inherent contradiction within much of Lamar’s music. Lamar is a Christian but he is also unrepentant about the fact that he might smoke weed or cuss or write about sex, money, or the realities of growing up black in America (in reality he is, as he calls it one song, a “sober soul”). There are many “Christians” who might even questions Lamar’s own “Christian-ness.”
Kendrick Lamar has songs like “Kush and Corinthians” on his first album, Section.80, where he raps: “Look at me, look at me, I’m a loser, I’m a winner/I’m good, I’m bad, I’m a Christian, I’m a sinner/I’m humble, I’m loud. I’m righteous, I’m a killer/What I’m doing I’m saying that I’m human.”
One of the central themes to Lamar’s work is the exploration of the duality inherent within himself/humanity. He often writes songs about the pull of between good and evil, temptation and the devil, and the ever-present conflicts within himself and us of pride, lust, hate, love, God, and humility. Lamar writes with a unique shifting point of view within his lyrics—some songs are personal (taken at face value as personal memoir) others are in the third or second person, weaving dialogue between two characters or voices in Lamar’s head and it becomes difficult to know who the narrator of the particular song is.
On the album Damn. and the song “FEEL” he raps “Ain't nobody praying for me,” a glimpse into the loneliness and isolation Lamar often feels. “I feel like my thoughts in the basement,” he says, and then goes on to talk about he feels like he’s boxing demons, monsters church god, religion, token blacks, and industry promises. The other songs that make up Damn. have titles like: “GOD” “PRIDE” “HUMBLE” “LUST,” and “FEAR.” Each of his albums are dense and layered with spiritual meaning.
Lamar’s relationship to faith is not so much a deconstruction of it, but an examination of the way in which he or we try to live out our faith on a daily basis and the various desires and temptations that often pull us in different directions. How we are often torn between the things of God vs. the Devil (both metaphorically and literally).
From the moment I heard Kendrick Lamar on Section.80, I felt an affinity with his lyrics on multiple levels (we’re both Geminis you know? Both dudes with twin sides of good vs. evil swirling inside of us) perhaps because of the way in which Lamar can retain some type of faith and yet still create art that is complicated, personal, and reaches far beyond a “Christian” audience. Kendrick Lamar showed me a way me a way in which it was possible to be critical of faith, to have crises, to maintain artistic authenticity and integrity, and yet still believe in some form of God. To not throw out the baby with the bath water so to speak. There’s God and then there’s religion (and often the gap between the two is made even greater by religious structures itself). Lamar doesn’t criticize the system of religion outright (though he does criticize the state of racial injustice in America outright) rather he talks about his personal journey where God is a constant presence. It is both a source of strength and conflict. It is real. It is human. Like all good music is.
[1] https://www.grunge.com/236650/the-hidden-meaning-of-r-e-m-s-losing-my-religion/
Levi Rogers is the author of Utah! A Novel. He has an MFA from Antioch University and lives in Portland with his wife and two daughters. His work has been published in The Clackamas Review, Entropy, and Sprudge.