Comments on: Pluralism, absolutism, gospel music

By: SM

SM — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 20:36:57 +0000

Have you been studying symbolic interaction theory lately?

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:38:25 +0000

Avery,
I don’t know if you even want to get into this, and I respect you either way, but what is your religous background? I’ve been wondering about that since I started reading your posts. For someone who has the depth of knowledge that you do about SG, it is a bit of a surprise to me to hear you say that you a long way from the “orthodox beliefs” of a SG listener. I guess that says more about my view about the SG fan base than anything else, but I’m just curious.

By: Tim Eutin

Tim Eutin — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:30:07 +0000

Perhaps Freud’s statement that, “Sometimes a Southern Gospel song is just a Southern Gospel song” applies. :~)

“Rather it’s up to the listener to develop personalized responses to and make individual meaning out of the general religious or spiritual ideas suggested by the song”. Sounds like you are getting close to what I remember of Jung and his Archetypes.

You state, “Shaded with personalized psychospiritual responses, southern gospel becomes the music of the individual and the collective body, simultaneously”.

I don’t understand why you limit your observations to one genre of music. It would seem that the more general, vague lyrics found in today’s AC Christian music allow for an even more personalized constuct of meaning and it happens to a larger audience numerically.

I’ve often wondered just how much of an emphasis the casual listener places on lyrical content beyond sonic appeal. SG music is not know for exploring deep truths, or more perhaps more properly, deepy into the Truth. IMO it is indeed the ” harmonic and emotional resonances” that attract fans and define the genre.

It will be interesting to see where your mind takes you on this…..

“How do we know what we know and how do we know that”, Woody Allen.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 05:00:38 +0000

Avery, this is one of the posts I’ve been waiting for you to write. I’m a convert to high church Anglicanism and the catholic tradition who was raised in a strict evangelical environment. A good theological education guided me on the journey to discover the Anglican roots of the Wesleyan tradition and abandon most aspects of evangelicaldom (although I am still a member and minister in the same denomination in which I was raised–I just view things much differently now!). Southern gospel is one of the few aspects of evangelicaldom that I still hold on to, although I could never let anyone in the theological academic world know about this or I would lose all credibility!

Yes, I do construct individual interpretations of sg songs. It’s the only way to make sense of things, especially when one is not so certain that anyone is ever going to “fly away, oh glory,” let alone myself. But I tell myself that the imaginative language used in the 60% of sg songs that talk about life in heaven are just variations on the kinds of poetical language used in the Bible to describe the glories of the presence of God, even if the songwriters and singers and many fans most likely think they’re some sort of literal description.

I think I can go along with you when you write that “southern gospel allows for a shaky but workable religious pluralism to emerge just beneath its absolutist surface.” But I’m an empiricist, and I need cold, hard facts. Is there any reliable polling that has been done about who sg fans are?