The irony of a Christian gospel gathering on a steroidal pleasure boat is not lost on the Freedom Cruisers (for one thing, Southern Baptists don’t drink). While they sit in this darkened theatre, their fellow passengers are gambling, attending seminars on how to get a celebrity smile and flawless skin, playing bingo, watching a slideshow on Jackie Kennedy’s jewellery, or taking part in one of the contests—earlier I saw Debby from Kansas City and Wendy from Phoenix shake their asses before a cheering crowd to win a Raspberry Crème Brûlée Martini.

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Guy Penrod, a lupine fiftysomething country and gospel rocker with waist-length grey hair and a trimmed goatee, is the star of the Freedom Cruise concerts. He’s also the most vocal about the opportunity his fellow Christians have this week. They can get out there on the ship and minister to the lost—those “who have not met the lover of their soul.” Penrod is the son of a Baptist preacher and he met his wife Angie, with whom he has eight children, at Liberty University in Virginia, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell. “The Bible is a manual for living,” he tells the crowd. “You can spread that news, you can be Jesus to them.” The audience applauds and amens and raises its hands in praise. The guitar strikes up, the lights swirl, and he sings: “Though none go with me, still I will follow, I will follow Jesus.” Such scenes are at best foreign (and at worst, anathema) to the Republican party’s economic libertarians and Wall Street conservatives, who for the last 30 years have found themselves in an odd political marriage with evangelical Christians.

The whole thing is here.

In that order then: Yes, and Meh.

Southern gospel is a deeply politicized subculture, both in terms of its own internal political dynamics and the wider world of electoral politics. And insofar as southern gospel performers amount to celebrities within certain segments of evangelicalism, an ad recruiting Daniel Riley (and Chuck Norris!) to shill for a gubernatorial candidate in the deep South is about as extraordinary as George Clooney stumping for Barack Obama.

Now can it be disappointing for fans to see someone from their favorite group aligning himself with a fringe politician still trafficking in, among other things, the tired old racist rhetoric of “states’ rights,” esp in Alabama? Sure. But expecting sound political judgment out of someone b/c they’re a celebrity (religious or not, conservative or liberal) is rather like expecting to get sound financial advice from an ATM.

So the only real surprise about the Moore ad is that it’s taken so long for someone to do.

Some people seem to think this may be the first time a campaign ad has appeared in the SN, and this may well be true (to be sure, I’d have to defer to avfl’s honorary historian of All Things SN, Dean Adkins). But it’s certainly not the first time the SN has carried explicitly political content. Just off the top of my head, I’m thinking of the “news” piece last year announcing that Scott Fowler had attended the Iowa Caucus, and oh by the way, he got there on Mike Huckabee’s private campaign jet.

The only real difference between that “story” and this ad is that SN is getting paid this time.

From the right: Gerald Wolfe’s recent e-letter urging people to remember that Barack Obama supports abortion seems to be getting quite a bit of attention (h/t, everyone who sent me a copy). Here’s a taste: 

[A]s Christians, we have values and beliefs that go deeper, and are more important, than our wallets.

Our first question should be…what are the candidates positions on the value of human life? 

[snip] 

Our next President will be replacing at least two, and maybe three Supreme Court Justices during his term in office.  If you keep up with politics at all, you know the Supreme Court is the most powerful entity in the government, as they “interpret” the laws passed by the Congress, and, in essence, have the power to “make” law.  It was the US Supreme Court that over-turned a State law in the famous “Roe v Wade” decision that made abortion-on-demand a “human right”, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Americans over the last thirty-plus years.  Earlier this year, Senator Barrack Obama said “If one of my daughters makes a mistake, I wouldn’t want her to be punished with a child.”  That statement, along with his voting record as an Illinois State Senator, is a clear and undeniable statement on his position concerning the basic human right of “life”.  His election will result in the continued killing of untold millions of living, unborn people. 

It goes on like this for a quite a while, but you get the idea.

Maybe it’s just cause my guy’s winning, but does anyone else see the flopsweat seeping through at the edges here? I mean, really: rallying the base is nothing new, but things must be getting bad in Republicanland if the faithful – and I imagine there isn’t a more faithful conservative voter than your average Gerald Wolfe fan, myself excluded – have to be reminded that their guy opposes abortion and the other candidate doesn’t. I got an email a few days back from another southern-gospel bigwig with the subject line “character does matter,” which I think could be loosely translated: hello? [tap, tap, tap] is this thing on? Can we please stop talking about our weak candidate and go back to talking about how foreign the other guy is? (The body of the message was a Charles Krauthammer op-ed, so don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything; also: if you prefer your political commentary in sports analogies, Kevin Drum made the flopsweat point wonderfully last week using a Foreman/Ali comparison.)

And from the self-aggrandizing center: Lori Burger attended the Presidential debates at Belmont last week and hobnobbed with some really famous people. She made an announcement out of this, naturally, and the SG ShowPrep covered it, naturally. Reminds me of another report in the ShowPrep recently about d-lister Cheryl Jackson landing a supporting role in a dinner theater production of a play whose lead was the brunette from Three’s Company, Joyce DeWitt. Please note: “Joyce told Cheryl that she keeps her CD in her car all the time and loves her song “Be Still.” Be still, indeed.

Bonus nugget: Back to Hendrix … I got an email from a reporter the other day at the Rothenberg Political Report, a beltway insider political magazine, asking about Rick Hendrix, which suggests either his star is ascendant or at least the reports of his ascendancy are  not going entirely unnoticed. Fwiw.

As a Democrat, I have strong beliefs against abortion, I am an avid supporter of prayer in our schools, and I feel our borders need a fair, tough, enforceable and realistic plan.

And/but he’s currently a delegate to the Democratic National Convention for Hillary Clinton, and according to Hendrix, he was personally asked to run for Congress pledge a delegate vote for HRC by no less than Bill Clinton.

As I was reading all this earlier today, it occurred to me that there really aren’t many better ways to prepare for Congressional politics than southern gospel radio promotions.

Update: The full ShowPrep story is here.

But have you seen southern gospel connections to the presidential race pop up in some of the last places one might expect to see southern gospel related names in the news?

First there’s the endorsement of John McCain by John Hagee, whose fringy rants about Israel and infidels dogged McCain for a few good news cycles recently. Hagee … hooo boy. Talk about your crazy old uncles. Anyway, on the up side, as long as Hagee is busy creating apocalyptic problems for McCain, this will ideally only increase the likelihood that he will stay away from the NQC stage, which has been mercifully free of him and his musically mediocre family the past few years.

And then today I saw that a program director at Salem Radio, a division of the same Salem that owns the Singing News, has owned up to producing a so-called “mashup” video attacking Barack Obama over the Jeremiah Wright flap by linking the candidate to black radicals and separatists.

Just another proud day for conservative political discourse, I guess.

Update: Thanks to commenter SG Fan for reminding me of the Rod Parsley/McCain fracas (fueled by Parsley’s calls for a destruction of “Islam” and McCain’s description of Parsley as his “spiritual adviser”). Parsley, you’ll recall, was a big booster of the Crabb Family back in the day.

And that reminded me of the Obama/Donnie McClurkin issue a while back. McClurkin, the gospel soloist who collaborated with … wait for it … The Crabb Family back when the Crabbs were busy “blurring the lines,” got Obama into something of a tight spot when people started wondering why Obama, with his message of inclusion, was hanging out at a campaign event with McClurkin, given the “ex-gay” McClurkin’s history of homophobic (and/or anti-gay) remarks since his “deliverance.”

When politics, right, left or centrist, starts to permeate art of any form, it’s time to read, listen or look at something else. It’s hard enough (as numerous discussions on this blog indicate) to encourage good art in a narcissistic, culturally-entrenched, economically-challenged genre of music like southern gospel. Subverting art in such a blatant manner reveals the utter lack of understanding on the part of the writers and performers of what art is meant to be and do.

Read the whole thing. I’m not sure I’m convinced by the suggestion here that good art should or has to be apolitical. Apolitical art is like objective journalism. It’s just not possible. Subtle art (and fair reporting)? Absolutely. But all artistic expressions have a set of politics deeply embedded in them whether the artist “intends” it or not, and that’s as it should be. It’s part of what good art does, it seems to me - provoke thought and feeling (including the political, broadly considered) without predetermining conclusions.

What I do entirely agree with is CVH’s point about blatantly saturating songs with heavyhanded political declarations. It’s a sure sign of artistically impoverished vision when performers start turning their music into the sound track for a political rally. This is what always bugged me about the Steeles (though they’re the only example that springs most readily to mind and not the only offenders, by any means … the Pfiefers, often the Inspirations … there are others). You could tell they wanted to be hailed as ideological heroes for “daring” to say from the stage what a clear majority of their fans probably already thought and felt anyway. But that’s not politically courageous. It’s just self-serving buffoonery, the last resort of the artistically desperate.

But that’s a matter of taste, I suppose. The bigger issue is that the music-as-political-chum approach disrupts the useful fiction of universal ecumenicalism that is an essential precondition for the successful live performance of gospel music (listening at home, you can just skip the cringe-inducing polemics). Typically, concerts work in no small part because we all have agreed to pretend that we agree about everything because we share a love of gospel music performed live. It’s one thing for artists to sing or talk about “values” or “Godly leaders” or voting for those people who will ensure this is a “Christian nation.” We all think we know what we are supposed to infer from these loaded words (politically conservative, religiously fundamentalist positions), but they’re sufficiently vague to allow listeners of all political and ideological stripes to assign their own meanings to these terms … and for those of us to the left of the hard right, hope the awkward but bearable moment of vaguely political grandstanding passes quickly. As soon as you start getting into specifics – abortion, the war, sexuality, prayer in school, whatever – you cut off access to that interpretive flexibility and make people choose sides. In the process you descend from the artistic ether (where people will suspend a lot of disbelief about politics and such and assume you’re someone they’d get along with because they like your music) and become a partisan hack with a microphone.

Many of the artist in southern gospel have their ministries set up as 501(c)(3). I think if the politics continue as they have in the past it will only be a matter of “when” and not “if” the IRS lowers the boom on these ministries. Here is the guidence taken directly from the IRS web site if anyone questions rather the practice is not allowed. (Not to mention “unwanted” by most fans.)

http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=139018,00.html

Can a tax-exempt organization endorse candidates for public office?

The type of tax exemption determines whether an organization may endorse candidates for public office. For example, a section 501(c)(3) organization may not publish or distribute printed statements or make oral statements on behalf of, or in opposition to, a candidate for public office. Consequently, a written or oral endorsement of a candidate is strictly forbidden. The rating of candidates, even on a nonpartisan basis, is also prohibited.

*********

(With that said I am not operating as a non-profit but I still hold my tongue when it comes to my personal political views. My son is the only one who knows where I keep my “Never Trust A Talking Bush Unless It’s On Fire” T-shirt”.) (c)Charles Brady-CMG-2006

I don’t think I’ve ever done so little to start so much of a conversation, and I’ve a good mind to just stay out of it, but of course I won’t. And before going in any further, I want to say (again) how delightful it’s been to be the host of such a civil conversation. I guess it’s a kind of backhanded compliment in a way (”Look, evangelicals can talk about politics without having a bloody brawl!”) but alas evangelicals DO have a bit of difficulty talking about politics without scorching the earth and anyone who they perceive as their enemies. Which makes this conversation all the more noble. I really do think this is a model of discourse and exchange that a whole lot of the world could copy. Thank you. That said, I am going to limit my remarks to southern gospel and politicized lyrics and only touch indirectly on some of the larger political issues circulating around this topic. This blog is about southern gospel, and not contemporary politics, after all.

Perhaps not surprisingly I’ve been thinking a lot and writing some about this topic in my day job, which was the source of the original post in the first place. And/but I’m not entirely sure what I think about it yet. Consider, then, what follows as so many promissary notes toward a more fully formed and thoughtful (as well as thought-out) opinion in the future.

On the one hand, I have no reason to think that Jeff Steele doesn’t believe what he’s writing and singing about when he proclaims himself and other Christians victimized by a pervasive culture of immorality and recklessness. Thus I think we are obliged to take lyrics like these seriously, even though in my own case I find them somewhat crude, more than a little opportunistic, and deeply uncomfortable to listen to. On the other hand, it’s difficult to see any direct evidence that evangelicals suffer as mightily as the lyrics of “We Want America Back” would have us believe.

A song like “We Want America Back” works by encouraging audiences to convince themselves emotionally, in the experience of the music and its polemical, rousing recitation of anti-Christian bias in the world, that evangelicals suffer real pain through symbolic or legal actions. Courts banning the display of the ten commandments in government buildings or prohibiting formally sanctioned prayer in public schools, same-sex marriage and abortion – these are issues about which conservative Christians have strong emotional and political feelings but usually very little at stake personally: few evangelicals are, I would wager, in a position to want or seek an abortion, want or seek to marry someone of the same sex, nor are these same people likely to experience any kind of irreversible pain or suffering from the absence of the ten commandments in a courthouse or public prayer in school. “We Want America Back” – and songs like it – exploits the emotional investment evangelicals have in these issues, whipping up conservative audiences into a good thoroughgoing ideological froth over hot-button issues and then inviting audiences to consider that ideological outrage proof of the purity of their faith.

In some ways, this makes a certain kind of sense. White evangelicals are among the most powerful and coveted bloc of Americans in contemporary politics these days. Most laws and policies that have direct impact on quality of life and ordinary living are written with these peoples’ interest foremost in mind. There just aren’t that many instances in ordinary American life when evangelicals are going to be penalized or forced to suffer severely for their beliefs. And yet evangelical theology is founded in large part on the belief of the centrality of sanctified suffering for Christ and his cause. Thus the primary opportunities for white, middle-class evangelicals in middle and southern America to suffer for Christ are probably going to have to be ideologically, politically, and to some extent, imaginatively, in the kind of constructed crisis of Christianity and culture that a song like “We Want America Back” attempts to call forth lyrically. Christian faith and commitment are affirmed through an intensity of feeling and immensity of affect generated by, say, a concert in which “We Want America Back” is the centerpiece.

In a different context, the literary critic I. A. Richards called this form of religious feeling “emotional belief” – a way of believing that another critic, Robert Milder, has described as “aris[ing] from and fulfill[ing] a psychological need without … making claims on practical behavior.” This is exactly what’s happening, I think, in a song like “We Want America Back.” With apologies to Ruby Thewes, a song like this creates its own emotional weather pattern and then says “aren’t we brave and noble Christians for standing out in the rain.”

I want to be clear that though I am deeply ambivalent about the kind of belief and action in the world that ideological music like this gives rise to, I’m not trying to demean the song. What I’m more interested in as a student of gospel music is the song’s misrepresentation of reality as mainly anti-Christian (that evangelical Christians don’t always get their way is not the same thing as the world being out to get them) and the way that that distortion speaks to the volatility or paradoxes of evangelical identity. The popularity of polemic songs like this suggests that evangelicalism today relies an awfully lot, though not entirely, on narratives of victimization to energize the faithful. It speaks to one important function of southern gospel music in evangelical life, it seems to me, that so many evangelicals find a song like “We Want America Back” an essential distillation of their feelings about their Christianity and the experience of religious living.

Anyway, aside from the predictability of the article’s conclusion (God is still a Republican and you should be too if you’re reading this), could the SN not find one single prominent female gospel musician to comment on questions of faith, politics, patriotism, and Christiam music performance? What are Janet Paschal’s views? Libbi Perry-Stuffle’s? Sonya Isaac’s? Kelly Nelon’s? Lauren Talley’s? Joyce Martin’s? Is God a sexist, too?

“I spoke to [Anthony Burger’s] wife Sunday and she said he would be so moved by the outpouring of sympathy. His favorite TV network, CNN, aired a piece on him and she said that would have thrilled him. He will be terribly missed.” [My emphasis]