I am the only Christian I know who hates singing in church. All of it. From hymns to gospel to, God help us, “praise choruses,” any form of church singing makes me want to effect a quick conversion to the nearest available silence-based sect.
This doesn’t mean I hate all church music. From Bach’s cantatas to Mahalia Jackson’s soaring melismas to the Innocence Mission’s “Christ is My Hope,” there’s plenty of the stuff I’ll listen to. Even hymns, which are kitschy almost by definition, acquire a nice sort of gravity as they age, like retired congressmen or Biedermeier couches. It’s the act of singing that hurts. I suspect this is oddly enough because of my love for music. I don’t just mean this in the snotty sense: “I love music too much to witness the tortures it undergoes at Christian hands,” though this is sometimes true. Nor do I mean, “I love music too much to witness the tortures it goes through at my hands,” though this is always true. I mean that music affects me so intimately that, when it’s good, the sensation it arouses is too intimate to be borne in public. And when it’s bad, well, it pisses me off on an equally primal level.
I’ve heard not a few little moral lectures on this subject, of course, beginning with the douchebag of a Christian-camp counselor who yanked me by the arm during chapel in seventh grade and bellowed in my ear the words “You’re not too good for this!” (I bet his type was very useful during the Crusades.) Nowadays it tends to be gentler: “But don’t you think church singing is about God, not you?” Well, no kidding, fellows. But tell that to the violent and uncontrollable self-consciousness that arises in me at the first note of church music. I suspect there’s no helping my state; it’s just something to be lived with, like a handicap. But I do think it might be a little easier for those of us who have trouble entering into the spirit of the thing if the default church-music mode, among evangelicals especially, weren’t songs designed to be performed rather than sung. The place where I’ve been going for the last few months uses almost exclusively songs that feature arpeggios, note runs, vocal pyrotechnics, and whoah-oh-ohs that privilege the performer over the (presumably untrained) congregation. I’ve observed the same phenomenon in churches from many denominations, many demographics, but I haven’t heard people discussing it: they complain about changes of style, about lyrical shallowness, about drums frightening off the oldsters, but not about this. It seems like the sort of change people might want to be talking about.
