Time Magazine has just run a great piece - thought-provoking even if (perhaps especially if) you don't go with all their assumptions - about 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now:
There's some gloriously provocative stuff here that's endlessly quotable and could sustain several blogs for months, but I homed in (naturally enough) on:
3. The New Calvinism
Here's a flavour of the piece...
If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."
Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.
Sadly, the 'take home' from the article is the backbiting between Christians (including the 'flame wars' in online forums!), but it's an interesting observation of the way religious movements often oscillate between extremes - and tracking them by way of their worship music is a particularly appealing method.
If you've been a church-goer for long enough, what have you seen change in the music focus of the churches you've been part of? And is it just the lyrics that are significant? I reckon you could track a lot by style/feel and even key?
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