Hymns are powerful emblems of our faith. We often hold our favorites of them as we would a favorite Sunday hat or a colorful brooch on the lapel, but when we sing hymns we say more than what we individually believe. We engage with a larger Christian body than any denomination can hold exclusively, too. Hymns open our faith experience and practice to that of the entire Church—folded in time and rooted in Christ. Hymns are more than devotional or catechetical. They are a uniquely social form of centuries-old Christian discourse, revised and expanded in circulation, but never shedding the truths that they have come to present throughout history. 

This essay examines the social power of hymnody. I argue that to understand the full capabilities of hymns we must acknowledge the multiple ways that these songs are social tools. In church services, revivals, household practice, and Christian texts, hymns bring together the Church in ways that other media fail to do. These songs claim more ecumenicalism across various Christian traditions than sermons, biblical translations, and liturgies. Being open to the sociality of hymnody allows us another way to truly be one body.

Hymns contain a telling social power. One of the first questions that I am asked after attending worship at a new church is inevitably, “What’s your favorite hymn?” My answer, which is never the same each time, reveals much more than whatever earworm comes to mind. As markers of Christian identity, different hymns carry cultural meanings wrapped in identity politics. “Rock of ages” speaks to my midwestern Baptist upbringing—a popular hymn sung at numerous weddings, funerals, revivals, and church services that often reminds me of the black and white evangelicalism of my childhood. I remember feeling attacked when, shortly after moving to Cleveland for college, one person commented, “some hymns deserve to be forgotten” after hearing me mention “Rock of ages”. This commenter undoubtedly had a different attitude surrounding “Christ is made the sure foundation,” their own favorite. Invocative of Victorian Anglicanism, the regal quality of the tune Westminster Abbey sounds miles and years away from American revival hymnody. And yet, surely there is enough room somewhere for both.

Many hymnal publishers agree. Since the 1980s, a growing trend of hymnic ecumenicalism has emerged in the United States. The hymnal of my youth, The Hymnal for Worship and Celebration, shares both “Rock of ages” and “Christ is made the sure foundation” with other Protestant hymnals such as The Hymnal 1982 and Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Hymns such as these exceed Protestantism, too. Felicia Piscitelli examines the growing extent in which Protestant hymns are used in Roman Catholic worship in a book chapter titled “Protestant Hymnody in Contemporary Roman Catholic Worship.” (1) Although hymn texts are often revised or replaced in hymnals such as Gather, many American folk tunes that originated in evangelical worship and revivals are included in these Catholic publications. When prayers and biblical translations fail to connect Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Roman Catholics and more, somehow “Rock of ages” achieves that bond. 

But how? How is hymnody a binding force that has come to represent growing currents of ecumenicalism in American Christianity? To answer this question, we must turn to the material capacities of hymns: their circulation across printed texts and emotional capacities during performance.

Circulation shares worlds. It is a process wherein the sounds and meanings of hymns merge and accumulate, stitching together various realities across religions and cultures much like a patchwork quilt. Ethnomusicologist David Novak argues that “circulation itself constitutes culture” instead of something that occurs only between diverse cultures. (2) The circulation of hymn texts across various Christian denominations beginning in the nineteenth century has led to a codified musical ecumenicalism in American Christian traditions. Some of the earliest examples of such activity is seen in Ira D. Sankey’s Gospel Hymns, where eighteenth-century English hymns such as “All people that on earth do dwell” appear alongside popular gospel hymns of the late-nineteenth century like “Blessed assurance”.

Although circulation often changes the meaning of hymns according to specific religious environments, even altered texts and tunes cannot be fully separated from earlier versions of the same hymn. Many hymnwriters in America have been aware of these powerful historical connections cast in verse and tune. For instance, the abolitionist poet John G. Whittier used Martin Luther’s tune Ein feste Burg (most associated with “A mighty fortress is our God”) while composing a hymn for the Union at the onset of the Civil War:

What gives the wheat field blades of steel?

What points the rebel cannon?

What sets the roaring rabble’s heel

On the old star-spangled pennon?

What breaks the oath

Of the men of the South?

What whets the knife

For the Union’s life? –—

Hark to the answer: —— SLAVERY!

In vain the bells of war shall ring

Of triumphs and revenges,

While still is spared the evil thing

That severs and estranges.

But blest the ear

That yet shall hear

The jubilant bell

That rings the knell

Of Slavery forever!

Whittier’s pairing of this text with such a familiar hymn tune produces intentional ties between Luther’s historical religious movement and American politics at the mid-nineteenth century. Southern slaveholders justified slavery through biblical interpretation and Christian tradition. (3) Abolitionists argued against the same institution using similar techniques. At the head of Whittier’s hymn, even before his own name, reads the text: “Luther’s Hymn.” The inclusion of this subtitle demonstrates that Whittier viewed his work as an extension of Luther’s—another kind of reformation built on Protestant morality. Through its circulation, including the transmission of layered meanings to which it is attached, the hymn bound together these two worlds.

Hymns also serve as vessels of emotion. They have the power to unite (and sometimes divide) subjects around affectual impulses during performance. (4) Affect circulates in the singing of hymns because emotions and feelings are shared within a performative religious body. Affect also shapes the political, which in many cases is interconnected with the sacred. On 14 September 2001 Luther’s “A mighty fortress is our God” was included in a memorial service for victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks at the National Cathedral in Washington DC. Many politicians, including four presidents of the United States, attended the service and it was broadcasted live on multiple media networks. During the organ introduction to “A mighty fortress” one news anchor described the hymn as one that “Christians of every stripe will find most familiar.” Following the horrific events that occurred in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania three days before, the hymn also spoke across political and religious divides. As the organ accompanied in full volume both Democrats and Republicans sang the lines:

For still our ancient foe

doth seek to work us woe;

his craft and power are great,

and armed with cruel hate,

on earth is not his equal.

Luther’s text, translated and revised for many centuries in circulation, references the sinister power of Satan. Many in the congregation at the September 11 memorial service seemed to ponder this timely allusion amid national uncertainty. As people wept, the hymn-singing reached its conclusion: “the body they may kill: / God’s truth abideth still; / his kingdom is forever!” Which kingdom? Was it the evangelical kingdom of Billy Graham, who preached later in the service, or a broad kingdom of heaven familiar to the Episcopal clergy present? Or was the reference interpreted in a nationalistic manner? The answer may be all of these or none—and it doesn’t really matter. Each congregant’s emotional response contributed to the collective effervescence of the hymn performance. Affect accumulates in performance and such a process reaches far beyond a specific event to the musical meaning of hymns.

The material circulation and affectual dimensions of hymns reveals a social power characteristic to them. Hymns like “A mighty fortress is our God” connect Christians throughout time and space. Even though lyrical alterations and musical differences occur, those who join in the singing share the long history of such hymns and contribute to their collective meaning. Of course, multiple theological interpretations of a single hymn can and do exist, but focusing on the practice of hymn-singing instead of specific dogma and theology highlights how music is often flexible to cultural difference and operates under a form of lived religion. Robert Orsi explains how lived religion exists when “religion comes into being in an ongoing, dynamic relationship with the realities of every day life.” (5)

Hymns thus unite us by demonstrating our humanity across a vast scale—reaching for (and sometimes missing) high notes in the melody, grabbing a quick breath between verses, and finding our own ways to relate to these age-old texts at the individual level. They open us up to the humanness of being human, including our strivings and failings, joys and sorrows, kindness and evil. And singing hymns, whether it be “Rock of ages” or “A mighty fortress”, recalls this elaborate and varied Christian history through the voices of God’s children.

1. Felicia Piscitelli, “Protestant Hymnody in Contemporary Roman Catholic Worship,” in Wonderful Words of Life: Hymn in American Protestant History and Theology, ed. Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll, 150-163 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004).

2. David Novak, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 17.

3. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 505-565; Paul Gutacker, “Seventeen Centuries of Sin: The Christian Past in Antebellum Slavery Debates,” Church History 89, no. 2 (2020): 307-332.

4. Sara Ahmed describes affect as “sticky” and explains how it circulates to “bind subjects together” under a common emotional umbrella. See “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 119.

5. Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7.