PUNK ADVENT
A Bad Religion Collectible Christmas Ornament.
One of my favorite holiday albums is the 10-year old EP Christmas Songs, by the punk band Bad Religion. The album opens with an a cappella arrangement of “Hark the herald angels sing!” that quickly descends into chaos. The electric guitar swells, the drums roll in, and the carol takes off at a blistering tempo as singer Greg Gaffin’s gruff voice shouts out the familiar words. Most of the tracks on the record are traditional religious Christmas carols – a puzzling choice for a band whose logo is a “crossbuster” (a black cross with a red circle and slash canceling it out). If their name wasn’t a clue, Bad Religion is no fan of organized religion – ordinarily, their songs are scathingly critical of the Christian church. But that dissonance makes the mash-up even more fascinating – why would an avowedly atheist punk band record an album of Christian holiday songs?
When you hear the band talk about it, they point to the delicious irony of the record. Gaffin argues that the dissonance of a punk rock take on Christmas music reveals that there’s nothing particularly holy about the music. He points out that it isn’t the band that’s made the mash-up ironic – “the secularization of modern society” has already marginalized the religious tones of the season (most of the band members celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday with their families). Guitarist Brett Gurewitz describes the record as a “desecration” – a way to desacralize the music, revealing that there is nothing supernatural or transcendent about it. The band plays the songs seriously – the performance isn’t a parody or joke – but they do not intend any religious overtones. And for anyone who misses the irony, the band makes their stance clear by donating 20% of the album’s proceeds to a charity for children abused by priests. For Bad Religion, Christmas Songs is a subversive rejection of the dominant [Christian] culture’s spiritual claims about the season.
But every year, I play the album over and over again during the Advent and Christmas seasons. It pumps me up on my drive to church for a marathon of Christmas Eve services. The pounding drums, the frenetic pace, the snarling guitar solos, the ragged vocals – this album, for all its attitude, just feels right. While Bad Religion intends to be subversive, to me they’ve captured the Christmas spirit in a distinctly religious way! This all clicked for me when I heard Gurewitz talking about the album with Dustin Kensrue (another punk rocker) on the Carry the Fire podcast:
“The feeling in a lot of our songs is a feeling of yearning. Yearning to know something, yearning to be part of something, yearning for meaning. That’s the human condition, that’s why I love Christmas songs – they all have that feeling… Christmas songs sound like punk songs.”
Christmas songs sound like punk songs. Or maybe, it’s the other way round – punk songs sound like Christmas songs. The urgency, energy, camaraderie, and rebellion that characterize punk music are reflected in the Bible stories that we read this time of year. They share this overwhelming sense of yearning – a protest that the world is not yet as it should be, and a longing for what it might become. The intensity of our lectionary lessons during the seasons of Advent and Christmas remind me of punk rock.
Jesus describes an apocalypse – mysterious scenes of destruction and judgment, a world that is shaken and changed at an hour that nobody knows or expects. The normal stuff of life, the eating and drinking and marrying, will be swept away by an unforeseen flood. Two will be in the field, one will be taken and one will be left. The thief is coming in the dead of night. These dramatic vignettes are alarming, and they read as a warning: change is coming.
You don’t have to stretch your imagination to picture John the Baptist as a countercultural figure – wearing outlandish clothes, wandering in the wilderness with a cult following, protesting the injustice of the social system, condemning people in power. Every icon I’ve seen of blessed John looks like he could shout “Repent! The kingdom of God is near!” over thrumming power chords before launching into a killer guitar solo.
Mary’s song, the Magnificat, could easily be rendered as a punk anthem too. “He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” The royalty of Mary is that of a rebel princess.
The story of the Holy Family describes the down-and-out folks who find their place in a fringe movement. They don’t fit in – lost in Bethlehem at the edge of empire with no room in the inn and under the cloud of scandalous rumor, they must carve out their own space beside a manger.
I think of the motley cast of characters in Luke’s Gospel – the scruffy and unwashed shepherds, or the angels out in force singing together, or Herod the tyrant exploiting the poor and downtrodden. I think of John’s Gospel, where a single Word contains the fullness of God – a defiant light that cannot be overcome by darkness.
While Advent is often described as a season for waiting, I experience it as a season of urgency – hurry up and come, Lord Jesus, come! The fast-paced, high-energy attitude of punk music is a perfect fit for this time. Punk is galvanized by moral outrage, an anger against the unjust realities of our world. But the Church, at its best, also expresses this moral outrage. My own anger towards the perpetration and protection of sexual abuse in the church is driven by my faith. Christians perceive these destructive realities as the marks of sin and the curse of death. And both punks and Christians refuse to be complicit – we shout and thrash and tell the truth, a prophetic act. Deep beneath the anger, there’s optimism. It’s a kind of hope: hope that the world can be better, that we can be better, than the way things are right now. That’s the deep yearning of punk music and Christmas music, the longing the Church proclaims as we wait for Christ to come again.
Even the dissonance that Bad Religion describes, the irony of an anti-church punk band covering Christmas songs, finds its place in the season. We experience dissonance whenever we try to wrap our heads around Advent. Christ will come: a baby in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, and a king in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead. The kingdom of God is near, and perhaps already here, and still yet to come – what scholars call partially realized eschatology, a heavenly kingdom that has been inaugurated at the first Christmas but is not yet fulfilled. Jesus Christ is the incarnate Lord, fully human and fully God. It’s the dissonance of the Word made flesh and dwelling among us, the incongruence of God’s own son wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger on the outskirts of a lonely backwater town at the edge of the Roman Empire. Advent disorients us by pulling these disparate strains together. That sharp edge lies beneath the sweet sounding melodies of our carols.
When I sing along to punk rock carols, it stirs something in my soul. Music has the power to speak beyond words, which is why “What Child is This?” sounds so different when accompanied by raucous guitars instead of dulcet piano. But the drums and amplifiers convey something new, shaping our interpretation of familiar words that have perhaps lost their edge. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll joyfully sing these carols in the pews, where the beautiful sounds of organ and choir evoke feelings of piety, reverence, and holiness. But the season of Advent and the good news of Christmas are more than those feelings, too. They’re rough and ragged, eager and earnest, loud and longing.
So as the church crowd makes its way into that holy night after the late night Christmas Eve service, I’ll rub my bleary eyes, turn up the stereo, and tap the steering wheel in time to Bad Religion. The silent night will be pierced by that revolutionary proclamation:
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
