Religious Experience as Nostalgia

I grew up in the church ensconced in a musical family. For me, music and worship have always gone together. I have believed for a lifetime that the addition of music to worship could only be a good thing. Lately I’ve realized that while religious music is still wonderful, like anything real it also has a down side.

Let me talk about the positive side first. For the most part (at least including the musical genres that I like) religious music makes me feel good. It finds its own way into my soul without necessarily stopping to visit the more cognitive parts of my brain. Music can even be transformative in ways that are healthy, though unpredictable. Music has maintained my connection with God at times when my thinking could not do the job. It has been very useful and enjoyable.

From the more negative side, religious music makes me feel good. Yes, I know I just said that was a positive element. How can it then be negative? The problem is that feeling good can turn into nostalgic numbness. It can turn the experience of worship into just another consumer event. If I like it, I’ll go, and if I don’t like it, I won’t.

I sometimes get nostalgic about certain events from my past and music can evoke that nostalgia. But I don’t think or see clearly, either about the past or the present, when nostalgia hits. I grew up singing hymns with certain lyrics, but I have discovered that some of those lyrics no longer reflect my present theology. If I’m feeling nostalgic, then I don’t even notice the friction. (By the way, while I’ve talked about music in particular, almost any aspect of past worship experience is capable of producing nostalgia.)

But I want my religious experience to be more than consumerism and nostalgia. I want to be challenged to think more broadly, even when that requires me to experience discomfort. From a larger perspective, I’m afraid that nostalgia is killing the church today. What was meaningfully nostalgic for one generation may drive the next away.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not fundamentally comfortable. It is certainly not designed to legitimize behaviors that are deemed acceptable in the worlds of government and business (although it is often used in just that way). While it’s good to have a warm sense of belonging in the Realm of the God of love, the larger purpose of that gospel is the propagation of loving relationships, not just in the personal realm, but across societies.

I suspect I will always love religious music, but, please, God, don’t let me settle for nostalgia.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson
“Don’t place a period where God has placed a comma.” Gracie Allen
The United Church___of Christ