If you go to any random evangelical church today, chances are you will not sing any Psalms. You might sing one or two songs with a line from the Psalms, but likely, you will not sing the Psalms. Why is that? There are several reasons. One of the reasons, like a coin, has two sides. First, Americans are obsessed with happiness, health, and wealth. Second, Americans are embarrassed by sadness, weakness, and lamentation. Therefore, the Psalms are avoided because they are not all about health and wealth. Instead, many are full of tears, sadness, and prayers of sorrow. Who wants to sing about broken, contrite hearts and tears for food when we can sing about happier things?
Carl Trueman explained this evangelical embarrassment of the Psalms very well in his article “What Do Miserable Christians Sing?” The whole article is worth reading – you can find it online. Below is part of the article that caught my attention today:
…Let us look at the contemporary language of worship. Now, worship is a difficult subject and, having experienced—and generally appreciated—worship across the whole evangelical spectrum, from Charismatic to Reformed—I am myself concerned here less with the form of worship than I am with its content. I would, however, like to make just one observation: the Psalms, the Bible’s own hymnbook, have almost entirely dropped from view in the contemporary Western evangelical scene. I am not certain about why this should be, but I have an instinctive feel that it has more than a little to do with fact that a high proportion of psalms are taken up with lamentation, with feeling sad, unhappy, tormented, and broken. In modern Western culture, these are simply not emotions which have much credibility: sure, people still feel these things, but to admit that they are a normal part of one’s everyday life is tantamount to admitting that one has failed in today’s health, wealth, and happiness society.
Now, one would not expect the world to have much time for the weakness of the psalmists’ cries. It is disturbing, however, when these cries of lamentation disappear from the language of the church. Perhaps the Western church feels no need to lament—but then it is sadly deluded about how healthy it really is. Perhaps—and this is more likely—we have drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that we simply do not know what to do with such cries and regard them as little short of embarrassing.
Yet the human condition is a poor one—and Christians who are aware of the deceitfulness of the human heart and are looking for a better country should know this. A diet of unremittingly jolly hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party—a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is—or at least should be—all about health, wealth, and happiness silently corrupted the content of our worship? Few Christians in areas where the church has been strongest over recent decades—China, Africa. Eastern Europe—would regard uninterrupted emotional highs as normal Christian experience. Indeed, the biblical portraits of believers give no room to such a notion. Look at Abraham, Joseph, David, Jeremiah, and the detailed account of the psalmists’ experiences. Much agony, much lamentation, occasional despair—and joy, when it manifests itself, is very different from that found in so much of our modern Western Christianity. In the psalms. God has given the church a language which allows it to express even the deepest agonies of the human soul in the context of worship. Does the absence of such cries from contemporary worship indicate that the comfortable values of Western middle-class consumerism have silently infiltrated the church, making us consider them irrelevant, embarrassing, and signs of abject failure?
I was once present at a church meeting where someone argued that the psalms should take a higher priority in evangelical worship than they generally do—and he was told in no uncertain terms by one indignant person that such a view betrayed a heart that had no interest in evangelism. On the contrary, I believe it is the exclusion of the experiences and expectations of the psalmists from our worship—and thus from our own horizons of expectation—which has in a large part crippled the evangelistic efforts of the church in the West and turned us all into spiritual pixies. By excluding cries of loneliness, dispossession, and desolation from its worship, the church has effectively silenced and excluded the voices of those who are themselves lonely, dispossessed, and desolate, both inside and outside the church. It has implicitly endorsed the banal aspirations of consumerism, and generated an insipid, trivial and unrealistically triumphalist Christianity. In the last year, I have asked three very different evangelical audiences what miserable Christians can sing in church. On each occasion my question has elicited uproarious laughter, as if the idea of a broken-hearted, lonely, or despairing Christian was so absurd as to be comical—and yet I posed the question in all seriousness…
Carl Trueman, “What Do Miserable Christians Sing?,” Themelios 25, no. 2 (2000): 2.
Shane Lems Covenant Presbyterian Church (OPC) Hammond, WI, 54015
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