How is Spiritual and Religious Awareness in the Contemporary World Reflected in Popular Music?

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How is Spiritual and Religious Awareness in the Contemporary World Reflected in Popular Music?

Pop music has thrived since the post-war boom in youth culture and is now an established part of our contemporary culture. Spirituality can be defined as that which affects ones inner life or spirit, an incorporeal aspect to life which is often associated with religion.  This essay will look at the aspects of spirituality such as the desire for something beyond the self, the search for community, the search for meaning and the expression of love and other emotions, and whether they are reflected in popular music. This essay will look at religious awareness in the contemporary world and how this is reflected in popular music.

Our post-modern society is increasingly one without a shared set of values. Society is isolated in the present with little heritage and a fear or ambivalence of the future[1]. Consumer culture places greater emphasis on ‘things’, personal relationships become devalued.

Average church attendance in the Church of England in 2005 was 988,000[2] every week. CD sales in the UK in 2005 were 33,375,000, and 11,443,000 downloads[3] (with the majority of all purchases made by those aged 25-44), this equates to an average of 861,885 CD and download sales a week.

What these figures don’t tell us is how many people listen to music, and those figures are much higher. Figures from RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research Limited) suggest that in 2008 in the UK 45 million people listen to the radio each week[4], which equates to 90% of the UK population listening to the radio.

The figures also do not reveal the wider context of church attendance versus the purchasing of music. The 0.9 million who attend church regularly are from a larger pool of church attendees, numbering around 1.7 million. Whilst the number of people buying and listening to music comes from a pool of the entire population.

What this means for society in the UK is that people have a far greater exposure to pop music than it does to the church. The two things are not directly linked, but the decline in church attendance since the 1950’s is symptomatic of a society with other distractions of consumerism and leisure (to simplify the issue hugely!), pop music being one of those distractions.

The spiritual and religious awareness in pop music is perhaps inevitable as it reflects the immense changes in society and culture over the last fifty years. It could be argued that the UK has a heritage of Christian belief[5] which expresses itself and organically emerges in the medium of pop music.

Inevitably the picture is more complex than this but the emergence of pop and rock music can perhaps be linked with the erosion of inherited faith and church attendance[6]. Alongside this is how religious awareness is reflected in society at a time when the church appears to be in decline.

Berger, in his book ‘A Rumours of Angels’, writes that the final third of the 20th century can be seen as when ideas of the supernatural and ideas about God ceased to be prevalent in society. Berger contends rather dramatically that ‘God is dead’[7].

Alongside the consumer culture, society is pre-occupied with the ‘natural’, the everyday in which we live and act, rather than the ‘supernatural’ in which religion makes sense of the everyday reality. The rock group Pink Floyd sum this up in their 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, ‘And all you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be’.

Modern society is increasingly accepting the ideas of science and rationality, and rejecting the possibility of a supernatural world, becoming increasingly secular. Berger goes on to suggest that church goers are less likely to be looking for salvation and transcendence and more likely to be looking for moral teaching for their children, or attending church as part of their social life[8]. This rejection of the supernatural and the reliance on the here and now is the process of secularisation.

Through our consumer society we have the power to have, to buy anything we want. Benton writes that through this power we have become like gods, we have the promise of happiness through material goods[9]. To have this power we need money, and whilst credit is easy to obtain, in popular culture the fast route to wealth (and happiness) is through achieving fame. With the advent of television programmes such as The X Factor the route to fame is presented as being achievable through pop music. Pop and rock stars are society’s new idols, concert arenas the new cathedrals. So any spiritual and religious content in pop music has a large and receptive audience.

Religion and the spiritual needs of the population are becoming separated from how society is run. The church increasingly does less in terms of government, education and socially within society. This process of secularisation would suggest that the spiritual needs and religious awareness are declining. However, in America where the separation of church and state is written into the constitution, church attendance and religious awareness is very high[10].

There is also evidence to that the figures suggesting a decline in church attendance are misleading, and church attendance is changing and evolving as society does. Many churches saw increased attendance after 11th September and far from being in decline religion is still in demand and is very much resilient[11]. Also, Church of England figure imply that spiritual awareness is growing, in 1987 27% were aware of the presence of God, rising to 38% in 2000[12].

The demand for religion and for people to express their spirituality is still apparent in society; the problem is how people perceive the Church itself. Research has suggested that the church is disconnected from society, and is perceived as out-dated and irrelevant[13].

Society seems to evolve and move away from the church, but this isn’t always the case. Secularisation is a complex idea, and while it is clear that society is changing, human nature doesn’t keep pace with this change and the spiritual needs remain in place. Within secularisation, religious belief and practise is often pushed from the public realm to the private[14], and popular music can be seen as a means by which religion and spirituality re-establishes itself with a legitimate public role.

Consequently, whilst society seems to focus on the individual, popular music often rebels against this to focus on the community and the search for the greater good. The longing for community and the sense of belonging to something greater than oneself is part of the search for spirituality, and this is evident in a lot of popular music.

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For example, pop music has always been quick to respond to and reflect current events, and has frequently had an element of social commentary. For example from the early political folk music of Bob Dylan (such as ‘The Times are a Changin’ album from 1964) through to the recent 2003 song by the Black Eyed Peas, ‘Where is the Love’, with its very Christian plea for help:

‘Father, father, father, help us,

Need some guidance from above,

These people got me questioning,

Where is the love?’

Charity records are another example of pop music expressing its social conscience, ...

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