secular music is not secular at all

🎶 the way I needed music

For me, growing up in two evangelical churches in the 80’s and 90’s meant that I was not allowed to buy or listen to “secular music” without my mom’s explicit permission. She would need to read the lyrics of every song on the cassette tape or CD insert. If she didn’t feel good about it, I would have to return it. It also meant that “secular” radio stations were off limits. Naturally, I listened to Top 40 and Oldies and Soft Rock stations in the car alone or when she was at work. More on that in a bit.

Music had been wildly important to me for as long as I can remember. I used to hear my older cousin singing and I adored her voice. I remember around the age of five I asked her how she made her voice “go up and down like that.” She assured me that if I practiced, I would find my vibrato. When I was eight-years-old I wrote my first song and began journaling (how romantic were our little diaries with lock and key in the 80’s?), and I’ve been writing ever since. Both of my parents had a love for music. My dad introduced me to jazz and blues on our car rides to his apartment for my weekends with him, talking me through the breakdown of so many songs. My mom filled our little home with Motown jams and Gospel records when she cleaned the house and on the weekends. They were also in a band together as teens—my mother is a singer and my dad is a drummer—along with my aunt and two of their friends. I was destined to love music.

The whole truth is that I’ve always felt that music was a part of me. I believe it would have been wrapped up in my being even if I had not been raised in the middle of it. But I was. My stepdad came into my life when I was eight and he loved music documentaries and Austin City Limits as much as my dad did. He also happened to be a drummer. He played clubs and eventually became a studio and touring musician, filling in the gaps drumming on worship teams at various churches throughout my life. Being in the studio with him, hopping on a tour bus here and there, and listening in on rehearsals fueled the fire for me. He really nudged me to pursue a career as a singer/songwriter, too.

So back to “secular music.” As a 14-year-old who loved poetry, Shakespeare, and songwriting… the Christian music genre just wasn’t cutting it. I needed the emotive, beautiful words of Sarah McLachlan, the raw sentiments and wandering thoughts of Alanis Morissette, and the guttural cries of Jonny Lang. I had to sneak their music into my day. And I felt so guilty. And confused. Why was this supposed to be so bad? It left me feeling inspired to create. Not only music, but art. I would clumsily strum chords on my guitar all afternoon and fill notebooks with my own songs. And then I would sketch portraits until 4 a.m. listening to music that was allowed… like James Horner’s score for Titanic (also one of my favorite films in the late 90’s). This time in my life is one of my favorite seasons to this day.

But what if I had been allowed musical autonomy? It would have lifted the heaviness of guilt that I felt for disobeying my mom. Secretly disappointing her. Emotionally abandoning her when she wasn’t around. The reasoning she gave me for this rule was that secular music was created by people we couldn’t be sure were Christians. So their spiritual darkness could allow Satan to get into my mind and cause me to feel sad. You see, I had suffered from depression—a deep, defeating sadness— since I was very young. I had come to believe that any sadness present was a symptom of not praying enough or reading my bible enough. And apparently, also letting demons seep into my soul via secular music. But I don’t buy it.

Music helped me feel connected to myself and to God. I needed it. As children, we adapt and find ways to survive. I needed music to survive and I did what I needed to in order to feel ok. Survival turned out to be surreptitiously consuming music with no religious affiliation and vigilantly setting the radio dial back to the one archaic Christian station before my Mom returned. The tragic thing about this for me was that I was limited to what was mostly popular at the time and could not delve into bands or artists that were not getting airplay. I was deprived of musical inspiration that I surely would have devoured in a phase of my life when it would have shaped the person I would become as an adult. I was left to piece together later in life who the greats were. Who the musical icons were. Embarrassment would stretch across my cheeks and in my chest when someone would exclaim, “You don’t know ‘so-and-so’s music?!” And it felt like a loss.

Now can we talk about the term “secular” for a minute? Oxford Dictionary defines secular as “denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.” I can say that none of the mainstream music that I listened to lacked a spiritual element to it. To the contrary, it was the spiritual connection that I felt that pulled me in and filled a void for me.

I needed “secular music.”

I’m grateful to give my kids the freedom to explore music now and I trust that “the enemy” won’t overtake them through it.