Response to: Faith + 1

I was planning on making this an original post but after reading ‘Faith + 1’, I decided to post it as a response to Josh!

This weekend, I was driving in my car listening to some of my favourite albums – nothing out of the ordinary. But thanks to SMC305, I had another ‘AHA’ moment about Christianity and Popular Culture.

The first album I was listening to was one of my all-time favourites – The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Although I have listened to this CD dozens of times, it wasn’t until this weekend that I delved deeper than the rhyming lyrics and smooth melodies. The first song that caught my attention was “To Zion”, a song written to her first son. The lyrics of this song reflect the story of Mary and Jesus and it is not difficult to relate the words to the Bible. She describes how an angel came to her and proclaimed she would be having a baby.



However, it wasn’t until the song “Forgive Them Father” that I realized just how deeply rooted in Christianity Lauryn Hill’s lyrics were. In this song, she uses text from The Lord’s Prayer to ask forgiveness for the state of the world. It was just surprising to me that after years of listening to this album, I had never been aware of how “Christian” her lyrics really were.



The ‘AHA’ moment didn’t come until I switched over to Leona Lewis, a pop singer from the UK, most famous for winning The X Factor and hit singles “Bleeding Love” and “Better in Time”. The song “Footprints in the Sand” is a musical interpretation of the popular Christian poem. Again, my ears were opened to the deeply Christian lyrics of her song, which sounds just like any other secular ballad on her CD.



It was just amazing to me that after a few years of listening to both these albums, I never truly listened to the lyrics and understood the meaning behind them until now. What’s more is that both artists had songs so deeply rooted in Christianity between songs that have been so successful on secular charts such as Billboard. It seems as though Christian artists are everywhere. Their singles may not always be their songs with Christian themes (Leona Lewis’ Footprints in the Sand was #2 in the UK) but those songs are still making it to these popular artists’ albums! There are other popular bands such as Lifehouse, Paramore, and Evanescence that have claimed to be Christian in interviews. Although many of these bands have decided to keep their music separate from their faith, it is obvious many of their lyrics still reflect Christianity. I think Christian bands are all around us, we just don’t know it!