This week Dan talks about the popular praise and worship song, “Give Thanks With a Grateful Heart.” What is the message of this song? Written as a song of solace and hope, how does it also express an attitude that denies the reality of the things about this world and our places in it that should change? And what is the significance of expressing this attitude in the form of a song? Take a listen and find out.
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Hello, welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am your host.
Delighted to be with you, as always.
I want to begin by thanking all of you who listen, all of you who support me, who support the work here, the work that we do on this podcast.
I recently came back from the American Academy of Religion conference, had a great time there, and want to just give a shout out to all the people I met there who know about our work, know what we're doing.
We're so encouraging about all that, so thank you to all of you.
As always, this series builds on your insights, your thoughts, your questions, your comments.
You can reach me at danielmillerswag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Welcome, anything you want to send my way.
And with that in mind, we are now immediately before Thanksgiving.
I was going to do something else today, had some technical issues that kind of blew that up, so you've got me again.
But we did an episode last time on being grateful and the sort of obligation to express gratitude.
And I threw out the idea of thinking that, you know, it feels like there's a lot there and maybe there's more to talk about.
And I heard from several people just immediately after that episode came out saying, yeah, we think that there is.
And that sort of got me to thinking, like, you know, is there more to say about this?
And again, sort of thinking about coming up on Thanksgiving and so forth.
And then tied in with that, somewhere I got a song in my head.
I don't know how or where I heard it.
I don't know where it came from.
It is not a song that I have sung or listened to for a very long time, but it got in my head.
And what song, you say?
Well, I'll tell you soon, right?
But it fits into this theme that we're talking about, so I want to pick that up.
And so the song is, the song that I have in my head, it is a praise and worship song called, wait for it, Give Thanks, or Give Thanks with a Grateful Heart.
Now, I'm not going to sing it.
Nobody wants that.
Nobody wants to hear me singing on the podcast, okay?
I'm not going to play it.
I don't even want to try to pretend that I understand all the rules about copyright and things like that.
I wouldn't put you through that anyway.
But if you google praise song give thanks or something like that, you'll find it, right?
You can find it, you can listen to it if you want, that's the background.
For a lot of you who have come out of a certain kind of church tradition, you know this song, right?
If you're like me, I have not heard or listened to or sung this song in a worship context.
Man, I'll bet I haven't sung this song in a worship context in, like, 20 years.
Maybe more.
And yet, it is stuck in my head.
It has, like, wormed its way there.
I can't get rid of it.
And for many of you, I think it'll be the same.
As soon as I say the name of that song, you know it.
You know what it is.
So if you don't, pause this.
Go listen to it.
Take a quick listen.
If you do know what it is, it's already there.
Sorry, it's already in your head.
So what I want to do is I want to think about what this really, really widely known praise song, what it tells us about a certain conception of giving thanks and where I think it goes wrong.
And there's going to be some overlap between this episode and last episode, right?
This notion of gratefulness and giving thanks.
But I think I've got a couple sort of new thoughts or continuations of the thoughts from last episode that I want to share, okay?
So first, a little background on this song.
I didn't know this, just kind of looked it up.
Not hard information to find.
But the song was written in 1978 by a seminary graduate, a guy named Henry Smith.
But it was popularized a number of years later when a worship leader named Don Moen—I think is how you pronounce his last name—when Don Moen recorded the song, and it now plays in worship services not just all over the U.S., but all over the world.
It's one of the most well-known worship songs around.
And just so you know, I'm going to read through the lyrics here, okay?
Here they are.
Again, I'm not going to sing it.
I'm reading them.
It says, Give thanks to the grateful heart.
Give thanks to the Holy One.
Give thanks because He's given Jesus Christ His Son.
Give thanks to the grateful heart.
Give thanks to the Holy One.
Give thanks because He's given Jesus Christ His Son.
And now let the weak say I am strong, let the poor say I am rich because of what the Lord has done for us.
And now let the weak say I am strong, let the poor say I am rich because of what the Lord has done for us.
And then you repeat the chorus.
That's the lyrics.
Pretty basic.
You can see it's a basic song overall.
It's got a very repetitive structure.
It's got some sort of allusions to biblical text without really diving into them.
And that's all by design, okay?
I feel like sort of part of what I'm thinking about today is, you know, this notion of quote-unquote praise and worship music, and it's typical of that.
So for those of you who aren't familiar with this, right, different types or genres of music are used in church services and for Christian practice.
Often it's by the kind of church, maybe by the tradition, and so forth.
And so when people talk about praise and worship music, they're not just meaning worship that's used in a worship service or something like that.
It names a particular kind of musical style.
And this song is really typical of this.
It's usually built around choruses.
If you're in a church service singing praise and worship music, you sing the chorus like a million times, and then there'll just be a couple verses.
It's built around the choruses, They're short.
They're easy to sing.
They're easy to remember.
They're catchy.
The musical style is contemporary.
If you were to look at, like, go to church websites and things like that or have somebody describe their church to you, they will often describe the church as having a quote-unquote contemporary worship service.
This is what it means.
So they're typically not piano-based or organ-based or something like that.
They'll feature guitars or sometimes like a full band, but very sort of poppy and contemporary in the design.
And that's a general feature, right?
The simple style, the repetition, the kind of instruments that are used.
It means these songs are sort of very poppy.
It's by design, right?
It's so they're easy to remember, they're easy to sing to, they get stuck in your head like they did to mine.
And I'm sure there are some music theory people out there Uh, who could explain to me in greater detail, like, why it is that pop music and music that has these features, like, worms its ways into our minds and, like, we can't get it out.
I don't pretend to understand all of that, but that's a feature of praise and worship music, and they're intended to be catchy and easy to sing.
And in terms of lyrical content, what they actually say, they are also very simple, right?
The theological messages are really, really basic.
This one just says, basically, give thanks that God gave Jesus for our sins, and so now we can say we're rich and we can say that we're strong.
There it is.
That's the basic content.
They also tend to aim more at the emotions than the intellect.
Many of the most emotionally charged, memorable religious experiences I've had are in worship services singing this kind of music.
It really, really does affect us on a kind of emotional level.
And that's the aim, right?
It's not aiming at the intellect.
It's not aiming to be theologically complex.
It's aimed at that sort of emotional level.
And these songs can also be very performative.
So what I mean by that is praise and worship music is often used in like small, very informal, kind of intimate worship settings.
And you can think here of like, you know, One person with a guitar sitting and like playing a few chords and singing around a campfire or something like that or somebody like a small youth group gathering with a few kids all the way up to like mega churches that have professional quality and sometimes professional Praise bands singing these songs like a full band, full production, lights, sound, the whole deal, right?
So that they can range from very, very intimate and small to really, really sort of performance-based, almost concert-style experiences.
And that varies with more traditional hymns, the kind of church music that a lot of people who don't go to church, or maybe have only been in like more traditional churches, Might think of, right?
Traditional hymns, you open a hymn book, you've got the songs.
They're typically accompanied by piano or organ.
You've got a chorus, but you've also got like four or even five verses.
It's musically more complex.
It's often theologically more complex.
It's aimed at sort of getting a little bit deeper into a certain theological message and so forth.
And again, finally, for context, if you don't know, there's been long-standing debates about this among especially Protestant churches.
Traditionalist critics often, you know, decry the musical and lyrical and theological simplicity of praise and worship music.
Younger adherents, there's often a generational component to this, would affirm praise and worship, they preferred it, they liked the newer musical style, they liked the emotion of it, and so forth.
So there were long-standing debates among American churches about this.
I think that they've cooled off some as it has become more mainstream, as praise and worship music has.
But again, if you go and check out some churches, you'll find that they'll have like multiple services, and maybe they have like A quote-unquote traditional service at like 10 o'clock in the morning, but at 9 o'clock they have a quote-unquote contemporary service, meaning they have one service that uses contemporary praise and worship music, the other service is more traditional music, and maybe they have the same pastor preaching a sermon in each or whatever.
So if you were to, like, check out this song on Spotify or somewhere, you can hear all of that within it, right?
It's one of the more churchy of contemporary worship songs.
Contemporary worship music is also this, like, Christian analog in many ways of popular secular music, and so there are lots of Christians who who listen to this music like driving around or doing their household chores or, you know, all the times that we would listen to music, that's when they listen to praise and worship.
Some of it has a pretty high production value and so forth.
So all of this is part of the background of this song.
And there's a lot more we could say there about the way that a certain kind of conservative Protestantism in particular kind of clones secular culture and so forth.
We've talked about that some on this series, okay?
So all of that is to say that this song, this song I cannot get out of my head, it fits within this category of contemporary praise and worship.
Okay?
And I think that its background here is worth noting because it's going to come to our theme of thankfulness.
I promise we're getting there.
I'm going to land this plane.
I'm going to do it soon.
But Henry Smith, the person who wrote the song, developed an eye condition that left him legally blind.
Stuff I was reading says that he was looking for spiritual solace, and he was drawn to the passage in the Bible, 2 Corinthians 8, Verse 9, it says, For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.
Right?
And this led him to write this song.
Okay?
So I want to assert, I think that that part of the story is important because I wanted to reaffirm, as I did last week, that this theme of giving thanks or gratitude, it can have real meaning or value for people.
I'm not here to judge that or deny it.
I'm not here to say that Henry Smith shouldn't have written his song or whatever, okay?
But as I said last week, that message of gratefulness, this message of thankfulness, I think, has another message that it expresses.
And this I find problematic, right?
That's what I want to dive into today.
And so I want to think about this song again, because here's where I have an issue.
And I've had this discussion with people, like, how can you be upset about praise and worship music?
It's so positive.
It's so uplifting.
It's such a positive vision of life and so forth.
So here's my problem, right?
Give thanks to the grateful heart, right?
There's thanks and gratefulness there together.
Give thanks to the Holy One, that obviously is God, because He's given Jesus Christ, His Son.
So, be thankful to God that He has brought about your salvation by sending His Son, Jesus.
Okay?
Great.
So, what follows from that?
That's where the verse comes in, right?
Now, let the weak say, I am strong.
Let the poor say, I am rich because of what the Lord has done for us.
It's that issue, the kind of, now let us fill in the blank section, or let the poor say I'm rich, let the weak say that I'm strong.
I'm not trying to devalue acknowledging good, positive things in our life or learning to cultivate a measure of contentment.
Had a couple listeners this week who emailed about that as well.
Thank you, you're right.
Yep, as I said last week, say it again, it's important to acknowledge that.
But my concern is when that emphasis bleeds into a form of control that gets us to accept what we shouldn't accept.
And so here's my reading of the song.
This is what I cannot now help but feel and think when I read the song.
And maybe it's cynical.
Jesus died for my sins, so now I'll say that I'm strong, or I'm rich, or whatever.
Fine, but what if I'm not?
And I'm not just talking about physical strength, I'm talking about richness, I'm talking about what if I don't actually have these important good things in my life just because Jesus died?
My concern is that this emphasis on giving thanks, that it's a mechanism that prevents us from acknowledging the real challenges in our lives, things in our lives that are not good, things in our lives that are not as they should be, things in our lives that are possibly unjust.
I worry when this emphasis on giving thanks is a mechanism to make us okay with that.
Famously, the critical thinker, theorist, economist, I don't know what you want to call him, but Karl Marx famously argued when he called religion the opiate of the masses.
What he basically argued is that religion operates to keep us from enacting real social change.
He basically says we live in this world, he's writing at a time of crushing poverty and urbanization and so forth, and the industrial revolution, seeing all the social ills that come from this.
And basically he says, rather than seeing all this stuff that's wrong in the world, all this injustice, and naming it injustice, and doing what we need to do to change it, demanding change, instead of doing that, We project into an imaginary future a spiritual reality where everything will be good and everything is fine and all that injustice will be met instead of changing the world here and now.
It's a kind of avoidance of the real issues.
It's a form of self-medicating, right?
The opiate of the masses.
It's a kind of self-medicating to get us to ignore the pain of our experiences now by postulating this imaginary existence somewhere in the future.
And so in that way, religion becomes a means of maintaining and even legitimizing the broken and oppressive social realities in which we live, right?
Now, that's not always true.
Marx paints with too broad a brush.
You cannot say that that's what religion is all the time and everywhere and all of that sort of stuff.
Fine.
All of that is correct.
But it often is true.
And I think that it is almost always true when we talk about high-control religious environments.
And so if we decode this song, if we put on our, like, I don't know, our straight white American Jesus decoder rings, that's what I should do, by the way, right?
When we talk about our marketing stuff, we should develop, like, swage decoder rings, right?
When we decode this song, this is what I think it does, right?
Let the weak say, I am strong.
Let the poor say, I am rich.
Why?
How?
Because of something that happened 2,000 years ago?
How does that even make sense?
Well, it makes sense because it's a spiritualizing understanding of the Christian message.
I'm not materially rich.
I'm not materially strong.
And again, it's not about being rich or strong, right?
I'm not materially well off.
I don't have the means to live in a way that is safe and secure.
I don't have maybe health care.
I don't have a secure job.
All these kinds of things.
I don't have those things.
But I don't need those things because spiritually I'm rich.
Spiritually I'm strong.
And what I think the song does is it inscribes a religious ideology that actively devalues real, concrete change.
And I've talked about this on the podcast for years.
I've talked about it before.
This is part of what moved me out of that kind of Christian expression is exactly this, that I felt that it denied the reality and legitimacy of having to actually confront the injustices and problems in this world.
I felt like it devalued those.
I felt like it made them, you know, not real.
All in the name of a spiritual reality that we can't see or taste or touch, but we're supposed to take comfort in.
Right?
So I think it does that.
I think on a personal level, it leads us not to address or challenge real problems in our lives.
And even more, and this is where I find it makes me so angry and it's so pernicious.
I think it tells us that we should be satisfied with or even thankful for things that are not okay.
Not only should we accept them, we should thank God for them.
Right?
That's what I think it does.
I don't think that's the intention.
It doesn't do it for everybody.
Everybody who sings this song, that is not the experience they have.
I recognize all of that.
But that is why now, when I sing this song, or hear this song, or have it stuck in my head, that's what it brings to my mind.
Because here's the thing, and I want us to walk away with this.
There are things in our lives that are not okay.
There are things in our lives that should change.
There are people and situations in our lives for which we should not be thankful.
There are relationships in our lives that are not as they should be, and they should be rectified.
There are people who mistreat us, and then we should not be thankful or grateful that they do.
We should address it.
There are injustices in this world that need to be rectified, and we cannot abide A religious message that leaves those things untouched.
And if we come back, circle back around to the fact that this is this kind of poppy, contemporary worship song, I think that drives this home even further.
Because we all know, right?
You may never listen to contemporary music in your life, but you listen to some kind of music, right?
We all know the power that music has To operate on us, not just on some conscious level, but on an embodied kind of affective level to stir our emotions, to shape us in different ways.
And I think that this is why a song like this is even more pernicious.
It gets into our minds and our bodies in a way that goes beyond something that a message or a sermon would do.
It embodies an attitude of unquestioning acceptance in our circumstances.
I said, I have not sung this song in 20 some odd years.
And I remember the words, and folks, if I let myself, I feel the feels that I used to have standing in a group of people singing this song together, that kind of effervescent feeling of worshipfulness and so forth.
And what I think it does is it takes this notion of complacence and quietude and acceptance of things that should not be accepted.
And it codes them in our bodies with those positive feelings and those positive emotions, and I think it serves the ends of those who would keep the world as it is.
And that, for me, is a hallmark of high-control religious environments.
It's a hallmark of a kind of religion that ought not to go unchallenged.
So those are my thoughts on the song Give Thanks as we come into Thanksgiving.
If you're listening to this and you are coming into Thanksgiving, by all means, give thanks for things you should be thankful for.
Acknowledge the things that are of value in your life.
Take the time to note that.
Take the time to see that.
If you're miserable all the time because you don't see anything positive, address that, right?
But not at the expense of recognizing real things that demand real change.
Got to wrap this up.
I want to thank everybody again for listening.
I've got some things in the pipeline that I'm thinking about in terms of the series and some ideas that I'm excited about.
Always welcome your insights, welcome your thoughts, want to hear about those.
Keep giving us a listen, Straight White American Jesus, the interviews and things that Brad Onishi puts up, this series, our weekly roundup, all of those things, we are self-produced, we do it on our own, we couldn't do it without you.
