Gospel Music Makes Me Feel Alright - How I Spent My Summer Vacation* by Rebekka King

Gospel Music Makes Me Feel Alright (Video)

Matt Sutton who is a regular contributor to one of my favourite blogs, ‘The Religion in American History Blog’, has posted a series of reviews of his summer visits to archives across the US titled “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” Although admittedly I’m not as studious as Sutton—my summer vacation time is occupied by trips to music festivals in Upstate NY, New England, and Central Canada—but as an anthropologist of North American religion, I find plenty of data, even while on vacation.

This past weekend, I attended the 50th anniversary of the Mariposa Folk Festival on the shores of Lake Couchiching in Orillia, Ontario. The Mariposa Folk Festival was originally established in 1961 as a Canadian equivalent to the Newport Folk Festival (Mitchell 2007: 80). Like the Newport festival, Mariposa was bedevilled by problems with crowd control throughout the late sixties and early seventies. The festival was at one time the biggest folk festival in North America and featured popular headliners such as Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Buffy St. Marie.

The big-name artists are certainly what draws the crowds (this is equally true today as it has been in the past), but the appeal of a folk festival is the smaller daytime stages that feature ‘workshops’. For the unfamiliar, the workshop usually features several musicians and is organised around a common theme, style of music or type of instrument (e.g. Songs of Protest, Bluegrass Tunes, Slide Guitar). The musicians take turns performing but the expectation is that the other panelists will join in and lend their own styles to each others’ songs.

The folk festival as secular/sacred space, pilgrimage site or Bakhtinian carnival is an easy identification to make, one that, being unfamiliar with the field of ethnomusicology, I’m not sure if someone has already analysed. Instead of opening that can of worms, though, I would prefer to focus my discussion on observations on an overtly religious musical medium re-explored in this secular setting.

Hippie dancing at Mariposa Gospel Music Session (2009)
My favourite kind of participant-observation! I’m in the red skirt and black top towards the front.




That Old Time Religion: Reinterpreted in the New Secular Times

Regular attendees at folk festivals know that the Sunday morning gospel hour is an essential component of the festival experience. At Mariposa this year, the gospel music showcase was hosted by Ken Whiteley, well-known among Canadian folk music fans as the patriarch of the Whiteley family, Canada’s folk dynasty. Whiteley regularly hosts the Sunday Morning Gospel Brunch at Toronto-based roots music club, Hugh’s Room (now that my two years of fieldwork is *finally* over, those in the Toronto area will probably find me there as a semi-regular attendee). This year’s workshop featured Whiteley’s band along with Canadian blues artist Matt Anderson and South African singer-songwriter Liziwe Mahashe.

Whiteley opened the session by singing an old spiritual, ‘It’s Another Day’s Journey (I’m so Glad)”, which he first learned at the Mariposa festival in 1979 from African American gospel singer, Bessie Jones. Anderson followed with another traditional piece. Both Whiteley and Anderson stuck with traditionally religious songs (Whitely also sang his own song: ‘Let My Life Be Prayer’ and Anderson performed crowd favourites ‘Consider the Lilies’, ‘I’ll Fly Away’ and ‘People Get Ready’). Mahashe was the one who brought the themes into the more secular realm by contributing songs of liberation and political freedom from her native South Africa (‘My People, My People’ and ‘Soweto Blues’). For Mahashe, the gospel workshop created a space that was, for her and the audience receptive to a post-colonial critique.

Liziwe Mahashe and band, Sunday Morning Gospel Hour (2010)

I am often surprised at the popularity of the Sunday morning gospel sessions. The demographic of people who attend folk festival (both in Canada and the US) tend to be white, middle-class, left-leaning individuals between the ages of 45 and 70 (data on those who attend folk festivals in general is available here); they represent the same aging demographic who have in mass departed from organised religion over the past generation or so. In informal conversations I find that the majority of folk festival attendees are resistant, if not completely hostile, to religion, specifically Christianity (to the degree that in the last few years I have elected to tell people that I study anthropology, rather than religion, so as to avoid conversations about how the church/bible/clergy, etc are exclusive/controlling/obsessed with sex/money/power, etc). When religion does come up, most of the individuals with whom I have spoken would be classified as what Robert Fuller calls ‘the spiritual but not religious’ (Fuller 2001), or those whom Wade Clark Roof identifies as ‘Seeker Culture’ (Roof 1993). So while the message of the ‘Old Time Religion’ in terms of its social teachings and its theology has been swiftly rejected by most in attendance, the music itself continues to be celebrated by its mostly non-religious audience.

Audience picture taken during the sound check for Gospel Music Session (2010)

I asked Whiteley on Saturday afternoon why he thought that despite increased secularity and the decline in religious involvement, gospel music continues to appeal to people, particularly patrons at the festival. Whiteley explained to me that he thought that gospel music contains a message that is uplifting, something which appeals to a force that is beyond us and something with which anyone can connect, regardless of their background or beliefs.** Whiteley echoed this sentiment during the gospel workshop by pointing out that the session is intended to be inclusive: “atheists are more than welcome,” he explained, referencing the emcee’s introductory remarks about the strangeness of the gospel music workshop, since he is the only atheist on the Marisposa board of directors. Whiteley went on to declare that not only atheists but also people of all religious beliefs, from Gnostics to agnostics, are welcome.

The Sacred and the Profane: Remixed

The religious rhetoric at the Mariposa stage was light-hearted and friendly. At one point, Whiteley asked for an “amen” from the audience. Later he joked with one of the patrons about starting a revival (although, I wasn’t clear whether it was a folk music revival or a religious one; Mariposa has struggled financially in the past couple of years).

The appeal to inclusivity is of course not surprising for the hippie or folk subcultures that attend folk festivals. In 2005, American singer-songwriter Liz Carlisle wrote her dissertation for an ethnomusicology degree at Harvard on the folk festival subculture at a well-known American Festival, Falcon Ridge (which I also attended that year). Carlisle observed that the host introduced the gospel hour as not being about religion: “This morning’s service is not for any religion,” the emcee announced. “It’s for the spirit.” Later, he explained that “there is only one religion: it’s compassion.”

While not divorced from the theology behind most traditional gospel songs, the message of inclusiveness stands in contrast to some debates concerning authenticity within the contemporary gospel music community. Many traditionalists argue that the emergence of gospel music in the secular realm diverts from biblically based mandates that the sacred and the profane be separated (see Simpson: 18; see also Jackson 2004). They often appeal to epistle letters (e.g. 2 Corinthians 6:14; James 3:12) to argue that the intrusion of secular into the sacred music is a sin (interestingly, similar arguments were made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about the integration of musical instruments into worship services at many gospel and holiness churches).*** The imposed separation of the sacred and the profane dictated by certain gospel music purists is not a position held by all. As Jerma A. Jackson (2004) argues the integration of gospel music into the public sphere served a political purpose through which the Black Church sought to cultivate an image of respectability in the eyes of white America.

Arguments about the place of the sacred in the profane (and vice-versa) are in part what keep scholars of religion employed. My own personal conversations with some members of the folk community suggest that the integration of religion, specifically traditional and exclusive brands of Christianity is not welcome and is deemed to be out of place at a folk festival, which I’ve posited resembles a secular pilgrimage site). But as I and Carlisle observe, the integration of an open, inclusive religiosity is welcome; one that is rooted in traditional Christian theologies but explicitly represents itself as having, along with its audience, transcended specifics of belief and practice.

Notes

* Note to my dissertation committee: I swear I am working on my dissertation, please remember that at my recent review meeting you said it would be healthy for me to take the weekends off.

** I would like to say a special thank you to Ken Whiteley for taking the time to speak with me and for permission to paraphrase our conversation here on The Religion Beat blog. This conversation was the highlight of the festival for me (along with watching Ian and Sylvia Tyson perform ‘Four Strong Winds’ together).

*** A really interesting discussion of this debate and its manifestation in gospel music is available in a sound recording from the 1975 Mariposa gospel session, also titled ‘That Old Time Religion.’ Sound recordings, photographs and other material related to the history of the Mariposa festival are available at the newly launched Mariposa permanent collection housed at York University’s Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections.

Sources:

Fuller, Robert. 2001. Spiritual But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jackson, Jerma A. 2004. Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Mitchell, Gillian. 2007. The North American Folk Music Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945 – 1980. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.

Roof, Wade Clark. 1993. A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

Simpson, Alphonso, Jr. “A Thin Line Between Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: The Secularization of Sacred Song in the African American Religious Culture.” International Journal of African American Studies 2(2): 1 – 24.

Anonymous Believers in Bron Taylor's 'Dark Green Religion' -- By Sarah Kleeb

While it may be suggested, under the manifold and ever-shifting definitions of religion within academia, that environmentalism is already a tradition bearing many of the attributes associated with differing forms of religious belief, it is worth differentiating between such an outside assessment and an internal identification on the part of an individual, group, or movement. In Bron Taylor's Dark Green Religion, various forms of established thought with regard to environmental ethics are brought together in a way which suggests that they are key elements of a religious movement in and of itself. For Taylor, to be "Dark Green" is not simply to infuse pre-existing foundational tenets of belief with environmental significance, it is to be a member of a fresh (albeit deeply rooted) religious tradition and community. His project in this book is, at least in part, one of displaying the varying ways in which Dark Green Religion already exists, whether acknowledged or not, within a variety of environmentally sensitive, earth-centered, or bio-centric philosophies and traditions. Is this an entirely innocent task, however? When Taylor asserts that there are those that express convictions that "resemble religious characteristics without being self-consciously religious"[i], and yet who are included in his definition of practitioners of Dark Green Religion, is there any cause for concern? Moreover, what might be the impetus for ascribing a sort of anonymous affiliation to those who possess such convictions? Are all of those who profess deep concern for environmental causes, and who feel any kind of kinship with the multitudes of life on planet Earth - in whatever way, or for whatever reasons - automatically subject to his designation? If so, this internal identification takes on a sort of proselytizing element, even perhaps to the point of a colonization of thought, that might reproduce a detrimental model which proponents of environmentalism as religion seem dedicated to overcoming.

To set the stage for such a critique, one can turn to the section of Taylor's book entitled "Rejecting (and Defending) Dark Green (Para)religion". Here, Taylor critiques Richard Dawkins' insistence against assigning religious terminology to what he deems non-religious experience or sentiment. He argues that Dawkins' definition of religion is too narrow, that it focuses too exclusively on the idea of an "'interventionist, miracle-wreaking…prayer-answering God'".[ii] There is certainly little denying such a shortcoming in the thought of Dawkins' and his ilk, and Taylor rightly points out the powerful weight of specifically religious language. However, he condemns Dawkins' efforts to stress that those who utilize such language, but who are not otherwise necessarily affiliated with a religious tradition or worldview per se, "are not really religious (as he understands religion, of course)".[iii] Renowned figures such as Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan are invoked by Dawkins as representatives of those who occasionally make recourse to the language of the transcendent, while rejecting the perceived traditional confines of specifically religious structures. Dawkins uses the words of these individuals to stress their feelings of kinship with the earth, which he divorces from a religious context (again, as he understands it) by means of illustrating their well-known distancing from typical religious forms. Taylor (perhaps rightfully) complicates this, noting through example the complex, and perhaps at times ambivalent, thought of each of these individuals with reference to questions of god, metaphysics, the futures of religious traditions, and the like. He includes them in his definition of Dark Green Religion, because his "definition of religion is more flexible for the simple strategic reason that it serves [his] interpretive purposes".[iv]

Without delving into the understandably complicated thought of figures like Einstein and Sagan with respect to religious belief, we may still contemplate the ramifications of such a broad definition of religion, and the corresponding inclusion of those who are not "self-consciously religious" in this definition. This term "self-conscious" is of particular concern. There are, obviously, those for whom an identification of religiosity is lacking, they do not perceive themselves as "religious" individuals, despite adhering to some of the same criteria or experiencing some of the same phenomena Taylor establishes as part of his Dark Green Religion. They are not "self-consciously" religious. Taylor, however, inscribes upon them a form of religiosity - he is conscious of their religious nature, even if they themselves are not aware of it. He forms a definition of a kind of religion in which such individuals are included, even if they are oblivious to such an identification, or even perhaps unwilling to embrace it. An example of this might be someone like Tim Nicholson, the individual who famously won the November 2009 court case in England which resulted in the protection of environmentalist philosophy under the same heading as protection for religious beliefs. It is not a mighty leap to assume that a person who holds such an environmental ethic so strongly as to assert that his convictions are on par with religious beliefs would be included under Taylor's umbrella of Dark Green Religion. Nicholson, however, has been quick to distance himself from such a potential affiliation: "Belief in man-made climate change is not a new religion, it is a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values and is underlined by the overwhelming scientific evidence."[v]
 

It seems that such a wide definition of religion serves the purpose of creating a meaning system that can be labelled as such, and yet which rejects what are seen as the sometimes violent and arrogant tendencies of, particularly, the Abrahamic traditions. Taylor mentions multiple times in his book that many eco-spiritualists, naturalists, and the like, are wary of such traditions, due to their often anthropocentric worldviews and their role in the overwhelming disregard for non-human life on earth over the centuries.[vi] However, in trying to escape the perceived violence of these prevailing systems, has Taylor unwittingly unleashed a different sort of destructiveness - perhaps even a psychological form of violence - upon those whom he includes in his definition? Under the standards of Dark Green Religion, the multitudes of life on earth may be spared the ravaging caused by philosophies which disregard or minimize the value of a planet positively swelling with various forms of being. But is an injustice done to the idea of the lived-life of humans, the ability to at least in part define one's own self, via a sort of imposition of identity that comes with assigning religiosity where it is internally unnoticed, or perhaps, unwelcome? Is Taylor simply exchanging one form of forcefulness for another?

An illustration of this in Taylor's book might be his discussion of James Lovelock, the initial modern advocate for Gaian naturalism. I am not proposing to be an expert on the work of Lovelock, but rather am using Taylor's own elucidation of his thought as a case in point. Taylor notes time and again Lovelock's personal agnosticism, and general distrust of established religions.[vii] As such, Taylor utilizes the figure and thought of Lovelock as one that represents the difficulties of moving past the use of religious language - generally in the form of metaphor - when discussing matters considered worthy of reverence.[viii] While Lovelock may have grown "to appreciate the impulse to consider the Gaian system in religious terms,"[ix] he nonetheless refers to such translations as an instance of utilizing "the crude tool of metaphor".[x] Religious language serving as a symbol to cultivate a particular form of understanding may indeed be a useful, if at times simplistic, tool. However, does such an admission warrant his inclusion under a specifically religious heading? Taylor says that "it seems clear that what Lovelock would most like to see is not an ecologized theism but a Gaian religion of nature,"[xi] however, that does not seem "clear" at all. For a self-professed agnostic, wary of religious traditions, warning against anthropocentrism in established religions and against the concrete application of the concept of Gaia as specifically theistic construction, what "seems clear" is that he is attempting to make space for potential metaphorical interpretations of his theories for those who already possess deep-seated religious convictions. It may be accurate to state, with Taylor, that "one need not believe in nonmaterial divine beings to have religion,"[xii] and his inclusion of such a wide variety of thinkers and philosophies in his definition of Dark Green Religion may surely be indicative of this. However, it is worth asking, does this also fit into Lovelock's definition of religion, or the definition of religion held by any or all of the other groups or individuals included in Taylor's study? Is Taylor placing upon someone like Lovelock a designation which Lovelock would place upon himself? His constant and consistent distancing from concretized religious statements, at least in Taylor's depiction, suggests a negative response to this question.

To utilize the language of religion is to wield a powerful tool, loaded with potential for meaning.[xiii] As the case of Tim Nicholson proves, imbuing philosophical or ethical convictions with at least a quasi-religious sentiment provides a remarkable source for validation of said convictions in the public and legal spheres. The semantic potentials of religious speech offer a source of power and agency in terms of asserting authenticity or identity as groups or individuals deeply bound to particular standards and experiences. Yet, as with all forms of power, one must always make room for words of caution. In establishing this kind of thought as a viable alternative or supplement to the already-existing global religious traditions, Taylor advocates the idea of environmentalism as religion in an attempt to move away from the violence of anthropocentrism as a form of disregard for the variety of life on our planet. In so doing, however, it is perhaps advisable that too wide a net is not cast in creating this new tradition. While defining others as religious participants may not be the same form of violence as the ravaging of the earth and its inhabitants, it may be a harmful act nonetheless. Attempting to remove an individual from the process of defining the identity of that same individual her- or himself may be perceived as a destructive act, particularly when this negation is directly in the interest of the person or group making such a claim (such as Taylor), or in the interest of establishing parameters (and those within or outside the parameters) of social, religious, or political movements. It is essentially to state that that person's vision and projection of their Self is irrelevant, or worse, incorrect. If the potent language of religion is indeed a means of asserting power, and if we can include in this vocabulary the idea of assigning a designation of religiosity, then those such as Taylor may be well advised to avoid laying a foundation for applying such language to those for whom it is foreign. Much like his critique of Dawkins, there is danger in labelling such individuals as "really religious" - as Taylor understands religion, of course.

---

[i] p. 77

[ii] p. 159

[iii] p. 160

[iv] P. 177

[v] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6494213/Climate-change-belief-given-same-legal-status-as-religion.html. November 3, 2009. Emphasis added.

[vi] pp. 5, 8, 32, 36, 75, 163, 170, 210 - Of course, he makes note of those within said traditions who try to reclaim environmentalist or bio-centric ethics and include them within their already existing worldviews - though even these, he says, often only do so by "apologetic" or "confessional" means. p. 11-12

[vii] pp. 36-8

[viii] p. 40

[ix] p. 36

[x] p. 38

[xi] Ibid

[xii] P. 40

[xiii] As Jürgen Habermas rightfully asserts, “Philosophy…will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses.” "Themes in Post-Metaphysical Thinking", p. 51