We are now 6 days away from the due date for my first-born child, and consequently, my life has recently been filled with lots of activity related to preparation for his arrival. I’ve been assembling nursery furniture, taking online birthing classes where I have learned basic terminology and what to expect, and, of course, working as many extra shifts as I can at work to pay off some debt and have as much cash on hand as I can.
But those activities are entirely reasonable and expected. I’m sure that most expecting parents are doing those things. What I did not expect in the weeks leading up to the birth of my first child was to be listening to live Christian worship albums for hours a week.
For context, I grew up in an immensely Christian-centric household, but today, I do not spend any time consuming Christian media.
And I’m struggling to concisely explain the degree to which Christian media dominated my entire cultural lens during my childhood. Christianity and Christian media were involved in every single aspect of my life.
I did not expect in the weeks leading up to the birth of my first child was to be listening to live Christian worship albums for hours a week.
I went to at least three Lutheran Church services a week. I attended a Lutheran school through 6th grade. The only friends that I had were in that church network; we weren’t allowed to play with the other kids in the cul-de-sac. My most memorable weekend hangs were at the church (youth group all-nighters in the school gymnasium playing dodgeball, playing softball and capture the flag on the playground field, etc.). Even off campus, much of my hanging out happened with kids in the Church youth group in highly controlled spaces (like afternoon trips to the beach that would culminate in a worship sesh and prayers by the fire).
We didn’t even celebrate Halloween. I didn’t realize that this was not the “typical” child experience until I was in high school. In lieu of goblins, ghouls, and door-to-door trick-or-treating, we had the Reformation Party every October 31st, a day deeply important to the Lutheran calendar.
(I’ll provide a quick aside for those unfamiliar. There are many groups that call themselves Christians, and most of them fall under the categorization of Catholic or Protestant. For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church was really the only Christian institution around, until a German guy named Martin Luther nailed a list of complaints to a wall of a big Catholic Church [literally, apparently]. And of course, this guy nailed those complaints to the wall on… you guessed it: October 31st, 1517! Many scholars agree that this act by Luther was the beginning of a major cultural movement in European Christianity called “The Reformation.”
Get it, Protestants are protesting the Catholic Church and are attempting to Reform it? [to be honest it took me years to pick that up because no one explicitly told me that].
Anyway, nearly any namable Christian sect has some kind of doctrinal beef with the other ones, so they make their own leadership councils and they nearly all fall under the Protestant umbrella. Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Pentecostals, Quakers, Adventists, Baptists, are just a few Protestant branches.)
So since I went to a Lutheran Church and School, and this guy Martin Luther was pretty important to the non-Catholic Christian movement, and since his big moment came on October 31st, we had a small candy giveaway party with homemade carnival games and a jumper in the church’s parking lot. We were allowed to wear costumes, but there were definitely no spooky masks, skeletons, zombies, or even slightly devilish and ghoulish attire to be found. Kids with “questionable” costumes were asked to change at the door. In fact, the first time I went trick-or-treating was my senior year of high school, but I was told more than once that I was too old to be doing it.
And then there was our media. I thought the music we listened to, the films and tv we watched and the books we read could be found in every child’s bedroom across America. I did not know that my parents were quite deliberately putting up what they saw as protective walls against an evil and destructive American culture.
Sure, the VHS collection contained a few of the Disney classics, but we primarily watched films purchased from a local Christian book store (VeggieTales, Psalty the Singing Songbook, and Bible Man). For years I was barred from reading Harry Potter or playing with Pokémon cards (you gotta remember that Pokémon evolved, and that was a hot button issue for many churches around the country in the late 90s, including my own). Our books were mostly animated versions of Bible stories. And of course, our music was contemporary Christian radio with a small smattering of the pop-80’s my parents enjoyed in the days of their youth.
I don’t know if everyone knows this, but the late 80s and early 90s saw a rare bump in the US birth rate. And I’m just guessing here, I’ve never read actual research on the topic, but I’ve always been under the impression that this coincides with a lot of social trends that we see in that time: a market for toy crazes like Pokémon, a renaissance in Disney animation, the explosion of demand for children’s television programing. And maybe it’s not too farfetched to claim that there was also an increased demand for music that sounded like pop music but had a Christian message. Enter my family into the arena of contemporary Christian music.
Christian music dominates the memories of my childhood. I was in the children’s choir. My dad was in the worship band. Cassette tapes from worship bands of the 80’s and 90’s were on repeat for both long road trips and short trips to the grocery store.
In August of 2000, I can specifically recall coming home from recycling cans with my dad and he stumbled into 95.9 The Fish, a new contemporary Christian music radio station in our area. How excited this man was! I remember him explaining to me how cool this was. And for the next 10 years, nearly nothing else was listened to in the car.
This general music listening trend went on in my house for more than a decade, even as my parents enrolled me in a public high school.
But into my first years of college, I still lived at home. “And if you live in my house, you’re going to church,” my mother would say. Oddly enough, work came first, for my parents. I didn’t have to go to church if I had a shift scheduled. I started working at our local theme park, and I explicitly asked my management team to have me work on Sunday mornings. Operating a roller coaster for $8.25 an hour while hungover seemed infinitely better than sitting by myself in the back pew while hungover for $0.00 an hour.
But here we are, now six days until my son’s expected arrival, I’m unironically jamming on these songs several times a week.
Philosophically and chronologically, I moved further and further away from the songs of my youth. But I worked at that theme park more than a decade ago, and The Fish is celebrating their 22nd anniversary.
But here we are, now six days until my son’s expected arrival, I’m unironically jamming on these songs several times a week. I’m back on the old jams: Amy Grant, Mercy Me, Michael W Smith, Jars of Clay, Casting Crowns, Audio Adrenaline, Third Day, Steven Curtis Chapman.
After a week of this, my sister finally asks me why I’m doing this. I have distanced myself very deliberately from the Christian church, and the music is fun, but not an extraordinary display of musicianship or technicality. So why do I have several live Christian worship albums in the rotation lately? Why did Spotify recommend a playlist titled “Youth Group Throwbacks” today?
After a little reflection, the answer must be that I am about to become a father.
I’m 30 years old. I’ve been employed by 20+ companies, opened bank accounts, made my own doctor’s appointments, gone to court, paid bills, gotten an apartment, fallen in love, been arrested, filed taxes, gotten a driver’s license, gotten into car crashes, gone to college, dropped out of college, gone back to college, fallen in love, raised puppies, driven a Uhaul cross-country, been hammered drunk, gone to music festivals, traveled abroad, changed a tire, and started a business.
All of these things are behaviors that I thought were pretty adult-y.
But now, on the brink of being a father, none of those things in the list above feel very adult-y at all.
Maybe some part of me believes that this is the 11th fucking hour of my childhood. All of those other “adult” things from before suddenly feel unimpressive. The worst case scenarios for all of those adult behaviors seem small compared to the worst case scenarios I can imagine for raising a child.
And this isn’t to say that I think I’m going to do a bad job or that I think the worst case scenarios are likely. But I have certainly realized that this action, having and raising a child, is more serious than any of the other “adult” things I thought I had done before.
So maybe that subconscious finality of losing my childhood has led me to a subconscious desire to find that feeling of juvenility and youthfulness one more time. By listening to the music of my youth, maybe I can find it.
So before I take the jump into a new endeavor for which there is no safety net, I look back on my first safety net, the community of my Lutheran church, for comfort and nostalgia.
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