One of Stryper’s greatest hits was a tune called “To Hell With the Devil,” a song it sang with as much unironically literalism as you can achieve, belting out the phrase against crunching guitars, wearing skin-tight spandex and teased out hair. (I remember my father finding my To Hell With the Devil album in my cassette collection and preparing to give me a good talking-to about it, until he realized that they meant the song sincerely, and, after all (he said) there’s probably no better place for the Devil than that.)
So I was reliving the oldies with my Gen-Z friend, like I say, and a half hour later we’d covered any number of Stryper tunes. It was a bit embarrassing for me, to realize how bad my musical taste was at sixteen, though in those days I thought Stryper were virtuosos at their craft (and, to their credit, if you can see past all the corny costumes and glammy make-up, they were actually pretty talented musicians as far as the hair-metal genre goes).
But what stood out to me on this 40th-year reunion with the music of Stryper was how theologically clunky their songwriting was. It never occurred to me, at sixteen, that a line like “Speak of the Devil, he’s no friend of mine / to turn from him is what we’ve got in mind” was not exactly elegant poetry.
Here’s the opening verse of another Stryper classic, “Soldiers Under Command.”
We are the soldiers under God's commandIt’s not exactly subtle. But neither was the theological impulse of a band like Stryper. Essentially, the group—and the Christian metal genre more generally—was attempting a kind of Christian coup of utterly secular cultural expressions, baptizing all the hedonism and pseudo-occultism of the heavy metal genre with a veneer of religion, so that Christian metal fans could eat their cake and have it to.
We hold His two-edged sword within our hands
We're not ashamed to stand up for what's right
We win without sin, it's not by our might
And we're fighting all the sin
And the good book -- it says we'll win
I say this with a good deal of fondness for Stryper. As a yearning sixteen-year-old raised in a devoutly Christian home and trying to find his way in a decidedly un-Christian world, music that had all the energy and urgency of the stuff my friends were listening to, without any of the guilt I got when I listened to Iron Maiden, was, quite literally, a God-send.
But I also say it by way of contrast to the music of U2, the band that this series is actually about. One of the huge questions swirling around U2 when I was a teen, and this was especially asked by the same youth group leaders that recommended the music of Stryper to me—the most important thing to know about the band—was: Is U2 a Christian band?
The jury never returned a verdict on that one. Certainly, much of their music, especially the earliest outings, were replete with spiritual references, Christian allusions, and religious subtexts. And even without these more direct nods to the stuff of faith, their music never offered any pagan peons to Satan, or celebrated debauchery and dissipation the way so many of their contemporaries did. If they weren’t overtly Christian, then at least they were “Christian friendly.”
That said, they were also very evasive about their religious convictions. They never openly declared allegiance to any church or creed, never explicitly stated their faith, never tossed Bibles into the crowds at their concerts (a staple at Stryper concerts). Yes, Bono sang passionately in his belief in “Kingdom Come, when all the colors bleed into one,” but that’s a far cry from announcing that he was going to “fight all the sin,” because the “good book says we’ll win.”
As one music critic put it, U2 is “the greatest Christian band that never was.”
When held up against a band that is so brashly “Christian” as Stryper, U2’s ambiguity about their Faith raises some profound questions about the role of Christian artists, the relationship between faith and culture, and, especially, what makes Christian art “Christian” anyway.
In his book, Christ and Culture the renowned Christian theologian Richard Niebuhr offered a succinct framework for understanding the different postures different Christians take when it comes to the relationship between faith and culture. He described 5 distinct positions: 1. Christ against Culture (standing opposed to culture as irredeemably secular), 2. Christ of Culture (uncritically embracing developments in culture as being of Christ), 3. Christ above Culture (seeing your Christian faith as something separate from culture, with no conflict and very little contact between them), 4. Christ and Culture in paradox (seeing culture and faith as irreconcilably in tension with one another, but participating faithfully in both without resolving the difference), and 5. Christ as the Transformer of Culture (believing that culture is redeemable, and working faithfully to transform it in a way that brings glory to God).
Using Neibuhr’s framework, I would argue that, although a band like Stryper was attempting to adopt the fifth posture—Christ as the Transformer of Culture—what actually happened when it tried to Christianize the tropes of Heavy Metal was closer to the first posture: Christ against Culture. I say this because of the view implied by a song like “Soldiers Under Command,” that the only thing that can make a musical genre like heavy metal acceptable is if it is “co-opted” for the purposes of the Gospel. This explains the blunt-force with which the message is delivered in Stryper’s music. The whole approach suggests that the only acceptable musical expressions are those that are explicitly, unambiguously, even aggressively clear about the faith that has motivated it.
By contrast, U2 tends to adopt Posture Four in their music: holding Christ and Culture in tension, somewhat reveling in the paradox, and refusing to resolve the ambiguity. Christ is certainly present in their art, but not in its entirety, nor are they willing to pull back the veil and show where he is or is not standing. The deep irony—and it’s an irony we will explore more in coming posts—is that while adopting a “Christ and Culture in Paradox” posture, U2 has had a far more profound and far-reaching impact on culture than Stryper ever did. In adopting Posture Four, that is to say, they found themselves standing in Posture Five.
In her beautiful book, Walking on Water, Madeline L’Engle shares thoughts on being a Christian and an artist, arguing that we do a disservice to faith and art both when we assume that the thing that makes Christian art “Christian” is the number of times it refers to Jesus, and/or the clarity with which it makes those references. When we do this, she says, we end up both exploiting Jesus and corrupting art. What makes Christian art truly Christian, she argues, is the faithful lens through which the artists views the world, the mercy and love with which they engage what they see, and the freedom and the honesty with which they attempt to convey that in their art.
Whatever else the music of U2 offers us, it is an intriguing object lesson in L’Engle’s claims on this point. Consider, for instance, a song that attempts compassionately and mercifully to step into the agony of a heroin addict—like their poignant “Running to a Standstill”—or a tune urging us to acknowledge the difference that divides us and carry each other all the same—like their achingly beautiful “One”—or a lyric playfully celebrating the mystery of grace—like their tongue-in-cheek “Daddy’s gonna pay for your crashed car.” Perhaps tunes like these bring far more glory to God, despite the fact they never mention the name of Jesus, than four spandex-clad metalheads ever could, belting out at the top of their lungs that “In God we trust, in him we must believe, In God we trust, His Son we must receive.”
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