What if Christians Sang About What Was Really On Their Minds? September 10, 2011

What if Christians Sang About What Was Really On Their Minds?

By Hemant Mehta
September 10, 2011

What would happen if Christian worship music reflected what so many people in the congregations were actually thinking?

It might look like this:

I laughed 🙂

Credit where it’s due: The song’s courtesy of First Baptist Orlando Church.

(via Friendly Atheist Forums)

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  • “Go ahead give them applause, they’ll shut up”

  • Rozannef

    Hemant, I laughed out loud. Thank you for challenging me in my”walk.”  We Christians, myself included, truly need the wake-up call! How we live daily in our neighborhoods and beyond is much more important than what we do on Sunday.  Sadly, sometimes this is true.  I love looking at Christianity through your eyes. You truly challenge me to think how I live and love others.
    Rozanne Frazee

  • Hahahaha… That is pretty good….because it’s true!

  • Dude. A CHURCH wrote this song. My parents’ church used to do this kind of shit too. The WHOLE POINT was to shame people into becoming MORE god-obsessed. It was all about shaming. It was all about telling people who rotten they were, how lost and selfish. 

  • dauntless

    I think the point is also to have a laugh at those “Not True Christians”. I’m sure everyone in the church is thinking about someone they know who this song is about, someone who pretends to be Christian. Of course, they’re all pretending to be Christian, because it’s humanly impossible to follow all the rules in the Bible.

  • Anonymous

    I realize they’re trying to make a point to the congregation and move them towards a more genuine worship experience, but it’s what I’ve felt is the bald-faced truth at every praise service I’ve ever attended.   If you go to a horror movie, you’ll feel fright.  If you go to a comedy show, you’ll experience humor.  If you go to a contemporary church, you’ll feel the manipulated manufactured emotional rush.    At least this one was humorous and enjoyable!

  • Anonymous

    A Mohawk? That’s to prove he can be a coooooolllll christian. 

    The feeling IS gone by Monday. Wednesday at the vary latest. The youth rallies and revivals use the same manipulative technique that corporate pep rallies use — or is it the other way around? The trick is simple: get people on an emotional high. Emotions, a fight-or-flight body response, can NOT be sustained. Therefore, you must come back for another emotional “fix”. This is disguised as being spiritual upliftment that you need.

    It is Pavlovian conditioning that bestializes people by treating them as animals that need to be conditioned, and bypassing the reasoning abilities. Physiologically, emotion short-circuits the frontal cortex, the reasoning (and authority-questioning) part of the brain.

    This need for another emotional fix is reinforced  by the awful self-worth of christians haunting them in the middle of the night. 

    No matter how much you christians are in denial of this, I remember. I was there. Only now am I beginning to think that a few christians actually perhaps did not go through this, but since it a natural reaction to the manipulations, only the truly simple-minded ones would be free from the questioning and angst. You have to have a certain level of intelligence to suffer through a “dark night of the soul”. Perhaps simpletons really don’t!

  • Erinn Foley

    Love it!  I wonder how many ppl in that church are thinking, “this really is the truth, but I have to do this because of what other ppl will think of me…”

  • Here’s my post responding to this video after seeing it here: http://lovejoyfeminism.blogspot.com/2011/09/shame-shame-shame.html

  • Iamchuckles20

    That’s hilarious. The funniest thing about it being from a Church is that I’m sure they’re trying to guilt people into church. Like I’ve seen written here already the ‘Not True Christians’ but the funny is that most Christians think others are not “REAL” Christians and that “HELL” is always reserved for someone else.

  • Cold Ivory

    What makes this even better is that this song is a parody (in a Weird Al sense)–the tunes and melody lines are all from “praise team” songs (I think; I’ve played a few of them).

  • Rabid

    “…until next Sunday!”

  • Yes, the purpose was to shame, shame, shame, the congregation into being more involved with the church – to tithe more, to volunteer more within the church, to witness more – to do all those things that maintain and keep the church going and growing. 

  • Anonymous

    “I fake the emotion”

    Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

    They do! I can see through christians doing it now.

  • LMAO oh god that’s awesome! Christians are the best; they amuse me weekly without fail.

  • There’s this great short story by on of my favorite sci-fi authors, Connie Willis called “All Seated on the Ground” that covers this – with Christmas songs/hymns.  I highly recommend it:)

  • Anonymous

    OMFSM but I love the irony of this.  It wouldn’t be nearly as funny if it weren’t true believers singing it.   They are singing this song to shame their members about not being brainwashed enough.  Yet, every song the xians sing sounds to me just like this song.  They’ve created a god who is just like them, but moreso, and then spend endless hours glorifying the image of themselves that they made.  “I exalt me” indeed!

  • I was in the middle of singing a praise song when I realised I was an atheist. I was a christian when the song started.

  • Nice, a local video! I do hear gossip about some of this stuff. Nice to see that a church can poke fun at it.

  • Anonymous

    Awesome. I think we here in atheist-land, often used to dealing with the crazier fundies, can use a reminder now and then that many actual Christians are entirely self-aware and not blind to the hypocrisy and fakery of many aspects of their religion. 

    I know the song is made to shame, in an amusing way, believers into walking their walk, but the song is great. The woman in particular had me laughing with her exhultant gestures and “I lift my hands and see my nails, they match my eyes ohhh sooo weeell”. Hilarious.

  • Ryan Booker

    That video brings back some memories. As a teenager, I used to sing many of those exact songs every Sunday and not mean a single word of it. Although I believed in the Christian god, I never understood the passion that many of my peers and my family experienced when in worship services until many years later when I learned about the scientific hypotheses on the origins and prevalence of religion. I just didn’t feel it, which was a very lonely state to be in when almost everyone I had ever known and loved seemed to feel it so deeply.

    Whereas the intent of this video seems to be to shame Christians into more commitment and deeper faith, the opposite happened for me as a teenager. Eventually, rather than wonder why my faith wasn’t strong enough, I began to wonder about the origins and validity of my faith, something I had never done before. Several years of cognitive dissonance and desperate attempts to cling to beliefs I had long stopped actually believing later, I finally reached the same inexorable conclusion that many here have: the problem isn’t my faith, or lack thereof, the problem is religion and the idea of god in general.

  • Ben Leedom

    Damn it, I know the songs they’re parodying, and now the songs are stuck in my head.

  • This was my first thought exactly. Yeah, kudos for the humor and all, but I used to hear (less well-sung) parodies like this in church all the time, and the implication was clear – how dare you approach religion with anything less than full-blown fanaticism.

  • Anonymous

    Fortunately people don’t follow all the rules of the bible since it’s inhumanely to do so.

  • Anonymous

    Too bad they didn’t include a line about not putting enough in the collection plate. I’m sure it would have gotten the ministers support.

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