Catholic Song in a Secular World
The following is an abbreviated version of a talk given at the most recent Catholic Imagination Conference. The talk was part of a panel titled: “Sing a New Song: Catholic Imagination in Secular Songwriting." The talk itself can be viewed here.
While a relatively small slice of the population will pick up a collection of poetry or read a short story this year, it’s hard to imagine a person making it through a year without hearing a song. Because of this, songs hold a unique potential for Catholic artists and a Catholic imagination to reach a wide and secular audience. A Catholic vision in song does not have to be limited to hymns, as beautiful and profound and necessary as hymns are, but can infuse a spiritual richness to songs that still play better in a bar than in a church.
There are many ways for a Catholic imagination to show itself in secular songs—a sacramental vision of the world and of man, a recognition and reckoning with the reality of sin, a hope of redemption and resurrection, the struggle in man between evil and good. I’d like to focus specifically on one aspect I’ve seen directly addressed less often: the conveyance of what I would call truth-rich “paradoxes of faith.” Through these paradoxes of faith, Catholic secular songs can convey a worldview at odds with many values of contemporary culture to audiences that may otherwise remain unconfronted by certain parts of a fully Christian vision.
In well-written songs, the mood, melody, harmony, and other musical qualities are often what strike us first; the beauty of the music gives pleasure and allows the lyrics to draw the listener into a deeper experience of truth, or bring her to grapple with a worldview other than her own. Scripture and the Christian life frequently challenge our vision of reality—challenge us to see with a supernatural vision. The paradoxes of faith that I’m talking about mean looking at the world from a vantage of faith and mystery, of humility and, often, a vision at odds with contemporary society’s norms and values. A Catholic artist with a heart directed toward virtue sees and experiences the world differently from those who are fully “of the world.” Even when writing songs meant for popular consumption and not for church or prayer, this view of reality will come through.
There are some artists whose creedal beliefs I don’t know but who possess this Catholic view of reality and demonstrate it in song. One of these is Clem Snide, stage name of Eef Barzelay. Barzelay, when I saw him perform live once, said that he was the son of atheist Jews but some experiences in his life dramatically altered his course, and it is clear from many of his songs that he is a Christian of some creed and has a strong sense of God’s reality. One song that shows him to be a Christian mystic of sorts is the title track from his album Forever Just Beyond. In words almost identical to the Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, Barzeay sings, “God is simply that which lies forever just beyond the limit of what we already seem to know.” Taken alone, this line is ambiguous enough that we might think it more new-age mysticism than Dionysian or John of the Cross mysticism; but to alleviate that uncertainty, Barzelay sings later on the same album, “Rely on Jesus Christ / I can finally see the light.” In the song “At Your Command,” from his 2024 release Oh Smokey, he sings, “God, treat me as you would a little child / I’m here always at your command.” Whether he would term it this or not, this is abandonment to divine providence, preached by Fr. Caussade, by Brother Lawrence, and by other spiritual heavyweights.
Mark Shiiba is another artist whose songwriting deserves repeated listening and contemplation. He has a song on his album Bones titled “John at the Cross” that uses the figure of St. John, watching his beloved friend and Lord die, crucified, suffering, analogously for the difficulty we each face when we see our loved ones suffer and die. “John at the Cross is braver than I thought / Death is terrible to watch.” Faced with suffering and death that we can’t understand, Shiiba turns not only to the cross, but specifically to the figure of John at Christ’s side, and uses his pain at watching Jesus’s death to place and understand vicarious suffering through those we love. In another track, he echoes Dionysius and Clem Snide, singing, “Tell me, brother, do you see the beauty in the mystery of love.” We do not and cannot know everything. In a culture of materialism, Shiiba leans into mystery and, with it, humility.
Another brilliant artist whose career has leaned more and more toward a recognition of the transcendental and of God is Joe Pug. Pug is truly a worthy successor to Bob Dylan and the great American songwriters of the 20th century. On his most recent album, 2024’s Sketch of a Promised Departure, Pug demonstrates a view of the world that holds faith and virtue in high esteem. In “Treasury of Prayers,” Pug sings exactly that: a litany of petitions and intentions. He is explicit about the place of faith, praying, “That faithful’s not a word that I cannot define,” and “That it feels just like a memory when my Father calls me home.” The song is full of beautiful lines, but there is one verse—and the final line in particular—I return to again and again:
That my children live out stories they can tell around a fire,
That they can recognize beauty, that they can recognize a liar,
That their innocence remains, that they never question my love,
That they work to build cathedrals they won’t live to pray inside of.
In “What Is Good Will Never Change,” Pug conspicuously sings his way through the transcendentals, telling us in the title and first line that “what is good will never change.” Even if we “lie and say it does [change],” the truth of the good abides, and in spite of any ugliness in the world, “there’s a beauty that remains.” Pug’s prayer and vision of life in this line is drastically different from modern consumerist, materialist tendencies.
One secular artist whom I do know to be a practicing Catholic is Mike Mangione, and it’s no surprise that his songs most directly strike up this paradox of faith. In his album Blood & Water, Mangione presses repeatedly on the topic of love. C.S. Lewis wrote in “The Weight of Glory” that men of his day had replaced the virtue of Charity with “unselfishness;” in our own day, I think we’ve replaced it with “kindness”—both of these are strikingly less than true Charity, which Mangione recognizes. In these songs, he presents a vision of love that is opposed to a sentimental, romantic, feelings- or “kindness”- based love. In “The Turnabout,” he recognizes the sacrificial nature of love: “I wanted to love you but I couldn’t see / Only love becomes itself sacrificially.” He becomes more explicit about love, its demands, and its fruit in “Love Ain’t No Easy Thing”—“I want a sensualized, crucified, mystified kind of love;” and, “Don't want no simplified, sterilized, half-realized kind of love;” “I don't want no disguised, I want baptized, so I can testify our love / because love, real love, ain't no easy thing to do.”
In “Against the Grain,” he becomes more explicit about the fact that this vision runs counter to secular culture: “And you must listen to me please, this will not come with ease / you must be open to the glory and the pain / When they pierce that sinful mistress you catch her blood and hold witness / she'll come running to your heart against the grain.” The nature of the love he believes in runs “against the grain” of a culture of narcissism and of death. Mangione ends his album with these words:
Life is painful, so stay strong, and for you I wrote this song,
It’s in love where we humans carry on.
We were made to be given, we are taught to take.
One who dwells on the surface in time will break.
Your beauty will steady the promise they shake;
This world is drawn to a spirit awake.
As an artist whose view of the world is through the lens of faith, without specifically setting out to do so I also write songs which reflect that understanding. One example of this in my own writing is the title track of my album Callused. I wrote this song for my oldest son when he was born, with a vision of life that intentionally calls him higher than what the world often expects from us:
I hope your hands will get callused, but your heart never will
You’ll live til you’re broken and give til you’re filled
And when your days reach their end, may you be able to say
That you gave every one away.
The Catholic songwriter does not set out to teach a moral or even to be a Catholic in every one of his songs—but if he is a Catholic, or is deeply informed by that faith, and has the habitus of art, the work he creates will reflect that faith and intellectual formation, and his songs give him an art that can reach a broad audience with a compelling and beautiful vision of truth.
