A Godless Fundamentalist: Chapter 4

by John Ellis

One of the sad ironies embedded in my authority figures devotion to protecting my testimony was that while they were busy guarding my external actions, Satan was further warping and hardening my rebellious heart of stone. Even if my authority figures had been successful in protecting me from outward acts of sin like sex and alcohol, they would’ve still failed. Yes, some of the music I loved stoked my desire to have sex, drink alcohol, and to discard any external semblance to the fundamentalism stifling me, but, even more harmfully, some of it provided a counter worldview to the worldview of my parents; it found a comfortable home in my heart, because my heart was already in the full throes of rebellion against my Creator.

While writing this, I realized that I’m wearing an old Guns N’ Roses t-shirt. A t-shirt that is purely functional for me because it remains mostly untorn and it fits in a way that helps me ignore the fact that I’m an increasingly squishy middle-aged man. The logo on the front could be a picture of my mailbox, for all I care. As a teenager, though, I would’ve given almost anything to be able to lounge around in a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt without fear of punishment.

Currently, I have two (I think I only have two) Guns N’ Roses CDs hidden away in a box that’s collecting dust somewhere in a storage area in my house. I use the word “hidden” purely in the sense that those CDs are hidden from my sight.

When I was a teenager, though, my one Guns N’ Roses cassette tape was hidden in a box collecting dust under my bed. And it was hidden so that my parents couldn’t see it. At night, I would pull my contraband Walkman out of its hiding spot, place the earphones over my head, and listen to “Welcome to the Jungle” while fantasizing about the day that I could live in the glorious jungle that Axl Rose wailed about.

Slash’s opening guitar riff followed by Axl’s blasphemous entrance into a song that immortalized in my young mind the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll became for me the standard that stood against what my parents, teachers, and youth pastors believed.

Kicking off the song, the lyrics begin, “Welcome to the jungle, we got fun -n- games. We got everything you want, honey we know the names. We are the people that can find whatever you may need. If you got the money honey, we got your disease in the jungle. Welcome to the jungle.”

During my first summer working as a ranch hand at the Bill Rice Ranch, I wrote the lyrics of “Welcome to the Jungle’s” first verse and chorus on the wooden slab holding up the mattress of the bunk above me in the dorm room. The Bill Rice Ranch is a fundamentalist Christian camp in Tennessee; a place where girls aren’t allowed to wear pants, guys aren’t allowed to wear shorts, and no one is allowed to listen to rock music. I earned legendary status for my act of brazen rebellion scrawled on the bottom of that bunk.

While I understood that the song’s protagonist wasn’t singing to me but to naïve, starry-eyed girls getting off the bus in LA, I still felt that Axl was speaking to me, in a way. It opened the door to a world unencumbered by the rigid, seemingly pointless rules of my parents and school. A world that offered me an escape from the specter of God, I believed. After I found out that Axl had grown up in a strict religious family (Pentecostal), my connection to his band only strengthened.

The amount of energy and effort put into scaring us of off rock music only served to heighten our interest in the verboten music. My dad, especially, dedicated a lot of time and energy into making sure the youth under his charge were separated from rock music.

Having been taught music in high school by the revered Frank Garlock, one of my dad’s pet issues was music. In fact, many of my dad’s closest friends within fundamentalism seemed to be focused on warning Christian school kids about the dangers of rock and roll. Hugh Pyle, Danny Sweat, Barry Webb, Tim Fisher, and others preached the dangers of rock music as they were steadily paraded across chapel platforms, during youth group, at summer camp, and as speakers for revival services at the invitation of my dad. And I loved anti-rock sermons.

Growing up during the pre-internet age meant that much of my knowledge about bands and musicians was provided by anti-rock music preachers. Many of the bands that became my favorites were first introduced to me during a sermon. For example, a sermon is how I first learned about Ozzy Osborne. An anti-rock music book is where I first learned about Motley Crue. Both of those educational progressions occurred when I was in elementary school. Much more harmful, an unintended consequence of the anti-rock and roll sermons was the way that many of them undermined the gospel.

One of the favorite rock and roll boogeymen for fundamentalist preachers was the Australian hard rock band AC/DC. Over the course of my youth, I heard many times that AC/DC stood for “anti-christ/devil’s child.” Except that’s 100% wrong.

Before hitting the big time, the band was sitting around the Young brothers’ mom’s flat while trying to come up with a name for the band. At some point during the discussion, they noticed the AC/DC symbol on a sewing machine, thought it looked cool, and then named their fledgling band AC/DC.

Hearing the band relate that story while being interviewed on MTV caused everything the anti-rock preachers said to be suspect in my mind, including any and all parts about Jesus. If they were lying or so badly misinformed about the band’s name, how I could trust anything else they had to say?

That bit of misinformation is just the tip of the iceberg of errors that riddled the anti-rock sermons. Throughout high school, me and my friends would basically play a game of anti-rock bingo during the sermons. The errors, obvious misinterpretations, and overall cluelessness about the genre we loved caused us to view the preachers and their messages as a collective joke.

Most of us were immune to the never-ending parade of anti-rock music sermons and lessons. While listening to the preacher rail against our favorite bands, we attempted to hide our smirks and comments to each other from our authority figures. Figuring out how to quote lyrics out loud in class without the teachers knowing what we were doing became a favorite pastime. Trading cassette tapes took the place of trading baseball cards. Being the first one to tell our friends about a new song or a new band became a benchmark for cool.

That doesn’t mean that all my friends were immune to the effects of an emotionally charged altar call. The best preachers could get some of the most hardened reprobates to tearfully stumble down the aisle and promise to rededicate their life to God, starting with getting rid of their rock music collection. I was always tempted to suggest to those ensnared by the preacher’s pleas that instead of trashing their music they let me hold onto it. That way, when they wanted it back in about three weeks, and they always wanted it back, I could give it to them. I never suggested that, of course, because doing so would’ve been a good way to ensure that a newly “repentant” friend would feel compelled to earn some extra repentance points by turning me in. Instead, I ruefully watched the same friends throw away their rock music at least once a year, a decision they always regretted later.

I don’t know of a single kid who successfully swore of the “devil’s music” for more than a few weeks. You see, we Christian school kids loved rock and roll.

And, so, as our authority figures attempted to protect our testimony by shielding us from pop culture, they were unwittingly doing battle with a foe that they were no match for. All of their handwringing and dire warnings fed our adolescent rebellion.

The more they railed against our favorite bands, the more power they gave those bands. The more they told us silly warnings about kids who crashed their cars while listening to “Highway to Hell,” the cooler we felt as we blared our car radios with the windows down. In my own heart, based on what our authority figures were telling us, I thought that listening to rock music meant that I really wasn’t that different from my public-school peers. And that was one of the things that I wanted most of all.

I was wrong, of course. No amount of illicit cassette tapes nor knowledge of rock music could bridge the difference between me and the public-school kids. As high school ended, I became painfully aware of that. And during my final year of high school, I began to have a sneaking suspicion that my life of convenience was at war with my life of conviction in ways that I didn’t realize and with consequences that I previously hadn’t foreseen. I began to realize that finding answers to my childhood doubts and questions about God while embracing a world that my parents firmly eschewed meant far more than breaking rules and having fun. And that realization was birthed and fed, in large part, by my growing sophistication when it came to music.

Before explaining that, though, I would be remiss, I think, if I didn’t share an anecdote that was simultaneously confusing and cool. For all my dad’s fundamentalist baggage, his interactions with unbelievers often revealed an often-hidden empathy fueled by the gospel. One Sunday morning during 8^th grade revealed this and stayed with me, even during the height of my rebellion against God while I was in my twenties.

Every Sunday morning, the church my dad pastored paid for airtime on the local a.m. station with the call sign of WCOA. Most churches sent prerecorded segments in for the station to play. Not my dad. He loved going in and doing it live. One Sunday morning, he took me with him.

WCOA was the sister station of Q-100, a top-forty station. At the time, top-forty was a much broader genre than it is now. Rock was included, as was true hip-hop. Q-100 was one of my favorite radio stations. Unbeknownst to my parents, I would lie awake at night, listening to it.

The studios for the two stations were in the same building. Getting to WCOA’s studio required passing Q-100’s studio. As we passed the “cooler” FM station’s studio, the long-haired, tattooed DJ stuck his head out of the door and cheerfully greeted my fundamentalist pastor father as if the two were friends. That blew my mind. I knew who the DJ was, looked up to him as the epitome of cool, and could not wrap my brain around how someone that cool could know, much less be friends, with my decidedly uncool preacher father. To confuse things even more, the DJ invited us into the studio.

I don’t remember what he and my dad talked about. I do remember the song that was playing while we were in the studio: Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.” To this day, whenever I hear that song, I think of my dad.

As I stood in what I considered the inner sanctum of coolness in the presence of a man whom I considered one of the high priests of cool while listening to one of my favorite songs, I could not wrap my brain around what was happening. Rock music was playing, and my dad was nonchalantly chatting with the long-haired man who was responsible for that “evil” song being sent out over the airwaves. At the time, it didn’t compute.

And therein lies the rub.

My dad witnessed to that DJ. I know that, because the DJ would occasionally show up at church, as would several other DJ’s. Their presence in church wasn’t by accident. My dad fostered a friendship with them for the sake of the gospel.

I praise God for my father’s faithful obedience in sharing the gospel with sinners. That he was not put off in the slightest by the sinner, and befriended sinners for the sake of the gospel. Yet, in the same breath, I lament that his confused, hurting son was only able to ever see glimpses of that father and never experienced it personally.

Almost every time long hair on guys was brought up in my fundamentalist world, it was done so in a manner that dripped with disdain and with invectives hurled in the direction of any man who would dare have long hair. Rock music was taught as so detrimental to society that being in its mere presence was dangerous. That Sunday morning at the radio station, my dad interacted with that DJ in a manner that flew in the face of the attitude that he and my other authority figures had constantly displayed throughout my childhood.

There is no such thing as a “what if,” but what would have happened if my dad’s approach towards pop culture and the youth in his church, including his own children, had been the warm, unafraid, non-hyperbolic man more concerned with the sinner than the sin that I witnessed in Q-100’s studio?

Oh, my word, what would have happened?

Instead, my friends and I were fed a steady diet of moralism. We were treated as Christians who needed to be protected from sin and not as sinners who needed Jesus.

And as our authority figures attempted to shape our worldview by shielding us from pop culture, they were unwittingly doing battle with a foe that they were no match for. And they were no match for it because our affections had yet to be turned towards Jesus.

During my senior year of high school, I began to realize that rock music mattered in ways that I had previously been oblivious to and in ways that gave my authority figures reason to fear it.

My parents, teachers, and youth pastors turned making lists into an art form. Any music that even remotely sounded like rock and roll was declared anathema; the lyrics could’ve been the text of the KJV’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer, and just the hint of a syncopated beat or the mere presence of an electric guitar would’ve deemed it unholy. Unless it starred John Wayne, and with other occasional exceptions, my parents refused to rent movies rated above G. Renting The Journey of Natty Gan was even scandalous. Of course, renting movies was the only option because going to the movie theatre was not allowed. Our testimony could be undermined if we were spotted at the movie theatre.

Unfortunately, my fundamentalist authority figures approached pop culture with a one-size-fits-all rubric. Worse, they simply condemned rock music and, in doing so, missed out on many opportunities to articulate, teach, and discuss a Biblical worldview with me. As I got older and began listening to more “sophisticated” music as well as actually listening to the lyrics and paying attention to the interviews of the artists, the tension inside of me began to deepen.

As I listened, as that tension began to widen the divide between me and the fundamentalists around me, I began to realize that my authority figures weren’t completely wrong: Their worldview was at odds with the worldview promoted by the music I loved. Realizing that I was going to have to shed my “hypocritical” equilibrium and choose a side was neither comfortable nor easy, though.

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