Worldviews have consequences. LGBT+ liberalism cannot and will not ever produce anything even remotely resembling the Messiah. It is forever bound to be parasitic upon the Christendom culture and worldview from which it rebels. However much it tries to be “creative” and “alternative”, however much it attempts to “think outside the box”, it can only ever deconstruct the norms, degrade the standards, and erode the good convictions and traditions it has already seen and heard.

Note: Is it a coincidence that western culture returns to Handel’s Messiah year after year? Why is modern secular culture incapable of creating anything like it? What does it indicate about the kind of culture Christians ought to be creating?

In the previous post on Handel’s Messiah, I considered the tension between evangelical “heart religion” in the first Great Awakening—which was occurring at the same time as Handel was composing the Messiah—and musical excellence. Many evangelicals today, as a result of that Awakening, still believe that the Christian influence upon national cultures is to be avoided because it will inevitably contaminate the purity of the Biblical message.

The trouble is, not only would that probably mean never creating anything remotely resembling the quality and impact of Handel’s Messiah ever again, but it would also mean missing out on the insights which such works offer to our understanding and experience of the Biblical message.

Painting the Word

It is very clear, of course, that Messiah has a unique brilliance about it. Whilst some have spoken of it in terms of divine inspiration, many have certainly noticed the powerful way in which it amplifies Scripture so profoundly, in ways that go beyond what can be achieved in ordinary reading, or even in ordinary preaching.

This includes the way in which it fuses musical tonality, Scriptural narrative, and rhetoric in order to magnify the significance of the truths being sung. This is often known as Handel’s “word-painting”. A well known example is the line “the crooked straight” (Isa. 40:4) where the tune juts up and down on the word “crooked” and flattens out for “straight”.

There are also the bouncing polyphonies in “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isa. 53:6), resembling a chaotic flock of sheep dispersing in different directions simultaneously, before reverting from the frivolity of these sheep turning to “each to his own way” to a sombre descent reflecting the darker consequences: “And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” You can read such words and gain the insight, of course, but there is something about hearing them like that which conveys their truth with particular starkness.

The depth of insight offered into the Scriptural words adds to the profundity of what those words intend to convey even to the coldest hearts and minds. And the thing about it is that, unlike Wesley’s early prediction that this oratorio would have “no staying power”, western culture cannot seem to shrug it off. Like the words of the oratorio itself, it keeps on repeating.

What does it mean that time and time again, year after year in our supposedly “post-Christendom culture”, we keep returning to this piece of music, centred entirely and exclusively on Christ? I cannot help thinking this is no coincidence. However much it tries to shake it off, secularism continues to be haunted by the spectre of Christendom.

But whilst secularism is haunted by Christendom, it is also true that some of the vestiges of Christendom are haunted by secularism.

Queering the Messiah?

Inevitably, those colourful people at LGBT Inc. recently decided that yet another Christian tradition should be denigrated with the announcement by The Foundling Museum in London that they would be staging a “Queer Messiah”. Of course! Why would we expect otherwise?

Here was their all-too-familiar rationale:

“We will be repositioning the Messiah story so that it may better resonate with a 21st-century queer audience, keeping intersectionality in mind so that…their queerness feels represented, regardless of whether they identify as religious or not.”

Notice how they do not even attempt to produce their own original long-form oratorio with the kind of multi-layered complexity, beauty, depth, and popularity of Handel’s Messiah.

Read More