So why have I decided to remove Bruce Springsteen from my play list? I can’t get his recent words out of my mind, spoken at the height of the nation’s political season: “… I’m concerned about women’s rights. I don’t have to tell you the dangers to Roe v. Wade under our opponent’s policies.”

Well, it certainly wasn’t because he writes “secular” music. There are over 350 songs on my iPod, and only a few, like a great Mahalia Jackson song entitled How I Got Over and a joyful Fernando Ortega creation called This Good Day, are religious.  For transcendence and spiritual transport, I happily rely on the magnificent music in the Trinity Hymnal and Psalter. That’s the music I hope to be singing when my eyes close in death.

But I also am more than willing to raid the Egyptians for those good things which, by God’s common grace, are true, beautiful and sometimes… OK, I’ll say it – fun.  This is, after all, popular music we’re talking about.  So my iPod boasts a sampling of various genres: Scottish folk music, Jamaican reggae, opera, Muddy Waters’ blues, old-style country like Hank Williams Sr., Mo-Town, several Broadway show tunes, southern rock, the tunes of the classic crooners my parents loved, lots of the late (and great) Dan Fogelberg, and a generous portion of classic rock and roll.

So why have I decided to remove Bruce Springsteen from my play list?

I can’t get his recent words out of my mind, spoken at the height of the nation’s political season: “… I’m concerned about women’s rights. I don’t have to tell you the dangers to Roe v. Wade under our opponent’s policies.”

I know, I know – a majority of the artists on my list are liberals … or worse. If I restricted myself to those musicians with discerning political views, I might as well not bother with popular music.

What makes Springsteen’s passionate support for abortion on demand so galling is that he is no ordinary naïve liberal. Beyond being immensely charismatic, musically gifted and a famously generous band leader, Springsteen has always been a rather prophetic voice for common men and women. And he has done it in an unpretentious way. He has written many songs about unemployed blue collar workers in his home state of New Jersey as well as highway road workers and others displaced by modern life and technology.  He is concerned about those whose job skills have become antiquated, those whose hopefulness has been shattered by serving in American wars, those whose glory days all seem to be behind them.

Springsteen is, in other words, an artist with what would appear to be a creative vision full of compassion and integrity. But, there is burden which comes with that calling.  To whom much is given, much is expected.

And the problem is that Springsteen’s moral concern for the powerless and voiceless suffers from an ethical apartheid. Apparently, he only cares for those fellow citizens who are born.  I would not remove him from my playlist for his views on taxes, the role of government or our nations’ foreign policy. But his unqualified support for the practice of human abortion is especially appalling.

New Jersey has a very high abortion rate, even in the top twenty percent of American states.  But those nascent human beings, being uniquely powerless and voiceless, have no voice for them in the Boss. Their destruction and dismemberment will continue apace, the result of the very despair and calloused hearts Springsteen would seem to want to redeem with artistic empathy and solidarity.

This all makes it sound like I made the decision to fire the Boss from some finely calibrated ethical decision. Not really. I listen to my iPod when I am walking my dog, cooking pasta, and driving in the car.  I listen to it because it gives me some reliable joy in this veil of tears.  But the mental picture of Springsteen’s moral apartheid is too much to take, and now his music just makes me sad.

And that’s why I fired the Boss.

Dean Turbeville is a Teaching Elder in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP) and is Pastor in Residence at Sovereign Grace Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Charlotte, N.C