Musical Taste, Beauty, and Love for God

I have a vivid memory from childhood of a well-meaning follower of Jesus nearly driving me away from the faith. At the time, my family could be found in the directory of an independent baptist church in the suburbs of Chicago. The man was a P.E. teacher, and I can’t recall if I was in Sunday school or Bible class. Either way, a small cadre of students received a lecture about how rock ’n’ roll and all other adjacent genres of music were sinful - that was a given - and bad for our physical health. 

I remember my gut-level, threefold response. First, there was a tinge of nervousness, because maybe he was right. I loved punk rock, not to mention hip-hop and various other implicated genres, and for better or for worse this was an authority figure.

Second, there was some disgust. I wasn’t convinced of the first part of his argument,  though I lacked the intellectual ammunition and the intestinal fortitude to enter the fray, and the backend felt nothing short of conspiratorial. 

Finally, there was a commitment to secrecy. I was just rebellious enough to believe he was wrong and to continue to listen to the music I found mesmerizing, but not rebellious enough to wear that badge in public. Not very punk rock, I know. 

To this day I find his thesis woebegone. Rather than helping young people navigate the complexities of their relationship with a potent art form, the art form most likely to send my soul into the atmosphere and ground it again like the falling leaves of an autumn afternoon, he bound their consciences to a legalistic facade that would, in its best form, limit their discernment and enjoyment of a sweet gift from God.

A couple decades later, I’d like to attempt a response. Not a direct one. I’m not interested in the relationship of beats per minute, heart rate, and physiological health. Instead, I’d like to make the case that my teacher’s understanding and theology of music, and beauty more fundamentally, was emaciated to the point of masochism. Legalism is much like an eating disorder in the soul. It binds choice to instinct; it warps perception; it seeps life from the individual and those close to them. 

As with many of God’s most moving gifts to us, music is best received humbly and enjoyed in community, while acknowledging and adjusting for the limitations in oneself and one’s neighbor.

Taste in music is a wild and, at times, fickle thing. Everybody has it, and almost everybody has strong feelings about it, even when they pretend not to. There are two interweaving components of our musical taste that can be hard to distinguish, but they’re important.

Rightly concerned with the impact of algorithms on the human experience, a cultural commentator for The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka, articulates the first component succinctly: “Taste is a word for how we measure culture and our relationship to it.” As he sees it, taste is an attunement mechanism for what is happening around us, notably among human endeavors. It is to know what is or will or should have cultural cache based on what one experiences and feels in response to some created thing, whether that be food or music or whatever the mechanism is attuned to. And, it’s our intuition toward “should” that clarifies Chayka’s assessment, because our taste unavoidably affects our relationships with people. “Taste,” he argues, “borders on morality, representing an innate sense of what is good in the world.” We don’t merely feel the music (or food or whatever) we enjoy is good; we often think others ought to feel the same way. 

The reason for that inclination toward projection onto others is Chayka bumping into the second component of our musical taste, and it’s the word he avoided in his own definition. It’s taste as the capability and capacity of both creators and receivers to discern the beauty of an object. We know we’ve encountered beauty the moment it happens. Our gaze gets transfixed. Our gut opens to a chasm. Our mind enters a whirlpool. Or maybe, more simply, we’re arrested to the moment. In the eloquent words of Roger Scruton, “These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.” Human culture becomes an important ingredient for its influence on and in the making of taste, but there’s something more foundational - beauty itself.

There was a brutalist limitation in my P.E. teacher’s taste in music. His was mostly a cultural definition of beauty. Music ought to have a certain combination of instrumentation and a particular lyrical ethos. It’ll come as no surprise the cultural preference under the surface of his musical inclinations had a lot in common with America pre-1960s, and a white America at that. 

In adolescence, the nervousness and secrecy I carried regarding my own taste in music were not conducive to understanding, so it wasn’t until many years later that I began to learn why I was drawn to music in the way that I was. In fact, it took more than a decade and full geographic removal to begin to discern how my heart and mind interact with the music I hear. Here’s something interesting: lyrics have never had much of an impact on me, and that sword cuts both ways. Positive, rich, even theological lyrics…little impact. Negative, flippant, derogatory language — no problem.

Some might say I’m not attending to the music sufficiently. That may be, but you’ll find I have great interest in attending to music and encouraging others to do so. And, it’s not unique to me as a way of receiving music. 

Simultaneously, I know people who relate to music in almost precisely the opposite way. They need to hear and understand the lyrics to feel like they've listened to the music at all. For these folks vocal styles matter a great deal, because they can make or break a song on the intelligibility of the lyrics.

Here’s what’s both fascinating and confusing about the range of musical taste though: if  Christianity is to be believed, beauty is objective. Beauty is real; it’s not merely a subjective experience. Despite what can feel like an individualized awareness of it, beauty transcends any one particular take. It’s out there to be discovered and cultivated. 

It took scholars like Peter Kreeft and Donald Williams to help me finally connect the dots. Beauty’s objective tie is God’s glory. So, when we experience beauty, we encounter a reflection (through a glass, darkly, as it were) of the very real glory of almighty God. 

We’re threading a fine needle here, but the beauty to glory connection explains how our experience of beauty happens on a kaleidoscopic spectrum. God’s glory is infinite and capable of wonders for which we have almost no words, and we are painfully finite and traffic in brokenness and confusion. The vast and unpredictable array and diversity of experiences with the beautiful are nearly self-evident. Some of us can hear the beauty of the accordions of polka music; some of us can hear it in the bass-boosted rhythms of hip-hop.

Our response to beauty (God’s glory) is never a limitation of beauty as such. We are the limiting factor. Likewise, our finite attempts to create beautiful things always contain the inherent limitations of human involvement, which means it is certainly the case that some artistic creations are more beautiful than others. This is why some songs ostensibly about God can feel cheap or ugly, and it’s why some of the most beautifully written songs can have abhorrent subject matter. And if you won’t grant the latter point, at least acknowledge the fact that some of the most beautiful music ever written came to us from the minds and hearts of non-Christians.

Thankfully, God’s glory is uninhibited by our imperfections and limitations, which is why beauty’s allure can be felt by all of us. And it’s why beauty can be life-changing. A mountaintop sunset. Stargazing away from light pollution. A deeply true poem. Lovely music. It’s because we’re bumping into the glory of God, and the glory of God is capable of transforming whole persons. 

These philosophical musings help make sense of one of the fascinating but noticeably strange patterns in the scriptures. The closer the characters get to God’s glory, the more inexplicable their experience becomes. Often, the author reaches indiscriminately to the outer limits of their vocabulary to get it recorded. What emerges is a pattern of God’s glory or beauty itself being measured by the extremes of awe-inspiring natural phenomena - earthquakes, lightning, jewels, etc. There simply aren’t many words capable of describing a firsthand encounter of the beautiful, which is a limitation I think we can all relate to.

The people of God arriving at Mt. Sinai, where Moses encountered God’s presence and glory, describe the mountaintop as thunder and lightning with clouds and smoke and fire and an earthquake. 

The prophet Ezekiel in numerous visions describes God’s presence as a whirlwind, a huge cloud with fire that gleams like amber. God’s own words to the prophet describe beauty with a variety of gemstones in an exquisite arrangement.

This kind of thing happens all the way to the end of the scriptures with John’s apocalyptic visions containing a corresponding linguistic impulse toward poetic pictures borrowed from nature.

We are inescapably drawn to God and his beauty; it’s an integral structural beam in the architecture of our hearts. It’s embedded in the very essence of humanity; we bring it up in the most important questions about life and meaning. Here’s the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

This is what we do. And, this is what makes beauty distinctive within all of our human experiences. A genuine encounter with the beautiful can cut through us into the deepest recesses of our psychology and worship, and it can do so in an instant, like nothing else can. It’s primal and intuitive, and we may never be the same.

When Moses came down from that mountain, he’d been in much closer proximity to God’s glory than his contemporaries, and he had visibly changed. He couldn’t help it, and the people couldn’t help but see it.

There have been manifestations of the beautiful that have changed me. For example, words have that power. I’ve been instantaneously and irrevocably changed by the fiction writings of figures like C. S. Lewis and John Steinbeck and Leo Tolstoy. I’ve experienced something similar in the nonfiction of Wendell Berry and the poetry of Dante Alighieri. These writers have captured truth and goodness via beauty, and I knew in a moment I wouldn’t be quite the same.

It just so happens that lyrics don’t tend to do that to me, which is presumably a limitation in me, but the melody and accompanying music do. I feel something resonant in my chest with a collection of sounds that communicates an emotion long before the lyrics have had any real bearing. Emotions and ideas arranged in beautiful music can clarify or alter my feelings and perspective because instrumentation and melody can capture feelings better for me than words can (most of the time). That’s how beauty works, in spite of my limitations and in spite of the limitations of artists. God’s glory breaks through my faults and defenses and transforms.

That’s why my taste in music is the best. It’s why you feel similarly about your taste in music. My particular story with my requisite limitations marching in fierce pursuit of beauty and truth and goodness - that’s a recipe for beholding something real, something of God himself, and being remade by it.

All of us think our taste in music stands out because our imaginations are ignited by different artistic renderings, different manifestations of beauty, which is symmetrical and proportional to our stories and emotions. Rest easy though, the beauty is real. We have different vantage points and limitations, but the way forward and the way deeper is not to stop engaging with beauty. This was the grave error of my P.E. teacher. The heartbreaking but inevitable result of his teaching would mean the limitation of my discernment and/or my enjoyment of a sweet gift from God.

So let me put my money where my mouth is. If I were a teacher helping my middle school self process his own musical inclinations here’s what I would prioritize communicating, though perhaps not in these words:

Love

The most essential ethic of the way of Jesus is love. It’s central to who God is, and it’s the undeniable north star of a virtuous life. The deliberate enjoyment of God’s glory (which we encounter in beauty), a proper form of loving him, is a good and foundational start. A middle schooler's desire to find and create beauty is, thus, an inherently good one. It’s one to be celebrated and empowered. The challenge is to promote and not lose sight of this perspective as we engage and make art. 

Love must motivate and clarify our relationship with art, with the artist, with other listeners/receivers, who are our neighbors, and with ourselves. The good news is the young version of me, for all of my many faults, was full of love. I loved the music I was listening to, I loved my friends and family, I loved the intersection of relationships with people and beautiful things. 

I think that basic set of impulses is unavoidably human insofar as we all bear the image of God, so it’s only in the most dire and traumatic of stories that a person might not relate to feeling full to the brim with love for certain people and various forms of beauty. What that means in practice is that love ought to be celebrated and encouraged wherever it can be found. 

In hindsight, the saddest part of my response to my P.E. teacher was the secrecy. I longed to know and be known through music, but I shelved that desire during my most formative years. I stayed secretive in more than one way around most adults, including my parents, and one of the surest ways to break down those barriers would have been in conversations about the music I was drawn to.

I gently propose the remedy can be reverse engineered. The places I might have opened back up could have begun right here with the stuff I found beautiful because it resonated deeply in my heart. With music. Admittedly, it may not be music for everybody, maybe it’s theater or hiking or cooking, but the logic holds. If my love for music had been encouraged and nourished, it’s hard to say what might have changed, but it’s not difficult to imagine a world in which I had become more trusting and vulnerable. And as a natural consequence, I might have been more open to the musical inclinations and preferences and, dare I say, recommended restrictions of the authority figures in my life. Should love have been the starting point, I would slowly but surely have wanted to learn how to love music and people even better than I had before. 

That’s how this works in practice. Love of music and love of others collides with knowledge of oneself and one’s limitations. In the words of Jesus, we love God, and we love our neighbors.

Community

The context and culmination of artistic engagement is communal. At a minimum, even the most unintentional bump into the beautiful includes a person and God. Think of it. Aloneness fades away as we’re awestruck on the beach before a breathtaking sunrise because we’re nudged toward our Creator. To exclude God is a choice which must truncate the experience. Aimless awe has a lower ceiling than awe headed toward the infinite divine. I’ll come back to this idea in short order. 

What’s more, since beauty is a gift bestowed to all, its trajectory and experiential zenith includes a person and God and more persons. And of course this is true - God considered Adam’s aloneness in the garden in Genesis 2 to be not good, paving the way to another person. The impulse to share that which is beautiful is simply a human instinct to share in God, to be present to and delight in God’s glory together. In fact, that is at the very roots of what it is to be human. 

That’s why you should go to live shows and concerts. It’s why you should share your art with your family and friends, and you should be present to and absorb the beauty of the art of your family and friends. It’s why you should play and write music with others. At the very least, when you’ve seen or heard or felt something beautiful, Kyle Chayka is all too right, you ought to share it with others. Talk with your friends and family about the album that moves you the most. Write about a painting that captures something distinct. Make good food and delight in it with others. Take others to the place with your favorite sunset. Get into it - help one another see/hear the beauty in what moves you. Humbly listen to others’ experiences of the same. 

Should any of those actions feel difficult or aspirational, start with a question: what’s your favorite song or album? What do you love about it? Instigate relationships that include and wrestle with the beautiful. Go on the hike together; buy an extra ticket to the concert and invite a friend. Above all, account for others’ experience of beauty and learn their limitations. 

This intersection, where one’s love of beauty and love of people meet, is the very center of the challenge. It’s the creative challenge of love, and it’s where the most is at stake. You can lose your brother or gain him here. Your understanding and appreciation of beauty can be multiplied or fractured here.

If a certain song or type of music makes your friend uncomfortable or prone to wander, then you can and should adjust because of your love for them. Likewise, if your friend is in good conscience able to listen to a wide range of music, you ought not restrict them. These are the kinds of case-by-case, creative decisions that loving relationships demand. 

This was where my P.E. teacher failed so confidently yet precipitously. The root of his restrictions was something insidious masquerading as love. Either, he demanded that others find beauty in music the way that he did, thus inhibiting the connection of beauty and love that’s possible in relationships. What could have been mutual and two-way became one-way and conscience-binding. Or, he feared what certain types of music might generate in others without sufficient knowledge of their hearts and minds. Whether it was pride or fear, if you squint, you can see how he likely meant to be loving, but it’s twisted. This is not love; it’s legalism. It drove a wedge between my love of music and my interest in Jesus.

Intention 

To defend him for a moment though, the great temptation of western cultural interactions with beauty is something like the opposite of the wrongs of my teacher. We are inundated with options and access and forceful algorithms. We’re mostly prone to consumerism and decadence. Like cartoonish royalty of a bygone era: Hey Siri, bring me my shows, my music, my daily bread with as little friction as possible. I’ll just sit here and keep scrolling.

In that context, one is painfully unlikely to discern and enjoy and share with others in God’s glory without intention. We must reawaken to beauty and love and pursue it deliberately, and it’s not because God’s glory has declined or beauty has faded. The tailwind of our culture is strongly pointed in another, addiction-forming direction.

Our general struggle isn’t with legalism; it’s with antinomianism. We lack both restrictions and any plan at all. 

In my experience we can hardly notice beauty. First, we’re flooded with economically motivated, brain-chemistry-affecting entertainment and distraction. It’s a deluge; it’s nearly omnipresent and nearly omnipotent. You already know the statistics about how many hours we all spend on our phones per day. Yet, so few of those hours cultivate beauty or connection.

Second, to do something outside of the morphine-drip of our predicament is akin to choosing physical therapy instead of narcotics. It’s more painful, slower, and has mixed results. Searching for, finding, and interacting with beauty is often laborious, draining time and attention and energy. Why make the switch at all? To view a sunset will at the very least demand getting off the couch and walking to where you can see it. Why do that when the next episode of the show I’m binging starts in five seconds?

So to this hypothetical middle school student, I’d commend intentionally and rhythmically engaging with the things they love, the things they find beautiful. I’d help them consider their options and encourage their persistence. 

Discerning the beauty of an object is a skill, which is to say it can be cumbersome and frustrating, but it’s also a task ripe for experimentation and development. And since beauty’s roots are God’s glory, we ought to. My love for and enjoyment of music only increased as I learned to play the guitar in adulthood, then again increased when I helped write and record an album. And, yes, it was a punk rock-adjacent project.

Because we’re finite, there’s a limit to how much we can prioritize and pursue, but if the result is seeing and hearing the glory of God, that we should intentionally seek it out rhythmically and prayerfully is undeniable.

Religion 

As a pseudonymous writer recently put it, “The Church didn’t always live up to [Jesus’s] ideals, but it did something else: it preserved them.” Followers of Jesus ought to be practitioners of his teachings, and they normally aspire to that, but they are never less than his scribes. We refuse to forget, even though we’re prone to precisely that shortcoming. Our gargantuan group project is to continue to remind one another and point back to the staggering kindness and vital beauty of our Savior.

My final bit of advice to this middle schooler would be to do all of the aforementioned things in the context of religious practice. 

Palpable contact with the divine, or at least its rehearsal, is what rounds out our pursuit of beauty. I need to be reminded that my encounters with the sublime are not incidental or vacuous. That I’m more than a hapless wanderer in a world that has real beauty. To have our experience of beauty, our taste in music, validated by knowledge of the God who gifts it lovingly is to become more wholly human. It’s to find a home for our wandering hearts. Our aesthetic instincts are under-formed without our religious and doxological ones, because it’s akin to rewriting the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify and to enjoy forever.

It’s missing the main point, even as it gets the actions right. To seek out beauty without allowing it to drive us toward the Source of beauty is to choose loneliness where relationship ought to be; it’s to dam the flow of the river of life. 

Go to church and become part of the life of the body of Christ. Speak and read and sing the truth to one another; receive the word and the sacraments. Occasionally it all may even strike you as beautiful. In the end, our inclination toward beauty is an inclination toward relationship with God. That’s what religion is for, so don’t allow yourself to wander far.

Love. Community. Intention. Religion. All of them overlap, of course, and each one of them was within easy reach of this middle schooler. Helping the younger version of me take steps toward the beautiful was an opportunity to help me see more clearly and love more deeply. I wouldn’t have understood it all, and I would have still made plenty of mistakes. When it’s all said and done though, the glory of God is worthy of our lives, and to enjoy it is to be made new. So, send me your favorite albums.