Authenticity and purity in worship music

Abstract

This article critically examines the concepts of authenticity and purity in musical worship, arguing that their prominence may obstruct broader social action and justice. While authenticity is often regarded as the hallmark of ‘good’ music, particularly in worship, this notion can lead to an overemphasis on personal devotion, distancing individuals from communal and societal concerns. Drawing on ethnomusicological perspectives, it explores how authenticity is contextually dependent, often reflecting the values of specific communities, yet potentially fostering inward-focused worship. Furthermore, it introduces the concept of purity as a counterpart to authenticity, noting its historical and theological roots in Abrahamic traditions. Purity in worship, much like in marketing or cultural identity, can contribute to exclusionary practices and a reluctance to engage with the complexities of a compromised world. By analysing contemporary worship practices and the cultural discourse surrounding ‘pure worship’, the article critiques the prioritization of spiritual purity over social engagement. Ultimately, it calls for a reorientation of worship practices away from these ideals towards a more inclusive and socially responsible form of engagement that embraces imperfection and compromise as paths towards communal good.

In countless interviews and magazine editorials we are told how important authenticity is for music. In fact, it is often understood to be the defining criterion of ‘good’ music. ¹ Common usage of the term reveals its meaning to be something like realness or fidelity.

For instance, we might ask whether an instrument is an authentic Nord, or Gibson, or Steinway, or Stradivarius. Or, extending this thinking to account for popular usage, we may ask if a song or collection is authentic; as in, does it adequately reflect the values or convictions of a community?

This second usage begins to beg a question, however: authentic to what? How can an object or phenomenon or song be authentic if singular, alone? Authenticity, then, depends on a set of standards, be they moral, aesthetic, cultural or dogmatic. So, when we ask about the authenticity of a song or repertory, we are asking about the adequacy of that piece’s or collection’s representation of the values we deem to be central or honest to the community.

This point of emphasis becomes further pronounced when we consider the weight afforded to authenticity in contemporary musical worship. Ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls has pointed out how crucial the perceived authenticity of the performance is for the power of musical worship, and many others have echoed her. ² But this observation incites compelling questions, chief among them being: is authenticity actually the goal for musical worship?

This article argues that it should not be. Despite the ubiquity and near universal appeal of the term and the ethics it implies, it suggests that such emphatic fidelity inhibits justice and social action for worshippers. By centring the individual’s devotion in myriad ways, authentic worship effectively turns the heart inward – not on the community but on the self. Such myopic views distort and obscure the inherent necessity of relationships for a good life, ³ and convey the idea that through authentic musical worship we can disentangle ourselves from the multifarious evils that permeate our globally dependent economic systems.

And it is at this point that it becomes clear that authenticity itself is not a stand-alone concept, but depends on another, more historically established concept for worship efficacy: purity. If the world is so hopelessly enmeshed with its self-perpetuating evils, then purification becomes the critical criterion of, if not salvation, then certainly personal ethics, holiness and sanctification. Theologians will no doubt sense the conundrum I am presenting; indeed, the dominant strand of atonement theories in my part of the globe establishes the purity of God a priori. And this is where we start to squirm. What do we mean by purity, and at what point are we differentiating the purity we ascribe to God, and the purity we seek in worship, from the purity we find in marketing campaigns and self-improvement diets? ⁴ And, once we’ve settled these questions, we may perhaps by haunted by a more practical one: is such a thing even possible, and, if so, what level of disentanglement and re-definition is needed to achieve purity so as to affect meaningful social change?

Authenticity

At the most basic philosophical level, authenticity is about determining realness: a thing is what it purports to be, a person is who they say they are. But why would we need to know that, and how would we go about knowing it? Ironically, the knowledge of authenticity appears to have been caused by the appearance of fakes. As Victor Turner pointed out in the 1980s, you would not know that there was a concept of real if you had not encountered a fake at some point. ⁵ This holds true in worship as well, as countless blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, magazines, articles and books dedicate large sections of their material to establishing that the majority of those who worship are faking it.

This line of thinking leads to another level of authentic understanding: that of the self. How do you know you are real? Or, better yet, how do you know what real is in relation to yourself; who are you? Could you not actually be you, but someone else instead? Applied to sacred music, how do you know that you are not faking your worship? This kind of question gestures at another core aspect of worship theology, which is Christian identity: who are you in relation to religion? How does one find oneself in worship, through encounter with God and God’s people? What about the affective nature of music in this dance of identity and integrity?

This, in turn, leads to another key aspect of authenticity: performance – how you act in a given situation. This can be understood in many ways, but two are the most helpful here: first, as adhering to the expectations of the event or context; and second, as adhering to the convictions you hold about yourself. Given that music is first and foremost an activity, it follows that the manner of performance becomes a first point of contact with authenticity. As Peter Kivy, Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor have noted, along with a host of others, the performance of authenticity is of utmost importance for musical quality – and for social capital. ⁶

Monique Ingalls has called attention to this practice in musical worship, in what she calls ‘authenticating gestures’, such as facial expressions and physical postures, ⁷ and Marcell Steuernagel has extended the topic of performance to encompass all of musical worship. ⁸ Joshua Busman has articulated some of the particular ways that musical worship must be performed in order to count as authentic, such as the level of proficiency (not professional but not unlearned: a studied amateurism), ⁹ and he and Adam Perez have offered suggestions for how to understand the reception of such performances by congregations. ¹⁰

It is at the intersection of these two values that govern authentic performance in musical worship that we find much debate on the subject: supposing an eventual conflict between the expectations of the context (community, denomination, etc.) and the sense of personal values (or integrity), which is to be afforded more weight? Because musical excellence in most contemporary worship spaces is evaluated not on technical proficiency but rather on a perceived demonstration of authenticity, as Busman has pointed out, ¹¹ the debate between authenticity to the expectations of the context (be they theological, ethical, social, or what have you) and the integrity of the individual is one of paramount importance. In this light, charges of ‘faking it’ could imply either that the worshipper is not really being honest about their beliefs and convictions, or that they are not being faithful to those beliefs and convictions.

Disentangling this web of ‘authenticities’, to borrow Peter Kivy’s term, will be aided by taking a look at the historical development of the idea. It will help us see how the idea of authenticity is not a stand-alone concept.

Regina Bendix has pointed out that authenticity as a value emerged with the middle class in Europe and has been intimately tied to concepts such as ethnicity and race ever since. ¹² In this sense, authenticity means fidelity to the values and performative markers of a society, class, culture or community. Musically, the nascent ideal of authenticity interlocked with Arthur Schopenhauer’s claims about ‘real music’, by which he apparently meant wordless music of a sufficient character for contemplation. Everything else was ‘noise’ – including folk songs, opera, anthems and chorales. ¹³

The racial and ethnic connection from early modernity is paralleled in musical worship, as the majority of those obsessed with authenticity in North America identify as ‘white’. As Gerardo Martí has pointed out, black worship leaders are perceived as more ‘authentic’ than white ones by many white worshippers. ¹⁴ Marissa Glynias Moore picks this up and extends it into the realm of vocal timbre, arguing that sounding ‘black’ is a critically important value for many worshippers – who lament their lack of this identifier. ¹⁵

Paralleling the dilemma posed by Schopenhauer’s claims about real music, the conflicts over musical style for worship have argued about the legitimacy of style for worship. Some, citing the criterion of authenticity, have argued that older musical forms are pretentious and elitist distractions from the reality of personal faith and encounter with Jesus, while others, such as Robert Shaw and Paul Westermeyer, have suggested that ‘electronic church’ music is worse than pornography – the insinuation being that it is a sensationalized and ultimately dishonest imitation of the real thing. ¹⁶

Each of these impulses is at once a reflection of and impetus for what is commonly known as the ethics of authenticity. Put simply, the ethics of authenticity claims that the best thing you can do is to be yourself; that an individual is either evolutionarily unique or created uniquely, and that therefore your highest personal goal should be to realize yourself and live in accordance with your personal values. ¹⁷

By now, you should all be starting to sense that the system I have been describing does not quite work; that being authentic does not guarantee your goodness, and that really worshipping does not assure your formation.

Purity as the telos of authenticity

Purity has a long history in Abrahamic religions, and the concept of purity and holiness has been a prime mover in ritual studies since at least the late eighteenth century, with most religions placing it at the heart of their worship. Indeed, the Bible is full of references to purity and holiness: from the Deuteronomistic code and Mosaic law to the emergent Jewish faith as they returned from exile, and into the Christian testament, we are told again and again how important it is not to defile God’s presence with the impurity of our sin.

Of course, a careful reading of these texts reveals that there is a great variety of what is both meant and at stake for observing purity. As many have observed, ritual purity was a means of giving order to chaos, ¹⁸ and many of the prohibitions on eating certain foods or buying certain materials served to ensure that the wealth of the community was not exploited by an enemy or uncaring overlord.

But what does purity mean, exactly?

In modern (but not necessarily biblical) parlance, it means that something is clean and without any other materials. Literally, of singular origin. The OED first defines ‘pure’ as ‘Not mixed or adulterated; clean, clear, refined; spec. (a) not mixed with any other substance or material.’ Interestingly, the first and oldest definition of ‘purity’ is: ‘The state or quality of being morally or spiritually pure; sinlessness; freedom from ritual pollution; ceremonial cleanness; innocence; chastity.’

But this flies in the face of everything we know from science. Indeed, we know of no element that is self-causing and unpolluted. Andreas Bendlin sums it up well: ‘Purity and pollution are not given or natural physical or mental states. They must be understood as two categories constructed in relation to religious and social conventions.’ ¹⁹ Everything comes from something. Lines of purity such as race or politics are conventional at best.

Still, it’s easy to see the connection. An unmixed, unadulterated thing is also the way we conceive of moral and spiritual purity, revealing a deep origin of theological reflection; that, at one time, before the fall, everything was unmixed, segregated, insular. But then came the fall: sin, impurity, corruption. Everything since has borne the stains of impurity, of defilement. The ceaseless quest of reformers from time immemorial has been to recover the pure essence of primordial life. The singularity.

It does not take much squinting to see how this can have devastating and catastrophic consequences. Fundamentalist Christians reject all authority but their own interpretation of the Bible to return to the ‘pure’ truth, and Nazi planners in the middle of the twentieth century sought to stamp out all ‘degenerates’ to recover a ‘pure’ Arianism. We have seen no end to the destruction that purity demands: ethnic cleansing, genocides, wars, famines, ecological collapse.

It is not just the fanatics who embrace purity as a concept. Secular society is equally enchanted by the alure of the pure, the clean and the virtuous. In fact, it is one of the most popular marketing strategies for foodstuffs and health and beauty care products. ²⁰ Beyond marketing, purity is an important concept for building an identity. Consider the different ways in which belief in some form of purity configures ideas about race, as a biological distinction that has a clear implication for how we attempt to order our societies. ²¹ Or, consider the implications of ideas about purity regarding culture, as that which affords differentiating qualities of dress, speech, behaviour and meaning making. How much do we hold an ideal about a ‘pure’ form of our culture, which is bound up with myriad intersecting ideals and values? ²²

Or even ideology, in the sense that, on the one hand, the soundest ideas are those which contain the fewest ingredients, and, on the other, as that which is most faithful to the original idea. Or, ritual purity, which in its various forms continues to occupy a position of importance in many congregations, inasmuch as we perform the function of our activities with utmost precision and fidelity to the form and pattern. And finally, consider the idea of spiritual purity, where we aspire to both a holy and sanctified existence while also accepting that God’s being is pure, undefiled and alone.

Purity as impediment to social action

Despite the word itself getting a lot of bad press in the last few decades due to the fallout of toxic ‘purity culture’ in the 1990s in North America, with its twisted views of human sexuality, purity has seen something of a renaissance for its value in musical worship. A simple search on your favourite internet browser for ‘pure worship’ will likely turn up more than a million results, ranging from YouTube videos with hundreds of thousands of views to blog posts to books. But, beyond a simple Google search to determine ubiquity, what do these web entries say about purity?

As it turns out, the concept of purity is often tied to ideas about relational intimacy with God in these popular sources. For instance, celebrity worship leader Jeff Deyo, former lead singer of foundational modern worship band Sonicflood, recently published a book entitled Awakening Pure Worship. ²³ In it he argues that pure worship is being fully, authentically, focused on God’s self and living a life of intimacy with God through prayer, worship and scripture reading. All well and good. But he couples this life of devoted intimacy with a commitment to not being distracted by the ‘good work of serving the poor’. ²⁴ Thus, for many worshippers in North America, intimacy with God is the essence of pure worship, and needs to be prioritized singularly.

The problem with this interpretation, as social theorist Alexis Shotwell explains, is that the concept of purity becomes one of the biggest impediments to social action. Ironically, it is belief in purity as a concept or platonic ideal that prevents us from acting for the betterment of society and those around us; purity prevents our acting towards a compromised good, as Shotwell argues:

[T]here is no primordial state we might wish to get back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is not a preracial state we could access, erasing histories of slavery, forced labor on railroads, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothing we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webs of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there? ²⁵

She goes on to ‘champion the usefulness of thinking about complicity and compromise as a starting point for action’. By recognizing that our situatedness means that we are already compromised and make mistakes, she suggests that knowing we cannot let our impurity prevent us from acting on behalf of others makes us better positioned to act well.

Let’s consider Shotwell’s proposition from the perspective I just outlined. How might we square the circle of theological purity with the recognition of compromise she suggests?

First, we might recognize that our infatuation with authenticity is enmeshed with our belief in a pure something – in this case, a pure us. That pure us is somehow disaffected by the world’s pollution, and by discovering our true selves in worship we might become the sort of people who will escape the judgement to come. This notion directly opposes the grace that Christians claim as central to the faith, and, as the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, acceptance of grace costs us our piety. I might paraphrase and say our purity. This recognition is what enables action on behalf of the others, those who give us our identity and enable the authenticity we seek.

We can see that authenticity and ‘purity’ are mutually supporting, but that each can become distractions to the pursuit of good, positive social change – and, I might add, religion. My suggestion is not to seek music that is fake, inauthentic, boring and disingenuous, but rather to realize that authenticity is not the defining criterion of goodness, and that its interconnectedness with insular ideas about purity as that which is untarnished or undefiled by the pervasiveness of evil serves to orient our activities in the wrong direction.