Synergeo: Fear and Trembling: Finding God in the Music of the Millennials
Popular music is a medium that often poignantly expresses shared experiences of the next generation and both speaks on behalf of young people and to them. Bands that find a groundswell audience have histories of capturing the spiritual moods around them. Nirvana did this in the Gen X era via the new punk, producing what Rolling Stones calls “heart-shaped noise” [2] that expresses the real angst and distress of their day and their frustration with the authority associated with religion. The song, “Come as you are” is riveting with its ironic grunge echo of Matthew 11:28, capturing the deep prophetic despair of the songwriter at the young age of twenty-five in the context of his time.[3] U2, with their more explicit engagement with Christianity, also spoke for Gen X, presenting both alienation from and yearning for Christ. Bono notably wrote an introduction to the Psalms for the Pocket Canon Series and explains the struggle when he writes, “How do you explain a love and logic at the heart of the universe when the world is so out of whack?”[4] He probably sings it better, in the lines of “One”, “Love is a temple, love the higher law/ You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl/ And I can't keep holding on to what you got,/ 'cause all you got is hurt.”[5]
The music of the current generation is no different to Gen X in its amplified lyrical expression of the zeitgeist of the present. Millennials and Gen Z experience the fragility and complexity of contemporary society in disconcerting ways, caught up as they are in the flux of reality in the brave new world. Sobering threats contaminate their trust, and seem to foretell a grim future, such as the reality of climate change, although equally climate change activism has recently become popularized amongst Gen Z. There are the ever new and disturbing realities of the present day, such as the novel coronavirus and the significant impact this has had immediately and symbolically on the lives of millennials and in light of the future they are inheriting. There is a lot to weep over, and rage over. There’s a lot to turn into music in order to get it out.
Gang of Youths is a current indie band of twentysomethings from Sydney with a fascinating relation to evangelical Christianity. The collective was born while at youth group in North Sydney’s Hillsong Church. David Le’aupepe, lead singer and songwriter, says of his own beliefs,
Personally, I don’t have any religious affiliations anymore – those are ties I cut some time ago. Within conversations about faith, however, I still align myself with Jesus. I’m just not a great poster-boy for it ...[6]
Le’aupepe and Gang of Youths embody this millennial zeitgeist in a prescient way. The members of the band, while initially enthusiastic about the distinctives of Christian faith at Hillsong, always possessed a sense of being outside, with Le’aupepe describing himself as a “loner” and opening up about his dark moments.[7] For Le’aupepe, a young church marriage that broke down, a loved one with a terminal illness, and the later tragic loss of his father transported him to rock bottom, threatening his life, his faith and his sense of self in a life-changing way. Yet Le’aupepe explains,
People always expect us to be ashamed of our heritage, growing up in church … But I got to play music and I met my best friends. I’m not ashamed at all.[8]
At the same time, Le’aupepe balances this gratitude with “a healthy suspicion of institutions” and describes his spiritual journey outside institutional religion as “a deep desire to learn shit, to find out what is absolute spirit, and how to navigate that through the lens of art.”[9]
The spiritual mood is conflicted for many millennials and Gen Z who might be inspired by Jesus but resist the authority associated with the institution of the church. As Bono explains,
words and music did for me what solid, even rigorous, religious argument could never do, they introduced me to God, not belief in God, more an experiential sense of GOD.”[10]
Millennials might want God but feel stifled by the church. They might want meaning and spirituality, but they want it to reflect the deep longings that they didn’t hear sufficiently addressed on a Sunday. They might want to stay in the conversation with Christian spirituality but not within what some perceive as tired conventions and lack of relevance to the very real trauma in the world. It was from this place that much of Gang of Youths’ lyrical source material found its roots. And it’s this music that invites us to sit in the desert with them and listen.
Most millennials can reference times in which their faith has become destabilized, and when doubt transforms into existential crisis. In my attempt to sit with Le’aupepe compassionately in his faith journey, I (Sam) want to narrate my own experience. I was nineteen years old, in a small group discussing issues of faith and scripture, and one question was all it took to have an explosive impact on my confidence that night. One of my core foundation blocks was rocked and it took a long time for me to find that effortless ground of comfortable faith again. When I lost hold of what was an important frame of reference, the universe instantly felt colder and less knowable, less safe, and I felt less incubated by a benign divine presence. It was terrifying. The experience is something like a grieving process as I came to terms with the fact that the structures that I had built in my mind to make sense of this world no longer held up. I felt lost. For Le’aupepe, the traumatic experience of illness, divorce, mental illness, and addiction created circumstances that demolished further the already unsteady ground of his relation to the church. And yet, within his poetic lyricism, Le’aupepe pursues salvation, and expresses it in a kind of leap of faith through the medium of his music.
In the Gang of Youths’ song “Fear and Trembling,” released in 2017 in the album, Go Farther in Lightness, Le’aupepe searches for this lost ground of faith. In the song, “Fear and Trembling” he wrestles with the angel alongside the Danish theologian, Søren Kierkegaard. Le’aupepe, the songwriter, references Kierkegaard both in the title and in the body of the song. The title invokes Philippians 2:12 “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” The line, “if faith is to lose the mind to win God, then I guess I got nothing to prove,” riffs off quotes from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death.[11]
'Coz we were raised where the pastors
They danced in the aisles
With a moshpit up front full of youths
So if faith is to lose
The mind to win God
Then I guess I got nothing to prove.[12]
Kierkegaard, like Le’aupepe, experienced a complex relationship with the established Church.[13] Kierkegaard’s own time and place is Copenhagen in the backdrop of the 1800s and he is the troubled millennial of his own day. Kierkegaard notoriously critiques the values of the state church, and searches in an almost constant state of existential angst and loneliness for spiritual truth. He is pilloried in the newspaper, the Corsair, for his trouble.[14] The result of his seclusion is a remarkable catalogue of theological writings often under nom de plumes. The epiphanic moment for Kierkegaard is the situation of faith beyond religion. Faith is the existential leap beyond laws, statutes, expectations, traditions, and dogma. Kierkegaard recuses himself from public, religious, and domestic life in order to feel everything of the suffering and despair of human existence that for him mirrors Abraham’s journey into “absolute” belief, the paradoxical leap into “absolute relation to the absolute.”[15] In this way, Kierkegaard is not unlike Le’aupepe, in that the search for truth requires a leap into the immediacy of the existential moment, to look truth in the eye, and to feel God in the everything, which for the songwriter is via music. Bono, too has his own thoughts on faith and compares it to music:
… explaining faith is impossible … Vision over visibility … Instinct over intellect … A songwriter plays a chord with the faith that he will hear the next one in his head.[16]
Alongside anxiety about the existential dilemma of faith, millennials often report anger. Le’aupepe’s anger boils over in “Fear and Trembling” in the line “I feel everything/ Yeah I feel it all/ And I feel it in my bones and in my f***** skull.”[17] In my own faith crisis, anger was an emotion that arose too. I was frustrated about how unprepared I was to deal with this experience of destabilization. I was furious about how simple my faith had been allowed to remain. So much time and resource had been given but how little these things had held the reality of my experiences. Bono also writes about his “young man’s anger” at Christianity in Ireland:
In the ‘70s the story was ‘the Troubles’ and the Troubles came through the stained glass; with rocks thrown more in mischief than in anger, but the message was the same; the country was to be divided along sectarian lines. I had a foot in both camps, so my Goliath became religion itself; I began to see religion as the perversion of faith.[18]
In my own experience, I was able to form new structures that helped me to give space to my questions and still participate in Christian community. I learned how to sit with my questions with honesty and with compassion for self and others. I developed a new respect for church leaders who led with this kind of courage and humility and didn’t shy away from their limitations nor the hard questions.
Church communities bring people together for projects, support, sharing of ideas, and for the strong group identity, but most of all, for the way in which the Spirit mediates in and through the community. For the growing number of millennials who journey outside of the Christian “scene” there is no recognized group to really take you in and it can be lonely. For me, I was left to my own devices listening to podcasts, reading books and writing music, yearning for something like church that isn’t church. Le’aupepe describes it as, “a kind of existential loneliness that struts and frets a stage.”[19] I wanted to be known and explore my beliefs openly, while not having any obligation to adhere to things that would make me a “faker and a fraud.”[20] Friends at the time talked about not wanting to pray or sing or engage with Scripture in the same thin way, or wanting to distance themselves from labels that would put them in a religious box. But I did want community and I did want to talk about faith. I wanted to have a crew, a home base, and the warm heart of a compassionate community. But I didn’t want to have to jump through the hoops of religious conviction in order to be accepted.
Some of my friends just bit the bullet and suppressed it all so that they could still belong. But others like Le’aupepe and Kierkegaard, seem to need to live for a time on the outside, and Kierkegaard shows us that this spiritual journey is no less real or true. It’s comforting for those who have ever walked the lonely path outside the church community to know that there are others who have walked this way and followed Jacob’s route. It’s a well-worn path. It’s also a path that can lead back around to the Ecclesia writ large, the community of souls who together find peace in Christ. The Church is not homogenous and monochrome, it is not one shape or one size or one fit. There are a multitude of spaces and welcomes there, for all kinds of travellers.
The leap of faith that occurs after wrestling with angels is a place of transcendence. At this point in my own story, I stopped living my faith vicariously, hanging on to the coattails of religious leaders, and my faith became my own. It is a marker in a spiritual journey that is new and free and exhilarating and terrifying at times. This is because the universe used to be simple and reliable in terms of meaning. And the vista that can hold real questions and yet offers layer upon layer of wisdom and depth of understanding of God can feel foreign and vast. The responsibility to work out our salvation in fear and trembling becomes even more vital as Paul writes in Philippians 2:12. But in my experience, this leap of faith opened my heart and mind to others, and offered a new depth of compassion and comprehension of grace, and most importantly, I started to see God in places I never thought God would be, in music, in communities, in tradition and in the future, and even in the midst of a chaotic world. And that’s beautiful.
And I still care about the present
And the weight of circumstance
To the muckraking of cowards
And a symphony of sass
While I have questions of mortality
The clear and present vast
They just yell the words "pretentious"
"With no clarity or class"
So light 'em up
Their shadows in my blood
"Oh, a weary heart", they say
"It shatters it all"
So light 'em up[21]
Sam Burrows is a lecturer at Laidlaw College in the School of Education where he lectures in a mixture of theology and education based papers. Sam has many years of teaching experience including experience as a deputy principal and is currently completing his Master of Theology at Laidlaw College.
Yael Klangwisan is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Laidlaw College and a Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies for Laidlaw Graduate School. She is the author of Jouissance: A Cixousian Encounter with the Song of Songs (Sheffield Phoenix, 2015). Her creative writing and poetry is published in the journals Meniscus, The French Literary Review, Hecate, Stimulus and Tarot.
[1] Gang of Youths, “Fear and Trembling”, Go Farther in Lightness (Mosey Recordings, 2017).
[2] David Fricke, “Heart-shaped noise and the music and the legacy of Kurt Cobain,” Rolling Stone Magazine (June 2, 1994). https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/heart-shaped-noise-the-music-and-the-legacy-of-kurt-cobain-56845/
[3] Kurt Cobain, “Come as You Are”, Nevermind, (DGC Records, 1992).
[4] Bono, “Introduction”, The Book of the Psalms (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999) kindle edn.
[5] U2, “One,” Achtung Baby, (Island, 1992, track 3).
[6] David James Young, “Gang Of Youths’ David Le’aupepe Talks Jesus, Blackface, New Music & Life As A Lonely Millennial,” Music Feeds (March 8, 2016). https://musicfeeds.com.au/features/gang-youths-david-leaupepe-talks-jesus-blackface-new-music-life-lonely-millenial/#YgsVWw1L3wABOUOD.99
[7] Young, “Jesus, Blackface and New Music”.
[8] David Fricke, “ How Gang of Youths are living their dream of being the next U2,” Rolling Stone (April 22, 2018): https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-gang-of-youths-are-living-their-dream-of-being-the-next-u2-627939/
[9] Fricke, “How Gang of Youths are living their dream.”
[10] Bono, Psalms.
[11] Travis M. Andrews, “Meet Gang of Youths, the hell-raising rock band whose songs grapple with God,” Washington Post (Dec 22, 2018): https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/from-hillsong-to-barrooms-gang-of-youths-search-for-god-through-hell-raising-rock-and-roll/2018/12/20/2ede3dc6-ff0a-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html; Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Penguin, 2004), kindle edn.
[12] Gang of Youths, “Fear and Trembling.”
[13] Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
[14] Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
[15] Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
[16] Bono, Psalms.
[17] Gang of Youths, “Fear and Trembling.”
[18] Bono, Psalms.
[19] Gang of Youths, “Fear and Trembling.”
[20] Gang of Youths, “Fear and Trembling.”
[21] Gang of Youths, “Fear and Trembling.”