"Awesome God" Unites Red and Blue States?
Yale has created a committee to review religion in campus life. Should Battell Chapel be used for both religious and secular purposes? Should the chaplain refer to God at university functions?
Christopher Ashley wonders about some of the questions in the Yale Daily News. Where did all this talk of "Awesome God" come from, and how did it penetrate the hallowed walls of Yale? You may be surprised by the answer.
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If you were listening closely at this year's Freshman Assembly, you may have heard three different people speaking at once during University Chaplain Jerry Streets's opening prayer. Obviously, there was Streets himself, who began with the words "Awesome God" instead of his customary "Holy God". But behind that choice was Illinois U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama, who, just weeks before, had brought the Democratic National Convention to its feet by declaring "We worship an Awesome God in the blue states." He, in turn, was drawing on the late Christian singer-songwriter Rich Mullins, whose best-known work is a thunderous modern hymn called "Awesome God."
Those two little words made some strange bedfellows. Obama is one of the Democratic Party's new leading lights, whereas Streets has been relatively apolitical during his Yale tenure. Mullins' Celtic-tinged folk-rock would feel out of place in Streets' church, the proudly traditional Church of Christ in Yale. Obama's core audience of urban liberal Democrats has little overlap with Mullins' core audience of white evangelicals. But again, a closer listen reveals why these disparate voices could speak in unison from the stage of Woolsey Hall.
The story begins with Mullins' 1987 hymn, which anyone under 40 who has ever attended a white church event has probably heard. Contemporary Christian worship CDs are a constant presence on Billboard's Top 200 album chart, but no song off any of them has ever attained the seeming omnipresence of "Awesome God." This song has even crossed the American church's fearful color line: it gets played in black churches, and Kirk Franklin covered it with his choir. In a country where the most segregated hour of the week is still Sunday morning, the song's crossover between white and black gospel should make anyone who cares about race in America take pause.
Christopher Ashley wonders about some of the questions in the Yale Daily News. Where did all this talk of "Awesome God" come from, and how did it penetrate the hallowed walls of Yale? You may be surprised by the answer.
_____________
If you were listening closely at this year's Freshman Assembly, you may have heard three different people speaking at once during University Chaplain Jerry Streets's opening prayer. Obviously, there was Streets himself, who began with the words "Awesome God" instead of his customary "Holy God". But behind that choice was Illinois U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama, who, just weeks before, had brought the Democratic National Convention to its feet by declaring "We worship an Awesome God in the blue states." He, in turn, was drawing on the late Christian singer-songwriter Rich Mullins, whose best-known work is a thunderous modern hymn called "Awesome God."
Those two little words made some strange bedfellows. Obama is one of the Democratic Party's new leading lights, whereas Streets has been relatively apolitical during his Yale tenure. Mullins' Celtic-tinged folk-rock would feel out of place in Streets' church, the proudly traditional Church of Christ in Yale. Obama's core audience of urban liberal Democrats has little overlap with Mullins' core audience of white evangelicals. But again, a closer listen reveals why these disparate voices could speak in unison from the stage of Woolsey Hall.
The story begins with Mullins' 1987 hymn, which anyone under 40 who has ever attended a white church event has probably heard. Contemporary Christian worship CDs are a constant presence on Billboard's Top 200 album chart, but no song off any of them has ever attained the seeming omnipresence of "Awesome God." This song has even crossed the American church's fearful color line: it gets played in black churches, and Kirk Franklin covered it with his choir. In a country where the most segregated hour of the week is still Sunday morning, the song's crossover between white and black gospel should make anyone who cares about race in America take pause.
posted by hellisotherpeople at 1:04 PM
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