[MUSIC] The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and Eurythmics' "Missionary Man"
The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and the Eurythmics' "Missionary Man" are two of the best religious songs that I can think of.
(Here is a link to the original "Missionary Man" video, the one with all the stop-motion animation.)
"Sympathy for the Devil" was inspired by Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov's brilliant The Master and Margarita, a novel that explores the consequences of a visit, by an urbane and smoothly-spoken Satan with its entourage, to Moscow in the late 1930s and the effect that this has on the lives and faiths and choices of others. For this samba-grooved song, Jagger chose to sing in the voice of Satan.
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
The narrator goes on to say that "I stuck around St. Petersburg/When I saw it was a time for a change/Killed the czar and his ministers/Anastasia screamed in vain," that he "[h]eld a general's rank/When the blitzkrieg raged/And the bodies stank," et cetera. But then, after this litany of atrocities, Satan places the blame for all these sins on the song's listeners.
I shouted out,
Who killed the kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me.
Elsewhere and almost two decades later, "Missionary Man," the first single off of the Eurythmics' otherwise disappointing Revenge album, was a very good rock song--the Eurythmics' last Top 20 hit in the United States--that told a story at least superficially concerned with the troubles of believing too much in religious authorities, especially individual ones. Everyone is a sinner, the song begins.
Well I was born an original sinner.
I was borne from original sin.
And if I had a dollar bill
For all the things I've done
There'd be a mountain of money
Piled up to my chin...
But, the singer continues, mother warned us all to watch out for the missionary man.
Well the missionary man
He's got God on his side.
He's got the saints and apostles
Backin' up from behind.
Black eyed looks from those Bible books.
He's a man with a mission
Got a serious mind.
There was a woman in the jungle
And a monkey on a tree.
The missionary man he was followin' me.
He said "stop what you're doing."
"Get down upon your knees."
"I've got a message for you that you better believe."
It's probably correct to think that the missionary man chasing the singer wants to dominate the singer in modes other than the religious.
What these songs tell me, taken both individually and in combination, is the need for anyone who's religious, anyone's who's trying to engage with the beyond (whatever that is, whether that is) to engage it on their own terms, fully understanding what they're doing. Religious belief, I'm inclined to think, can't be simply assumed, can't be simply inherited, if it's to mean something. Rather, it has to be something adopted as a consequence fo one's explicit choice, something one's constantly engaged with, something that one tests out for signs of excessive credulity and other sorts of sloppiness. If it isn't examined, what's the good of it?
These are my prejudices, mind, and how I'd practice religion if I was to practice. (I don't, because, among other things, I've serious problems with the concept of original sin, but that's peripheral to the thrust of this post.) What think--and, perhaps--do you?
Click to view(Here is a link to the original "Missionary Man" video, the one with all the stop-motion animation.)
"Sympathy for the Devil" was inspired by Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov's brilliant The Master and Margarita, a novel that explores the consequences of a visit, by an urbane and smoothly-spoken Satan with its entourage, to Moscow in the late 1930s and the effect that this has on the lives and faiths and choices of others. For this samba-grooved song, Jagger chose to sing in the voice of Satan.
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
The narrator goes on to say that "I stuck around St. Petersburg/When I saw it was a time for a change/Killed the czar and his ministers/Anastasia screamed in vain," that he "[h]eld a general's rank/When the blitzkrieg raged/And the bodies stank," et cetera. But then, after this litany of atrocities, Satan places the blame for all these sins on the song's listeners.
I shouted out,
Who killed the kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me.
Elsewhere and almost two decades later, "Missionary Man," the first single off of the Eurythmics' otherwise disappointing Revenge album, was a very good rock song--the Eurythmics' last Top 20 hit in the United States--that told a story at least superficially concerned with the troubles of believing too much in religious authorities, especially individual ones. Everyone is a sinner, the song begins.
Well I was born an original sinner.
I was borne from original sin.
And if I had a dollar bill
For all the things I've done
There'd be a mountain of money
Piled up to my chin...
But, the singer continues, mother warned us all to watch out for the missionary man.
Well the missionary man
He's got God on his side.
He's got the saints and apostles
Backin' up from behind.
Black eyed looks from those Bible books.
He's a man with a mission
Got a serious mind.
There was a woman in the jungle
And a monkey on a tree.
The missionary man he was followin' me.
He said "stop what you're doing."
"Get down upon your knees."
"I've got a message for you that you better believe."
It's probably correct to think that the missionary man chasing the singer wants to dominate the singer in modes other than the religious.
What these songs tell me, taken both individually and in combination, is the need for anyone who's religious, anyone's who's trying to engage with the beyond (whatever that is, whether that is) to engage it on their own terms, fully understanding what they're doing. Religious belief, I'm inclined to think, can't be simply assumed, can't be simply inherited, if it's to mean something. Rather, it has to be something adopted as a consequence fo one's explicit choice, something one's constantly engaged with, something that one tests out for signs of excessive credulity and other sorts of sloppiness. If it isn't examined, what's the good of it?
These are my prejudices, mind, and how I'd practice religion if I was to practice. (I don't, because, among other things, I've serious problems with the concept of original sin, but that's peripheral to the thrust of this post.) What think--and, perhaps--do you?