Derek Webb's Not So Subtle Musings

I just received the most recent Relevant magazine, which I usually thumb through in about five minutes. But this month it featured an interview with Derek Webb - former band member of Caedmon's Call who has struck out on his own - and his interview has stuck with me.

I've decided to include a great majority of the article because I think it is a tremendously important read, largely because of how bluntly Webb puts many things. I specifically enjoyed reading his thoughts about Christian art and Christian politics - two subjects Webb and I see eye-to-eye on. He is not subtle, and that's what I appreciate about him.

There's a number of quotes that may jump out at you. They should; there is some challenging and controversial stuff in here.

Wes


Relevant Magazine's Interview with Derek Webb:

Generally, it’s seen as a bad thing if people walk out halfway through a concert. But for Derek Webb, a strong reaction was exactly what he was looking for. Even if it wasn’t the most supportive one.

In the fall 2005, Webb went on a tour of colleges to introduce fans to songs from his then-upcoming album, Mockingbird. During a decade as a member of the popular Christian folk band Caedmon’s Call, Webb built a strong following and was able to sell tickets anywhere he played. Then, at an otherwise unmemorable stop along the tour – Webb says he doesn’t even remember where it was – part of his audience walked out.

He’d just finished playing “A King & A Kingdom,” a song about allegiance. When it came time for the second verse, he sang it like he had every other night on the tour:

“There are two great lies that I’ve heard:
‘The day you eat of the fruit of that tree, you will not surely die’
And that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class Republican
And if you wanna be saved you have to learn to be like Him”

No one can know for sure, but that’s probably when he lost the crowd. A full three rows had left when the song was done …

Webb has become a thorn in the side of many in the Church and a voice of hope for others. He is both polarizing and unifying. Love him or hate him, Derek Webb is the voice of a new direction.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing for Webb’s critics is that he was once one of their own. He played at their churches, sang on their albums and graced the cover of their magazines. Now he’s their disease, and he’s criticizing them with a bluntness that’s rarely seen in the Christian music industry …

His sophomore album, 2004’s I See Things Upside Down, was praised for its experimental instrumentation and brash lyrics but was all but ignored by Christian radio. Webb knows how the business works, though, and says he couldn’t care less about being on Christian radio.

“We have a radio genre that is, on the whole, pretty uninteresting and pretty bland artistically,” he says. “Radio is the gatekeeper. If you can’t get through radio, you are not going to get your big audience that you want to hear your great message or whatever it is. So you make very slow, gradual compromises to the sound and content of your music in order to get it through the passage gatekeepers, and then you are done because what you gave up to get there is all you had. The progress just isn’t worth it.”

His problems with the Christian music scene aren’t just artistic; they’re spiritual.

“Christian artists don’t seem to be focused anymore on making great art,” he says. “That’s our main problem. It doesn’t matter what we are talking about if our art is no good. A lot of the songs I have heard on Christian radio are just outright misrepresentations of the character of God. Don’t let your local Christian bookstore do your thinking for you and believe that everything they have there for sale is good and spiritually beneficial to you. If anything, we have unfortunately proven that the Church is identified with really poor art” …

Back to the people who walked out of the show. What Webb has a hard time understanding is not why they left, but why they didn’t leave sooner. Earlier in his set, he’d played songs with the same theme – idolatry that limits our relationship with God. He’d played “Wedding Dress,” a song from She Must and Shall Go Free, which calls its collective listener a whore. The audience didn’t move. Then he played “A King & A Kingdom,” a song loosely about politics, and the audience bolted.

“Politics is too specific an idol for some people,” he says.

The fact that people walked out of “A King & A Kingdom” only encourages Webb of the relevance of his message. He believes that politics and patriotism have become an idol for many Christians and that some have pledged their primary allegiance to the kingdom of America instead of the kingdom of God.

“It’s not saying not to have national pride,” Webb says. “It’s saying that there’s an allegiance that trumps all of that. Politics is a broken system, especially a two-party system. It’s really hard. I think there is work to be done. I feel like there is kingdom-building to be done in that arena, but it is not ideal” …

His problem with Christian politics is the assumption that the Republican party is “the Christian party.”

“I feel like the way that moral issues have been co-opted by a political party for nothing else but to develop a constituency whose votes they can depend on is really dangerous,” he says. “I just want to get in that I feel like it is nearly impossible to walk a party line – especially in a two-party system – and follow Jesus.”

The only song from Mockingbird that has received more heat than “A King & A Kingdom” is possibly “Rich Young Ruler,” in which Webb sings about giving things up to follow Jesus. In the second verse he sings, “Come on and follow me / But sell your house, sell your SUV … / and give it to the poor.”

Many listeners immediately become defensive. Not everyone is called to live among the poor, they claim. Saying that Christians shouldn’t have SUV’s and big houses is pure legalism, right?

To ask those questions, Webb says, is to miss the point. “Rich Young Ruler’ is not about wealth, but it is a paraphrase of a story,” he says, noting that the title of the song should have been a hint. “It’s about idolatry. When you apply the story of the rich young man to the Western Church, the story still works. We as a group are a people who have shown a lot of signs of being unwilling to give up our wealth in order to follow Jesus. I think one key symptom of that is the situation in Africa.”

He has now moved to the topic closest to his heart.

“It is the greatest concentration of the world’s poorest people, and in light of the second greatest commandment to love our neighbor, these people are right before our faces,” he says. “They are intimately linked to our economy. We can set up Coca-Cola over there, but we can’t send life-saving drugs? These people are part of our way of life” …

“If we don’t [do more to help Africa], we are going to find ourselves in the West at odds with orphans of those whose aid we did not come to,” he says. “It would be less expensive to care for them now than it will be 10 years from now to have made enemies of them and have to go to war with them. We can be preemptive about peace as much as our nation is talking about our preemption about war. Africa is a perfect example of how you do that. How do you fight for peace? How do you represent the Prince of Peace in our culture? You think ahead. You plan ahead. You get creative” …

That said, Webb doesn’t believe that getting involved in social justice issues is an absolute requirement of faith. “I’ve heard too many of my brothers and sisters who also have a heart for Africa say, ‘God is going to judge us based on how we respond to the emergency in Africa.’ But I believe that’s an outright lie,” he says. “I’m not interested in spiritually manipulating anyone. God has already judged and punished Jesus for the fact that we don’t love people well. That’s very good news, but it also calls us to be about the Lord’s business, which right now I believe is in Africa.”

[These excerpts are from “Derek Webb: The Heart, Mind and Politics of the New Church” by Tyler Clark. Relevant Magazine. Issue 20, May-June, 2006. Pgs. 54-60]