For a while, I went to a church that played this song in their worship music set. I guess it was some better than some of the other songs they sometimes chose, but it’s still not really a good song.
Cringe
The cringe is pretty strong with this one. Almost all of the lyrics are an appeal to emotions, especially if the listener is having a tough time.
The Good
I do want to point out one bit of the lyrics that says something worth saying…
Who would take my cross to Calvary?
Pay the price for all my guilty?
Who would care that much about me?
So, a mention, brief as it might be, of the cross and paying the price for…I’ll go ahead and say “sin”, because the phrasing in the song is awkward. Still, to borrow a phrase from Fighting For The Faith, it’s a gospel nugget, and that’s deserving of a small bit of respect.
The Bad
Almost all the rest of the song could be summed up with a statement like this, “Do you feel bad? Are you not happy with how you are? Then let Jesus come and change your life.”
Let me use some other people’s words to, I hope, explain what this song is really about…
According to sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, most American teenagers believe in something dubbed “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD). Within this MTD “religion,” God is a cosmic therapist and divine butler, ready to help out when needed. He exists but really isn’t a part of our lives. We are supposed to be “good people,” but each person must find what’s right for him or her. Good people will go to heaven, and we shouldn’t be stifled by organized religion where somebody tells us what we should do or what we should believe.
As described by Smith and his team, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism consists of beliefs like these: 1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth." 2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions." 3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about ones self." 4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem." 5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."
Why would I say that My Jesus is all about this concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism?
What does the song make the biggest deal about? The first verse asks if we have heavy burdens, if we’re weary, if we’re feeling empty and feel shame. The second is more of the same, but about broken dreams, wasted years, and wrong turns. To put it another way, and as TGC put it, God is made into your “cosmic therapist”, he’s there to help you solve the problems you have with your life.
And if you feel things like that? Well, here’s me singing a song about my Jesus, and telling you to let my Jesus change your life. Or, to put in Mohler’s words, "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about ones self."
So, why is this a problem?
There is no real gospel in this “Woe is me” message and it’s solution of life change. At best, it’s focusing on the wrong things.
If you look at the sermons in the New Testament, you’ll see a distinct lack of any “Are you feeling bad” appeal; instead, those men preached about sin and about Christ. In Acts 2, Peter preached against the people listening, because they’d had a part in crucifying Christ. He does the same in the sermon recorded in Acts 3. Peter in Acts 10 preaches about believing in Christ and thus receiving forgiveness of sins.
Our problem isn’t bad feelings, wasted years, or broken dreams. Those are at best mere symptoms. Our problem is sin. Our problem is that God is a law giver whose laws we have violated countless times, and he is a judge who has every reason to condemn us because of our countless violations of his law. Our problem isn’t that "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other…”, but that God wants us to be perfect, he expects us to be as perfect as he himself is perfect.
Focusing on our bad feelings, as if they are the important things, is egotistical. We are not the focus of the story, we are not the main players. We are the created beings. Our bad feelings are as nothing compared to the bad reality, the reality that we are sinners, that God would be completely just to condemn all of us.
We don’t need a “cosmic therapist”; we need a rescuer, a savior. We don’t need to be made to feel good, we need to be made clean, to have our sins washed away.
That is the message that is downplayed in this song.
Conclusion
This song is mostly junk food. Even the one good part of it is not worth wading through the rest of it. There’s just so many songs so much better than this bit of junk food.
Austin is a high school student. He’s not a very good student, so he’d hanging his college hopes on his football skills. After he has a falling out with his coach, who refuses to play him, he decides to transfer to another school, hoping to make their team. But things at this new school are not all good, and he becomes the target of some bullies. But some other students come to his help, he gets in with their church youth group, and eventually helps in some way with their big Christmas event to raise some money for a local nursing home.
Cringe
For the first half of the movie, it wasn’t too bad. In the second half, it grew worse, and the Christmas concert was painful.
Acting
Most of the acting was solid. Some of the action during the football games was a bit awkward, such as one “tackle” at about 17 minutes, a tackle which was really little more than the defender giving the running back a push and the running back flopping to the ground.
Interesting Aspects
The story is different from normal, and while I don’t know if that was intentional or not, I’ll assume it was. I really hope it was, because it’s a point of interest for me.
In thinking about the movie, I was trying to determine what Austin’s main conflict was. Was it with the coach? That plays a part, but not much is done with it. Was it with his old girlfriend? Nor really. Was it the bullies? That was too sporadic.
There didn’t really seem to be a central conflict; rather, it was more like a slice-of-life story. And those can be some of my favorite kinds of stories.
If, for example, the story had been about him either getting over his coach’s bad opinion of him, or maybe earning his coach’s respect by changing his attitude, or if it was about him facing the bullies and defeating them in some way, that could well have been a good story, but it would also have been typical, the usual conflict/resolution that of thing.
One example of a good slice-of-life movie that I like, that I even consider among my favorite movies, is from Studio Ghibli, Whisper Of The Heart.
Like Shake Off The World, Whisper Of The Heart is a story following one character as she faces normal problems and challenges, and how she grows and matures over time. It’s not about the main character facing one big problem, such as one big villain or catastrophe or rival. In a way it’s a story that could be seen as a few smaller stories that hold up well together, though that description could make it seem loose-jointed, which it isn’t.
So, on the one hand, I want to give some respect to the writers of Shake Off The World for trying something different in this story. On the other hand, although it’s not all bad, it really does need some work.
Problems
What happened to football: The first half hour of the movie is heavily focused on football, with scenes of players in the locker room, scenes of players practicing, and not a few scenes of game action. The whole reason Austin transfers from one school to another is the hope that he can continue playing. But after the transfer, football completely disappears except for being mentioned a few times in conversations. Austin even seems less interested in football, which is never explained.
The name: I’m still not sure why this movie was called Shake Off The World. I know the Christmas program at the end of called Shake Off The World, but I’m not even sure why it was called that name. Nothing in the musical numbers performed had anything to do with shaking off the world.
Can he do that: I don’t know what the rules are for athletes in North Carolina schools, but it seems odd that Austin can quit one school and go to another, I’d guess in the same town or a very nearby one, and still be eligible to play sports on that new school’s team.
Character development: Let me go back to Whisper of the Heart for a moment. The strength of that movie is in seeing Shizuku’s character development. She starts the movie as a bit immature, though not so badly for her age, with a superior attitude toward some of her classmates and family. Her pride gets taken down a few notches, and her growing friendship and affection for a certain boy in her school who knows that he wants to become a violin maker leads her to want to stop drifting along and find her own skills and passion. By the movie’s end, she’s clearly matured.
On the other hand, Austin either doesn’t really have much character growth, or we aren’t shown it happening. Things happen to him, and he makes some interesting decisions, but he’s still very much the same character at the end as he was at the beginning. His seeming lack of interest in football toward the end of the movie could be considered character development, but it comes out of nowhere, without really any reason or explanation.
Even Austin’s sources of conflict are not given much screen time. His football coach doesn’t like him because he can be argumentative, but we are shown only one very brief incident of him arguing with the coach, and even that isn’t a very intense scene. His relationship with his mother is good from the start. His falling out with his first girlfriend is briefly shown but then nothing more comes of it as she splits from him and then disappears from the movie. Whether we see his story as character development or character reveal, we know almost everything we need to know about him early on, and there is no significant change or important reveal during the rest of the movie.
The season: This movie begins at the time the school year starts, which would have been in August, goes through the high school football season, and ends at a Christmas musical event, so probably some time in December. So, it starts in late summer, goes through the fall, and likely into early winter. Yet the movie looks as if it were all shot in the summer. Perhaps if the movie were set in, let’s say, some parts of Florida or Texas or Arizona, that would be believable, but being set in North Carolina, this is hard to buy into. The weather should have been cooler, there should have been trees turning and leaves falling. And at various times, especially in scenes in the town itself, there should have been Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas signs and decorations on display.
Along with that, there is nothing really Christmas-y about the youth group’s Christmas concert.
Theology: Because church stuff doesn’t really appear until over halfway through the movie, this isn’t a very theology-heavy movie; still, it is there, and it’s…odd.
At about 46:10, we get a small sermon snippet from the pastor of the church Austin has started going to:
I think faith is like a spice rack. A lot of times we have a lot of options. You have the different kind of spices and flavors in the world. We have ginger and basil, oregano and rosemary, sage and parsley and cinnamon. I love cinnamon. All these different kind of spices are available right in front of us, sitting right there on our spice rack. But when we’re cooking, half the time we forget that they’re even there. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we’re good at adding salt and pepper. It’s always the salt and pepper. And like I said, the spices are like faith, and sometimes we forget that we have them and that we can use them. We have variations of faith that we believe in and that we can use in any opportunity. But like the spices on the rack, we forget about them. And when we’re going into a tragedy like a death in the family or some situation that sometimes hard to bear on our own, we forget about the spices that are on the rack.
So, first, dealing with a spice rack simply as flavorings, as someone who does a bit of cooking myself, I’ll just say that I like to use a bit more than just salt and pepper, though those also have their place. So his point about me forgetting about the spice rack is rather lost on me, because I don’t.
Second, it should be noted that this little snippet has no scripture in it to support his idea about faith being like spices, or the idea that we have “variations of faith that we believe in and that we can use in any opportunity”. I can’t recall anything in the Bible about “variations of faith”, though I can be forgetful. Still, with no scripture to support the claim, I’m unclear why I should buy it.
In fact, it seems rather a needless distinction. We Christians have faith in God. What variations of faith can I have, when that faith has one focus?
The movie give us three musical performances from the Christmas program. One, a girl singing Amazing Grace, I’ll not say much about here. Amazing Grace is a solid song. The other two, though, need to be more closely looked at.
The first song is called “Good Morning” by Tiffany and David Spencer, and performed by Tiffany Spencer in this movie.
Perhaps my main problem with this first song is that it’s empty, it’s mostly just fluff and nonsense. It’s saying almost nothing worth hearing. You made it through another day? Well, congratulations, you’re like about 6 billion other people in the world. You told the snow to flee? Maybe that explains why the weather in this movie is so summer-like right before Christmas. If you want to say something worth hearing, instead of some trite “I gave it to the Lord and he said it’s ok”, what about going into what it means to “cast all our cares on him, because he cares of you”, or what God told Paul concerning his thorn in the flesh, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness”, and Paul’s response, “More gladly will I boast in my afflictions, for when I am weak, then I am strong”.
I don’t need some kind of trite “it’s ok” rah-rah message; I need a message with real substance; my soul doesn’t need cotton candy, but food with real spiritual nutrition to it. This song is just cotton candy, no substance at all.
The second song in question is “I’m On Top Of The World”, written and performed by Kendrix Singletary, and it is even worse.
If Spencer’s song says nothing, Singletary’s song says less than nothing. It’s basically just him going on about how good he feels and nothing is going to make him feel bad, keep your negativity to yourself, and somehow (for what I guess is a Christian song in a Christian movie) your drama is messing with my chi, and right now there’s nothing wrong with me. There is nothing Christian at all about this song.
There is nothing particularly Christian about feeling good. It’s not that feeling good is wrong, but stop pretending that Christianity is about feeling good, about being “on top of the world”, about not having problems because you pushed them all on to God. If you read the Bible, can you really say that any of the people written about in the Bible felt good all the time? If you read the Psalms, do you think the psalm writers always felt good?
There is a place for bad feelings. “Godly sorrow leads to repentance”, and that is a good thing, because there is always something wrong with us, we are sinners who have broken God’s laws countless times. “You are blessed when men revile you, persecute you, and speaking evil against you falsely, for my (Jesus’) sake.” “Those who endure to the end will be saved.” Christianity is very down-to-earth, even as it is also about setting our affections on things above and not on things of this earth.
And it would be wise to remember a few more things: we are disciples of Christ crucified, who suffered and bled and died for our sins, who lived as Isaiah described as “a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief”; we follow Christ in the footsteps of the Apostles, who themselves often suffered persecutions and rejections and martyrdoms; we follow Christ in the steps of almost 2000 years of persecution on the church, of people who were burned at stakes, of people who were imprisoned for their beliefs and who suffered in other ways.
It is trite and silly to try to sell Christianity as an “You’ll always feel good” religion. “You will be hated of all men for my (Jesus’) sake”. Even the process of discipleship is described by Jesus himself as being like taking up a cross, a particularly cruel form of execution.
The gospel: You can have a Christian story without a conversion scene, but if you do have a conversion scene in your story, you need to get the gospel right.
So, does this movie have a conversion scene? Really, I’m not sure what it has.
At about an hour and two minutes, there’s another sermon snippet, where the pastor is trying to get people to commit or recommit their lives to God. Austin, who apparently missed the rest of the sermon, walks in from the back of the auditorium and up to the front, then just stands there, and after a moment the church’s youth group, and a few random people, come up and put a hand on him while the preacher keeps speaking.
I’ll give the movie some credit here, because this is the prayer the preacher wants them to pray:
God, I know that I have sinned against you. But Jesus Christ took the punishment that I deserve, so that through faith in, I could be forgiven. I place my trust in you for salvation. Thank you for your wonderful grace and forgiveness, the gift of eternal life.
So, there is some good stuff in this prayer, an admission of sins as well as the truth that Christ suffered and died in our place. A few things make this scene confusing, though.
One is that Austin is the focus of this “conversion scene”, yet in an earlier scene, one where he’s sitting with some friends from his old school telling them he wants them to help with the Christmas program, he says that he “recently joined a church a few months ago”. The phrase “joined a church” usually means someone has become a member of a church, though it’s ambiguous enough to have other meanings, too; perhaps Austin meant that he’d been with the youth group for a while and was fitting in well with them.
But he was also dating the girl from the youth group at this point in the movie, and they were getting close, yet if the church knew that he wasn’t yet converted, and if her family knew that (we don’t meet her family in the movie, but I’ll assume some family is in theory there), shouldn’t they have been warning her about getting close to a boy who didn’t yet share her faith? Shouldn’t they have been warning her about being unequally yoked with an unbeliever?
Ponderings
False advertising: This movie depicts the church’s youth group as some kind of ideal club, where a newcomer like Austin just fits right in without any problems, and even quickly finds a new girl after his old one breaks up with him. This youth group somehow puts on a Christmas program that looks maybe semi-professional, with lights and smoke machines and well-performed music, all while also being high school students who have to go to school and do homework and, presumably, be at football practice. The kids in this youth group are always super-nice to each other, there are no hurt feelings or other dramas. The movie is like a big advertisement saying “Church is perfect and will make your life better”.
Of course, everyone knows that’s not true, especially anyone in a church. So, why try to sell Christianity in that way? Isn’t that false advertising?
But worse than that is the theology in the Christmas program’s music, which is selling Christianity as a “feel good” religion—I’m on top of the world so keep your dramas to yourself ‘cause you’re messing with my chi, don’t be negative, and God’s going to take your problems and tell you it’s all ok. Believe me, when you leave that concert, your problems will still be there, things will happen that will make you feel bad, and these silly and trite songs will not help you one bit; however, know the God’s grace is enough for you, that God’s strength is made perfect in our weaknesses, that biblical truth can be a real help to us.
Shallow: This story is simply shallow. You have problems in school? Join the church’s youth group. Your girl friend/fiance just broke up with you? The church’s youth group has several young ladies waiting to meet you. You got big problems in your life? Break out your faith spice rack and try to find a kind of faith that will work for you. There is no depth to any of this.
Strange extra stuff: What was the point of the fireman’s race? Why was the Christmas program the big climax of the movie, especially since the main character Austin had almost nothing to do with it? Since Austin was a defensive player, why was so much of the football game action focused so much on the offensive, and why was so much football time spent on a bit character whose main contribution to the story is to keep having concussions whenever he’s hit? For that matter, shouldn’t someone encourage that player to stop playing, if he gets concussions that easily? Is it common for a high school junior, which I think Austin was in this story, to propose to his girlfriend, also a high school junior? What was the point of the fish bowl scene? Why bring in completely new people, people not previously in the movie, to perform at the Christmas program?
Conclusion
There are a few things I like about this movie, but several other things I don’t. The big concert-like not-Christmasy-at-all Christmas program is especially distasteful, with its silly and trite message of Christianity as a feel-good-all-the-time religion. I simply can’t give this movie a recommendation.
We can do better. We can do much better. We should do much better.
We can at least leave the unbiblical songs out of what would have otherwise been an acceptable, though still bad, movie.
I know that I’ve called this blog The Cringe, but for this first entry, I want to look at something that is good.
Cringe
I’ve listened to several of NF’s songs, and one word I not use to describe any of them is “cringe”, and that is especially true of this one.
Summary
The rapper NF performs a song about losing his mother to drugs, and about growing up with a mother he barely knows because of her addiction. There is nothing lite or frivolous about this song.
Thoughts
Many people have posted reaction videos while listening to this song, giving their insights and responses to what NF is saying. I’d recommend finding some of them, to see how much this song, and others he’s written and performed, have affected people.
What is the difference between “cringey” and “moving”? Between “painful” is the sense of it being cheesy and “painful” in the sense that it’s too real?
If most Christian musicians or song writers did a song about mother, either a specific mother or mothers in general, it would be much different than NF’s song. To revel a bit in alliteration, it would be soppy, sappy, syrupy, and saccharine. Heaven pays extra special attention when mother prays, or memories of mother draw the wayward back home. Mother would become the ultimate saint, perhaps no longer even a little lower than the angels.
It would be almost unheard of for a Christian music artists to put out a song like NF’s, where the mother is seen as the one in the wrong, where the mother is the one with the big faults, where the mother is the one not there for her children, and where the son is almost in a rage, grieving and accusing, remembering times she should been there but wasn’t, knowing that she will not be there when he has his own children because her addiction finally and ultimately took her from him.
In the world of yippy-skippy Christian music, or of yippy-skippy Christian entertainment in general, this song is an anomaly; rather, NF is an anomaly, and one much needed.
But it’s one thing to say all that, to point to NF and this song as good examples, but what does that mean?
I don’t think it means we need to be grittier. That kind of thing can be just as fake as yippy-skippy. Also, I know there are movies and shows that I like that aren’t “gritty”, some of them are not necessarily all that realistic, but they still say something worth hearing or seeing.
I don’t think it means we need to focus only on the ugly side of life. Again, that can be just as fake. And we know life isn’t all ugly.
I don’t think it means we need to downplay hope.
Let me give an example of something that may show what I’m trying to say.
When we arrive at Good Friday, it’s becoming common to want to rush past that day, to saying something like “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming”. We seem to want to get past the bad stuff, the bad feelings, and get on to the good stuff. We, we church people who at least claim to be Christians, at least those of us in the US or the west in general, don’t want to deal with the bad, the ugly, the terrible. We have, for example, created a theology that says that God wants us to have only good things, that he wants us to be healthy and wealthy, that he wants us to have nice families, that he wants us to feel fulfilled and happy, and all we have to do is say the right words, repeat affirmations to ourselves over and over and over, or do some other magical act to make it all work for us.
If we acknowledge Christian persecution, it is usually “over there”, or maybe when we want to feel like we’re being brave and heroic, we point to some little difficulty in the culture, maybe some cashier at a store who says “Happy Holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas”, and we paint that as if it’s real persecution.
We are silly and trite. It is any wonder that we can only produce silly and trite entertainment, and that we only want to watch and listen to silly and trite entertainment?
So, instead of jumping past Good Friday to get to Easter Sunday, let’s stay for a while in Friday. Let Good Friday have its fair 24 hours of our lives.
Let’s remember that God killed God. God the Father sacrificed God the Son, and God the Son willingly laid down his life as a sacrifice, as the Lamb of God sent to take away the sins of the world.
Let’s have at least one day of solemnity, of sober-mindedness, even of mourning. Let’s set aside this need to jump to the next good time. Let’s remember with sober gratitude the sacrifice of Jesus. If we do that, we may find that Easter will be all the more meaningful.
What makes a lot of Christian entertainment cringey is this need to get past the bad to get to the good. Even if the bad is acknowledged, it’s more to get to some quick hyper-spiritual answer, or teach some kind of lesson, or maybe get to a “Things are going bad for me so I’ll pray and everything will work out fine for me” resolution.
We can do better.
Ponderings
Keep it real: Of course, NF makes what he calls Real Music, and this song seems about as real as entertainment gets. Even for sci-fi and fantasy types of stories, there is a real-ness that can give those stories a bit of extra impact.
Emotions vs emotionalism: This is a distinction I heard in a Martin Lloyd Jones sermon, and it sums up the thing that often bugs me with entertainment, especially Christian entertainment.
Emotions are good, they have their place; emotionalism is just manipulation, a cheap reaction.
What’s the difference?
One big difference I see is this: emotions are linked to the mind, they are an informed response to what we’re learning; emotionalism tries to by-pass the mind to play at the heart.
NF’s song is highly emotional, but it’s emotional because it’s very thought-provoking. It’s not a detached philosophical musing about seeing a parent make choices that are both self-destructive and also damaging to her children, but it’s also not some kind maudlin pack of cheap sentiments and empty words meant to stir feelings without also causing self-reflection.
Get your theology in order: This relates to the first point, and it’s not something I’m really taking away from this song. I know little about NF. I know he considers him either a Christian rapper or a Christian who raps, and I can guess that his beliefs are not along the lines of “God wants us to be happy and never feel bad”, because he does have songs about his own bad feelings and struggles with mental issues, but that’s about the most I can about his beliefs.
Sound theology is real, sound theology is real life. The Christian is the last person who should not be able to face reality. Sound doctrine can help the Christian face the bad—ours sinfulness, the effects of sin on the world, and even the effects of sin on many people’s afterlife—and the good—God’s blessings and mercy, the gospel of Christ dying for our sins, and salvation from sin and Hell.
This is one reason I have little patience with fairy-tale theologies, those who teach that “You should never say that you are sick” and “You need to speak to yourself that you’re rich, that you’re a success”. They are essentially telling us to lie, and God would never tell us to lie. We would be better off to face the truths that sound theology teach us, the truths about our own sinfulness and helpless and how God has by his own hand worked to save us when we cannot save ourselves, than to believe such fantasies.
Conclusion
Give NF a shot, even if rap isn’t music you like very well. He is not the typical rapper in any respect, and that’s a very good thing.
Christian movies are filled with bad acting, bad stories, and, worst of all, bad theology.
Christian novels are often no better.
Christian music is hardly worth listening to. Popular Christian worship music is filled not only with bad music, but also with bad lyrics
The point of this blog is not to be critical just to be critical, though there may be some merit even in that; rather, there is the hope, a very small hope to be sure, that this will provide some small help or incentive to make these Christian forms of entertainment better than they are now.
I hope that this might be a guide of some kind for the readers, so they can know what’s not worth their time to see or read, and maybe every now and again, what may be worth seeing and reading.
I hope it might be some part of weeding out the really cringey stuff that infests Christian entertainment.
I hope it might warn against that “worst of all”, the bad theology that would make even otherwise not-so-bad Christian entertainment no good.
Despite how negative I am in this little introduction, understand please that I intend to be fair. I don’t intend to be negative and critical just to be that way, or in the hope that it’ll draw attention.
One more thing: I’ll probably do more than just reviews of Christian entertainment, and even more than just reviews. We’ll see. The reviews should be the primary content, but maybe not the only content.
