I have three teenagers and we listen to a lot of music. I also coach high school volleyball and lead a discipleship training program for teens. I am around teen culture a lot. I don’t pretend to be an expert at it, it’s way too fast-moving and amorphous for me to keep up. But there is one icon of teen culture who stands above the rest (at least, for now): Taylor Swift.
The former country music princess, who was so sweet and charming in her early years, has traded it all in for her current reign as pop queen and super celebrity. And so, her latest album has made quite the splash since its release just a few days ago. As always, she masters her vocal melodies, filling them with hooks and ear worms. I have to admit being quite disappointed that she resorted to boring pop musicianship when she could have opted for far better arrangements. But this isn’t an album review. This is a reflection on a single song from the Lover album: False God.
While other reviewers are lauding the song as one of her most powerful on the album. I have to call it the most disturbing. It’s disturbingly honest in its idolatry of romantic love. Few beside her have named it for the idol that our culture has made it out to be.
Here are the key lines from the song:
But we might just get away with it
Religion’s in your lips
Even if it’s a false god
We’d still worship
We might just get away with it
The altar is my hips
Even if it’s a false god
We’d still worship this love
We’d still worship this love
We’d still worship this love
I know heaven’s a thing
I go there when you touch me, honey
Hell is when I fight with you
But we can patch it up good
Make confessions and we’re begging for forgiveness
Got the wine for you
“Even if it’s a false god/we’d still worship this love” is just about as revealing as you can get. And by naming the song “False God,” Swift is answering her own “even if” question. It is a false god and she’s going to worship it.
Like so many others before her, Swift reaches for religion to give her the language she needs to describe the feeling of transcendence brought to her by romantic love and sex. Heaven is where she goes when her lover touches her. And her hips are the altar where they worship.
Sex is the central act of worship of this false god.
Hozier’s “Take Me To Church” is so similar to Swift’s “False God.” When he sings about “church,” like Swift, he’s referring to sex and the romantic love that goes with it.
My church offers no absolutes
She tells me, “Worship in the bedroom”
The only heaven I’ll be sent to
Is when I’m alone with you
I was born sick, but I love it
Command me to be well
Amen, Amen, Amen
There is nothing new with sex and romance being revered as gods. What’s new is the brash audacity with which Taylor Swift names them as such — even acknowledging her love as a false god — and forges ahead anyway.
There’s an added irony that Swift refers to praying to Jesus for a sick friend in “Soon You’ll Get Better,” the song just before “False God” on the Lover album. But I find this irony so revealing of American spirituality.
We want Jesus around whenever we or our friends get sick and especially when that sickness seems to be heading toward death. We’ve got this inkling that Jesus is the key to a good afterlife, whatever that might look like, and so we keep him in our pocket, ready to pull out and pray to in these worst of life situations. He’s hardly more than a lucky rabbit’s foot. He’s not the King. He’s not the face of God turned toward us. We treat him more like a dog to command than a god to be worshiped.
But the gods we worship for real are sex/romance, alcohol, entertainment, family, business/money, health/our bodies, and so on. Our devotion to these false gods is so easily seen in the way we spend our money, in the things we talk about, in the space set aside for them in our minds.
And this is exactly where I find Swift so disturbing and helpful at the same time.
The pretense is over. She’s named her real god. Yes, she can play at Christianity with her paltry prayers to Jesus for sick friends, but that’s not her real faith. Her real faith has less to do with the kingdom of God that was at the center of Jesus’s message and more to do with the kingdom of self.
Here’s the irony, the garden that Adam and Eve got kicked out of was the Garden of Eden, which would be better rendered as Garden of Delight or Garden of Pleasure. Our Lord is the author of delight, the inventor of pleasure, and he desires all good things for us. But when the man and the woman grabbed for godhood for themselves and snatched the one and only thing forbidden in a garden filled with pleasures, they got kicked out. They lost the good and simple delight of sex, where the man and the woman were naked and unashamed.
And so, here we are, with Taylor Swift and Hozier and so many of us worshiping sex and romance instead of the God who gave them to us as good gifts. But God longs for us to restore our affections so that we see sex and romantic love as a window into intimacy with our Lord himself.
Jesus said, “You’re way off base, and here’s why: One, you don’t know your Bibles; two, you don’t know how God works. After the dead are raised up, we’re past the marriage business. As it is with angels now, all our ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God (Mark 12:24-25, The Message).
This isn’t bad news. This isn’t the loss of something good and beautiful. This is good news. This is the full flowering of what we only experience in part in this life. When the dead are raised, sex and romance will be raised as well, raised to a whole new level.
C.S. Lewis put it this way: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased” (from his sermon “The Weight of Glory”).
Dear Taylor and all who follow in her steps, your false god is exactly that, a false god. As long as you pursue what’s false, you’ll miss out on what’s real. And that’s a damn shame.