We are the (godless) World

A few months back, Eric called our attention to the remake of "We Are the World."  Like Eric, I was pretty clueless about who most of the people were singing the new version.  Eric told us that he would get the scoop from his daughters.  Because my girls are still stuck on “The Wheels on the Bus” and “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” I had to rely on Google and Wikipedia. 

In the course of learning about Justin Bieber, Fergie, and T-Pain, I discovered that it wasn’t only the artists who had changed.  In addition to adding a new bridge near the end of the song, the remake altered two lines of the original lyrics written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.  In the original version, Willie Nelson and Al Jarreau sang:

As God has shown us by turning stone to bread,

And so we all must lend a helping hand. 

In the remake, some people who I didn’t recognize sang:

We can’t let them suffer, no we cannot turn away,

Right now they need a helping hand. 

You can imagine the outrage that ensued.  Here are some of the comments posted to news stories and blog posts about the remake:

“The new version is pretty good.  But what I don’t like is that they took out the lines referencing to God. Why would they do that? They are always trying to take God out of everything.”

“It’s sad, in a time when our ‘World’ needs God the most, you chose to leave Him out.”

“I can’t believe that God and His miracles are now ‘irrelevant’ to today’s society. That is truly very saddening.”

All of this is a bit harsh.  After all, God still manages a cameo in the new version when Mary J. Blige sings “We all are part of God’s great big family.”  But the deeper irony is that the commentators who seem to care so much about the altered lines miss the fact that the original lyrics are pure heresy.  In the New Testament account, God didn’t turn stone to bread, and that actually turns out to be pretty important to the story. 

Those objecting to the altered lines in “We Are the World” may have wrongly assumed that the mere presence of the name of “God” mattered more than the meaning it acquired through the context in which it was used.  Many religious believers make a similar mistake when “God and His miracles” show up in the ceremonial language of the state and the public speeches of its officials.  Presidential speechwriters from both parties have become particularly adept at smuggling unattributed biblical passages into official addresses.  Over forty years ago, sociologist Robert Bellah defended these kinds of moves as part of “American civil religion.” 

Bellah’s position has encountered not only secular objections but also theological ones.  In an essay called “The Earthly Peace of the Liberal Republic,” law professor H. Jefferson Powell (drawing from similar arguments advanced by theologians John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas) has argued:   

[T]he professions of carefully “nonsectarian” religious belief that permeate American government—the national motto “In God We Trust,” the prayer at the opening of the legislature, the “God bless you” at the end of the official speech—ought to provoke Christian outrage.  Rather than greeting these expressions of American “civic religion” with a kind of relief, as though they were a welcome reminder of some underlying equation of the United States and the biblical city on the hill, Christians should view them as objectionable, an attempt to manipulate public sentiment that is as cynical as it is essentially blasphemous.  We need to educate politicians who are practicing Christians about their Christian duty not to engage in this type of profanity.

If Powell is right, then George Bush and Barack Obama use the language of “God” about as carefully as Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.  Of course, the comparison is a little unfair.  Jackson and Richie were only manipulating public sentiment to sell a song.  Our politicians are selling a lot more.