What Happened to Christmas Music?
You would think that down here in South Fundistan you would find a radio station playing traditional Christmas carols around the actual holiday, but not this year. The Evangelical propaganda ministry that controls several stations was broadcasting weird new songs that mentioned the ‘reason for the season’ only in passing.
NPR went HD locally and only put the news/talk format on the airwaves for regular radios. The music channel requires buying another radio.
The people who actually control programming on the local radio stations don’t actually live here, so they only respond to the ratings, which are not representative of the area.
The problem for me is gathering up all of my Mother’s Christmas CDs and putting them out by her player, instead of just tuning her radio to a station. Like there wasn’t enough to do at this time of the year …
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Haven’t attended a service in 30 or 40 years but when I was invited to a Christmas Concert at a local church, I told myself it might be a nice evening of Xmas nostalgia listening to a live performance of some old standards. But no. Not a single carol was forthcoming. Instead I was treated to a mashup of just about everything I despise about corporatized America, including bigscreen TV repeaters and dull, soul-sucking “contemporary christian” musical numbers interspersed with insipid Nativity commentary by a “network news team” in Jewish drag. All scripted, lit, miked and stage managed to a fare-thee-well.
Clearly the singers and musicians had also spent a lot of time rehearsing. Quite a few people put in quite a lot of effort to serve up this dog’s breakfast. All the reverence and genuine emotion of a TV commercial. It was enough to make you cry, really. Or to turn your stomach. I left early.
Yep, the ‘sanctuary’ has become a TV studio and everything is copyrighted. Instead of hymnals they use teleprompters. I knew they were bad, but the worst was a couple of years ago when Christmas was on a Sunday and the local fundie church across the street cancelled services because ‘Christmas is a family time’. Amazing, and all these years I thought it had something to do with Christianity. 😈
It is amazing how radical supposed conservatives are.
Life inside the Fox bubble.
The merging of evangelical religion, corporate propaganda, nationalism and anti-intellectualism has birthed a culture that is deeply, deeply weird, but also very banal. Spreads like dry rot and scares the hell out of me, to be honest.
They are definitely ‘a disturbance in the Force’, with numbers large enough to distort reality in their immediate vicinity. The real problem is their desire to impose their ‘reality’ on the rest of us.
They have been a recurring phenomenon in US history, but earlier versions had the decency to head off to unsettled regions to ‘live their dream’, and usually die trying when reality refused to change for them.
Funny that here in liberal “War on Christmas” San Francisco Bay area, we had at least one station in every listening area switch to a full-time Christmas music schedule, yet there in South “Christian Riviera” Fundistan you hear nary a Christmas carol on the radio. Makes you wonder who, exactly, is doing this whole “War on Christmas” thing in the first place :twisted:.
Other than the decorations put up by the town, there is no indication of the holiday on the local fundie church property. It’s weird to see a church that doesn’t have Crèche out front at Christmas. it is almost a legal requirement in the ‘liberal’ Northeast. The usually have a ‘living Crèche’ that their real center of worship – a local shopping mall.
My take on new-generation Fundies is that their true religion is the worship of money. One of the last of the old-line preachers came to preach at the little Baptist church near my grandmother’s house. Within a year the deacons had to run him off because the patrons were pissed that a) he interfered with their Sunday afternoon football games by preaching too long, and b) he kept telling them they had a Christian duty to be kind and charitable towards their fellow man regardless of the race, color, creed, or political leanings of said man, and kept quoting the Bible verses at them that said that, and the majority of the patrons quit coming to church because they didn’t want to hear that they had to stop hating the Other if they were going to be good Christians.
I talked to the preacher a while when he did one of his home visits to my grandmother. He was a sincere and very nice man who truly believed the message of the Beatitudes. Not a very smart man, but most true believers aren’t (just an observation). But that simply won’t be tolerated by today’s Fundie congregations, who want entertainment rather than faith, who want to be told they’re better than others rather than that all men are sinners, who want to be told that it’s okay to be greedy and graspy and hateful rather than told that a true Christian lives a humble and modest life where anything beyond his or her own needs goes towards assisting others. So it goes. “Christian” (with quotes). Bah humbug.
Ah, yes, the ‘prosperity gospel’ with no mention of camels or the eyes of needles. You are saved by grace not works and after you are ‘elected’ you can do no wrong. This accounts for all of the fundies who think Poor Richard’s Almanac is a book of the Bible, because they keep quoting Ben and attributing it to the New Testament.
[Aside: What the hell is ‘A penny saved is a penny earned’ supposed to mean. You had to earn the sucker before you can save it. Is it like a friend of mine who keeps telling me what great deals he gets when he spends money on useless stuff because it was so cheap. He would have saved a great more money if he hadn’t bought the stuff at all.]
I don’t see an redeeming social value in organizations that serve no purpose other than legitimizing personal prejudice under the guise of religion. Most of them spend more time on political action that saving souls.