Bob Smietana looks at “How worship music became the soundtrack of today’s political right.”
He focuses on the prominent example of one particular song:
If you’ve been to church in the U.S. over the past two decades, chances are you’ve heard “How Great Is Our God.” First recorded by Chris Tomlin in 2004, the song is a favorite at big-box megachurches and tiny congregations alike. In mid May, it was #10 on the list of top songs sung in churches, compiled by the CCLI, which licenses songs for congregational use.
But in recent years, “How Great Is Our God” and other worship songs have been sung at conservative political events too: the Jericho March before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol; MAGA events and anti-vax revivals during COVID-19; pro-Israel protests during the Gaza war; and Charlie Kirk’s memorial.
The song’s adoption as a political anthem for the MAGA right seems puzzling, Smietana says, because, “There’s nothing overtly political about this song.” It’s simply a song about God.
But is it really? Look again at the title there. It’s not “How Great Is God,” but “How Great Is Our God.”
The same folks who love to rail against “pronouns” sure do love using that one. It’s a possessive pronoun, extremely possessive in this case. And it does some strange things to this song. It hints at something monolatrous, but polytheistic (our God is great, their God can’t compete).
And it muddies up who exactly is being praised and celebrated in this “worship.” The glory is not God’s alone, but also ours.
Ours and not theirs. The Them in this Us vs. Them is not merely implied, but required. The God of “our God” cannot be identified unless we first identify both Us and Them.
Rick Pidcock touches on this somewhat in his Baptist News piece on Chris Tomlin as a “worship warrior” for the right:
Although Tomlin hasn’t explicitly promoted the authoritarian politics of the Trump administration, he’s spent the past 20 years singing about evangelicalism’s God being the “God of this city” and the “Lord of this nation.” He’s explored such warfare themes as “the battle rages on” and “we raise our white flag.” He’s sung about the “God of angel armies” crushing the enemy “underneath my feet.” And in perhaps his most popular empire-like song, he sings of the evangelical God being greater, stronger and higher than all others, and then asks, “If our God is for us, then who could ever stop us?”
The God who is the purported focus of this worship is identified — defined, bounded — as “our God” in the context of this Us vs. Them “battle.”
In other words, the popularity of this song at right-wing rallies against pluralistic democracy is not so much puzzling as it is clarifying. This is the song’s composer and its biggest fans telling us who the “our” they’re singing about is, and thus also telling us which God it is they’re worshiping. And what they’re telling the rest of us is that we’re not “Us” — that their God is not also ours. They’re explaining that their God is theirs — and only theirs.
So ultimately this is a “worship song” or “praise chorus” that diminishes God — reduces God to a parochial, partial, and partisan wisp of a deity.
This is not a song about the God of the Cosmos, the creator and redeemer of the world who is reconciling all things, by whom, and through whom, and in whom all things consist. It is not a song about the God who made the Pleiades and Orion, who turns midnight into dawn and darkens day into night.
The subject of this song is, rather, a smallish neighborhood God. This is a puny God who is not the God of Haitian refugees, not the God of second-generation immigrants — not the God of LGBT people, not the God of women, not the God of widows and orphans and the poor, not the God of the sick and the immunocompromised, not the God of any of the billions of people living in any of the other 194 countries of this world, let alone the God of any of the billions of other stars in our universe.
The “our” in “our God” turns out to be so constricting and restricting that the list of people and things this “God” is not the God of turns out to be more impressive than this “God” itself.
How great is such a God? Not very.
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