What on Earth are They Thinking?

Good morning! A note before I get started. Life is complicated. As I’ve said, “Life is change!” And so change and the reorganization of the complicated has consumed my time. I am finally to a point where, maybe, I can begin to write more consistently. No promises though. I seem to be along for the ride of life at the moment. It is mostly all good. There are of course complications as every life holds. I’ll work around them and be back as those complications come up.

We are still going to talk about TS’ new(est?) album. I’m starting with “Guilty as Sin” because in speaking about how The Tortured Poets Department as a whole is viewed by some in the evangelical community, this one comes up as a source of discomfort even for those who are not hard and fast fundamentalists that would reject the entire album as being just another example of “Hollywood filth”. So lets explore that discomfort.

I have a perspective here that some will call nuts. That is okay. It was nuts. I’ve long called it nuts myself. It is the reason I am no longer part of that particular strain of Christianity. What you read here will be colored by those experiences, by conversations with friends, family and others as I grew away from the crazy, though some of those folk firmly believe that I am the one who is nuts. That’s okay too. Someone has to be, why not me?

Here is an example of how I experienced life growing up in a fundmentalist home. As child, I once had my birthday present, a radio, taken away on my birthday for “dancing”. What was I “dancing” too? “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” by B. J. Thomas. Such an evil song. And the “dancing” I was supposedly doing? I was simply swaying back and forth. That is it. And the long asked for birthday present was gone. On my birthday. I hadn’t had it in my possession for more than an hour. It was the first time I had turned it on and the first song that was played. (A commercial played first!) This is the sort of Christian fundamentalism I grew up under.

I like to start at the beginning so let’s talk about the title of this particular number, “Guilty as Sin”. I grew up in Alabama surrounded by good country people. I was related to a host of those people to the point where my mother had to okay any potential date I or my sibling might be interested in to make sure they weren’t a close cousin! (It is okay to laugh here. I still laugh about this.) We knew most of our first cousins, but because of my parents’ particular beliefs, we didn’t associate very often with them, their parents or the wider extended family. It was very wide! We lived close to my mother’s family and she was one of 14 children.

When we were with people, I could tell, by the tone in my parents’ voices, when the good gossip was about to begin. The phrase “guilty as sin” was very often used at the end of a description of wrong doing by the subject of the gossip. It was a judgement. Those three little words conveyed a host of unspoken meaning. It meant the subject had been, if not caught in outright wrongdoing, they had behaved in such a way that they looked guilty. Another old saying that would come out in these conversations was “where there is smoke, there is fire”. Meaning that if someone looked guilty, they probably were. “Guilty as sin” then took on the mantle of truth. If you were pronounced guilty as sin, it was up to you to prove you were not in fact, guilty of anything. There was no innocence until proven guilty in this part of 1970’s rural Alabama. Oh no. If the local grapevine said you were guilty, you were guilty of something! This btw, was based, at least in our house, on the Bible scripture that says: “Abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:22-23, KJV).

Here we are then with a statement, “Guilty as sin”. Notice there is no question mark in the title. The question comes later in the song. Right now it is a pronouncement. Guilty. Someone has been judged and found wanting. It doesn’t matter if they are actually, legally or morally, guilty of something. They are guilty because they have been pronounced guilty by the society of people around them. They should have KNOWN better.

But what should they have known better than to do? See in my house on that birthday in the 1970’s I was one that should have “known better”. We had had a running disagreement (yes, even though I was a kid!) over whether ballet was a sin. I think I was born wanting to take ballet lessons. But dancing was a SIN. Capital letters sin, like swearing or lying. It would send you down the path to HELL!!! Eventually I will learn how to add graphics to my posts, but for now, just know that I was taught a fiery hell awaited those who sinned. Sin was whatever my parents or some adult in the church we attended said it was. Someone had said dancing was sin and so it was. Ballet was dancing so ballet was sin.

Now, I never believed it. It didn’t matter what “they” said was sin, because “they” had taught me to read and provided mostly the Bible and Bible related materials to read. What I read, did not usually align with what my parents’ said. Since I didn’t want to get knocked around or belted, I learned not to argue those points with them. In those cases, I was told that children must be obedient or that was a SIN too. It didn’t matter if my parents were correct in their theology, I was to obey without questioning and if I didn’t, they gave me a taste of the fires of Hell.

I should have known better than sway to the music. But how? While we had a running discussion about how ballet was sin, I was still allowed to watch Laurence Welk every week. That was worldly dancing. They wore modest dresses and there was none of that heathen beat that rock and roll contained in the music. So it was okay to watch and listen, but not actually do. That wasn’t contradictory at all! Both styles of dancing involved moving ones’ feet. That 10th birthday of mine, my feet were not moving. But. There you have it. I was guilty as sin. Guilty of sin. Because lets face it. We are talking morals here. We aren’t talking about things proven under the laws of the state of Alabama, as backwards as they can be. No, I was guilty of violating a law of God that I had no knowledge of, that didn’t actually exist, but that I “should have” been able to infer. Okay. Sure. Swaying equals dancing which equals sin but watching actual dancing doesn’t equal sin as long as it is “okay”.

You and I can see that the logic here doesn’t add up. I was “guilty” and I suffered the consequences of that “guilt”, whether or not the logic was logical, fair or crazy as the Betsy bugs I had by this time begun to believe my parents most resembled.

And so, we are back to the title of this song, “Guilty as Sin”. Someone made a statement of guilt. Is that statement true? Would the speaker like for that to be true? Is the speaker afraid that people will think they are guilty as sin? Could it be that just speaking those words in reference to another makes the object of the expression actually guilty? Or could it be that the speaker of those words makes themselves guilty in the eyes of God for pronouncing judgement on another person?

Things to think about! This is long enough. We’ll talk about the song’s lyrics next time.