We have seen them in our daily travels. From the church that places slogans on their church sign such as “God’s like coca-cola, he’s the real thing” to the religious group that put in white letters “Got Jesus” on a black billboard on a major interstate highway (imitating the ‘got milk’ slogan), these cornball humorous slogans are designed to influence people to seriously reflect on the state of their spiritual condition.
People with noble intentions create these slogans for the reason I stated in the last paragraph. However, some really believe that the slogan will be ‘the mother of all slogans’ that will eventually ‘win everyone over to Jesus’. In reality, this is not the case but the people who change the church signs try and try (and try…..) again and again in search of the ultimate slogan.
What made me write this blog post was not my experiences with many of the slogans that eventually become t-shirt theology. What made me write this post was this Billboard magazine article about the next Rush album tentatively scheduled for release in the spring of 2007 where drummer Neil Peart reveals in both his new book Roadshow : Landscape With Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle and also to the interviewer of the Billboard article that during his motorcycle journeys throughout the United States, he noticed the vast amount of religious billboards and the slogans such as “If You Take Satan For A Ride, Pretty Soon He’ll Want To Drive.” that got him pondering on some deep intellectual thoughts that led to the thoughts listed below:
Just seeing the power of evangelical Christianity and contrasting that with the power of fundamentalist religion all over the world in its different forms had a big effect on me.
You try to put your own way of seeing the world into some kind of congruence with other peoples, and that’s difficult for me I mean, I see the world in what I think to be a perfectly obvious and rational way, but when you go out into it and see the way other people think and behave, and express themselves on church signs, you realize, Well, I’m not really part of this club.
I looked for the good side of faith. To me it ought to be your armor, something to protect you and something to console you in dark times. But it’s more often being turned into a sword, and that’s one big theme I’m messing with.
Where some previous Rush albums had one song {2112 epic, Freewill, Totem, You Bet Your Life, Carve Away The Stone, and The Big Wheel (who can ever forget the line “I was lined up for glory, but the tickets sold out in advance”) } that talked about religion, chance, and fate, it appears that the theme of religious faith and it’s obsessions and excesses that drive people to fanaticism is going to be the centralized themepoint running throughout the lyrics of the entire future album. I am very interested to see what Peart is going to say and very interested to see how much I will agree (and/or respectfully disagree) with what he may say.
I have in the past experienced both the armor and the sword. From armor and sword to protect, shield, and guide me to armor and sword to viciously fight something that I disagreed with in the name of ‘the cause’ to armor and sword used against me in an attempt to destroy me in the name of ’someone else’s ungodly fanatical causes called thus saith the Lord’, I have seen and felt the protection, the fanaticism, and the weapon that the armor and shield can be in the hands of both the righetous person, the zealot, and in the hands of the unrighetous.
However, I will wait for some time in early-to-mid 2007 for the new Rush CD to analyze the lyrics to see how much the church signs and religious billboards influenced the lyrics. In the meantime, I keep pressing onward and forward and continue to read the Scriptures to be taught by the scriptures and receive meat and not the milk of church cliche catch-phrazes turned t-shirt theology.
