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<p>Fundamentalist Christians loosely affiliated with Bob Jones University (Greenville,
SC) teach that music influences listeners’ faith and moral characters for both good
and evil, expounding their views since the evangelical Worship Wars began in the 1960s
over the use of popular music styles in church services. In their dichotomous moral
view, good music reveals God’s nature, allowing born-again listeners to draw closer
to God and witness their salvation to unbelievers, and bad music pulls listeners away
from God by promoting immorality and false worship. Fundamentalists also prioritize
mental engagement with music over emotional and physical responses to it because they
believe that people more directly relate to God through their conscious minds and
only indirectly with their bodies, as when fundamentalist musicians make music with
their bodies, an activity that they believe glorifies God. Considering their discourse
and practices from ethnographic and theological perspectives, I argue that these reveal
a view that all musical sound is dangerous in its insistent entrance into listeners’
bodies: music is like fire—useful under control but devastating if unrestrained.</p><p>I
examine the outworkings of their beliefs in three primary areas: recorded music, congregational
singing (both aloud and silent as congregants practice inner singing while listening
to instrumental hymn arrangements), and solo and soloistic vocal music. Musicians’
invisibility on recordings underscores how fundamentalists’ beliefs are primarily
about musical sound, not performers’ movements or appearances. Robust congregational
singing reflects believers’ “joy of salvation,” but their collective emotional affects
are limited, and they are physically constrained to small movements that almost never
bloom into something fuller. Finally, although fundamentalist leaders consider classical
music and its associated performance practice to be “excellent,” even this musical
style must be restrained for classically trained vocalists to minister in their churches.
These arguments are based on my fieldwork and my analyses of fundamentalists’ extensive
written and recorded discourse on music.</p>
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