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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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A couple of weeks ago, there was a discussion on the relative popularity of religious vs. secular Christmas songs on the radio. Every time I’ve been in the car since then, I’ve listened exclusively to two local radio stations that played nothing but Christmas music. One station switched back to its regular cycle of music the day after Christmas, and the other switched back today. Here were the results:

Out of 539 songs, just under a quarter were religious in nature, including instrumental-only recordings of religious songs, such as Mannheim Steamroller’s versions. Close to a fifth of the religious songs on one channel were Gospel versions of traditional Christmas carols. This surprised me, as I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single Gospel Christmas recording on the radio before, let alone so many. I didn’t time the songs and so can’t give an exact number, but I’d estimate that each Gospel song was two or two-and-a-half times as long as anything else.

Stores were a different matter. I didn’t hear any religious songs in any store I went to. I also didn’t hear any traditional recordings of secular songs either, just a bunch of fairly crap modern recordings of both traditional and new music.

What this means for the War on Christmas, I don’t know. I was a bit surprised at the low number of religious songs on the radio, but not completely shocked. I also imagine the numbers are probably different in other parts of the country, with the coasts presumably having the most secular music and the south having the most religious music.

Anyway, those are the numbers for one city in the Midwest, for what it’s worth.

Texan here. I definitely noticed a number of distinctly Christian songs, even in the grocery. Perhaps it’s just because, outside of Mariah Carey, lots of secular Christmas songs…kind of suck?

No idea on the statistics.

I won't do the statistics but I definitely heard some "silent night" and "away in a manger" sung by the kinds of nominally-country stars that mostly put out generic top forty.

I wonder how Utah would score on that scale.

I assume the station with the gospel versions was a black station?

In recent years, in stores and malls I've heard a lot of repetitions of "Everybody's Waiting for the Man with the Bag", which sounds like a rejected song from the 1971 Willy Wonka movie.

It was not a black station, which is why it surprised me so much. There is an actual Gospel station in town, which I assume also had Gospel Christmas music.

I would guess unless you were listening to a Christian station which felt like about 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of religious carols, it would be pretty similar in Utah (Clear channel/iHeartRadio runs an enormous proportion of big radio stations).

If I never again hear "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas", I'll die happy. Our classical radio station was playing multiple versions of it over the holidays and no matter how good the song, very few can stand up to that kind of repetition. For religious music, there's a lot of John Rutter about this time of year, and he's a composer I can't stand because it's the aural equivalent of Thomas Kinkade paintings.

Listening to my local classical music station, I heard a number of religious songs. Maybe the only kind of Christmas music on that station. I'm not sure I heard many on the other stations. Little Drummer Boy?

In a sense, I think it's better for Christian icons to be shunned by the secular culture, than casually, lazily, lamely embraced. Isn't the faith supposed to mean something?

I find myself going back and forth on this very thought. On one hand being shunned by the world makes the signal stronger, on the other @Absoluto makes a good point.

If they skipped Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, you need a better classical music station.

Nah, there being an ocean of half-believers makes it easier for people to leap to total belief. It’s easier to compare your virtue against a hypocrite than a total alien.

I also tracked it, and found zero religious Christmas songs anywhere, albeit with a much smaller sample size. Part of that is from being a homebody and only listening to radio when I drove, but another part is that I didn't seek out 100% Christmas content. The final score was 24-0, and the only song that even hinted at any sort of religion was Walking in a Winter Wonderland ("...and we'll pretend that he is Parson Brown..."). Heck, I caught more religious references in Die Hard than on the radio, and that was only a single fakeout line about "the guy upstairs".

I'd say that the frontlines of the War on Christmas are very firmly in the secularist camp. Religious Christmas has been firmly extirpated from public life, but it remains to be seen whether the current purely-commercial version is stable or not.

EDIT: I'd also like to walk back one statement: the government does recognize Christmas as a Christian celebration, but only in the most boilerplate manner imaginable.

Oh, I either missed or forgot that you’re Canadian. I already think of Canada as a more liberal, secular, and aggressively multicultural version of America, so your experience just reinforces my preconceived notions.

I distinctly remember hearing some version of the Little Drummer Boy, which I believe is Christian, in a US Starbucks somewhere in the mid-late 2010s, though I'm not sure if they kept all the lyrics.

As Stefferi points out in a sibling post, the situation is quite different in other countries. Germany for example has its own distinctive tradition of largely explicitly Christian christmas music which continues unabated, and the handful of secular songs in the tradition created over the decades (starting with the Romantics, pickig up under the Nazis and in the GDR) got folded into the canon without really taking it over.

OTOH in some past thread people from countries other than US indicated that religious Christmas songs are much more common there. I can concure re: Finland: We played the kids a lot of Christmas music from Spotify during the Christmas time from Finnish Christmas music lists and about half of the fare was more or less religious. I tried to Google for "most popular Christmas songs" in Finnish and got a list of songs most often sung in karaoke (a very popular fare here), with the top one being a previously-unknown-to-me, explicitly religious song by a popular pop artist made in 2014 (Google Translate gives a pretty good indication of the content), so we're not just talking about people going through old standards, here, either.

That song is actually a cover of a Swedish one which dates back to 1999, and I personally find much better. I actually heard both versions on a Finnish all-year web Christmas radio, which I'd highly recommend for quality and surprisal (like this black guy doing Christian(?) rap in Finnish), and have not encountered them on Swedish media, though an irreligious older Swedish friend I asked knew of it in principle.

(like this black guy doing Christian(?) rap in Finnish)

Yeah, he's a Christian rapper (previously unfamiliar to me, I don't really follow Finnish rap apart from a few select artists) and the song is a basically working off this Lutheran hymn.

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