All the Different Christians I Have Been

Read part 1 here.

Throughout high school, I was able to maintain my secret love for pop and rock music rather easily despite being at my church/school building for several hours a day 6 days a week because no one in my home life was enforcing the church’s music standards, my parents were a bit more lenient regarding those rules, and I listened to a lot of music on my headphones. Sure, there were a few times I got into trouble after my mom went through my CD collection and freaked out (to be fair, she was an employee of the school and could lose her job if they found out her sons listened to “sinful music”), but overall, I was relatively free to listen to whatever music I wanted to.

College was a different story entirely.

Before I started attending university, I was led to believe that I would have more freedom than in high school, which would have been true had I attended a normal university. Instead, I attended Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Suddenly, keeping my musical tastes a secret became an actual effort. Sure, I might have thought it was tough when I was in high school, but at a place like BJU, the attention you needed to pay in order to avoid getting caught was astronomical. I had to be alert 24/7 and watch out for any possible pitfalls.

I suppose I could have given up my music and adhered to the rules during my time at BJU, but I couldn’t go back to listening to that kind of music entirely, when my tastes had grown much broader over the previous decade. I needed some variety in my life. Sure, I was happy with classical music while performing it in choir, and it was certainly quite moving when I was singing. But for casually listening while studying or lying in bed to fall asleep? BJU’s style of music just wasn’t going to cut it.

I kept my iPod with me at all times, along with a pair of headphones tucked away in a hidden pocket inside my messenger bag, so that my contraband music was with me at all times. I couldn’t risk someone else finding it.

I never listened to my music during the day while on campus. For starters, we weren’t actually allowed to have headphones. At night while I was lying in bed though, I would put one earbud in and listen to my music at an almost impossibly low volume so that any sound bleeding out of the headphones wouldn’t be audible to my roommates.

One night, as I was listening to my music, I could feel someone peering into my bed. I turned over, making eye contact with my hall monitor (the BJU idea of an RA). He had seen a light emanating from my bunk when checking rooms after lights-out, so he needed to see what was going on (i.e., catch someone in the act).

I ended up extremely lucky that night. He must have thought I was simply texting someone on my phone and not scrolling through my music library on my iPod, so he simply handed me 5 demerits for being up past lights-out.

There was another incident in which I wasn’t quite so lucky. At an event hosted by my literary society (BJU’s form of fraternities and sororities, just far cheesier and mandatory for students to participate in), I was responsible for selecting the music and leading worship (though that’s not what they would call it in fundamentalist circles, since they had an aversion to using the word “worship” in reference to music for some reason). Since the theme of the event was love, I included the song “Above All,” by Michael W. Smith in the setlist (again, not a term they would’ve used, but I can’t think of the fundie-friendly terminology at the moment). I made sure to strum it in a way that didn’t emphasize the backbeat, and everyone who knew the song sang along with it and enjoyed the evening.

It didn’t cross my mind again until a couple weeks later when I received an email asking me to visit the Dean of Men’s office.

I walked to the administration building and was ushered into an office where I sat across a desk from Jon Daulton, the university’s dean of men at the time. He asked me if I knew that Michael W. Smith was a Christian rock musician. I lied and said I didn’t. He asked me how I knew the song “Above All.” I told him I had heard someone sing it at my church back home and requested the sheet music (another lie). He then pulled out a printout of the lyrics and pointed out how insidious it is to hide a small doctrinal lie within a dozen truths. He highlighted the words, “You took the fall and thought of me above all.”

“These words are a lie,” he told me. “When Jesus died on the cross, he did not ‘think of me above all.’ He thought of God the Father. He thought of his sovereignty and the glory he would be bringing to the Father in his death. We cannot allow a lie like this to fill us with pride, imagining that Jesus would have been thinking of us ‘above all’.”

He then told me that because I did not know who Michael W. Smith was, I was only getting 50 demerits instead of 100.

How gracious of him. Though I suppose getting caught lying to an administrator might have gotten me in worse trouble, so I should probably retract the sarcasm in that last sentence.

Read part 3 here.