This week I caught up with Rick Pidcock, a friend from the shared publishing world of Baptist News Global who has now written a riveting new book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Rick, an intrepid reporter as well as gifted analyst, describes the way some of the worship music which is the soundtrack of church life for millions of people has been weaponized for right-wing Christian imperialism, extremism and aggression against perceived enemies.
David Gushee
David: You spent two decades as a worship leader before becoming a journalist and critic of evangelical culture. What did you once believe worship was doing in the lives of Christians, and what have you come to see differently over time?
Rick: During the 20 years I led worship, my conscious motivation was magnifying the supremacy of God and spiritually leading the congregation toward offering their entire lives as worship to God in response to the gospel. Worship was a response to revelation, an overflow of gratitude because Jesus lived the life we never could live and died the death we deserved to die, and thereby adopted us from slaves and enemies to sons and daughters of the king.
When I enrolled at Northern Seminary in 2018 to pursue a master of arts degree in worship, I learned in my Bible classes how ancient empires strengthened their own power, dehumanized those below them and waged war against anyone who wouldn’t submit. But rather than imagining a God whose power is displayed through the top-down dynamics of empire, the authors of Scripture and Jesus himself explored what it might look like if God valued those on the underside of empire. In other words, rather than sacralizing the empire, they subverted it for the healing of those who had been harmed.
But in my church history classes, my fellow students and I often became discouraged to discover how much Christian history has been shaped by men fighting men and countries fighting countries. What we assumed had been spread through the Great Commission was too often spread through colonization.
In my worship classes, I started to notice how easily the language of worship mirrored the dynamics of empire. Worship was about bending the knee to the highest power, celebrating our rise from slaves to sons and daughters of the imperial family.
So what I once considered magnifying the supremacy of God, I now considered an embedded obsession with the authority and submission dynamics of empire. And what I once considered to be gratitude for the changing of one’s station from slaves to children of the divine emperor, I now wondered how that framework would affect my neighbors who my theology categorized as slaves or enemy combatants.
David: Your title, Weapons of Worship, is provocative. What do you mean when you say worship has been “weaponized”? How can music that appears devotional also help form people politically?
Rick: If you would’ve told me when I led worship that I was complicit in the relational dynamics of empire that promoted the privilege and power of politically conservative straight white men, I would’ve thought you were being weird. So I realize when evangelicals read my title or subtitle, it may feel a bit over the top.
But during my time in seminary, I began reading the perspectives of Christians on the underside of empire. For example, rather than simply assuming the theology of white male slaveowners was correct despite the way they lived out their gospel, I read the songs of slaves, or the perspectives of liberationist theologians. They were naming how worship lyrics that highly valued power, the taking of territory and enlisting Christians as soldiers to conquer their neighbors were being weaponized against them.
I also started listening to women and learning how they were being dehumanized on worship teams.
For example, on the surface, it may feel like a really devotional moment to watch an attractive woman in her 20s with her eyes closed amid stage lights and fog machines and hear her beautiful, gentle voice sing lyrics about the Holy Spirit falling like rain. But through reading comment cards and listening to women on worship teams, you start to wonder if men are assuming intimacy with God by experiencing intimacy with a woman.
“You start to wonder if men are assuming intimacy with God by experiencing intimacy with a woman.”
Because the worship stage so often models the distinction of a warrior masculinity and an intimate femininity between men who conquer and women who help, what white evangelicals assume is glorifying God and edifying the congregation can actually be spiritually forming them into racial and gender roles that can be easily co-opted by politicians who are promoting white, heteronormative, monogamous families that strengthen the power of straight white men, dehumanize women and exile those who won’t submit.
David: How much of the problem lies in the lyrics themselves, and how much lies in the larger ecosystem surrounding them — worship leaders, megachurches, conferences, algorithms, political rallies and the theology in which the songs are embedded? Could the same song function very differently in another setting?
Rick Pidcock
Rick: There are definitely layers to this conversation that can be complicated to sort out because different layers have different motivations. For example, the song “Raise A Hallelujah” by Bethel Music was originally written as a private prayer because a 2-year-old child was in the hospital, unlikely to survive the night. The songwriter felt like they were facing a “giant of unbelief” and wanted to sing of their hope louder than the giant they felt was telling them the child would die. They sent a voice memo of the song to the child’s father, who played it in the hospital room. And the child recovered.
But eventually, the song was taken outside the hospital room and published by Bethel Music, turning it into a financial asset worth millions of dollars due to CCLI fees collected every time an evangelical congregation displays the lyrics while singing it on Sunday.
Then in 2020, Sean Feucht started playing it at worship protests during the COVID-19 shutdowns. He viewed Christians who wore masks and practiced social distancing as exercising unbelief that Jesus was more powerful than a virus. So he spread “the virus of joy” by singing the lyrics “louder than the unbelief.”
When Black Lives Matter protests began spreading in the wake of the George Floyd murder, Feucht started a “Riots to Revival” worship tour where he set up sound systems to drown out the cries of Black protesters with the lyrics, “Sing a little louder.”
“He set up sound systems to drown out the cries of Black protesters with the lyrics, ‘Sing a little louder.’”
Then during the 2024 election, he named the “enemies” more explicitly as the Democrats and prayed God would deliver the nation through the election of Donald Trump and through a Republican takeover of Congress.
The question isn’t whether the original songwriter intended to promote political domination. It’s what happens when a song written to express hope in a private crisis becomes part of a public narrative in which political opponents are cast as enemies of God. What a songwriter may intend to express love for a friend can be co-opted by a worship warrior to be louder than a perceived enemy.
David: Evangelical worship has long drawn on biblical language about kingship, victory, spiritual warfare, conquest and the reign of God. How do you distinguish legitimate biblical imagery from its political appropriation? At what point does spiritual warfare begin to take on a political meaning?
Rick: It’s important to remember that worship isn’t a 21st-century phenomenon. While I get into the modern worship oligarchy that treats worship songs as financial assets to trade, that determines what churches sing through algorithms and corporate gatekeepers who likely aren’t even Christians, the language of worship emerged in societies shaped by empire. So it’s going to incorporate the relational terms that empires used.
Our project isn’t to make worship nonpolitical because worship from the very beginning always has been political in the sense that it used the language of empire in a subversive way to redefine human assumptions about power, our neighbors and the gods.
This is why it’s so important for Christians to be willing to learn from biblical scholars, historians, ethicists and sociologists. When we recognize how empires function, we can more easily identify when we’re being played for power and who we should be listening to on the underside of power.
Jesus occasionally used the language of empire, but he did so in a way that subverted rather than sacralized it. For example, in Matthew 25 he spoke of a king whose brothers and sisters were the empire’s “least of these.” Or also, the early church used the Roman term ekklesia, which Rome meant as a ruling body or a civic assembly to enforce their hierarchical values of Roman authority over a community. But when the early church used the term, it offered the alternative of a Communion table where hierarchy roles dissolved, everyone belonged and neighbors were loved.
So while I personally dislike all language of empire and would prefer we move on to other metaphors altogether, I can be OK with using terms like “king” or “ekklesia” as long as we’re purposefully subversive in our practice of using them. And despite my personal disconnection with empire, perhaps we should keep those metaphors so we can subvert them, since the empire we will always have with us. Where things get political in the harmful sense is when we use those terms to sacralize power over our neighbors and threaten them with exile as the empire would have.
David: Your work is often sharply critical of contemporary white evangelicalism. How do you think about the risk of critique becoming too sweeping? Are there forms of evangelical Christianity, worship or community life that you still regard as genuinely life-giving?
Rick: There’s a current debate happening among writers about whether white evangelicalism needs to be defended and whether critique should be more nuanced than it has been. One thing I’ve noticed is that those who defend it and call for nuance often claim evangelicals are simply acting as normal Americans do who aren’t fully aware of the harm their votes are causing.
“A lack of awareness and love of neighbor is the problem we should focus our energy on.”
I don’t think a lack of nuance is the primary problem we need to address in hopes to defend the people causing harm. I think a lack of awareness and love of neighbor is the problem we should focus our energy on. So instead of questioning the motives and expertise of people like Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jemar Tisby, Robert P. Jones and others, we should be listening to them and learning from them.
That said, nuance is important, not in the sense of making white evangelicals feel better about themselves, but in the sense of deepening our awareness in order to be more comprehensive in our healing of the wounds that have been caused.
For example, in my chapter on worship and the end times, I make the distinction between pre-millennial and post-millennial theologies in worship songs to demonstrate how an escapist mentality based on fear and a colonizing mentality based on power can both work together to dehumanize and exile non-evangelicals, despite being different theologies.
Scholars like Du Mez, Tisby and Jones understand these nuances and identify as Christians. Hearing them name those dynamics and stand up for those who are being harmed is genuinely life-giving to me. I can no longer lead worship in evangelical environments because to do so would feel like complicity to me, given what I’ve learned.
Privately, I can listen to the songs and even sing along because it feels like a safe space to heal in my kitchen or car without harming self and neighbor. Any public community I’m interested in participating in these days would have to be a community of neighbors who are open to naming harm, healing bodies and being liberated from the imperial dynamics of power, dehumanization and exile.
David: What surprised you most in researching this book? Was there a particular event, song, worship leader or moment when you realized that contemporary worship music was more politically consequential than you had previously thought?
Rick: The surprise for me came halfway through my master’s degree when I realized how our liturgies about “the highest power” were assuming and fueling the values of empire. After that clicked, my journey since then hasn’t really been surprising at all. It’s been more like, “Of course. That’s how empire works. So of course it would also play out like that.”
“I share a lot of specific stories in the book that many are going to find shocking.”
That said, I share a lot of specific stories in the book that many are going to find shocking. For example, there was an event in Seattle where worship leaders set up a stage in a park near a lot of LGBTQ people. Then they commanded the LGBTQ people to be silenced, declared their voice was cut, and told them to fall to the ground, to bow right now or leave. At one point, they identified their neighbors as Goliaths, picked up invisible rocks, and roared while pretending to throw the rocks at them. Then when violence broke out and police were tossing protesters around and kneeing them in the back, the worship leaders thanked God for the police and claimed to be persecuted. Is this shocking? It’s definitely dramatic. But of course, worship co-opted by empire would act like this.
Another example I share is at the “A Million Women” march on the National Mall in October 2024. They literally set up a stone altar to a demon in front of the U.S. Capitol, performed an exorcism on the United States and on the U.S. Capitol, and then beat the altar for eight minutes straight with hammers and mallets while more than a quarter-million evangelicals screamed, blew shofars and sang about Jesus reigning over the U.S. Capitol. Again, of course a Christianity co-opted by empire would behave like this.
At the same time, these over-the-top events are attempting to re-embody the Canaanite Conquest narratives in the Hebrew Bible, which are the events that so many seemingly innocent children’s worship songs being sung in Sunday schools just happen to use. Is it surprising that children singing songs about being in the Lord’s army and whacking off Goliath’s head would grow up to throw invisible rocks at their LGBTQ neighbors and pound demon altars to rubble in front of the U.S. Capitol?
It’s at least understandable, given how they’ve been taught to identify themselves and their neighbors. And even if most white evangelicals don’t literally go to parks and throw invisible rocks at their neighbors, it’s worth wondering if the same imagination of enemies and conquest is forming them to vote overwhelmingly for an administration who will send masked ICE agents into the streets with guns.
David: If worship can help deform a Christian community politically, can it also help reform one? What might worship look and sound like if it were forming people toward humility, neighbor-love, peacemaking, solidarity and democratic life rather than domination?
Rick: One of the most basic assumptions I have in Weapons of Worship is an ancient mantra I learned from Constance M. Cherry: “As we worship, so we believe, and so we will live.” Our worship affects our beliefs and actions.
“As we worship, so we believe, and so we will live.”
Liturgy creates maps that help us recognize who we are in relationship to our neighbor. Much of the way worship fuels our obsession with power and harms our neighbor is through metaphors of empire. God is defined as the highest emperor, Christians are the imperial family, and everyone else is either slaves or enemy combatants.
Humility can be tricky in these spaces because so much of the evangelical group identity is based on theological hierarchies of submission that require its adherents to put themselves down. This is not true humility. It’s a failure to imagine your neighbors’ humanity because you’re failing to imagine your own.
True humility recognizes how one is embodying the empire over one’s neighbor, and then walking out of your Tower of Babel to sit with them in the ashes your armies created in hopes that in time, everyone might heal. This implies that a healing worship would include a lot more lament than the white evangelical worship industry of individualism, consumerism and celebrating certainties cultivates.
When Jesus used empire metaphors, he deconstructed those top-down dynamics of domination by identifying the king as a family member in and among the empire’s “least of these.”
But Jesus mostly seemed to use organic metaphors like seeds, vines, trees, fruit, breath and birth. For worship to form us toward humility, we need to become more aware of how the industry and its language have become complicit in forming people to value the relational dynamics of empire. We need to listen to people on the underside of power, learn from their visions of healing and liberation, lament the wounds we feel and recover more organic metaphors that emphasize our interdependence rather than our domination over others.
If the vision of Scripture points to the making of all things new and the healing of the nations through the beating of swords into plowshares, and if worship is being weaponized like swords, what might it look like to turn praise into plowshares?
The theology is there in the Communion table. The tradition is present in Christian mystics like St. Francis who spoke of the universe as an inextricably intertwined family in the Canticle of Creatures through language like Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water. This communal consciousness is also present in the liturgies of indigenous spirituality and liberationist theologies.
So again, I find myself thinking we don’t need to be more nuanced in our criticism of a white evangelicalism that’s been overwhelmingly complicit in the values of empire. We simply need to be more aware of how complicit it’s been, be willing to repent of the harm we’ve caused, and then walk outside its towers in silent solidarity to participate in the healing of the nations.
David P. Gushee serves as Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, chair in Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is past president of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Christian Ethics. He also is author of 30 books, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust; Kingdom Ethics; Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies; Changing Our Mind; and The Moral Teachings of Jesus.