Handel's Messiah and the Spectre of Christendom

On Secularism, Culture, Glory, and the King of Kings

Is it a coincidence that western culture returns to Handel’s Messiah year after year? Why is modern secular culture incapable of creating anything like it? What does it indicate about the kind of culture Christians ought to be creating?

In the previous post on Handel’s Messiah, I considered the tension between evangelical “heart religion” in the first Great Awakening—which was occurring at the same time as Handel was composing the Messiah—and musical excellence. Many evangelicals today, as a result of that Awakening, still believe that the Christian influence upon national cultures is to be avoided because it will inevitably contaminate the purity of the Biblical message.

The trouble is, not only would that probably mean never creating anything remotely resembling the quality and impact of Handel’s Messiah ever again, but it would also mean missing out on the insights which such works offer to our understanding and experience of the Biblical message.

Painting the Word

It is very clear, of course, that Messiah has a unique brilliance about it. Whilst some have spoken of it in terms of divine inspiration, many have certainly noticed the powerful way in which it amplifies Scripture so profoundly, in ways that go beyond what can be achieved in ordinary reading, or even in ordinary preaching.

This includes the way in which it fuses musical tonality, Scriptural narrative, and rhetoric in order to magnify the significance of the truths being sung. This is often known as Handel’s “word-painting”. A well known example is the line “the crooked straight” (Isa. 40:4) where the tune juts up and down on the word “crooked” and flattens out for “straight”.

There are also the bouncing polyphonies in “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isa. 53:6), resembling a chaotic flock of sheep dispersing in different directions simultaneously, before reverting from the frivolity of these sheep turning to “each to his own way” to a sombre descent reflecting the darker consequences: “And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” You can read such words and gain the insight, of course, but there is something about hearing them like that which conveys their truth with particular starkness.

The depth of insight offered into the Scriptural words adds to the profundity of what those words intend to convey even to the coldest hearts and minds. And the thing about it is that, unlike Wesley’s early prediction that this oratorio would have “no staying power”, western culture cannot seem to shrug it off. Like the words of the oratorio itself, it keeps on repeating.

What does it mean that time and time again, year after year in our supposedly “post-Christendom culture”, we keep returning to this piece of music, centred entirely and exclusively on Christ? I cannot help thinking this is no coincidence. However much it tries to shake it off, secularism continues to be haunted by the spectre of Christendom.

But whilst secularism is haunted by Christendom, it is also true that some of the vestiges of Christendom are haunted by secularism.

Queering the Messiah?

Inevitably, those colourful people at LGBT Inc. recently decided that yet another Christian tradition should be denigrated with the announcement by The Foundling Museum in London that they would be staging a “Queer Messiah”. Of course! Why would we expect otherwise?

Here was their all-too-familiar rationale:

“We will be repositioning the Messiah story so that it may better resonate with a 21st-century queer audience, keeping intersectionality in mind so that…their queerness feels represented, regardless of whether they identify as religious or not.”

Notice how they do not even attempt to produce their own original long-form oratorio with the kind of multi-layered complexity, beauty, depth, and popularity of Handel's Messiah. Rather, they can only ravage what they have already received. They can only rust the steel that went before them. They can only tear down the cathedral which stands in front their eyes. This, as Augustine famously said, is germane to the nature of sin itself: evil has no positive content; it cannot be produced or created; it can only corrupt that which is good.

Worldviews have consequences. LGBT+ liberalism cannot and will not ever produce anything even remotely resembling the Messiah. It is forever bound to be parasitic upon the Christendom culture and worldview from which it rebels. However much it tries to be “creative” and “alternative”, however much it attempts to “think outside the box”, it can only ever deconstruct the norms, degrade the standards, and erode the good convictions and traditions it has already seen and heard.

Parasitic deconstruction is a fundamental part of its ideological programming. LGBT+ culture—a subset of secularism—is teleologically impotent. It has no ultimate goal, no true purpose. It can never produce genuine “offspring”. Thus, it can only corrupt the offspring of others. There are also more troubling analogies one could make here, which are becoming increasingly non-metaphorical.

Ultimately, you cannot reject the glory of the Messiah whilst keeping the meaning, profundity and aesthetic beauty which He inspires in others for yourself and your fellow rebels. Handel was moved to create the Messiah because there is truly only one Messiah capable of inspiring a feat of such cosmic significance. He is Jesus Christ, the only one of whom it may be sung:

"Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing."

—Rev. 5:13

Such a Lamb cannot and will not be “Queered”. For He is not only the Lamb, but the King of Kings and Lord of Lords who will reign forever and ever.

Restoring the Glory

How did we ever arrive at a situation where Handel’s Messiah could come to exist in the first place? What kind of social and cultural infrastructure needed to be in place for such a thing to happen? Had Europe remained a druidic backwater or a pagan Roman outpost or a barbarian’s hunting ground, could such a work ever have come into existence, let alone prominence?

No. It really couldn’t. The fact is that Handel’s Messiah is an inescapably “Christendomian” endeavour. It is well and truly a testament to the glory of Christendom and it cannot be imagined outside of Christendom. The flourishing of Christian values throughout culture across numerous levels of society leads not only to an overt emphasis on Scriptural proclamation throughout those spheres but to the marriage of Scriptural proclamation with aesthetic complexity.

The roots of the “post-Christendom” mindset which seeks to scavenge from the rubble of prior Christian influence arguably stems from the pietism of the Great Awakening, discussed in the previous article. It was this, after all, that had railed so strongly against the walls of the established church to move Christianity beyond the embedded cultural forms in which so many had fallen asleep, out from the trappings of aesthetic grandeur into the enlivened hearts and simplified chapels of the highways and byways of the people.

It was good and necessary that this happened. The Great Awakening was a glorious move of God across the western world. Yet such a situation did not lead to cathedral-building and oratorio-conducting on a scale we have seen in the ecclesiastical and choral tradition in England. This is because such things were seen by many as part of the idolatry by which the people honoured Christ—or, honoured “Christianity”—with their lips but not with their hearts (cf. Isa. 29). There is indeed a time for iconoclasm. But there is also a a time for rebuilding the walls with fresh faith and vision (cf. Neh. 4).

I emphasised this tension in my conversation on Christendom with Bob of Speaker’s Corner earlier this year. We cannot truly believe the full Gospel of Jesus Christ and not want that Gospel to penetrate all levels of society. It will spill out somewhere or other, so we may as well try to be more consistent about it, in keeping with so many of our forebears who were less troubled by the fullness of the Great Commission than us. And if we do follow their example again, we should not be surprised if truly converted Christians begin to lead the way in music again, as those who alone can testify to the divine order that enables music to exist in the first place, and then to magnify God’s truth in and through the good things He has made.

In its own small way, this is part of the vision within our own local church, by ambitiously staging a production of The Messiah for the first time this year, and with a plan to do so every Christmas. As I discussed recently with the conductor (and church elder) Chris Horn, this is about more than putting on a show or even singing truth; it’s about taking back stewardship of the treasures of Christendom, and letting them shine again. It testifies to far more than itself.

If you want a brief glimpse of the Hallelujah chorus from our church’s recent production of the Messiah, someone posted a short video below. (You might even notice someone among the basses…!)