Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

Last night Nancy and I went to the Arcade Fire concert down at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, Arcade Fire is an “indie” band from Montreal, touring in support of their second album, Neon Bible. I say “indie,” because clearly, if they’re headlining at Shoreline, they’re pretty damn big. And they are numerous on stage as well… I counted ten musicians, since their music has an unusual amount of orchestration in it. I won’t really go on to describe the band anymore, since you either know it already or can check it out pretty easily.

Arcade Fire belongs on the list of bands that I think of as “crypto-Christian,” along with Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, and more obvious candidates such as U2 (which, yes, now falls into the old fart category, sorry to have to tell you) or lesser known bands such as Woven Hand or Sufyan Stevens. Some of these musicians are semi-openly Christian (like Sufyan Stevens, who is, I think, an Episcopalian) while their music is not particularly obviously religious. Others, like Gary Numan, might say they are strongly opposed to Christianity, but you can hear them furiously and authentically engaging with God in every piece of music (for example, some of the songs Numan wrote after his wife miscarried). While a few of the lesser known bands may have had a boost in their early performing careers by being linked to the “Christian” circuit, most of them have avoided it like the plague, seeing the association as imposing a permanent cap on how wide their popularity might become.

And yet, they sing about dealing with suffering, their conflicted desires (here I think of Morrissey’s swoony ballad “I Have Forgiven Jesus"), and a sense of wonder that runs through the world. Even when they don’t sing about God or church per se (and even if they don’t go to church, and even if they’d be insulted if you kept pushing the subject), they sing from what I’d call a Christian imagination, formed in a worldview permeated with meaning and spiritual possibility. I’m not saying that they’d identify their muse in this way themselves, of course, but I certainly find a lot to feed my own imagination there as well.