Jennifer Clark Tinker Living Faith

When I was in high school I smashed all my “secular” music to bits with a sledge hammer on the floor of the garage.

This is probably pretty shocking to a lot of people I know. Indeed, it was an extreme act.

I’ve mentioned before that I essentially had two churches in High School: on Sundays I faithfully attended the Lutheran church where I was baptized at age 9 and on many Wednesdays I went to a charismatic Methodist youth group where my faith took on new dimensions.

To be clear, noone in leadership at either of my churches told me to smash my tapes and CDs.

Rather, there was an undercurrent among some of my peers that suggested we ought to do such things. Fellow Christian students would boast, “I got rid of all my secular music!” I even heard of a friend of a friend who apparently burned up secular tapes and CDs in a bonfire.

Why did we do these things? First of all, we had to rid our lives of those “evil” influences (Garbage in, garbage out!). But also it was to somehow prove how “on fire” we were for God.

I’ve written before about the law–the 10 commandments–and how I have spent some time in my life trying to skirt around the letter of the law to justify doing whatever I pleased.

I’ve also gone to extremes of legalism–using the commandments to really clamp down on myself and others. Purging secular music from my life was part of that clamping down.

If I was going to love Jesus with all my heart, then I should only have music about Jesus in my ears!

You might think, why not just give away or sell the music I didn’t want anymore to someone else who wanted it? But the thing is, the mentality of the time was that this stuff was corrupting people’s minds! So, if I just passed it on to someone else, I was responsible for corrupting them!

So then, why not just throw it away? But again, there was still the risk, if it remained intact, that someone else might pick it up and listen! Only the finality of complete destruction would do.

I considered burning the tapes and CDs I wanted to purge from my life. But living in a suburban neighborhood with pretty tight deed restrictions, I didn’t think a fire would go over too well. Plus, smashing with a sledge-hammer sounded fun.

And it was fun.

And it was a little funny too because CDs are pretty resilient and the hammer often bounced when it hit them. And once the tapes were broken open, the tape inside unraveled across the garage floor like streamers.

But it was sad too because I really liked a lot of that stuff. And most of it was pretty tame stuff. I mean, Wilson Phillips! I still miss that tape.

I want so much to distance myself from those days–from that legalism.

And the more my life-situation has me around fellow Lutherans–who are perfectly happy holding Christ and culture in creative tension–the more I puzzle over what I was thinking!

But lately, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I’ve become acquainted with others who were also dragged into this undercurrent.

In fact, I had been looking for the right time to share about this when a Christian blogger named Addie Zierman announced an opportunity to link up such stories. Her upcoming memoir, “When We Were On Fire,” is about how some of this same kind of stuff affected her.

I haven’t read the book yet (it will be available on October 15), but I do follow her blog, How To Talk Evangelical, and in reading it have felt a lot less crazy for things I said and did back in High School because I wasn’t the only one then.

And I’m not the only one who is looking back on it and trying to reconcile where I am am now with where I was then.

Nowadays, most of the music I listen to is still Christian music. I listen to the Christian music because I want to, not because I feel like I should. And I listen to a few “secular” artists that I enjoy too.

And I hear Wilson Phillips has a new album out…

You can read more stories of others’ “on fire” days over at Addie’s blog.