Back in 2018, up-and-coming musician and singer Jordan Benjamin (stage-name “grandson”) signed with the record label Fueled by Ramen, whose other active artists include All Time Low, Panic! at the Disco, Paramore, Twenty One Pilots, and Young the Giant. I’m very excited to see where grandson’s career goes. He combines modern rock instrumentation with rap in an innovative way, and his lyrics contain very relevant, very sharp social criticisms. His work is definitely worth checking out.
But this isn’t a music blog.◊ I’m writing about grandson because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the lyrics of one of his most chilling songs, “thoughts & prayers” – a song that he released in the same month that he signed with Fueled by Ramen. The chorus, which is sung sometimes by a young choir and sometimes by Benjamin, goes:
“No thoughts, no prayers / Can bring back what’s no longer there / The silent are damned / The body count is on your hands.”
This song is a vitriolic cry for action regarding gun violence in America. With lines like “Another politician bought / I swear I heard another shot,” “Another press conference / nothing gets accomplished,” and “Bulletproof backpacks / they wanna arm the teachers / I think I saw the reaper,” grandson drives his political message home with a sledgehammer. Perhaps the most ingenious part of this song – and the entirety of grandson’s discography – is how quintessentially 2010’s the lyrics are. The call-to-action rhetoric of this song is stunningly authentic. It’s exactly the sort of rhetoric we regularly see on social media: if you don’t speak up about this, then you’re part of the problem.
As a young American, I sometimes feel like I’m swimming in social justice movements. Every single issue – gun violence, free speech, mental health, abortion, education, LBGTQ+ rights, immigration, the environment, healthcare – is fighting for my undivided attention. Each issue is the most important issue, and the world would have a fighting chance if I just signed this petition, attended that rally, or marched on the capitol this weekend. Every movement under the sun uses the exact same rhetoric: in the words of grandson, “the silent are damned.” If you don’t mobilize around [insert hot-button issue here], then “the body count is on your hands.”
To make things even worse, any attempt to actually engage with an issue seems to be an eternal drain of time and effort. The list of ‘bad guys’ is endless, and most of the ‘good guys’ turn out to be hated by half of your fellow activists because in some detail of some press conference they gave back before you were paying attention, they said something problematic. Maybe. It’s complicated. Here are ten more articles you should read to catch up on it all.
How can we – American Catholics in the third millennium – navigate this sea of politicized social justice issues? Here are three practical suggestions:
1. Church teachings are valuable resources. While many Catholics see Catholic doctrine as restrictive or oppressive, a much healthier outlook is to focus on Church as community. It would be a mistake to view the magisterium as an opposing or antagonistic force relative to yourself, primarily because you are the Church. Catholicism is first and foremost the community that Jesus formed around Himself, and you are just as much a member of this community as any priest or bishop. Rather than imagining the Church as either “with me” or “against me” regarding any particular issue, try to think of the Catholic Church as a community working through these problems together. Yes, there are authorities within this community, but your voice is one of many at the table – you’re not on an opposing team, even when you disagree with the majority opinion.
2. Work towards having a consistent ethic. There are too many issues to research all of them, and nobody has the time to develop an opinion every time a new movement pops up in your social media feed. The only way to coherently address every problem is to have a set of broad ethical values that can be applied to any given situation. The most common way to accomplish this from a Catholic perspective is the Consistent Life Ethic. This is an approach to social issues where all aggressive violence is condemned and the inherent dignity of human persons is protected from conception to natural death. This ethic may sound like it was constructed to attack abortion and euthanasia – and it does do that – but it’s also an intellectual machinery that can handle diverse inputs. Which approaches to issues like free speech or mental health best affirm human dignity? How can we best avoid aggressive violence when we tackle immigration or environmental ethics? Having a well-organized set of broad values can help you establish your stance on a variety of societal problems while reducing the grunt-work of research and political surveys.
3. Actually spend time in prayer. While grandson insists that “no thoughts, no prayers / can bring back what’s no longer there,” this is only true in a strictly material sense (and sometimes God will surprise us even then). In our society, we haven’t only lost lives and resources, we’ve also lost our kindness, our discipline, our dignity, and our peace, and all of these things can be built up again with spirituality. Prayer cannot be and should never become a substitute for action, but it can provide the guidance that our actions desperately need. Learning to develop a prayerful inner silence is vital to the Christian life. How could we ever approach the noisy chatter of the world if we cannot calm the chatter that goes on inside our own heads? By spending time in the places where God’s presence is felt with the greatest intensity, such as the Mass, Eucharistic adoration, and personal contemplative prayer, we strengthen our relationship with God to the point where we will feel His presence even in the midst of our most difficult personal, communal, and national trials. God is always the protagonist in our life stories. The question is never “is God present here?” but “how much agency am I willing to give Him?” since God is always present everywhere.
In our society today, especially in new online spaces, everybody is desperately trying to mobilize everybody else. With all of the “the body count is on your hands” rhetoric, it can feel like no amount of activism will ever be enough. By allowing yourself to be informed by Church teaching, by developing a consistent ethic, and by spending time in prayer, you can navigate the sea of issues and movements, and – working from a spiritual foundation of prayerful inner silence – break the external silence in a healthy, Catholic way.
(◊ If you would be interested in a regular music blog from Keys and Cross Media, let us know in the comments!)
